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Comment by Gring | Hacker News Reader

All that great tech, and the end result is just another game where you shoot people until they're dead, then repeat with more people. Sad, really.

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Perhaps, I don't think we've seen a Crysis powered porno, that would be popular with the kids :-)

I think though that you've may have conflated cause and effect. This sort of engine isn't really useful in a poker game. Do you remember the beautifully rendered ChessMaster games on the Amiga? I remember people talking about a 'waste of the graphics' to render chess pieces like that.

I don't think anyone has done a good Myst replacement, this might be good for that too. An archeology game? possibly. Remember that the 'engine' and the 'game' are two different things. Perhaps the 'safest' thing to imagine is an FPS, known audience, known play etc etc. Licensing isn't cheap, so if you're paying for it you don't want to risk that capital on a hyper realistic 'angry birds' now do you?

Some other thoughts on uses for an engine that does good visuals:

  1 Mechanical puzzles - build machines to solve puzzles.
  2 Life/City/Population simulators - more fun to watch.
  3 Sex games - mentioned above.
  4 Sports games - haven't had a decent FP kayaking game
  5 Where's Waldo type

I'm sure there are others.

Oh no, my point isn't about cause and effect. I believe that when they set out to do a great graphics engine, they don't have derivate, tasteless games in mind. They're actually doing innovative, great things well worth their time.

The problem is the other half of their studio, which creates games based on those engines. This is where all the problems lie. No taste.

And it's not just Far Cry and Crysis. Check out their recently released iOS game "Fibble". It's tasteless horse radish.

Horse radish is hardly tasteless. Is this a colloquialism I'm unaware of?

No, but "tasteless horse radish" is a completely useless thing. Which is my point.

Are you allowed to make a porn game with this engine?

I ask in all seriousness... I'm thinking maybe the licence of this engine comes with certain terms?

Wait, "Where's Waldo" but in 3d, from first person perspective?

   6 Paparazzi - Start with a lousy camera, have to take
     photos which are graded for score.  Get better lenses
     and access to better hiding places as level ups.
     (This is like a FPS, but with no guns, and with 
     the enemy on a pre-determined route and with strict           
     time limits for each level)

   7 Tree in the Field - you start in a field.
     There's a tree.  You wander around.  You can
     climb the tree.  You can run. As you do certain
     things (start running, for example) a timer 
     starts with a recommendation ("Hey! How fast
     can you run round the field? / Climb the tree?
     / etc".  You find a magnifying glass.  You can
     look at bugs.  You can look at stones (and the
     fossils).  You can look at flowers.  The weather
     changes.  The day turns into night.  You find 
     a box.  When you find the box another prompt 
     pops up "Hey! This looks like a good place to
     keep your fossils!".  There is a rich and 
     diverse eco-system, with hooks into information
     about everything ("This is a 'Cowslip' (*Primula 
     veris*)" - but then more links if wanted.  Right 
     down to high level biology concepts.)  You can 
     race bugs against each other.  You find some
     seeds, and a trowel, and some rickety rackety 
     implements.

   7a Tree in the Field DLC - A Toolshed for the
      equipment / A mini greenhouse / etc etc.

Wow, absolutely love the Paparazzi concept. Have you got more ideas like these?

I have millions of ideas. Ideas are nothing - delivery is everything. I am unable to deliver anything.

Au contraire, you delivered a reply within 2 hours. :)

Perhaps you are too hard on yourself. (Although given you live in the UK that's likely a pre-requisite for continued residence...)

How about "You are the Road"

http://www.kongregate.com/games/duckets/you-are-the-road-mol...

This game came out of a game hackfest called the molyjam where each team had to pick a game idea from a Peter Molyneux's faker's twiter stream: https://twitter.com/petermolydeux

> 6 Paparazzi - Start with a lousy camera, have to take photos which are graded for score. Get better lenses and access to better hiding places as level ups. (This is like a FPS, but with no guns, and with the enemy on a pre-determined route and with strict time limits for each level)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pok%C3%A9mon_Snap

Your "tree in the field" idea sounds like something Peter Molyneux might promise ;).

Not true at all.

