IMPress Polly
02-16-2015, 11:27 AM
I'm sure many of you have heard of the upcoming Oculus Rift. For those who haven't though, it's a sophisticated virtual reality technology basically, and it's primarily designed for video games, though Hollywood has also taken a shine to it. The question before us on this thread is that of what sort of impact this leap to 4D gaming might have on how video games are made, as in what sorts of games we might find ourselves playing in the future. What do you think?
As someone who remembers the leap to 3D gaming quite well, I think the leap to 4D, as it with other leaps in game play structure, will be marked by a transitional period characterized by mediocrity before it truly absorbs the gaming world in general in a successful way and becomes standardized in the next console generation (which may well be the last, incidentally). That's how the leap to 3D was. I remember it well. When the 32/64-bit era hit properly in 1996, it was at first characterized by shorter games. In point of fact, almost all the way through 1997, I tended to think of 3D as just a gimmick. You see, unlike most gamers, I'd already been exposed to 3D gaming for a number of years by that point, as I'd acquired systems like the 32-bit 3DO and the 64-bit Atari Jaguar years earlier. In many ways, the emergent rivalry between Sony's 32-bit, CD-based Playstation and the 64-bit, cartridge-based Nintendo 64 seemed eerily similar to that between the earlier 32-bit, CD-based 3DO and that of the 64-bit, cartridge-based Atari Jaguar, only with more mainstream companies being involved this time around. What I'd learned from that earlier rivalry though was that 3D kinda sucked. My issue wasn't simply that these pricey, "next generation" systems not only had very few games, but that the games they had were very short and simple and almost all of them were either ports or belonged to one of three genres that didn't especially interest me: shooting, fighting, and sports (especially racing). And when the 3DO and Jaguar were replaced by the PlayStation and the N64, it seemed to me like that hitherto background noise had simply now come to the forefront of the gaming world, now being somewhat more within the average person's price range. For example, Super Mario 64 to me felt like a giant step backward for the franchise when compared to Super Mario RPG, which had just been released for the Super NES a few months earlier. The storyline in Super Mario RPG started out standard for the franchise (rescue the princess from Bowser's castle)...but then a giant sword crashed into the castle, just as you were about to save the princess, sending the both of you flying far away from it in different directions. Then the title screen appeared, letting you know that your real journey was only just beginning. My 11-year-old mind was blown! :grin: Super Mario games up to that point had mostly all been simple, rescue-the-princess affairs. This one, though, introduced a real, epic plot involving the fate of the world itself (and a certain philosophy concerning the consequences of mechanization and its deleterious impact on people's dreams). And Princess Toadstool (she wasn't yet known as Peach) joined you on your quest, along with Bowser, which made for hilarious exchanges between the two. :laugh: And some other really cool new characters joined as well. So when, shortly after completing that game, I found myself trying on Super Mario 64 for size, I was disappointed with its comparative simplicity and brevity. Although previously I couldn't have imagined Mario as a good RPG, I now saw the RPG format as the next logical step in the franchise's evolution: the one that should be henceforth Mario's default genre instead of platforming. Then I got Super Mario 64. The plot was: rescue the princess from Bowser. I beat it in two days. The princess baked a cake for me while the credits rolled. Woohoo.
I reached the zenith of my 3D rejectionism though with Star Fox 64. At 9:09 AM I was at the store plunking down my $70 for the game, which was even more back then than it is today, especially when you were a kid on an allowance rather than an adult with a job. By 10 AM I was at home watching the credits roll. I remember ripping the cartridge out without turning the system off (thus voiding my useless warranty :grin:) and throwing it into the air. I was rather frustrated with this new era! That was about as much as I'd ever spent on a video game before and it was also the shortest game I'd ever played outside of an arcade. True, I could extend the play duration by beating it multiple times through different pathways and earning medals and so forth, but that's really beside the point because I'd already seen the whole story, or at least the parts of it that mattered. The way I saw it, 3D was just an excuse for game makers to sell you shorter games at a higher price, i.e. a way of giving consumers less for more money. That's not to say that there weren't any early Sega Saturn, PlayStation, or Nintendo 64 games I liked, but it is to say that ones I liked the best -- which tended to be the ones with the most content and storytelling -- were most all 2D games, like Mischief Makers, NiGHTS Into Dreams, Mega Man 8, and the first Oddworld game for example. Other than games like that, I mostly stuck to my old Super NES library. The Nintendo 64 library was particularly abysmal to me, which is why I'm picking on that system disproportionately here. For the first year, the N64 basically had nothing but shooting games (Doom 64, Duke Nukem 64, Turok, Hexen, Blast Corps, Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire, Star Fox 64, etc.), fighting games (Mortal Kombat Trilogy, Killer Instinct Gold, War Gods, Dark Rift, etc.), and sports games (especially racing titles: Cruis'n USA, Wave Race 64, Mario Kart 64, San Francisco Rush, Extreme-G, Top Gear Rally, etc.) No RPGs at all. Or simulation games. Or even strategy games. Or even proper adventure games unless you count Super Mario 64. Bor-ring! You see, those epic-genre games were all supposed to be released for a device called the 64DD that was to attach to your N64, but the 64DD never came out in the U.S. and didn't even get released in Japan until like 1999. It wasn't until I got Final Fantasy VII and GoldenEye 007 at the tail end of that year (1997) that I finally became convinced that 3D games could actually have thoughtful game play and narratives complex enough to be interesting, and from that point on I started appreciating the expanded game play possibilities that the leap to 3D offered a lot more. But there was that lag time between the leap to 3D itself and full development of its artistic potential.
