The Best Games of 2020 136
Gamasutra held a contest this year to describe what hit video games in the year 2020 would be like. Over 150 detailed entries were sent in, and they've posted the top 20. One persistent theme is the ever-present connectedness to the outside world, both in reality-based games and with multiplayer modes that are part of typical daily interactions. Quoting:
"It's just an average day at your job. Noon swings around and it's time to amble out of the cubicle farm and venture outside into the city to find some lunch. You put on your slick steel framed Hunters Glasses, place your Hunters earpiece, and with black and white Hunters Gloves on, step out of the building and onto the street. After a block suddenly your dark tinted shades switch to a red tint. A silky female voice echoes in your ear, 'Players within range. Good Hunting.' The glasses are acting as a WiFi enabled computer screen. You swivel your head to scope the scene and find someone standing out within the red crowd as a white outline. The man with the white outline is scouting the area as well, trying to find who else is in the game right now. You get within range, pack a virtual snow ball with your gloves, approach slowly, wind up and throw with all your might the virtual snow ball at the man with the white outline. 'Player Eliminated,' says the female voice, 'Uploading Statistics.'"
Why should they be so different? (Score:5, Interesting)
Quake 1 came out 13 years ago, most of what has come out since then isn't all that different. Better graphics sure, but the recipe is the same, the worlds are still 3D, multiplayer support has actually gotten worse - we've gone from 24 to 32 players being fine in Quake/QW CTF down to 8 - 16 being the average in a lot of games nowadays.
That's not to say there haven't been innovations, the Wii is a good example, but it's still only shifted around 40mill units and around 150mill games, which is great, but not enough to suggest it's killed off the classic style of games (the PS3 + 360 + PC have still shifted a lot more games than the Wii in the same period). I think if anything the Wii has just added a new style of gaming that'll sit alongside the existing style, it's certainly earned it's place, but it's also unlikely to be a killer. But even then, particularly in the case of games like duck hunt are the Wii shooters really even an innovation even if the likes of Wii sports is?
But even moving away from that and moving away from FPS, 12 years ago we had Ultima Online, nowadays we have WoW and Warhmmer and I'm not convinced they're relatively any better. Graphics are of course but certainly the time I spent playing UO I enjoyed much more than the time I spent in both WoW and Warhammer, it simply had less of the boring grind/level crap you have today and more about actually enjoying the game and having fun.
So if not much has changed in the last 12/13 years other than the obvious changes we get with more horse-power such as better graphics or in the case of duckhunt to Wii shooters, the ability to move around and shoot has much really changed to suggest that games in 2020 will necessarily be anything different again? Particularly as somethings haven't move on in the last decade- again, multiplayer player limits in FPS haven't increased.
We were always promised bigger worlds, bigger battles and so on but all the horsepower goes into better graphics, better collision detection than stuff that particularly effects gameplay. This coupled with the fact that internet connection speed improvements are pretty lacklustre in most of the world means we haven't seen what we might have envisaged a decade ago.
Don't get me wrong, I love many of the games that are out today, but I'm not getting my hopes up that games in 11 years will be anything more than to games now that games now are to what they were 11 years ago. I'd rather the next decade was spent on gameplay rather than graphics personally, but gameplay doesn't sell hardware upgrades I guess. If we start to see graphics and story telling like that in Gears of War 2 coupled with the control styles of the Wii it'd be a good start, but for this to happen either MS/Sony need to adapt to Nintendo's control style or Nintendo needs to start catering to the hardcore. I think this is more important than many realise too- I think if Nintendo's control method isn't taken to the hardcore it runs the risk of eventually being just another fad, rather than an integral part of gaming. Hell, even the joystick died out to the mouse and keyboard, which back in the joystick's prime, people would've laughed at the idea of.
Re:That different? (Score:3, Interesting)
Back then multiplayer was you bringing your controller to your friend's house or connecting your Game Boy to your buddy's via link cable. The only time you'd ever play with someone that you didn't know was when you played Street Fighter at the arcade in the mall or movie theater. Handheld consoles had tiny screens that weren't backlit, which made playing in anything but ideal conditions nigh impossible, or they had bright color screens that were still small, but gave you about fifteen minutes of play time on eight AA batteries. Think about cell phones back then. There was no text messaging. There was no internet. Even an address book was a luxury that few had, and at the same time the phones were the same size as your cordless handset at home with barely more battery life than a Game Gear.
