Next gen war/free roamers....

[CARTIER90]

Mercanaries tried it, but was ultimately held back by the hardware....Operation flashpoint on the PC made a better stab at it and...pretty much succeded by all accounts. However what has been lacking in war games has always been the ability to have hundreds or even thousands of combatants fighting each other on a very large scale open map say several hundred k squared.

This is going to happen to a degree with 'Game 2' the sequel to Opflash...the PS3 surely would be a great platform for such a genre of game ?, with Blu-Ray you have the capacity to store such a large environment , the power , the memory (well 512 could be an issue )....being 'led down the garden path' during missions should be a thing of the past nowadays !.

Take a look at GRAW , looks fantastic yet it is apparantly 'empty', will we see true bustling cities such as those of the Getaway trailer or are we kidding ourlselves. The PS3 should be the platform for Quality AND quantity...is it memory that keeps back devs ?, i have heard that without gigs of RAM it is difficult to program thousands of peds and keep them running in the 'background' without bringing a game to its knees.....

My gaming interests are not what you would call 'eclectic', I have a hard-on (so to speak) for free roamers, only a handful IMO have pulled it off successfully...Im sure Rockstar will amaze us, but I dont want to see a Saints Row, simply a higher res city with the obligatory 'High dynamic range' lighting. Real advances in AI routines would be a sweet addition to such free roamers. Remember the bullshit we heard about every ped having a 'brain' in SA, well it didnt quite worked out did it ?. Are we still a generation away from being able to pick a ped at random and follow them about their daily life ?

Such 'stalking' in games may not be as ambitious as it initially sounds, imagine if after picking a ped and following them for a prescribed amount of time the AI would detect this and then make the 'target' ped follow on one of several hundred scripted 'trips' ....eg to a place of work , meet up with a date etc.....although this is hardly a leap in AI technology, it would at least 'fool' us into thinking it were, almost as if we were giving any ped at random a Turing test .......

Though such activities are unconventional, without a 'point' , this kind of sandbox style play should be made more of a priority by devs...think about even the longest games such as GTA, after the missions , one still wants value out of just driving around, stalking peds etc etc.....

So far MGS4 looks great, but will we see a more open ended mission structure ?, perhaps were a generation to early to implement the above ...but one day maybe :)

[jaxmkii]

^^^ im so with you on this...

2 or so years ago when PC hardware made it possible. some freinds and I tryed to make a grass routes addon for OFP. using the resistance map witch was HUGE. our goal was

1. to make a capture point in every city

2. citys captured alowed for certain units to apper in spawn points and forts to be built around the city.

3. the game was always on the server stayed open allowing players to come and go. the war was naturaly dynamic changing as random weather would pitch the battle in one sides favor of the other

exp... you could be losing but a rainy day might make it impossible for the apposing side to use air support giving you a few hours for your team to launch a counter offencive. or night time might make a infltration of a CP more easy

it was a big project and the ones that knew what to do lost intrest

[cliffbo]

the new game untold legends will have two online features: firstly you will be able to join a group and follow a storyline. that is very good because one of my main critisisms of online play is that it is basicly running around killing stuff to level up. secondly you will be able to break from the main storyline and go your own seperate way with nonelinear play. this is the way foreward as far as i'm concerned.

[CARTIER90]

mucho respect to those who have worked on OFP mods......look at ofp.info too see the insane variety of mods there are. I do find it laughable though, the OFP engine is not particularly good for huge cities, doesnt stop people making unrealistic maps that bring down framerates to single digits though !

[venomv]

I hope everything doesn't go the way your hoping, I like a few free-romers, but I love story based games, and free-roaming kill storys.

[Sephiroth_VII]

Actually, the king of linary games, Final Fantasy, seems to be very open-ended for exploring in it's 12th incarnation. The point is, of course, to progress along the storyline. But if you want to take a break from all the heavy battle's, you can just explore the world, kill a few monters for LP & EXP, then go on with the story. You can also go on quests to earn legendary items. And while not even progressing along the story, you can meet pretty powerfull bosses this way.

All in all, Free-Roaming is TAH FUTURE

[woundingchaney]

FF12 is getting some bad reviews (or at least Ive only seen a few and they were all bad) from Japanese gamers. It seems the battles have lost their intensity and the world itself is large but without much action throughout it.

http://www.1minaduki.com/bbs/bbs-gam...gview &page=0



Quote:
オンラインゲームをベースに一人で遊べるように改良したＦＦ、という印象を受けました。
（１２って当初はオンラインゲームの予定だったんですっけ？）

まだ４時間程度しか遊んでいないですが、確かに戦闘におもしろみが感じられない
仲間は自動で動くし、自キャラすら操作している感覚が少ないし…

マップと戦闘がシームレスなのはいいですが、恒例のファンファーレを聞くことができないのは淋 しいです
そして主人公とパンネロの声が浮いている気がしてなりません

It seems like the tried to make an online game for people who want to play offline, that's my first impression.

