What should developers NOT continue doing after this gen?

[MrPopo]

My list is to improve video games, not to make companies money. They are already doing everything possible to make money right now. I know most of those things will never happen. Money > everything else. That's the world we have lived in since the concept of currency was invented.

Fixed that for you.

[DinnerX]

Why do video games need to "grow up" and become more like some other form of entertainment? I don't think video games have anything to prove. They're just suppose to be fun to play and should try to change in ways that make them more fun to play. More realism and less censorship aren't going to do much for actual gameplay in my opinion.

[Xelyx]

You can have that game, but I expect the guy with the magic sword to be MORTAL and actually get hurt when someone stabs him unless the sword gives him some magic protection. I'm fine with a game giving me a reason for my character to be basically immortal

I think you're nitpicking a bit at this point. Let's say I play A Link to the Past. If it's enough for me to accept that the character lives in a world where a magic sword can shoot laser beams and a princess and her best friends can be stuffed into little diamonds, I don't see how it makes it any more or less far fetched for the characters health to be represented by a meter or replenished on the fly by hearts.

At some point you have to suspend your disbelief...otherwise how can you have any fun?

Every time I hear this argument I shake my head because it doesn't make sense. Do you see Chow Yun Fat running around in Hard Boiled with bullets bouncing off of him like they do on Nathan Drake in Uncharted 2.

Wait, did you just pick a movie full of 'John Woo Special' 100 shot pistols for your argument?

You guys are ignoring my point entirely, which is what everyone always does whenever I bring this subject up. Fiction draws a line when it comes to mortality. People get hurt and die even in worlds with magic or sci fi in them, unless they are superheros. John Woo films may have crazy, unrealistic gun shots, but mortality still exists. People get shot and they die.

There's a limit to how unrealistic most fictional forms of entertainment get, the line usually stops at how they treat mortality. That line doesn't exist in video games and its one of the reasons some people still don't take them seriously as serious art, because you can't get invested in a world that has absolutely no connection to reality at all. It's why I couldn't get invested in Infamous. When I see citizens gunned down by gun turrets and guards and they simply stand back up no worse for wear, then a cutscene happens a bit later where those same guards and turrets mow them down and kill them, it makes me realize that EVERYTHING outside of the game's cutscenes is completely fake. Immersion in the game's world thus becomes impossible and being invested in what happens in that game world becomes impossible.

All I'm saying is this. How would you feel if you watched an action movie and the main character was getting hit by bullets and he was not bleeding, he was not getting hurt, and he wasn't dying. And let's say that character was HUMAN, not Wolverine and not cyborg Arnie from the Terminator. That is why I laugh when games like Uncharted 2 are described as cinematic. The commercial for that game was all like, "you can't tell it's a game". Yes I can, that guy just got shot a bunch of times and he's not even hurt. That makes it a fucking video game you dumb tv commercial guy

Some games are designed so well though that a smart player will never take any damage at all, so lack of realism becomes a moot point for me because I can play in a way that IS realistic. Plus, there are those rare games I love that have NPCs who can die like normal human beings during the game which actually makes you want to help them.

Yeah, you can say all of this is nitpicking but it genuinely surprises me that there aren't more people like me who get annoyed by these things

Yeah, it's stupid, but how long would you honestly play a game where you died from EVERY hit? I'd quit after about five minutes, personally.

[scarper]

Nintendo should go back to the standard type of gaming, considering that it's what gave them such abounding success during the Game Boy era. You know, with buttons and joysticks and stuff. Real controllers and whatnot.

Like if they decided to use an iPad as a controller for their next gen console. Man would that piss me off. O_O

[MrPopo]

Nintendo should go back to the standard type of gaming, considering that it's what gave them such abounding success during the Game Boy era. You know, with buttons and joysticks and stuff. Real controllers and whatnot.

Like if they decided to use an iPad as a controller for their next gen console. Man would that piss me off. O_O

I can't tell if you're being snarky or not. Especially considering that the controller has as many buttons as the PS3 and 360.

[Hobie-wan]

Eh, regenerating health, to a point, just takes the place of developers placing health paks around every other corner or whatever. It's also a matter of evolving beyond the arcade model. To a point, lives/continues are constructs that allow you to define what 50 cents (or whatever) gets you.

Fighting past a tough point and barely surviving to find some one per level health packs gives you more of a sense of accomplishment then peeking around a corner for a few potshots, then ducking back to stand there while your health regenerates, rinse, repeat until you eventually wear the enemy down though.

[isiolia]

Eh, regenerating health, to a point, just takes the place of developers placing health paks around every other corner or whatever. It's also a matter of evolving beyond the arcade model. To a point, lives/continues are constructs that allow you to define what 50 cents (or whatever) gets you.

Fighting past a tough point and barely surviving to find some one per level health packs gives you more of a sense of accomplishment then peeking around a corner for a few potshots, then ducking back to stand there while your health regenerates, rinse, repeat until you eventually wear the enemy down though.

That's more a matter of implementation than the mechanic as a whole. Either system effectively can net the same thing - you need to play well enough through a given sequence to not die. Then you're granted a little downtime/powerups to recover.

It's a game balance/design issue, just like health pak placement. It can be done well, or it can be done poorly.

[Opa Opa]

Long load times should have gone the way of the dinosaur ages ago.

[J T]

That's more a matter of implementation than the mechanic as a whole. Either system effectively can net the same thing - you need to play well enough through a given sequence to not die. Then you're granted a little downtime/powerups to recover.

It's a game balance/design issue, just like health pak placement. It can be done well, or it can be done poorly.

This is kind of what I was thinking. Though I tend to prefer the health pak approach, the regenerating health bar does require a place to hide and they can keep you from regenerating health by lobbing grenades. In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare I found that I was often just moving forward incrementally from cover position to cover position, but some of those checkpoints were a challenge to reach because I couldn't regenerate health until I had cleared the area. This ends up working rather similar to the health pack. It does feel like cheating though to my aged gamer sensibilities, and it took me awhile to get used to the idea because I felt like I should be able to clear a stage without having to stop for health regeneration, until I realized that the game was designed with the expectation that I would do exactly that.

[hashiriya1]

No more bloody screens, thank you. Bloody as in blood, not the British slang term.