We're currently in the beta testing phase of our game where you get to shoot mechs until they're dead. http://mwomercs.com

Totally different than people.

Seen the trailer, looks awesome! Keep up the good work :)

Please stop browsing HN so we can have this game sooner.

Love, The Internet

Come up with something more fun then shooting down virtual people and earn a lot of money.

So lets try to really break this one down.

Game development costs significant money so gameplay can't take significant risks. Any viable alternative must be able to generate comparable returns. Cynically put, for a game to be a success, there needs to be enough instant gratification for mass appeal. Same lessons from Hollywood...

First person shooters a popular primarily because they give us an adrenaline rush, with secondary effects like boosting your ego if you play multi-player. That's why the format works.

So what other options are there?

You could invent another format that produces similar adrenaline rushes such as Amnesia, which is really just a spin on the FPS. Perhaps there are similar things you could try by simulating, say, a rollercoaster or a jet fighter.

But what else is there which provides the same immediate gratification of an adrenaline rush? An endorphin rush...

Now here the obvious choice would be sex, and I'm sure the porn industry is watching closely, but there's too high a risk of censorship for the mainstream game industry I guess; our society is much happier with violence than sex.

But another trigger of endorphins is relaxation. What about games which, when you play for an hour, you finish feeling relaxed, happy and calm? Take flow for example - http://interactive.usc.edu/projects/cloud/flowing/ - there's even a learning element there. Throw in some elements for player creativity, and you have your secondary ego boosts for longer term gratification. I don't think is has been explored enough to understand the potential, so risk is high but at the same time, rewards could also be high if you're the first on the scene.

This is incorrect. Whether it's the UDK engine or Cry Engine, you can do some amazing things with them if you have the capability. You are only locked into FPS if that's only what you're capable of making.

That is also incorrect. Making an FPS does not imply that you are incapable of creating another type of game.

"You are only locked into FPS if that's only what you're capable of making."

It seems clear to me that I implied that being only capable of making an FPS means you are locked into making an FPS.

If you look at sales, 95% of Cry Engine game boxes sold were first person shooters. I don't expect anything different for the future.

might be; but fact is: that's not the only thing, the engine allows you to make

Sure there might be an outlier of a good game somewhere. But the current market drives future innovation.

And the current market is "crap sells well". Let's guess what everybody is working on...

And what about UDK, which is similar engine but with more widespread adoption?

While it's true that most of them are FPS, I don't think it is 95%. Look at Aion for example (MMORPG)

Where's Jonathan Blow when we need him? Seriously though, cross this level of graphics with a storyline centered around exploration of a creatively made-up world, and it'd could be a birth of a game genre - an exploration as a game.

Busy working on The Witness. IIRC, they're not using a premade engine for it.

Something like GTA?

If you have an engine like CryEngine3 you need hoards of people creating content to make it look good. If you have hoards of people creating that content, you need to sell a lot of copies to pay their wages. To sell a lot of copies, you have to make something that appeals to the mass market. The mass market, at least for those who care about the kind of graphics attainable only through top-of-the-line game engines, wants straightforward mechanics where they kill things, providing a black-and-white scenario where they can feel that they have won.

http://dear-esther.com/ is a good example of using modern game media for story-telling.

Yes. Portal was also an amazing use of modern game tech without being destructive.

It's an interface problem. In the real world, for example, I prefer ultimate frisbee to laser tag, but in a video game we can't simulate anything more than point and shoot.

In some ways the tech encourages that, unfortunately; the huge numbers they quote for the Xbox 360 (which incidentally is 7, not 10) are only achievable with heavily vectorised code which implies heavy graphics work rather than AI. I guess they'd say that's what the market wants though.

If money from that is what it takes to drive the tech forward, I'm fine with it. Someone has to supply the cash to push this stuff forward, why not young adults that love shooters?

That's a good point. But the end result should be "lots of great games". And I can't find them.

