StarDestroyer.Net BBS

So last week I'm in a Wal-Mart or some shit with my brother, and there's the PS3 set up for play with some truck racing game. I walk over and pick up the controller.

Okay, motherfucking PS3. On an HDTV, no less. Time to be wowed by six-hundred bucks worth of high-definition awesome, right?

My reaction is an overwhelming "meh". I mean it looked nice, especially the canyon I kept driving into. But it was the same sort of game you could have played on any system for the last ten years. The graphics were pretty and all, but if someone had changed the display case to look like a PS2, I wouldn't have thought to question it.

A few days later I played some basketball game in Gamestop. Same reaction. "That's it?"

They're charging six-hundred fucking dollars for this? Are they mad?

LordShaithis wrote:A few days later I played some basketball game in Gamestop. Same reaction. "That's it?"

They're charging six-hundred fucking dollars for this? Are they mad?

Wow... it seems you had the same reaction I did when I saw the newer MSG Crossfire videos and played it at a friends...

Was the reaction any different with the Xbox 360?

I played that and was wholly unimpressed as well.

I've yet to play the Wii, but I suspect it'll be fun for multi player, but i'm not a multi player type gamer. Except for Pro Evo.

Something tells me i'm going to be underwhelmed by this console generation, beyond the graphics. But the PS3 still has the titles I want to play... I'll just wait for the price to fix itself.. and until I have an HDTV to play it on.

Personally, I think the current state of Electronic gaming is about to hit a wall if things continue as they are. After all, you can only increase graphical power so much until you reach photo-realism, which may happen by the end of this generation, and then what?

I'm wondering if maybe we're missing the point of the previous generations. Yes, the graphics got arguably better(I have reservations about calling PS1 graphics better, even if they were an important step up), but each of those graphical advances also increased the depth of the games as well. From a technical standpoint, games were able to do more, not just look prettier.

But to keep going, gaming has to do more than just buy fancier clothes every five to eight years. There are two ways to do this that are being done so far: Depth of mechanics(the Wii) and depth of experience(select next-gen games), but I fear the vast majority of 360 and PS3 games are basically going to be the same stuff we played on the PSOne and Two, only shinier.

Personally, I think the current state of Electronic gaming is about to hit a wall if things continue as they are. After all, you can only increase graphical power so much until you reach photo-realism, which may happen by the end of this generation, and then what?

Which is exactly what Miyamoto and Iwata have been saying since 2000 and exactly what lead to the development of the DS and Wii. This is not some unforseen catastrophe; people have seen this coming for years.

SAMAS wrote:Personally, I think the current state of Electronic gaming is about to hit a wall if things continue as they are. After all, you can only increase graphical power so much until you reach photo-realism, which may happen by the end of this generation, and then what?

"Photo-realism" is a long way off for games, and even then may not be wholly desirable in light of production costs for such finely detailed environments.

But to keep going, gaming has to do more than just buy fancier clothes every five to eight years.

I would suggest that it is less a matter of "to keep going" and more a matter of "to keep certain parties happy", those people being the same sort of people who insist that every (insert genre) game ever made is exactly the same and that we need fresh new gameplay mechanics every year or else by god the whole industry is intellectually bankrupt. There are many thousands of people who still play CounterStrike 1.6; I really doubt a dearth of "groundbreaking innovation" is going to outright kill the whole gaming industry.

Eventually, we're going to hit the ultimate brick wall that story writing hit many years ago; we're eventually going to exhaust every basic game type (just as supposedly every basic plot has been invented), and everything beyond that point will be one of two things:

1) Refinement of an earlier game - like how Supreme Commander is more or less Total Annihilation with shinier graphics and an awesomely superior interface.

2) The same game with different details - like how Quake 3 and Unreal Tournament both have a rocket launcher, but said rocket launcher behaves differently between the games.

But of course, we're not going to hit that wall all at once; it's going to gradually peter out, and as that happens a bunch of the "i need something different all the time why can't those stupid hamfucks make something unique" people will probably abandon gaming in favor of talking a bunch of bullshit over Web 3.0 or the "blogocube" or whatever the hell new internet fad has hit us by then.

