The Forgotten Art of Game Design or Today's Gamers Only Pay Attention to Graphics?

Define advanced, that's kind of a blanket term. Games like DMC4 or platinum's stuff have powerful systems and the gameplay is mastering those systems. Maybe that?

 

Good questions. I will have to think about it a bit. Respawning was very common in 8-bit and 16-bit games. I never liked that unless it was something like Gauntlet or D2 where I could destroy the spawner itself. Respawning is still common today. Enemy spawners are pretty much a standard although probably most often found in RPGs and other so called open world games. It is likely the wolves, bears and so forth in games like Skyrim respawn after the player has left the vicinity and a certain amount of time has passed. At least that is how it always seemed to me.

Pathfinding is generally pretty good these days although certainly can be improved in many cases based on the YouTube videos showing popular AAA games with enemies running back and forth the long way around or getting stuck.

Persistence seems to be based on the game in question (or genre at least) and the means provided to save the current state. Most modern games do a better job at persistence in general than games from 25 years or more ago at least as far as it playing a key part in the game design and implementing it in a more transparent manner.

Game design in general matured to some degree. I wonder if there are more things they managed to improve upon during 25 years or so of design and development.

 

Well I think decision mechanics and immersion (in various states) will continue to improve. TLOU on PS4 did a good job at combining cinematic story with decent gameplay mechanics. Looked great to me too..

Games like that are rare at the moment, in fairness I see little in the way of Mass Effect type games either.. That was an Epic trilogy that pretty much had it all, great gameplay mechanics, nice graphics, really engaging plot, decision making, level / crafting components / variety / great AI / sound and character followers.. It's one of those rare gems that was faultless all the way to the ending... GRRR!

 

What I was getting at was that those were only possible with better tech (mostly memory). On an NES, memory was dominated purely by what was on the screen. You could throw some character stats in there, but trying to do anything in memory without careful consideration and allocation was a recipe for disaster. This is in an era when they could count where the cycles would be distributed, and they didn't have many to play around with. These days physics ticks alone take up more CPU time as a percentage than all the time those old consoles spent doing anything that wasn't related to graphics.

I have to question what your definition of gameplay actually constitutes, because at this point it seems like your definition is narrowly focused on only interaction. Things like AI and pathfinding aren't things you usually interact with, so you're oblivious to how they impact play (never mind how many resources actually go into it).

 

Who are you talking to their chief?

 

Gar

 

Ha ha. I understand AI and navigation are important. Of course they are! Heck I always hope to see better AI particularly. I see those as fundamentals. And I am sure work has been done on those things over all of these years. I just think we should be seeing much better stuff than we are in these areas considering how much time has passed. Think of it from your own perspective alone. How much have your abilities/skills improved in these non-presentation areas over the past year? 5 years? A decade? In many ways the tech 25 years ago made everything much harder. The presentation side was more challenging but then so was everything else as well due to exactly as you said processing power and RAM. In many cases they had to spend as much time designing a way to fit everything needed into the game and retrieving it quickly enough as they did on the actual game itself. At least from a challenge perspective. Yet they still managed to fit in some decent AI and fairly complex systems at times.

Today developers have a massive amount of processing power and space to work with. Pathfinding and decent AI should present very little technical challenge at this point. The amount of RAM and CPU power is so huge there are loads of options. Heck we could probably even write a process to precalculate it and build a massive lookup table automatically that would make a small footprint considering the amount of space available. Sometimes I just wonder what are they actually using all of that speed and RAM for. As far as I know CPU speed nor RAM have presented roadblocks for a long time now. It is always the GPU speed and video ram that is the issue. The RAM and CPU speed should make writing some cool AI easy. Easy as in not being worried about how to fit it into 512KB and so forth.

There are some great modern games and I guess it is just considering the amount of power available it seems like so much more could be done in these areas. Maybe I am completely wrong but I think they are spending the bulk of their time fiddling around with the GPU trying to fit more textures in, push a few more polygons around, transfer data faster to the GPU and so forth.

 

People like realistic graphics as it aids in immersion but then whenever it portrays living things that are sentient it jars even more as they are never quite 'right' which then breaks the immersion. Does the industry spend more time & processing power making these things more realistic & lifelike or does it try to find the balance between looking good but acknowledging it isn't realism?

I've read that the cpu processes one thing at a time but gpu's can do multiple things at once. I've also read that research facilities built cheap, powerful supercomputers but stacking gpu's together & have proven they are as effective or more so than the standard supercomputer costing squillions of dollars. If that's the case would game developers & designers be better focusing on shifting some of the game processing to the gpu to enable more powerful & quick calculations etc?

 

I'll assume all of this was concluded after many months of rigorous testing. From my experience the CPU is rarely the bottleneck, and you don't want that on PC (especially desktop). If the game doesn't run on a desktop CPU well, there probably won't be anyone on a laptop who can run it period. On the GPU side, settings are usually substantial enough so that you can bog it down to whatever level you want. It's easy to shovel a bunch of different texture sizes into a GPU and let people decide how jagged they want everything. It requires very little work to enable, yet offers pretty useful benefits with people being able to run the game on much more hardware. If you're lamenting having eight cores that mostly go unused, you got ahead of the curve (or bought server tech and you shouldn't expect it to be that useful for gaming ever).

Simple pathfinding is fairly easy to implement, although a bitch to setup completely, and simple AI runs a small risk that is typically expected of development. Going any further than that is risky with little to gain, and when risks are costly, people look for safer alternatives. You do occasionally get a Shadow of Mordor nemesis system (which would be interesting to see more of) and things that are basically daemons running in the background. I suppose on the other side of the spectrum is Dwarf Fortress and the X space series, which are more simulation than game (and dedicate a F***ton more to the simulation part than the game part).

 

The Australian government research group (csiro) did it & built the gpu supercomputer (http://www.csiro.au/en/Research/Technology/Big-computers/Bragg)

It was more a question of whether game developers should keep pushing for more & more graphics power & realism or whether there is a benefit/need in using some of the gpu to augment any non-graphical processing if to much realism causes issues with the whole uncanny valley thing breaking immersion more harshly.