This paragraph best sums it up:

“Watch this—it never fails,” he said, bending over his computer keyboard. On one of his twin monitors, Hecker pulled up the movie-trailers section of Apple.com; on the other, he loaded the upcoming-releases page of GameSpot.com. The movies, Hecker pointed out, encompassed a huge diversity of topics and approaches, from buddy comedies to period dramas to esoteric art films. The video games, on the other hand, were almost all variations on a single theme: outlandishly attired men armed with gigantic weapons, shooting things.

Source: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/05/the-most...

It's helpful if you don't think of them as telling separate stories. It's more like watching different interpretations of Hamlet, or Romeo and Juliet. It's basically the same story over and over, but if it's told well, then it can still be entertaining.

This is pretty offensive to anyone who actually plays FPS games and isn't just bitching from the outside.

There are some great FPS's with amazing stories that make up a large part of the bedrock that is gaming as a cultural medium.

They are not retellings of the same story any more than Oscar-bait movies are retellings of other stories.

It's like saying "don't look at Harry Potter or Star Wars or Lord of the Rings as separate stories, instead think of them as different interpretations of the monomyth. It's the same story over and over, but if done well it can still be entertaining".

When all's said and done, I'd like to call them separate stories. Identifying the common plots and tropes doesn't make them the same at heart.

Well maybe I had it backwards. Maybe FPS's are trying to tell different stories but for some reason they all try to use the same tools to do it. Really, shooting people is not the best way to tell most stories. The creators of the Drake's Uncharted series, really great FPS games, are complaining that it's hard to get any serious dramatic emotion in a game that has you getting shot at most of the time.

What do you propose the player does in an action oriented, modern, gun-based game? What skill based mechanic can eat up 30 hours of a 40 hour game and is superior to point and click FPS shooting?

At the end of the day, your player has to PLAY the game and I guess I can understand the frustration of the grinding and the mechanic, but I fail to see what is superior.

Maybe people want more games like Heavy Rain? I loved Heavy Rain, it was an incredibly engaging and emotional story. I had a great connection with the characters and story, but there's only one problem: it's basically a choose your own adventure movie. Lots of watching, some playing, very little skill involved.

I don't think anyone is suggesting this is an easy problem or that there is some answer already out there for the taking. You can lament that state of the art gaming technology is put to use pandering to largely adolescent and tremendously violent fantasies without knowing all the answers.

That being said, a great example of simple, (relatively) nonviolent gameplay giving way to countless hours of playing time is Minecraft. A Minecraft or even BridgeBuilder clone with this CryEngine would be pretty rad.

Blue Lacuna http://playthisthing.com/blue-lacuna is a modern, ambitious adventure game with no graphics at all. Actually there's lots of drama in "interactive fiction" games, but most of them aren't 30 hours long. I think it's possible for RTS's to have strong storylines, require skill and interactivity, and fancy graphics to boot. Although I'm not sure it's a strictly better medium for storytelling, at least it's different.

Edit - continuing:

Ico is fairly engaging and even intense in places, and it doesn't involve guns. Little flash games like N+ are actiony and you don't have to shoot people. I think a AAA high-budget game with N+ mechanics would be awesome. Darwinia is a good example of telling a story in a RTS.

Lots of games, even FPS games, involve stealth. So that's something you can do in an "action oriented, modern, gun-based game" other than killing hordes of random enemies. Another action-oriented mechanics is hand-to-hand combat, from realistic(ish) UFC fighting games to Ninja Gaiden or even Mad World.

Well, an audience that doesn't look for variety, that instead only wants to hear the same story told over and over again - that's an uncultured audience in my book, no matter what story.

Somehow Total Recall (premise of the short story[1], as illustrated by the movies) seems a good starting point for this discussion: what do you want to remember for the first time? and have it unique to your experience?

([1] - We Can Remember It For You Wholesale, but everybody knows it as Total Recall.)

Why is that sad? Should "great tech" only be used to create the kinds of video games you like?

It's my opinion, baddox. Look at this video (from the atlantic jonathon blow article), then tell me the state of video games is just fine: http://bcove.me/vf4eof01

Its all related to your perception; maybe the constructions falls over you if you hit them hard enough, and maybe there is a part where the place is full of mirrors and you hardly can tell the difference between an enemy and his reflection... but all this little things probably doesn't make it a "new game" for you; but for some people it does.

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