We are alive during a very important time in gaming. The 360 and the PS3 are capable of things never before imaginable on a home console. The Wii, for all its flaws, may revolutionize contemporary control mechanics. And several upcoming games, with (relatively) close release dates, may also do their part in changing the face of gaming.
These games don’t do anything outright revolutionary -- for the most part, many of these games simply take existing genres (the space RPG, the action game, etc) and implement one or two wholly original game mechanics that change the way the entire title is played. With any luck, two things will happen: firstly, the mechanics will be as innovative and useful as they have been hyped to be. Secondly, these mechanics will be adopted by the developer community and large, and we’ll see a lot more of them.
So, do you want to see which five upcoming titles will change the face of video gaming? Of course you do.
Firstly, let it be said that I am not a “tech” guy. I don’t know the difference between 1080i and 1080p. When buying a new computer, I never know which graphic card to purchase. I have only a vague idea as to what a “gigahertz” is. So when I speak of gameplay innovations, I mean exactly that -- innovations relating to gameplay, not just graphics. Things that all players from all walks of life can appreciate. Things that change the way a game is, not just how it feels.
Secondly, this list will also be unranked because I goddamn hate ranking stuff.
Director AI -- Left 4 Dead
Question: how do you give replay value to a linear, multiplayer horror game with only a few maps? Invariably, the maps will become stale: players will learn exactly where and when enemies will come from as they memorize the placement of enemy triggers. What was originally a terrifying and suspenseful map soon turns into standard shootemup affair once the map has been fully explored and memorized.
Unless.
Unless unless unless.
Unless you’re the developer behind Left 4 Dead, and you decided to eschew any sort of scripted event triggers in favor of a gameplay innovation that will either revolutionize enemy placement* in video gaming forever, or single-handedly enslave the entire human race through its superintelligence: the Director AI.
The idea is that the Director monitors the assumed “stress level” of the players during any given game. If the survivors haven’t been hit with a zombie attack in a while, he initiates one. If the survivors have been fighting like mad for the past ten minutes, the Director gives them a break and time to regroup. The Director exists to dole out alternating periods of action and calmness -- peaks and valleys, as the developers so frequently state.
Not only that, but the Director determines everything about the attack: not only when they attack, but which types of enemies will appear, and where they will spawn from. If the 411 preview is to be believed, then the Director’s presence makes it so that no two rounds of Left 4 Dead are ever the same. In a game that lives and dies on its ability to terrify the player, what more could you ask for?
Climb everything--Assassin’s Creed
One of the biggest problems in modern action gaming has been how to define the player’s ability to traverse an environment. For the most part, areas the player can or cannot climb, jump, or grab onto are clearly marked: in the Zelda games, for example, you can only climb walls covered in green vines. Assassin’s Creed don’t play that.
Consider Assassin’s Creed a virtual freerunning game -- every piece of architecture that juts out more than two inches is climbable. Instead of the developers forcefully telling the player where he can or can’t go, the environment is realistically designed and it is up to the player to decide how to use it. You can climb up brick walls, traverse rooftops, and leap from ledge to ledge, without the hand of the developer coming down and either forcing or forbidding you from doing particular things in particular ways.
Up until AC, the most nonlinear “assassination” game available has been Hitman: Blood Money. There are literally dozens of ways to kill a given target in Blood Money, all of which have been meticulously programmed and implemented by the good people at IO Interactive. Now imagine combining the wonderfully varied methods of assassination found in Blood Money with a totally nonlinear method of level transportation, and you’ve got more ways to kill human beings than you can shake a goddamn stick at.
Procedural generation -- Spore
In many ways, procedural generation is simply an extension of everything Will Wright cultivated in the Sim games -- user-created content helped along by an intelligent and dynamic system of rules. In Spore, every single creature animation is developed on the fly by the generator. This not only makes things easier for the developers, who no longer have to individually create every single creature animation, but it creates literally endless possibilities for the player. Want to make a creature with only one leg, or one with its ass where its face should be, and vice-versa? Go ahead -- the procedural generator will figure out how your character will walk, fight, eat, and reproduce.
Spore’s procedural generator makes the entire game a playground for the user: whatever the user can think up, the procedural generator is capable of creating (for the most part). While many developers have attempted to create literal worlds for the player, Spore’s procedural generator is the first gameplay innovation that allows the player to create those worlds without developer restrictions. Not only do your creatures dynamically learn how to walk and kill and screw, but the buildings they create, and the societies they develop, all emerge from their original designs. Races built for combat will become more warlike and create armored buildings and vehicles, where herbivores will create humble homes in their peaceful society.
