oughtobe wrote:name one feature that will blow Crysis out of the water?
I'll list seven.
The storyline. The character development. The graphics. The babes. The one-liners. The gameplay. The feeling you get playing it.
Make it eight. The weapons.
I think games like Strife and Half-life were steps in the right direction, but until some really good adventure game developers start working with really good FPS developers, i don't see much happening with FPS's...
What you are describing is The Problem. The unintentional blending of genres through misguided attempts to appeal to more than one gaming market have given birth to such monstrosities as Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun, Sim City 4000, and Civilization 4.
I'll break each one down for you:
C&C:TS's central flaw is that it tries to make a RTS a RPG. This is great for the fantasy genre and virtually impossible to commit for a realistic combat simulator. StarCraft and WarCraft are fine for that because they start out an RPG anyway and manifest into a RTSish battle simulation interface. That magic doesn't work in reverse. No matter how well rendered the cut scenes are, or how well acted. That's cinema, not a game.
SC4000 is a total piece of crap. I say that because it is a simulator and not a game. The reason SC1 and SC2000 worked well was because it was a GAME that behaved like a (limited) simulation. The controls were pretty basic and the results of your actions were readily apparent in the game. It required trial and error, and learning the effective use of the controls in order to accomplish the objectives of the game: Growth of population, economic development, and positive statistics. SC300 onward, the game took a backseat to the simulation. They substituted sophistication in the controls for operative gameplay, replaced innovation in design with highly rendered sprites, and deprived the player of simple pleasure in order to provide them pleasant boredom. You watch a simulation and tweak variables essentially. What kind of game is that? Rainman might enjoy it. I don't. I want to play my games and feel like I am playing them when I am doing it. If the game runs without me, I never pick it up.
I don't even know where to get started on Civ4. It is a game, I will give it that. Just an overly saturated one with no sense of direction, no plot, no point apparent to it. Conquest was too politically incorrect as the obvious solution to the game, so taking a page from the textbooks issued to America's public school children, they made the ultimate objective a Globalist One World Government run by the U.N.. That in and of itself made me puke. I know the people who design that game aren't political scientists, nor most of the gamers who play it, but that is so improbable and so gross an abuse of the player's participation that that alone merits leaving the game on the shelf. That said, starting with Civ3 they introduced ridiculously highly rendered graphics, unnecessarily large and complex cut scenes and diplomacy screens which consumed far too much attention from the player (featuring realistic expressions, etc.) The game has clunky operation, numerous overlapping systems of controls and objectives, and basically doesn't know what to do with it self, much less offer you the opportunity to play it. See, I played CIV I when it came out. It was good. Cartoonish. Cute. Easy to play and understand. Simple in gameplay but rich with opportunities for a determined player to succeed. Like god damned Chess. Not fancy. Simple. Easy. Fun. It was a game. It played like a game. It was fun. It didn't pretend to be more than a game. I enjoyed that. It knew its place on my harddrive. Its copy protection scheme was aside from it all, easily cracked. Now they booby trap the game discs so they can't be backed up, and the software it dies under the weight of its exaggerated controls and overwrought graphics and orchestra-rendered scores.
I don't need all that. I don't need Jazz and a simulation,.. I don't need a movie, and an orchestra.
I want to sit my ass down, no muss, no fuss, boot up in less than 1 minute, type in CD SC2000 at the command prompt, and in less than a second after hitting the enter key after typing SC2000 enjoy the instant satisfaction of seeing the splash screen load, a second or two later, having the main menu right there, no movies, no bullshit... and starting a game I can easily control that has 0 lag and 0 bullshit with a nice tinny MIDI piped in the background. THAT's WHAT I WANT! AGAIN!
I want my World Leaders to make outlandish threats and unrealistic demands, and to smile their cute little cartoonish smiles as they do so. I want war, trade, and diplomacy to be the primary control interfaces. All the rest is bullshit anyway.
I want my tanks to mass and drive into enemy bases without excessive fanfare of pop-up warnings, HUD distractions, videos playing, pagers ringing, cellphones going off, faxes coming in, men with lawnmowers outside making agoddamnded racket... YOU GETTING THIS?!!
YOU UNDERSTAND ME!?
I guess what I'm trying to say here is that I enjoy simple pleasures and games that are, at least, and at most, games. And nothing but.
I don't want an Orchestra playing in the background.
I don't want your little Commie politics built into my game.
I don't need your flashy videos playing in my face while I'm trying to play.
Just cut the crap and get to the game.
So you see what I'm saying here? The games ceased to be games when they became productions, and not something you could sit down and enjoy for a few minutes, or hours, with no great obligations, or investiture of opinion, or necessity to gain understanding of an arcane system of controls.
I maintain DOS games like CIV1, SC2000, DUKE3D were essentially and actually superior to the games we play today. As an aside, I happen to think the same thing has happened with movies. Modern movies do not approach classic films. But that's another subject and I'm critical of all of them.