Meanwhile, there's probably going to still be a huge ton of people who are content to play the same old basic gametypes with different details (and perhaps superior implementations... such as better interfaces, like the Wii remote and DS touchscreen) and gaming will go on.

I know its probably popped up before but: GamerManifesto

That said the best games I have are basically unknown.

ColdWinter. FPS game, AI soldiers actually do more than A)charge at you, B)stand still and shoot. They take cover, they throw grenades, they provide coverfire for reloading allies. Yet vitually no one heard of it. Most likly because it wasn't pretty.
ColdWinter


Okami: New game with an interesting twist, one of the features is the ability to 'draw' effects into the game. Very eye-candy it is made to look like moving art.
Gameplay footage

Setesh wrote:ColdWinter. FPS game, AI soldiers actually do more than A)charge at you, B)stand still and shoot. They take cover, they throw grenades, they provide coverfire for reloading allies. Yet vitually no one heard of it. Most likly because it wasn't pretty.
ColdWinter

You know, there was another FPS where the AI soldiers had little actions like "throw grenade", "take cover", "run away from grenade", "don't all reload at once".

It's called "Half-Life". You might have heard of it.

Uraniun235 wrote:

Setesh wrote:ColdWinter. FPS game, AI soldiers actually do more than A)charge at you, B)stand still and shoot. They take cover, they throw grenades, they provide coverfire for reloading allies. Yet vitually no one heard of it. Most likly because it wasn't pretty.
ColdWinter

You know, there was another FPS where the AI soldiers had little actions like "throw grenade", "take cover", "run away from grenade", "don't all reload at once".

It's called "Half-Life". You might have heard of it.

ColdWinters are actually somewhat better. In half-life if your in a one door room they will charge the door over and over and over, in ColdWinter after the first 2 they'll sit there and wait for you. They also unlike half-life will not shoot you with high explosives from 2 feet away killing you both! (the tactic that made me swear off half-life until counterstrike came out.

For AI, no one's yet to beat FEAR's acutely super Soldiers. Until the blind super soldiers of say MGS3, FEAR's super clone soldiers could kick your ass if you were not careful. Trying to play through firefights without slow-mo VS them normal resulted in you eating a nice well balanced lead breakfast.

Setesh wrote:

Uraniun235 wrote:

Setesh wrote:ColdWinter. FPS game, AI soldiers actually do more than A)charge at you, B)stand still and shoot. They take cover, they throw grenades, they provide coverfire for reloading allies. Yet vitually no one heard of it. Most likly because it wasn't pretty.
ColdWinter

You know, there was another FPS where the AI soldiers had little actions like "throw grenade", "take cover", "run away from grenade", "don't all reload at once".

It's called "Half-Life". You might have heard of it.

ColdWinters are actually somewhat better. In half-life if your in a one door room they will charge the door over and over and over, in ColdWinter after the first 2 they'll sit there and wait for you. They also unlike half-life will not shoot you with high explosives from 2 feet away killing you both! (the tactic that made me swear off half-life until counterstrike came out.

You know, the Halo series actually has fairly good opponent AI; Grunts can throw grenades with reasonable accuracy and retreat when their superiors are shot up; Elites take cover when fired upon and can fall back and wait for their shields to regenerate; even Hunters are fairly good at covering their weak spots if you mess up when trying to snipe them. Of course, the allied NPCs can tend to be rather stupid, even though they do use cover, etc. on occasion; not stellar overall, but it does show that intelligent AIs are hardly a new gaming development.

In my experience, the marines in Halo have exceptional accuracy with grenades. That is, if I was their target. Of course, most of the people I play with understand that blowing up a marine in a ghost is for their own good.

LordShaithis wrote: "That's it?"

Same reaction I had at E3. I got to play PS3 and 360 games side-by-side at Sega's booth and got to try a few PS3 games and a ton of Wii games.

PS3 left me totally unimpressed...felt exactly like the 360.

Setesh wrote:Gamer Manifesto

Empty mewling bullshit. Popped up and mostly torn apart.

It's funny though. The self-importance is just... priceless.