Not only that, but the lack of developer-created material means that, when the player uploads his or her creatures/buildings/vehicles/worlds onto the massive Spore server where other players can download them, the file size will be incredibly small (only a few KB per item, according to Wright). The procedural generator will not only make single player gamingmore nonlinear and user-defined than ever before, but it’ll make the game’s multiplayer aspects a lot easier to access and utilize.
One-To-One Wiimote Swordfighting -- Uh, something, eventually
Alright, I’ll admit that no game in the next year will even attempt to tackle as daunting a task as implementing one-to-one melee combat on the Wii, but it has to happen eventually. At this point, it’s impossible to definitively say if one-to-one swordfighting is even possible on the Wii, but, more likely than not, it’s probable that the Wii can handle it. WarioWare: Smooth Moves showed us that the Wii can handle all different sorts of one-to-one movement (including an actual swordfighting game, though the player is only allowed to block). It’s only a matter of time until one enterprising developer combines all of these different control movements into one quasi-fluid, one-to-one swordfighting system.
Literally anyone who has ever heard of the Wii has probably thought up some of his or her dream games for the system, many of which involve swordplay. Whether we’re talking about anonlinear samurai RPG (imagine Way of the Samurai, but with better graphics and combat), or a Jedi simulator (imagine blocking blaster fire with the Wiimote before thrusting forward the nunchuck to force push a group of stormtroopers), players want a real melee combat game on the Wii. It’s only a matter of time until they get it.
Real-time Conversation -- Mass Effect
If you have to pick one thing on this list to be jaded and unsure about, make it Mass Effect’s real-time conversation system. Considering there have been practically no major updates on the game since February, it’s tough to tell whether the conversation system will be everything BioWare says it will be.
Hypothetically, as a character talks in the game, the player still has control. At any time, the player can interrupt with one of six dialogue choices presented in an onscreen radial menu, each choice consisting of one word each (“aggressive,” “complimentary,” “inquisitive,” etc).
Conversational responses -- and again, this is all very, very hypothetical -- will be context-sensitive, depending on exactly what the person has just said and when the player chooses to respond. If you interrupt someone too early, they may not give you the right sort of advice, but if you stop them at just the right time, you may get what you want.
The idea is to make conversation much more fluid than it has been in other BioWare RPGs; by a certain point, players will have subconsciously memorized the different responses on the conversation dial and will actively and effortlessly participate in the real-time conversation.
Of course, if the conversation system isn’t everything BioWare says it is, then it’s just a slightly gussied-up version of your typical RPG dialogue tree that has little to no impact on the overall game structure. Here’s hoping that isn’t the case.
Honorable mentions:
Euphoria/Digital Molecular Matter -- Star Wars: The Force Unleashed
If you’re unfamiliar with either engine, then watch theabove video, then go here and watch the Digital Molecular Matter demo. Essentially, Euphoria is a physical AI system where each character, rather than just going limp upon death (as is the case with current ragdoll animation), will strain and move in an attempt to protect itself or latch onto other objects. DMM is a method by which destructible objects break and shatter in the way they would in real life, instead of simply breaking in predetermined areas decided by the programmers.
While these two main innovations in Unleashed may eventually contribute to unconventional physics puzzles or more realistic hand-to-hand fighting systems, they’re really just aesthetic improvements in their current state. Euphoria, as sumotori dreamstaught us, can result in some hilarious and almost-realistic character movements without influencing gameplay in any tangible way. DMM may make explosions and destruction a lot prettier, but that’s about it.
“Emergent gameplay” -- Bioshock
The idea of “emergent gameplay” isn’t on the top five if only because it’s really just a buzzword: a buzzword that represents complex, user-defined experiences and wonderfully immersive gameplay, but it’s a buzzword nonetheless.
Unlike the games in the top five, emergent gameplay is not a simple mechanic that can be copied and ported into other titles: it’s a word that describes detailed, complex interactions between dozens of behavioral and environmental systems that combine to form a gameplay experience. The entireBioshock experience depends upon the interconnectedness of these separate systems, and “emergent gameplay” is just the phrase we’ve chosen to throw around to summarize those connections.
I'm looking forward to Bioshock as much as anyone else on the planet (maybe moreso), but the beauty and innovation in Bioshock is simply too big and too complex to be considered just one gameplay innovation unto itself. So don't write me angry emails asking why I'm hating on Bioshock, because I'm not.
*FACT: The phrase, “a gameplay innovation that will revolutionize enemy placement,” is the single douchebaggiest series of words ever typed on the Internet.
