The DICE conference in Las Vegas is good for a lot of things, but one thing it’s great for is bumping
into people. People who work in games and have opinions, even. So at this year’s event, I posed two
questions to many of them: what’s the one thing you want to see most in next-gen consoles, and why
are game budgets so secretive. (And perhaps notably, many of them said they’d heard the former
question a lot in the past few days.)
This story, if you’re playing along and read the headline, contains the answers to the first of those two.
Head over here for the budget talk, read on to see what people in the industry had to say, and if you feel
inspired, offer your own take in the comments below.
Brian Reynolds, Zynga
“Well, I think it would just be something faster, something that would load the next screen up. You
know, I play Skyrim and every time I go in a building I have to wait for it to load, and I would watch my
friend play the same thing on the PC, and the little [loading bar] only rotates this much , and I’m on the 360 and I have to watch it go all the way around. Just making it faster would be
enough. You know, if they make it higher-res, fine, but I don’t feel a hunger for high resolution graphics.
I do feel a hunger to have it go faster.”
Marc Merrill, Riot Games
“Just to be candid, we make games for the PC at the moment, and no immediate plans to change that, so I think we’re a little bit biased. We’d love to see consoles — it’d be great if there was no hardware, and there was sort of a virtual machine that was embedded in other places. I’m sure that’s very wishful thinking, but yeah.”
Mike Capps, Epic Games
“A tenfold increase in technology. It’s quite feasible. It’s quite possible. We showed that last year at GDC that that’s the PC hardware today, and I hope console manufacturers really step up.”
Randy Pitchford, Gearbox Software
“I want a direct and immediate relationship with all of our customers, so I want everyone to be connected all the time, and I want the distance between us to be as small as possible.”
Robert Bowling, Infinity Ward
“It’s all about processing power for me. I want those full physics on everything that it makes sense on. I want full special effects, and I don’t want it hitting framerate. So I want to get to that area where we can make everything an interactive environment, if we so choose, if it’s right for our gametype, without taking a hit in terms of framerate or smoothness of controls.”
Michael Condrey, Sledgehammer Games
“I’m excited for next-gens. I love current-gens, because right now we’re in that sweet spot — developers know how to really get every ounce out of it. You know, the processing power’s going to be great when we make that leap. I’m looking for really great social integration. I want everything in one box. Right now I have to do things on my iPad and my iPhone. I’m doing certain things on my set-top box. I’m looking forward to the full integration of all of my networks into one place.”
Matthew Lee Johnston, PopCap
“I’d like to see always-on connectivity. I’d like to see less of this sort of walled-garden environment where I can experiment more with my business model. Real time metrics so that I can continuously evolve the game and tune it based on player feedback that’s coming to me through their play data. It’s something that we have in mobile platforms now. I would love to have it in these next-gen consoles.”
Greg Kasavin, Supergiant Games
“For me, it’s just the extreme ease of use around downloading games. And games in particular, because I know that consoles are trying to be a whole bunch of different things now and they don’t really want to be about just games, and I get that, but as long as they don’t leave games by the wayside because that’s where the early adopters are — where the most passionate users of these devices are going to be, and they just need to make games as accessible to those people and as easy to find as possible.”
David Jaffe, Eat Sleep Play
“Real world or fantasy world? Real world would be always on, so as I get older and I have kids and I have a very demanding job and I still love console games, I don’t like the fact that there’s this long preamble that happens every time I sit down to play console games. The boot up, to going into the dashboard or the XMB, to loading up the game, to seeing the logos. It’s like ‘dude, I just want to fucking play.’ So what I loved about PSP and DS, the last generation, and I haven’t opened up my Vita yet but I’m assuming it has a sleep mode… But to have a console that basically I can be playing Batman, and my kids have a nightmare and I go take care of them, and two days later I get back to Batman, and I haven’t had to shut things down and I can pick right back up where I left off. That’s what I want, practically. I hope that’s in there. Fantasy-land, I want hardware that’s a lot easier for designers to work with, so we can just sort of imagine things and they appear on the box. That would be the best.”
Tomonobu Itagaki, Valhalla Game Studios
“I’m always saying the same thing, but what I’m expecting is just power — more power… Also, there needs to be a scheme that allows the console to connect to social games easier.”
Todd Howard, Bethesda
“It’s definitely coming, right, and it’s stuff that we are planning for and looking at. But I think the current platforms have been so successful, and a lot of people are happy with their systems. They’re HD now, they’re all connected, the graphics look great — you’re going to need to do something really special and new. And I do think overall we need to look at, OK, whatever happens, is there a way we can make these games upwards compatible? Can I put Skyrim in some other new fancy box and it’s better? I think that would be great for my current library. Think about when you upgrade your iPhone. iPhone 4 is out and it has a retina display, and now there’s all these updates for games — oh I’m gonna play Plants vs. Zombies now and it looks better. Or this looks better, or this looks better. But I’m not having to flush my library of stuff and get all new stuff, and decide if I want to commit to this. I think there’s a better way to go about it going forward, and I hope that would be the case. It’s definitely coming. I just don’t want to take all of the current systems and the games and all of the fans and say ‘well, your time is over.’ You know what I mean?
[1UP: Do you have another current gen game
in you?]
I don’t know. Our games take a while, so I can’t answer that question right now. I can honestly tell you, ‘I
don’t know.’”
Ted Price, Insomniac Games
“Instant loads. As a player, having my game load up immediately is pretty important to keep me engaged, so if there’s some way that can happen, I’ll be a fan.”
Posted by: admin in Gaming News
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