I've only played for 4 hours, but I also agree the battles aren't very interesting. Your other characters fight for themselves, and you barely have to pay attention to what your own character is doing.

Making the transition from overworld to battle seamless is nice, but where the heck is the music kicking into battle mode? This sucks this isn't there.

The main character's voice is also kind of off.


Quote:
もう7時間ほどプレイしましたが、正直もう松野氏はFFに関わってほしくないって激しく実感し ました。
FFとは思えないほどマジでおもしろくないです。
プレイしててテンポが悪くとにかくかったるい。


戦闘はほとんど１１と同じような感じになっててつまらないし、ライセンスシステムもいままで普 通に出来たの を条件付きにしただけでただめんどくさいだけ。
マップも無駄に広くて迷いやすいし、全体マップを見るのにも微妙に時間がかかってストレスを感 じます。

ストーリーもほとんどスターウォーズをパクってるように思える。
ほめられるのはグラフィックくらいです。
とくに背景や建造物のグラフィックは凄いです。
しかし、キャラのグラフィックはFF10よりグレードダウンしたような気がします。
オンライン専用であるFF11を除くと常に進化してきたFFのグラフィックが初めて退化した気 分です。


FF12には本当にガッカリです・・・



I've played for about 7 hours now and I can say that this team needs to stop making Final Fantasy games. I can't even believe this is a Final Fantasy game. The pacing is just terrible and dull.

Battles are pretty much just like in FF11, but license system is more convoluted with new conditions on everything. The map is also unnecessarily huge and easy to get lost, and it's also easy to waste lots of time trying to figure out the stupid map.

The story almost seems like they're ripping off Star Wars! About the only thing I can say is good is the graphics, the scenery and environment. But the characters don't look as good as in FF10, so I hate to say it but I feel like for the first time in Final Fantasy series history the graphics have gotten worse.

Ugh, such a let down...

[chrismt]

Wierd it sounds like FF12 sucked in Star Ocean 3 into the gameplay, story, and graphics. I liked SO3 however so I would love to play test FF12.

As to free roaming, I agree that the gaming market is beginning to shift towards free roamers, especially with the commercial success of GTA. Perhaps when devs tap PS3's full power we can see this type of game where every ped has an AI routine. I thought I remember some game mentioning this. I definately see Blu-Ray helping this type of gameplay out tremendously.

[PS3LikeNoOther]

Open ended games on the PS3 will be amazing. And as of the Playstation meeting they got even better. Just think, before when it was just the Blu-Ray the PS3 was already physically better than the 360. The PS3 for one is the only console capable of streamming true HD content. Now add the HDD into the equation. Holly smoke I just about crapped my pants. These worlds on the PS3 are going to be alive guys and girls. That HDD allows for all actions to be accounted.

I am totally siked now. The PS3 is truly the next generation and I can't wait.

[CreativeWriter]

Ugh, such a let down...

I'm not surprised. The demo that came with DQ VIII was terrible. The graphics looked similar to FFX and X-2 with no appreciable improvement. The battles were confusing (what the hell was I supposed to do besides select "attack") and the world seemed "typical" (beach and castle). Hopefully my impressions will be different of the final build of the game...

[Sephiroth_VII]

FF12 is getting some bad reviews (or at least Ive only seen a few and they were all bad) from Japanese gamers. It seems the battles have lost their intensity and the world itself is large but without much action throughout it.

http://www.1minaduki.com/bbs/bbs-gam...gview &page=0



Quote:
オンラインゲームをベースに一人で遊べるように改良したＦＦ、という印象を受けました。
（１２って当初はオンラインゲームの予定だったんですっけ？）

まだ４時間程度しか遊んでいないですが、確かに戦闘におもしろみが感じられない
仲間は自動で動くし、自キャラすら操作している感覚が少ないし…

マップと戦闘がシームレスなのはいいですが、恒例のファンファーレを聞くことができないのは淋 しいです
そして主人公とパンネロの声が浮いている気がしてなりません

It seems like the tried to make an online game for people who want to play offline, that's my first impression.

I've only played for 4 hours, but I also agree the battles aren't very interesting. Your other characters fight for themselves, and you barely have to pay attention to what your own character is doing.