I was aware of these developments before, individually, but seeing them all lumped into one place, and then thinking about ways to combine them...
Procedurally generated environments reacting to accurate physical simulations as director-placed NPCs flail about with a semblance of living reflexes, generating ways to play that the developer never even contemplated...
Seriously I was about to kick the nearest thing in the face if the Force Unleashed game didn't get some type of recognization. That game will be bad ass.
wait, so BioShock should be considered cause they scripted if you step in a puddle it makes a noise along with if you hit the wall, it makes a noise?
I mean don't get me wrong, I want to play the game but when the developers themselves say "It is a shooter", it is just a shooter. What is so big and special about it besides a pretty environment and the fact you can interact with the environment like any other game?
I just thought people hyped this cause it is the indirect successor to System Shock 2 and it look like it could be scary.
The appeal of Bioshock is the relationship between the NPC motivations and the protagonist's abilities.
Say, since Big Daddies only attack people who go after the Little Sisters, you could hypothetically trick a mutant into accidentally attacking a Little Sister, thereby siccing the Big Daddy on him and saving you the trouble of having to take the mutant out yourself.
Even the "successor to System Shock 2" card has been wiped off the table. System Shock 2 was a first-person RPG, not a shooter. I'm just excited because FPS and Ayn Rand are two great tastes that taste great together.
Snaileb:
Red Steel didn't do one-to-one Wiimote sword stuff. Red Steel did simple gesture recognition: I swing right really fast, the game waits and initiates a preanimated "swing right" attack. The onscreen sword doesn't follow my exact Wiimote movements, which is what I think we've all been waiting for.
Not to be nit-picky and a little bit of a Devil's Adovacate but...if you run around in the first person view with a gun shooting stuff, I tend to think that is a FPS.
@Rev
Yeah that is cool, but I've done that in other games. Can't you do that in Doom? Get the creatures to attack each other? I know it was done in games like Geist and Psi-Ops, possess a body and attack someone and everyone will attack that body. Geist and Psi-Ops are not 100% matches but it kind of gets the idea across but I know this has been done in other games.
To be honest, I'm just repeating stuff the developers have talked about: while their recent "It's a shooter" comment sort of surprised me, they've spent a majority of the last year talking about how you won't just kill everything you see on your own, and that you'll use either the environment (hacking autoturrets) or other characters against one another.
Of course, they could be totally full of shit, so I guess we won't know for a while.
Count me in the Too Human camp as well. Norse mythology and scripted cameras FTW.
Seriously, after God of War, I'll have a hard time playing action games with controllable cameras. Not once did I ever have to fight against the camera in that game.
Very nice article, it's good to see those innovations all at the same place. Additionally, these are all games that I'd like to give a shot, except for the melee Wii combat which I don't really consider exciting.
Hmm, I agree with others here. I can't ever see Wiimote swordfighting working in a way that's not going to make me want to hurl the wiimote at the TV. Or working in anyway whatsoever, for that matter.
every time i see a new trailer or q&a for bioshock, my jaw drops. if the game works out how the devs and designers are planning, it's gonna be the game to end all games. what valve tried to do with half-life 2 and failed miserably at. most anticipated game of the year, hands down.
I think the one thing that really stands out to me in this is that the Wii's one "potential" innovation would be real time interaction. The unfortunate thing there, however, is that the wii, due to its limited power, cant do any of the other innovations listed (not well at least). Sure a force push with the chuck will be cool, but not as cool as if it had been done to a dynamically animated enemy that surprised u due to its dynamic placement. Watching it smack into another storm trooper who dynamically decides to punch that guy in the face... dynamic!
On the up side raving rabbids is still fun as hell :P
Too Human looks like the bomb. I love the sci-fi meets Norse mythology feel and the class system sounds pretty tight. Couple that with an epic story and some none-too-shabby graphics and its right up there with Mass Effect and Fable 2 on my RPG most wanted list.
I never saw anything about left 4 dead other than it was a zombie survival game. That director AI looks pretty badass, if kinda disturbing; you have to get your ass kicked for 10 minutes to earn a break cause the computer feels bad for you? Pssh, screw that, I don't need to be patronized! BRING ON THE ONSLAUGHT! Also, cocks.
Dyack is hilarious, everytime he's interviewed its like he's desperately struggling, holding back from yelling at the interviewer, "Don't you see? Don't you get it? My game is going to break you, all of you, rend your mind with its awesomeness!!"
But I respect him, its a ridiculously ambitious project, and he's very emotionally invested in it.
