It surprised me just now when I was reminded XboxOne was released five years ago now! That’s just a year or two off a console generation so it feels like more consoles are nigh.
The problem is, I wasn’t tempted by this generation. I had high hopes for the WiiU but N’s contracts were too expensive and devs stayed away so the library still doesn’t merit buying one.
But I really dislike this focus on power. Yahtzee summed it up in his RDR2 review with ‘pointless decadance’ That defines contemporary game design for me.
Everyone is programmed to thirst for more power, probably a remnant if the 16bit generation which was always a step behind the arcades, which is no longer the case.
I don’t care about graphics. Splinter Cell on PS2 (with a slightly better video output) is all you need in my eyes. Games like Horixon Zero Dawn look the part but you can only look at a pretty scene once before it’s old news and then you’re left with gameplay. This aspect, as everyone keeps pointing out, has been seriously neglected.
Don’t blow your budget on graphics if you haven’t yet managed to make a game first. Pointless busy work in a AAA game is mind bogglingly pointless. I will direct you to Facebook games for that thrilling mechanic.
So modern game libraries look pretty samey to me. 16bit and 32bit games are being rereleased in hd usually pointlessly as now the edges are too sharp and resolution too high for the scenes as they were originally designed.
XB1 is £180 now which I was surprised by - that seems quite cheap! But all the consoles just put me off in principle. I hate the advertising - they are always snarling men are sneering boys being ultra aggressive or fake enthusiastic. I don’t associate with aspirational media invented alpha male man they use to advertise their wares.
I’m about fun. I want to sit down and start playing something. Not watching you’re boring cut scenes.
A console like WiiU is designed to try to mitigate the trap of just having a table of statistics to point at to draw customers in which will inevitably require hugely expensive AAA games to justify the power and investment. But how many PS4 games would run on a Wii, or GameCube or even Dreamcast? I’d say quite a bit over half.
So I want a console which has a new controller using my patent pending track ball controller design with just 6 buttons which honestly think is still too many.
It needs online shop, free online gaming (servers managed by publishers not hardware sellers).
A focus on experimentation and windows gaming like the DC tried to do. No mouse required-just a good control scheme.
Cheap contracts to encourage uptake with devs and publishers.
Cheap. £80. This could be cheaper but there is a human trait that shuns things if they’re too cheap so it would have to be artificially expensive to account for this despite the production cost being low.
Not chasing power but chasing mass audience. This will make game development for lower price point games with smaller to medium budgets more attractive to developers with a broader audience outside of RDR2 fans and encourage risk taking.
A pick up and play console with flash rom for no loading times and a return to cd format / 1gb gd-rom to stop people making games for dvd which must have content! Then load it into the hdd and shelve the cd.
Holding your hand through 10 hours of a cut scene and quick time event slog fest, requiring 10gigabytes of textures some of which you might see once is a waste of time.
Dial it back console makers and lighten up a bit. There’s more to games than chasing polygons per second.
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