It's been the same with other leaps in game play technology. The 128-bit generation was characterized by the standardization of online play, for example, which by then had been around for some time already and had certainly taken a while to fully realize. And the subsequent console generation was characterized by the standardization of motion controls, which weren't truly mastered for years after the Wii's release in 2006. Previous to 2009, the play in most motion-control games boiled down to waving the controller around randomly until you saw the desired result on screen. No brain use was required because the control scheme was hardly fully developed until the release of the Wii Motion Plus in 2009 and a subsequent copycat device on the PlayStation 3 and the next evolution of the idea, the Kinect for Xbox 360 (which had/has players abandoning the use of controllers altogether in casual games) in 2010. Part of the reason the current crop of new consoles isn't selling at the same rate as its predecessors did has to do with the fact that they haven't really standardized anything that revolutionizes the way we play games. It's the Oculus Rift that promises to lead to that development, which surely won't occur until the next crop of consoles comes out probably at the end of the current decade. After all, improvements in graphics have come with each new console generation obviously, but they haven't changed the actual way we play games since the leap to 3D some 20 years ago. Improvements in 3D graphics are now just a matter of style, not of game play substance, as the Nintendo people philosophically (and wisely) argued in 2006 vis-a-vis the launch of the Wii. The only way that future improvements in a game's visual presentation can again revolutionize the way we play games is by again adding another dimension, and that's what this new version of virtual reality technology promises to do. It will thus be the first SUBSTANTIVE graphical upgrade the gaming world has seen in two decades: the first one since the leap from 2D to 3D to add new game play possibilities, which in this case means the ability to move the "screen" in all directions for panoramic gaming. My fear though is that, while in the long run this surely bodes well for the evolution of the gaming medium (especially once the technology becomes standardized), in the short run the result may very well be a large crop of shorter, substantively inferior games. What do you think?
As someone who remembers the leap to 3D gaming quite well, I think the leap to 4D, as it with other leaps in game play structure, will be marked by a transitional period characterized by mediocrity before it truly absorbs the gaming world in general in a successful way and becomes standardized in the next console generation (which may well be the last, incidentally). That's how the leap to 3D was. I remember it well. When the 32/64-bit era hit properly in 1996, it was at first characterized by shorter games. In point of fact, almost all the way through 1997, I tended to think of 3D as just a gimmick. You see, unlike most gamers, I'd already been exposed to 3D gaming for a number of years by that point, as I'd acquired systems like the 32-bit 3DO and the 64-bit Atari Jaguar years earlier. In many ways, the emergent rivalry between Sony's 32-bit, CD-based Playstation and the 64-bit, cartridge-based Nintendo 64 seemed eerily similar to that between the earlier 32-bit, CD-based 3DO and that of the 64-bit, cartridge-based Atari Jaguar, only with more mainstream companies being involved this time around. What I'd learned from that earlier rivalry though was that 3D kinda sucked. My issue wasn't simply that these pricey, "next generation" systems not only had very few games, but that the games they had were very short and simple and almost all of them were either ports or belonged to one of three genres that didn't especially interest me: shooting, fighting, and sports (especially racing). And when the 3DO and Jaguar were replaced by the PlayStation and the N64, it seemed to me like that hitherto background noise had simply now come to the forefront of the gaming world, now being somewhat more within the average person's price range. For example, Super Mario 64 to me felt like a giant step backward for the franchise when compared to Super Mario RPG, which had just been released for the Super NES a few months earlier. The storyline in Super Mario RPG started out standard for the franchise (rescue the princess from Bowser's castle)...but then a giant sword crashed into the castle, just as you were about to save the princess, sending the both of you flying far away from it in different directions. Then the title screen appeared, letting you know that your real journey was only just beginning. My 11-year-old mind was blown! :grin: Super Mario games up to that point had mostly all been simple, rescue-the-princess affairs. This one, though, introduced a real, epic plot involving the fate of the world itself (and a certain philosophy concerning the consequences of mechanization and its deleterious impact on people's dreams). And Princess Toadstool (she wasn't yet known as Peach) joined you on your quest, along with Bowser, which made for hilarious exchanges between the two. :laugh: And some other really cool new characters joined as well. So when, shortly after completing that game, I found myself trying on Super Mario 64 for size, I was disappointed with its comparative simplicity and brevity. Although previously I couldn't have imagined Mario as a good RPG, I now saw the RPG format as the next logical step in the franchise's evolution: the one that should be henceforth Mario's default genre instead of platforming. Then I got Super Mario 64. The plot was: rescue the princess from Bowser. I beat it in two days. The princess baked a cake for me while the credits rolled. Woohoo.