Yeah. I think everyone at LucasArts is dropping a HUGE ball by not doing something that the thing seems soo well suited for, and would print money for them if they do it remotely decently.
Not to mention not making a new Rogue Squadron game. I'll play another Hoth level. I don't even care.
All of these games look fantastic. Is there any word yet on what type of computer will be needed to run Spore? It better not be some huge powerhouse PC or else I'll hafta wait for the console versions. Unfortunately I think Left 4 Dead WILL require a powerhouse PC.
All the other games mentioned look really good. However, Bioshock just looks like another moody FPS. Yawn. And Wii sword fighting will never be accomplished as much as we like to think it will because the system is too underpowered. Maybe on Wii 2.
And I, too, am really looking forward to Too Human after some of the latest info was released. I'm more excited for it than ever before, actually. It's not at the top of my list, but it's up there.
Where is GTA4, though? Or is the closest representation of a living breathing city ever seen in a game yet not revolutionary enough by today's standards?
I think we can all agree that many people will be very PO'd if BioShock does not rock the casbah. I think I'm most looking for ward to Assassin's Creed though. But all of the games listed are pretty high up on my anticipation list.
I don't think Left 4 Dead will require a behemoth of a machine, or at least it shouldn't -- it's running on the Source engine, after all.
And as far as why GTA4 isn't on the list, do we really know enough about the city to know if it really is the most realistic breathing city ever made, or if it just looks the prettiest?
The people that made the Rogue Squadron games are too busy pretending to recreate The Neverending Story on the PS3 with Lair.
I doubt we'll see one of those games again.
Too Human may look cool, but I've got to see something special in the game for me to like it.
Dyack misses the whole part that people ARE nosy about pre-production on movies. I blame Kirk Cameron and "Secrets of the Back to the Future Trilogy".
I'm not willing to dump a substantially larger amount of money on a game than I would be a shitty $10 movie.
To think... George Broussard could've bought DNF YEARS of good press if he'd only shown us some shitty unpolished demo footage. Then he could've blamed US and kept the game secret for years to come with no one mocking DNF at all.
Dyack has this master genius a-hole attitude about it, for the same thought processes on how Spielberg treats people who admire his technical ability. As though making movies (nee games) is some sort of revered magic process that only a select few are ever capable of performing such feats.
Hey, Too Human and the scripted camera thing should have gotte a mention I think, its a bigger deal than we think. Ever realize how much controlling a camera slows down the play of a game?
I blogged about it actually. I went to Silicon Knights and Dyack presented the game to us, showed off the camera and all - really nice. doxophobia4.blogspot.com if your interested.
Such a good read...must be under a rock as I only knew about half of these. I could see some of these being mixed together in the future for an even more immersive experience. Dammmit now I want to get next-gen.
@Rev
Didnt Oblivion promise something along the lines of living cities and all it seemed to me is that they still seemed like robots. Albeit, a shitload of robots.
Silverhertz:
Yep. Though Oblivion mentioned it as sort of a side feature made more for immersion than anything else, whereas Bioshock (if, as I presume, you're comparing the hype between the two) is pushing it as a necessary gameplay mechanic. This either means that the Bioshock guys can't possibly be lying because their entire game would fall apart, or that they've been really, really overstating the importance of unscripted interaction.
if these games rock, and are good as we hope they will be whether or not the innovations are there, is enough to make me happy.
we might be upset, but in the end if the game is a prooven wining experience i don't think anyone will complain about that one lillte innovation not working as intended...unless it ruins the enxperience, which could be a possibility
King: Will you save the kingdom?
Hero:No
King Come on!!! Please??
Hero:No
King Come on!!! Please??
Hero:No
King Come on!!! Please??
Hero:No
King Come on!!! Please??
Hero:No
King Come on!!! Please??
Hero:Okay
Destructoid is an open discussion community. You don't need to "audition" to post a comment - just speak your mind. We respect differing opinions on the site, so have at it. Be smart, funny, insightful, clueless, or cute -- but back it up with substance. Keep your cool, keep it fun. We only ask that you act respectfully and above all: don't be a troll and ruin it for everyone else. Don't bring down gamers or we'll, you know, gently shoot you in the face and stuff you into a flaming mailbox. Each comment is your opportuntity to make this community awesomer. Is that even a word?
Avoiding the banhammer only requires common sense: spamming, trolling, racism, NSFW stuff, and other forms of sucking will not be tolerated. If anyone is griefing please report abuse. Be good. Don't suck!
Destructoid is an independently-run publication forged by our love of video games and the gaming community's need of accountable enthusiast press living the dream since March 16, 2006
or just good game.