Making the transition from overworld to battle seamless is nice, but where the heck is the music kicking into battle mode? This sucks this isn't there.

The main character's voice is also kind of off.


Quote:
もう7時間ほどプレイしましたが、正直もう松野氏はFFに関わってほしくないって激しく実感し ました。
FFとは思えないほどマジでおもしろくないです。
プレイしててテンポが悪くとにかくかったるい。


戦闘はほとんど１１と同じような感じになっててつまらないし、ライセンスシステムもいままで普 通に出来たの を条件付きにしただけでただめんどくさいだけ。
マップも無駄に広くて迷いやすいし、全体マップを見るのにも微妙に時間がかかってストレスを感 じます。

ストーリーもほとんどスターウォーズをパクってるように思える。
ほめられるのはグラフィックくらいです。
とくに背景や建造物のグラフィックは凄いです。
しかし、キャラのグラフィックはFF10よりグレードダウンしたような気がします。
オンライン専用であるFF11を除くと常に進化してきたFFのグラフィックが初めて退化した気 分です。


FF12には本当にガッカリです・・・



I've played for about 7 hours now and I can say that this team needs to stop making Final Fantasy games. I can't even believe this is a Final Fantasy game. The pacing is just terrible and dull.

Battles are pretty much just like in FF11, but license system is more convoluted with new conditions on everything. The map is also unnecessarily huge and easy to get lost, and it's also easy to waste lots of time trying to figure out the stupid map.

The story almost seems like they're ripping off Star Wars! About the only thing I can say is good is the graphics, the scenery and environment. But the characters don't look as good as in FF10, so I hate to say it but I feel like for the first time in Final Fantasy series history the graphics have gotten worse.

Ugh, such a let down...
Try reading 1UP's review. They're very positive about the new battlesystem. BTW: Most of those nay-sayers are old FF gamers, that just can't take change.

[woundingchaney]

Dont get me wrong Seph, I have no doubt that FF12 is going to be an excellent title. Infact I believe Famitsu gave it sokid 10's. Im just worried about SE straying too far from their FF gameplay. FF has one of the largest and loyal followers in the history of video games if they alienate them then look for poor sales (although I seriously doubt that). The large majority of people that buy FF titles have been fans for years (myself included). I just dont want to see FF12 move in a direction set apart from other FFs. Sure innovation is great as long as its done well, some of the things attempted in the new game may very well be great concepts in other franchises but they just dont apply as well in a FF title.

[cliffbo]

ive seen nice crisp videos of this and the graphics are ahuge leap over the previous itterations. 7 hours in, he says in the rewiew. 7 hours!!!!! thats not even scratching the serface

[jaxmkii]

sounds like a hater if you ask me...

[CARTIER90]

i never could get into FF, i admire the 'epic' nature of such games though....

[xbdestroya]

I have to say though, I didn't like the FFXII demo either. It felt too much like a smoother FFXI to me, and to tell you the truth, FFXI isn't FF in my book. I've been with the series since the very first Final Fantasy came out on NES back in the day, and I had high hopes for XII since it was headed by the man behind Final Fantasy Tactics - a truly great game with a great story. (not talking the watered down GameBoy version)

Ah well, I'll still buy it and give it a shot. It's certainly legitimate to say that 7 hours in on an FF and you might be feeling something totally different upon actual completion of the game.

On the topic though, yeah I'm interested to see where the whole 'free roamer' thing goes. Oblivion should be the first game to really attempt it is my understanding - in terms of individual AI routines - so let's see how the reviews turn out for it.

[CARTIER90]

Is the now outdated phrase 'photorealistic' gfx not a possibility ?, I remember somewhere seeing gfx in a game which seamlessly used photos of real-life, as textures which were then overlayed onto the polygonal mesh of an objext, gives a great 'look' but would presumably be hard on texture memory ?......eg for a road, a real photo would be used as a road texture instead of repeating a tile continously...

On an unrelated point.....arent we lucky to have lived through the 8 bit - current gen consoles, that stupendous evolution in game gfx and complexity will never happen again....a 10 year old kid with a PS2 today is going to experience a much gentler increase in gfx/AI etc...

P.S - i get bored of my own threads easily :) hence the topic change

[cliffbo]

Is the now outdated phrase 'photorealistic' gfx not a possibility ?, I remember somewhere seeing gfx in a game which seamlessly used photos of real-life, as textures which were then overlayed onto the polygonal mesh of an objext, gives a great 'look' but would presumably be hard on texture memory ?......eg for a road, a real photo would be used as a road texture instead of repeating a tile continously...