I reached the zenith of my 3D rejectionism though with Star Fox 64. At 9:09 AM I was at the store plunking down my $70 for the game, which was even more back then than it is today, especially when you were a kid on an allowance rather than an adult with a job. By 10 AM I was at home watching the credits roll. I remember ripping the cartridge out without turning the system off (thus voiding my useless warranty :grin:) and throwing it into the air. I was rather frustrated with this new era! That was about as much as I'd ever spent on a video game before and it was also the shortest game I'd ever played outside of an arcade. True, I could extend the play duration by beating it multiple times through different pathways and earning medals and so forth, but that's really beside the point because I'd already seen the whole story, or at least the parts of it that mattered. The way I saw it, 3D was just an excuse for game makers to sell you shorter games at a higher price, i.e. a way of giving consumers less for more money. That's not to say that there weren't any early Sega Saturn, PlayStation, or Nintendo 64 games I liked, but it is to say that ones I liked the best -- which tended to be the ones with the most content and storytelling -- were most all 2D games, like Mischief Makers, NiGHTS Into Dreams, Mega Man 8, and the first Oddworld game for example. Other than games like that, I mostly stuck to my old Super NES library. The Nintendo 64 library was particularly abysmal to me, which is why I'm picking on that system disproportionately here. For the first year, the N64 basically had nothing but shooting games (Doom 64, Duke Nukem 64, Turok, Hexen, Blast Corps, Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire, Star Fox 64, etc.), fighting games (Mortal Kombat Trilogy, Killer Instinct Gold, War Gods, Dark Rift, etc.), and sports games (especially racing titles: Cruis'n USA, Wave Race 64, Mario Kart 64, San Francisco Rush, Extreme-G, Top Gear Rally, etc.) No RPGs at all. Or simulation games. Or even strategy games. Or even proper adventure games unless you count Super Mario 64. Bor-ring! You see, those epic-genre games were all supposed to be released for a device called the 64DD that was to attach to your N64, but the 64DD never came out in the U.S. and didn't even get released in Japan until like 1999. It wasn't until I got Final Fantasy VII and GoldenEye 007 at the tail end of that year (1997) that I finally became convinced that 3D games could actually have thoughtful game play and narratives complex enough to be interesting, and from that point on I started appreciating the expanded game play possibilities that the leap to 3D offered a lot more. But there was that lag time between the leap to 3D itself and full development of its artistic potential.
It's been the same with other leaps in game play technology. The 128-bit generation was characterized by the standardization of online play, for example, which by then had been around for some time already and had certainly taken a while to fully realize. And the subsequent console generation was characterized by the standardization of motion controls, which weren't truly mastered for years after the Wii's release in 2006. Previous to 2009, the play in most motion-control games boiled down to waving the controller around randomly until you saw the desired result on screen. No brain use was required because the control scheme was hardly fully developed until the release of the Wii Motion Plus in 2009 and a subsequent copycat device on the PlayStation 3 and the next evolution of the idea, the Kinect for Xbox 360 (which had/has players abandoning the use of controllers altogether in casual games) in 2010. Part of the reason the current crop of new consoles isn't selling at the same rate as its predecessors did has to do with the fact that they haven't really standardized anything that revolutionizes the way we play games. It's the Oculus Rift that promises to lead to that development, which surely won't occur until the next crop of consoles comes out probably at the end of the current decade. After all, improvements in graphics have come with each new console generation obviously, but they haven't changed the actual way we play games since the leap to 3D some 20 years ago. Improvements in 3D graphics are now just a matter of style, not of game play substance, as the Nintendo people philosophically (and wisely) argued in 2006 vis-a-vis the launch of the Wii. The only way that future improvements in a game's visual presentation can again revolutionize the way we play games is by again adding another dimension, and that's what this new version of virtual reality technology promises to do. It will thus be the first SUBSTANTIVE graphical upgrade the gaming world has seen in two decades: the first one since the leap from 2D to 3D to add new game play possibilities, which in this case means the ability to move the "screen" in all directions for panoramic gaming. My fear though is that, while in the long run this surely bodes well for the evolution of the gaming medium (especially once the technology becomes standardized), in the short run the result may very well be a large crop of shorter, substantively inferior games. What do you think?