I was disappointed that several of the responses had a tendency to sound like the rant of a forum lurker rather than an insightful comment of a respected developer.

Velops

Just as long as none of them wished for a monkey's paw.

cio

More larger norgs!

Never heard that term before... I'd wish for a base AI programme that can be adapted to run any AI in a game - like a hugely advanced version of the AI for Stalker or Oblivion.

This AI would basically be able to organise complex behaviours between factions/people etc and also survival instincts as well as combat tactics. People would be able to negotiate with enemies providing that they had leverage and if you injured an enemy you would still be able to heal/help them despite them being your enemies. Of course, that healed enemy might then choose to become neutral to you (giving the possibility of being your friend in future) or they might turn on you and start fighting again.

Complex stuff like that is really lacking in games.

Duoae

This is pretty cool, but the common thread throughout all of this is that development time totally sucks. haha But I'd say if some of these guys got their wishes, nobody'd have jobs.

My one games wish - I wish that all games were absolutely free to develop, free to play, free to own, free, free, free. This way, all of that marketing bullshit and corporate money grabbing goes away and we can all just enjoy some quality work and not the latest incremental upgrade.

dunetiger reads kotaku, seems pleased

HAHAHAHAHA! Plunkett... you've officially made me start to use the word norgs now. Awesome, or rather... Norgsome!

LionheartAce

I wish for the return of oldscholl gameplay.

Shiryu

@Hdfisise: because then way less people would buy a game which then would sometimes mean that the game doesn´t make enough money to return the development investment. Hence why so many pc developers are going crossplatform or other distribution and financing ways nowadays where every pc hardcore gamer is a potential torrent junky.

tomsamson

@vig0r: I don;t get why a developer couldn;t just choose a spec and then develop soley for that. Anything better then the spec goes faster so no one complains, and they can then spend the time saved by just developing for the single spec on innovating!

Hdfisise

others cheated and are now trapped inside a brass lantern for a thousand generations

Yes, but is it a battery-powered brass lantern?

beeporama (brian.j.parker)

I have quite similar wishes like those in the article.
Well, after all its always about the idealized star trek future, if there´s something like a holodek game creator then suddenly everyone could create games.
Of course then lots of people on the tech development end of game creation would loose their job but way more would open on creative ends. So yeah, would be nice if by then we also have replicators like in star trek so that there´s no working due to needing money anymore but instead every common everyday life consume good is replicated and people only work in fields because those interest them instead of for the money (cause there would be no money anymore). Then we´d get way nicer games by people who do it purely for the passion.
Not saying anything against today´s developers and designers,most of us surely are in this for the passion, but yeah,our creativity is often restricted by the technical limitations,time required to execute an idea and budget available.
Well,maybe in 2070... :)

tomsamson

Todd Howard
Executive Producer, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion and Fallout 3, Bethesda Softworks
Todd Howard

A standard platform across all consoles and PCs for games. [The time spent] supporting multiple systems, videocards, memory, and more is time we could spend innovating better gameplay and experiences. Think about a DVD -- you can play it on your PC but also on your TV. Or in your car. Why not a game?

Warren Spector

That's why developers <3 consoles now :(,mouse and keyboard are gone for the ever :O

vig0r

@tomsamson: I meant as well as doing consoles, just go for the PC this game will be designed to run on these specs and so on. So PC gamers are kept happy with a fast running game, and the developers still rake in the cash with consoles.

Hdfisise

Mine : Designers that doesn't require prototyping to know if an idea is good or bad. Designers that use maths and by checking them on paper know if a game will be good before even making anything produced.

LightStriker

How 'bout a ragdoll physics engine like Havok that doesn't send things schitzing out of control. Those dead body twitches in Bioshock started to get on my nerves.

Lazlo

Great pic Plunkett. I wish I had a monkey paw.

Gray665

@beeporama (brian.j.parker): good luck finding batteries.

i really like the idea of the holodeck. i sure could use one of those, but, um.. not exactly for game development. :x

geekgrrl

how about wishing for one universal console work with, no more competition from microsoft/sony/nintendo. devs happy, consumers happy, all 3 are happy and can split the profits 3 ways

kingme

Lazlo: Already invented, see NaturalMotions Euphoria Engine.

