Modern gaming history to present introduces a number of interesting developments technologically and some steps backward into the 80’s with regards game clones saturating the market and publishing house problems.
In the last 10 years or so we’ve seen the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii all have their hour of glory and interesting features highlighted; Wii had a motion sensitive remote that began a revolution of gesture based gaming, the PS3 had a built in Blue-Ray Player and the Xbox 360 promoted an add-on HD disk drive. The Wii was different and offered original games where you have to move around with your whole body to play games such as; golf, tennis and bowling. This brought attention to the fact that gaming could be a method of keeping children and adults alike fit and active. Microsoft and Sony cottoned on to this success and shortly after brought their own versions of gesture based gaming technology to the market; Kinect for Xbox 360 and Move for the PS3. The Kinect is completely different from the Wii Remote in that it is a stationary device which scans your entire body whilst you play and projects your image on screen and the Move is a combination of the two: It’s a remote with an accelerometer which is then tracked by a stationary device known as the PSEye.
Another technological advancement is that of 3D gaming. This idea and implementation has been around since the late 80’s with specially coded games for the ‘Sega Master System’ and the use of 3D glasses; it wasn’t until relatively recently that it was revised and revived by NVidia 3D Vision followed by Nintendo into their handheld Nintendo DS systems; Nintendo 3DS. The current problem with developing such technology for console systems is that consumers would need the 3D TV setups at home in order to view the games in 3D, which don’t seem to be all the popular at the moment and might never be…
Finally, technologically, I wanted to talk about the biggest step in gaming evolution; On Live. This is a mass audience, cloud-based, streaming, online gaming platform. It is essentially a delivery mechanism system that will allow consumers to have instant access to games on almost any “PC/Mac, Ipad or TV” – onlive.co.uk: Games on demand. Will there be a need for consoles in the future? Will streaming technology and server stability and structure be stable enough to deliver such a system without major lag issues, buffering and server crashes? The answers to these questions are apparently yes! Initial testing has had surprising results in its closed beta testing stages and appears to work as advertised. The revolutionary idea is that not only will consumers have instant access to triple A titles and more at their fingertips the technology is being dubbed as “future-proof”. This means that instead of the consumer having to update their systems and technology to stay up to date with games ever increasing demand for more power, the on-live system will be updated with new technology, more servers, more power, all at the back end. For this system you’re looking to pay a one of for controller(s) and possibly a small device to plug into a tv then a monthly subscription charge for the service. It’s said that additional charges may be incurred if a player decides to buy games to play frequently, but there will be free to play one-offs and free demos to try before you buy. Xbox Live could really suffer from this business model.
Each of these developments would mean any game developer in the industry, current or up-and-coming, would have certain considerations to make when developing in-game assets, particularly UI artists who have functionality and ease-of-use considerations to keep in mind when developing for gesture based gaming and 3D allows artists other areas to explore with regards spatial-awareness, depth of field and even some very creative UI work for those UI artists as well.
Although technology has advanced and allowed for some creative and innovative designs to break through and continue to evolve and enhance the consumers gaming experience there are still a number of issues within the industry that publishers and developers haven’t really learned from.
The most obvious of which is the number of cloned titles on the market today; Call of Duty being a prime example. Every release is the same game with a few tweaks and more recently recycling the same assets from the game before! We buy this? Apparently people do…Why? Mostly because people like “familiarity” and playing it safe. Publishing houses rake in a lot of cash for selling big franchises because they know they can sell them and refuse to take risks in case they don’t get back their investment plus profits. It’s a disgusting practice that’s beginning to stifle the creativity in big development teams. I mean, the consumer claims to want familiarity then when they get their Call of Duty 96 cry about how it didn’t live up to the last one and they might as well not have bothered…Confused yet? Operation Flashpoint Red River was Codemasters recent title, along with Bodycount, did so badly that Guildford Studio has closed and focusing solely on their racing teams.
If the AAA title isn’t a short-term, instant success, it may as well be a failure to what Kieron Gillan called ‘money-men’. Games like Titan Quest have sold millions and millions of copies over a number of years, but the game isn’t well known or thought to be a great success because it wasn’t immediate, yet the people involved in the development of that game are still making money today from the sales.
No comments:
Post a Comment