On an unrelated point.....arent we lucky to have lived through the 8 bit - current gen consoles, that stupendous evolution in game gfx and complexity will never happen again....a 10 year old kid with a PS2 today is going to experience a much gentler increase in gfx/AI etc...

P.S - i get bored of my own threads easily :) hence the topic change

thats a great point there Cartier90! you are exactly right. i have witnessed the whole evolution of games, from simple text based graphics to million poligonal extravaganzas. children will never be able to appreciate games in the way we will. start a thread on this. if you don't i will. you got 24 hours :)
and by the way every step of the way i got it right on what had to be done next (sounds smug but its true). the first games that gave me a vision of what future games would be was Attic Attack and Ants.

[cliffbo]

hope this isn't too long:

I just fought my way up a wind tunnel, scrambled through a ventilation duct, clambered across 40 yards of rope netting, rolled under a fence, and burrowed through a mass of grapefruit-sized plastic spheres. Now I'm facing two doors. One leads to freedom. The other to a room with something nasty in it, possibly involving torture.

I've got a full sweat going, my pulse is hammering, and the countdown on my wrist-mounted navigation unit tells me I'm running out of time. Minutes ago, a pictogram flashed up at me on a video monitor. Now I have to match it to one of a dozen symbols on a column between the two doors. Pick the correct one and I'm free. Mess up and I'm toast. I make my choice. Bzzzt. The door to my right swings open to reveal a large chair bristling with wires and leather straps.

Until this moment, I thought I had mastered La Fuga.

This medieval-looking electric chair sits deep inside an old bank in Madrid. The building has been remodeled to house La Fuga, a real-life role-playing game. Think of La Fuga (The Escape) as a $20 million cross between Halo and laser tag. The goal is simple: Decipher visual riddles to navigate and escape Mazzina, a high tech prison.

The company behind La Fuga is called Négone. It was founded by a sister-and-brother team, network engineer Silvia Garcia Alonso and former investment banker Jorge, who owned a piece of a dotcom that sold to Yahoo! for $400 million. They put their share of the money into live immersive gaming, starting Négone in 2002 and opening La Fuga last October. "There were lots of advances in in-home entertainment," Silvia says, "but in real-world entertainment, there was nothing happening."

A standard first-person shooter was one option, but the duo wanted something more cinematic. "There are certain plots that work again and again," Silvia says. "Finding treasure, a robbery, a big escape. The idea I think we all have when we see these movies is that it would be great to be the main character."

Creating the game presented both physical and intellectual challenges: They needed to erect a maze of steel and exposed concrete, and they needed to build a database to track the progress of each player through the labyrinth. Négone's coders didn't have to worry about writing the sort of physics-simulation software used in videogames, but Silvia says the logic engine - which keeps track of who's where in the building and what they're doing - gave her fits. "For video RPGs, you can use an off-the-shelf game engine, the way EA or Id does," she says. "But there's nothing that could handle all the kinds of data we need to use, so we had to build it ourselves." Now that the Madrid facility is operational, the company is focusing on opening a game center in Manhattan early next year - with plans for 60 more worldwide in the next decade.

I pay 15 euros, set up an account, and receive a navigational unit with a networked PDA and an RFID chip that I strap to my forearm. The chip tracks my progress through the prison.

I have three lives - three incorrect test answers - before the system will spit me back into the lobby. A kiosk scans the RFID chip in my wrist unit, and I head down a set of stairs and through a dark passageway into a room lined with steel. From a 17-inch flat*screen, a severe-looking woman with slicked-back hair tells me I've been assigned for reprogramming. Everything's in Spanish. I'm accompanied by a translator, but I need no help getting the gist: Resistance is futile.

The screen goes static and then switches to a view of a sweaty prisoner with a 5 o'clock shadow who tells me that I can liberate myself and all the other drones stuck in the prison. Those who have escaped before me will contact me to assist in my quest. The door opens, and I enter a sort of closet before another door opens to reveal a metal air duct. I try to step in, but I slip, fall hard on my ass, and slide down the chute into a room containing a baggage carousel surrounded by screens.

One monitor displays another female executive type extolling the virtues of the prison's reeducation system. I hold my wrist unit to the screen; up pops a member of the resistance, Lieutenant Gunderson, a sultry young woman wearing a combat helmet who claims to be my hacker guide. Between come-hither looks, she tells me I'll need a circuit-welding tool to get to the next level. I can't decide whether she's trying to help me or seduce me. But I need to stay focused. To get the tool, I have to solve a puzzle.