Now days every console has online play with people on the other side of the globe that you've never met. Every console has tons of additional content that can be downloaded. All of the consoles have wifi capability and wireless controllers. Even the DS and PSP have wifi built in. I can trade pokemon with some stranger clear on the other side of the country just as easily as I can battle a buddy in Iraq. Even then, the DS and PSP are several years old. Cell phone technology has advanced by leaps and bounds since they were brought to the market. The new Nintendo DSi has much more wifi functionality than the DS and DS Lite, two cameras, and onboard storage. Wireless connectivity between handheld consoles has been around since the GameBoy Color in the form of an IR port and actual wireless in the GameBoy Advance and DS.
Now to be fair, I only read the GEO story, but considering how far we've come in the past eleven years, everything the first scenario is easily achievable within five years, let alone eleven.
Oh, what a load of rubbish. (Score:5, Interesting)
First, classic mistake of picking a year SO close to us that there's almost no time to even guess what will happen before it comes around. It's like back in the 60's when everyone was discussing silver-jumpsuit-clad superhumans who live off food-tablets and have computers as their best friends on Neptune in artificial gravity... too much exaggeration in too short a time... all the "incidentals" that aren't mentioned (i.e. minor technical innovations that are mentioned in passing, or just assumed to be present) occur along the way but nobody ever noticed them. Come on, we still haven't properly managed videophones yet, although Skype comes damn close (it's just not "simple" enough that everyone wants to go out and buy a Skype-phone that doesn't need a computer switched on 24/7).
All we've done in the last ten years in gaming is go from Quake to Quake IV... it's all graphics. The *real* innovation in the last ten years has been in things like the Wii (specifically the controller), but STILL nobody wants to look like an idiot by *wearing* anything computer-related... the closest thing we have is fashionable mobile phones that you carry, but you STILL look a pillock with a Bluetooth headset - it's a simple fact.
Games in 2020 will be like games today... they will use the computer's facilities. This will undoubtedly include more speed, more CPU's, more realistic graphics (although "more" sound probably isn't achievable without spending a fortune on specialist hardware), smaller hardware, more touch-interfaces and more networking. The controllers may well change, but they will still be controllers (you can't beat a keyboard/mouse combo for FPS, a D-pad for platformers, a touch-screen for certain simple games, but there may well be "new" genres to take account of new-style controllers too)... you won't want to carry *anything* that you're not going to use throughout the day, certainly not a game controller. They may well integrate (so your phone is just as good a controller for your console as a Wiimote), but commercial "enterprise" will ensure that nothing works together without a hell of a lot of messing about.
We've been *technically* able to have the sorts of games that people are discussing here for DECADES. I've even suggested it myself in the past - combine paintball/lasertag with a real-time 3D game, stick a silly head-display on them and let some nutters run around in an enclosed virtual environment and shoot the crap out of each other (virtually). In an enclosed environment, location of each of the players quickly is almost trivial (especially if they are wearing your hardware), matching a plain warehouse modelled on the in-game map with some actual plain green boxes to clamber over is easy. That same plain-green background can be video processed by the most basic of PC's to overlay player's *actual* position/image into a virtual game perfectly - so you're running around a warehouse with your mates, but in your display, you and your mates are running around a map in Counterstrike. Targetting, aim, distance, recoil etc. is available through a conventional toy-gun accessory. It doesn't matter what it looks like in real life in this case (which is a big plus, because you do look a pillock running around an all-green warehouse firing a cap gun at virtual enemies), so it's easy, cheap and doesn't need a ton of technical expertise. You might only find them in theme parks, or specialist places at first, but we haven't even got *that* yet.
Instead, paintball has died. Lasertag died years ago. The companies that used to do it could *easily* have switched on to new media but didn't, because people *LIKE* the game-reality border, even if it blurs, they still need to know that they (and other, possibly more unstable people) are in a game and not killing real people. Plus, I don't *want* to play the games in real life... I play them to relax, not run around scared that someone will run faster than me, catch up with me and kill me in the game I'm paying to play.
Now, "all-digital down
Dennou Coil. (Score:5, Interesting)
There's a Japanese Anime/Light Novel called 'Dennou Coil' or 'Cyber Coil'. It's about kids that have grown up with glasses that are their link to the network. It lets them buy virtual items of all sorts, including pets and toys. They virtual items obviously can't interact with real objects, but they can react with other players (especially the glasses of the other players) and virtual objects. And they can make phone calls using the glasses by just making a phone shape with their hand, or call up a virtual keyboard and monitor for direct input/programming.
Yes, you'll still look a little silly to anyone not wearing the glasses. But once there are enough people doing it, it ceases to look funny. Bluetooth headsets are proof of this. 15 years ago, you'd look like you were talking to yourself. Now, everyone assumes they can't see your earpiece.
Also, having phone capabilities in the glasses will speed adaption greatly, even for those who don't normally wear glasses.
Re:..hey.. wait a minute (Score:2, Interesting)