Mr Bean wrote:For AI, no one's yet to beat FEAR's acutely super Soldiers. Until the blind super soldiers of say MGS3, FEAR's super clone soldiers could kick your ass if you were not careful. Trying to play through firefights without slow-mo VS them normal resulted in you eating a nice well balanced lead breakfast.

Aren't FEAR's soldiers able to climb ladders? It's sad that I was impressed by that.

FEAR's guys aren't really that clever, they're just better than the retarded shit we're used to.

Stark wrote:FEAR's guys aren't really that clever, they're just better than the retarded shit we're used to.

That's what I was getting at. How hard would it be to avoid the ever-present "RUSH THE DOOR LOL" scenario by instructing AI baddies to throw flashbangs/gas grenades beforehand or giving them multiple entrances to attack through?

EDIT: Just recalled Far Cry's lazy man's approach: give everyone bullet-proof riot shields and automatic shotguns! At least the outdoor sections were pretty good.

3rd Impact wrote:

Stark wrote:FEAR's guys aren't really that clever, they're just better than the retarded shit we're used to.

That's what I was getting at. How hard would it be to avoid the ever-present "RUSH THE DOOR LOL" scenario by instructing AI baddies to throw flashbangs/gas grenades beforehand or giving them multiple entrances to attack through?

Well, the AI has to be able to recognize a door (or other constricted area), for one thing, and tell the difference between it and a narrow corridor. And if a narrow corridor opens up into a larger room, what's the threshold at which the AI will pause to chuck a grenade into the room, and where they'll just storm in because chucking the grenade probably won't do much for them? And how are you going to turn all of this into computer code?

The other issue is difficulty. How difficult do you want the game to be? If the player-character is pretty durable it's not as much of an issue, but at some point you run into the fact that realistically, one guy should not be able to defeat a dozen well-trained soldiers, and generally the people bitching the most about dumb AI soldiers are the same people who bitch about realism.

Uraniun235 wrote: Well, the AI has to be able to recognize a door (or other constricted area), for one thing, and tell the difference between it and a narrow corridor. And if a narrow corridor opens up into a larger room, what's the threshold at which the AI will pause to chuck a grenade into the room, and where they'll just storm in because chucking the grenade probably won't do much for them? And how are you going to turn all of this into computer code?

You've neatly answered my "how hard" question, but I guess I'd be satisfied with just the illusion of intelligence on the AI's part; could you cheat by just telling the AI point man to toss a grenade when within a certain distance of where they know the player to be, and assuming they've not got line-of-sight and the door isn't closed.

The other issue is difficulty. How difficult do you want the game to be? If the player-character is pretty durable it's not as much of an issue, but at some point you run into the fact that realistically, one guy should not be able to defeat a dozen well-trained soldiers, and generally the people bitching the most about dumb AI soldiers are the same people who bitch about realism.

Plenty of shooters get around this by making the player a cybernetically-enhanced/mutated/magical beast like you noted, but in a realistic shooter you could always have the player as part of an NPC team. Or go the "Black Hawk Down" route by having intelligent enemies with sub-par fighting ability and equipment.

That's where most of FEAR's 'difficulty' came from. The enemy was accurate with powerful weapons: they didn't have to be very smart to be a threat. If you didn't have slow-mo the game would've been much harder but not because of the AI.

Then again, some people think making the badguys yell what they're about to do at the tops of their voices represents 'AI'. Like the FEAR psychically-controlled soldiers run by Fettel to know all... who use radios.

Spanky The Dolphin wrote:

Setesh wrote:Gamer Manifesto

Empty mewling bullshit. Popped up and mostly torn apart.

Link?

I think it's amusing that we go to EB Games and they have display units set up for both old and new generation consoles. With no prompting at all, my kids tend to gravitate to the older consoles, simply because the games running on them look more interesting. I actually tried to point out to them "Hey, look at how sharp the picture is on that one" and they just shrugged. There may be an improvement in graphics but it's not so big as to make people automatically prefer the new system.

The PS3 is actually the cheapest Blu-Ray player you can get at the moment.

DPDarkPrimus wrote:The PS3 is actually the cheapest Blu-Ray player you can get at the moment.

That will go great with my huge Blu-Ray movie collection.