Drizzlehell
Banned
I remember seeing a thread floating around where you guys talked about the graphical fidelity that we should expect this generation, and sure, it is an important aspect when it comes to the evolution of the medium, and I do appreciate me some nice graphics that justify buying all that beefy hardware. However, I feel like there are other, very important elements that make up video games that often get glossed over in those types of discussions, chief among them being the level of interactivity that's present in current triple-A gaming.
Currently there's so much effort that goes towards the visuals just so that the game could impress the audience at first glance but, as a result, most of the things that you see in the scenery ends up serving as nothing more than a set dressing. But in my opinion, the stuff that could help to make games far more impressive are things such as more advanced physics and destructible environments, or simply a higher level of interactivity with the game world.
To emphasize what I mean, picture a scene like this:
It would be this little, out of the way interaction that only serves as a small piece of humorous world building, but I feel that there's very few studios or individual creators who ever bother to put stuff like that in their games, because all the budget has to go towards the graphics and story elements. There are very few creatives in the industry these days who ever think about little details like these, chief among them being Hideo Kojima, for example. Imagine how much better Cyberpunk would be if Night City wouldn't be just a nice-looking wallpaper that decorates V's linear adventure. Or how much more impressive any game would be if you could actually destroy the environments and make the destruction persistent, which would be particularly impressive in games where you revisit certain areas multiple times. There are a few things that are quite as satisfying in a video game as examining the aftermath of a pitched battle, but you simply cannot do that if everything poofs out of existence mere seconds after its over because the devs needed to save memory in order to animate strands of hair up the main character's nostrils.
Currently there's so much effort that goes towards the visuals just so that the game could impress the audience at first glance but, as a result, most of the things that you see in the scenery ends up serving as nothing more than a set dressing. But in my opinion, the stuff that could help to make games far more impressive are things such as more advanced physics and destructible environments, or simply a higher level of interactivity with the game world.
To emphasize what I mean, picture a scene like this:
Let's say that you're playing a new Deus Ex game in a final installment of the Adam Jensen's prequel trilogy with a possible option to play in VR. One of the missions in the game takes you to a hotel where you're staying during a covert mission to put a surveillance on bad guys' room. You have multiple options in which you can achieve that, and one of those is reaching the roof and tapping into the hotel's network through a transmitter that's located there. One of your options to reach that objective is to exit through the window and shimmy across the ledge towards a ladder that will take you to the roof. As you reach the ladder, you hear a loud TV playing from a half-open window just a few meters further from the ladder. You can either ignore it and go up, or you can check out what's all the commotion. Inside of the room you can see a guy who dozed off while watching the box. Again, you can ignore him, or you can knock on the window, which will make him wake up. If he sees you, it would turn out that he's a conspiracy nut (in line with the series' themes) and excited about seeing an augumented super-spy outside of his window, he writes down and shows you a key code to some random broom closet door that janitors use, because he thinks they're hiding some stuff there that poisons the hotel water supply with a mind-controlling drug. He's a nutjob, obviously, so you can either pick one of the options from the dialogue tree that pops up to humor him, question further, or just tell him to buzz off. Or, instead of doing that, you can just say nothing and simply gesture a thumbs up before moving on, and he would actually react to it as well.
It would be this little, out of the way interaction that only serves as a small piece of humorous world building, but I feel that there's very few studios or individual creators who ever bother to put stuff like that in their games, because all the budget has to go towards the graphics and story elements. There are very few creatives in the industry these days who ever think about little details like these, chief among them being Hideo Kojima, for example. Imagine how much better Cyberpunk would be if Night City wouldn't be just a nice-looking wallpaper that decorates V's linear adventure. Or how much more impressive any game would be if you could actually destroy the environments and make the destruction persistent, which would be particularly impressive in games where you revisit certain areas multiple times. There are a few things that are quite as satisfying in a video game as examining the aftermath of a pitched battle, but you simply cannot do that if everything poofs out of existence mere seconds after its over because the devs needed to save memory in order to animate strands of hair up the main character's nostrils.
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it's really original do tell me that thought again