I'm shown four pictures, only one of which contains a pair of perfectly parallel lines. I have 30 seconds to choose the correct one. As the time ticks away, I push a button on my wrist unit: C. Bingo. A circuit-welder icon lights up on my screen.

I reach another door, which opens into another dark room crisscrossed by a maze of metal grates and mirrors, with more mirrors overhead. Gunderson appears on a ceiling-mounted screen, telling me I need a cloak of invisibility. Metal-and-glass-encased RFID readers are scattered throughout the room, each encircled by pulsing yellow LEDs. I hold my wrist unit next to one just to see what happens. Two hundred bonus points! I successfully answer another question, identifying the longest of four tangents extending from a circle. I get the cloak. Gunderson casts more sexy glances in my direction, and a map on the monitor guides me to the doorway out of the labyrinth.

I head up a set of stairs into a room filled with dance-floor fog pierced by red laser beams. I feel like Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible. A couple of other players are making their way between beams, contorting themselves and sliding along the floor. My invisibility cloak hides me from the lasers, and I move through the room quickly. I solve another puzzle; a door opens into the library. While most of the rooms are concrete and metal, straight out of Doom, the library is pure Ian Schrager: glowing glass walls with a cluster of monitors in the center. A code flashes up on one of them. Each wall is backlit in blue, orange, or white and contains book-shaped glass bricks. There's a code on each brick. I need to find the matching sequence among the dozens of bricks. I get it and move on.

One final room. The outside walls are lined with monitors, and a smaller glass chamber juts out from the far wall. Another puzzle opens another door, revealing several monitors mounted in a column like totems on a pole. There's a door to my right and to my left. Gunderson tells me I'm almost free. A screen flashes a complicated pictogram. I have to pick the matching one from a dozen similar tiles in various places on the pole. I press a button beneath one of the choices, and it's over - I've won. Back in the Négone lobby, I'm presented with a commemorative mug. It's almost too easy.

I take a walk to Négone headquarters and size up my score - 38,000 - on the company's Web site. Respectable, but the single-round record is more than 50,000. Either I need to start hunting down more of those little bonus-point boxes or there's a better way to do it.

The second time I play, Négone's system knows that I've mastered a basic version, so it sends me on a course that's more physically challenging. The system drives up my pulse rate just before I have to take the tests - by sending me up a flight of steep stairs, for example, or into a wind tunnel. This makes it much harder to concentrate on the puzzles. I reach the final glass chamber with two mistakes, and I think I might be able to pull off another win. Wrong. The right hand door opens to reveal the electric chair, and I'm shown the exit. It dawns on me that my initial run was Négone's version of the bunny slope.

Next stop: Times Square. Will Négone's planned 30,000-square-foot game center at 49th and Broadway appeal to US gamers? Today's videogame graphics and story lines are so sophisticated that aspects of La Fuga seem a bit canned and low-budget by comparison. La Fuga may be shooting for Halo's apocalyptic look, but the emphasis on discovery and puzzle-solving makes the experience flow more like Myst. The overwrought video clips smack of a bad telenovella. On top of that, the game's most compelling aspect - its physicality - could be too much for gamers used to moving only their thumbs.

But climbing ropes, tunneling through a roomful of plastic spheres, and squeezing through air ducts (just like in Aliens) can be pretty damn exciting - even without the rocket launchers, railguns, and frag grenades you get in the typical RPG. Maybe Négone's games will appeal to parents trying to get their Gen Y progeny out of the living room for a bit of exercise.

Even though I've never seen anything like it, the game somehow seems familiar. Then, on the flight home, it hits me: Eight years ago I went on a hardcore Doom jag for a few months and started having dreams that took place inside the game. That's what playing La Fuga feels like. It's a fully realized dream sequence. One thing I'm painfully aware of during my 13-hour plane ride: Falling down in a real-world game definitely leaves a real-world bruise.

can someone tell me what the hell this is?

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.03/lafuga.html

[Sephiroth_VII]

I guess it's some kind of theme-ride. But it seems to be out in the real world, where you can use somne kind of identifying chip to access. Like a real world game, just like the man said.

Try google, maybe you'll find something.

[indiekid4]

All I know is I can't wait to play this game. I am a huge FF fan and I loved FF11. It was so addicting. I loved the style and everything about it. So I am excited that FF12 takes a lot of elements from that game and put it into FF12.

Really, I am getting sick of all these old schooler FF people talking about how it sucks cause it's not the same FF they remember playing. Change is good and we all know the FF series needed a change. I wonder how many bad reviews for FF12 there are compared to the good ones? I bet they don't come close. I guess we'll all have to wait for the English version before we can make a final judgement. All I know is, bad review good review, I'm buying!