My wish would be that somebody would stick the depth back into the game. I liked the days where I had a 200 page manual came with a game and I really had to learn the game to progress instead of just consume it without ever being really involved. Games these days are way to simplified to be interested for more then a week. And by that I don't mean that a game should be hard, just that it should be complex enough to have still room left to explore after you already played it for 20 hours, most games these days already wear thin after five.

I don't need a full featured holodeck, all I would want is that somebody would move some of the game concepts from the mid 90's up to today, with current day tech. Immersion is great, but when todays games are no more immersive then 10 years ago something went wrong and I don't think we need a magic wish to fix it.

grumbel

I think that these visions to push game mechanics further are good, though fairly limited in scope. Pathfinding Will Wright ? I don't see the problem here, associate it to the environment, and player input? I think there are more important things you can tackle with AI than just pathfinding. More intricate readings into player input and patterns could lead to some interesting AI behaviour.
Spector it's interesting to suggest such an engine, though I think right now the functionality though complicated to some is quite reasonable, and in some cases probably easier than the construtcs of film. Bioware suggesting more emotional AI seems more like something that they aim to achieve, and already are on the path to. With most of their recent games the NPC's are built in a way that makes the player hold importance for the characters, and their role in the game world. It think it's a matter of how far they can push this, but so far they have been doing a good job. I think instead of pushing all of this technology, the main focus should be about creating games that are fun. They shouldn't have to feature tons of hardware shaders, realistic physics, or real world simulations. When games came into existance they captivated us in a way that never had any of those aspects, instead we used our imaginations and in the end probably were more engaged then than we ever will be with this new direction.

BaloniMan

percent

daCuk

The lack of Japanese developers being interviewed decreases this article credibility 50.

daCuk

The guys at Bioware wanted AI that is indistinguishable from humans and passes the Turing Test. That would be cool, but it would also kind of suck. Hasn't anybody there watched The Thirteenth Floor or read Kid Radd? You could get into this whole ethical thing about creating artificial life just to kill it for your amusement.

Tiber

Norgs?

I think you'll find that they're called Norks

brooza

Considering what AI is pretty much used for, the day AI becomes exactly like human's is the day we human's realize we're monster.

AntiZERØ

Maybe I'm losing it, but didn't I read this exact article in EGM months ago? I don't see anything on the site that lists this as a repeat of an earlier feature, but I could swear I've read this story in print. Anyone?

AtomicPlayboy

A never ending cookie jar sounds great... but human like AI sounds even better... Uh... Choices!
@AtomicPlayboy: It's possible. 1up and EGM are sister publications, just that one's online only, like Kotaku, but worse.
@Gray665: You won't by the third wish...

Erwin

@AtomicPlayboy: I remember a similar article appearing in Game Informer.

Thorax

@Velops: Well, these are dreams and wishes they're talking about, so it's no surprise that people recognize the same issues which are limiting gaming and computer science in general, albeit on a very very high level. When they say "Pathfinding is limited" or "AI needs to pass the Turing test" though, they probably have a lot more experience to pinpoint the exact limitations and problems with what we currently have than most forum lurkers.

Datheron

@grumbel: You need to look back and ask yourself exactly what made older games immersive despite the primitive interfaces and simple gameplay.

Chances are, you'll realize that a lot of that "immersion" came from your own imagination, taking the 10 pixels which were supposed to represent a sword and turning it into something majestic in your mind. As games actually become more immersive via improved presentation (graphics, sound, interaction w/ the environment), it's essentially replacing your imagination with a rendered model, song, or action. And guess what? It's pretty damn hard to compete with the human imagination.

(incidentally, this is the reason why the late Gary Gygax hated the current trend of bigger games - specifically RPG's - with better presentational values, in that it stifles the rich imaginative minds of gamers)

Datheron

@Hdfisise: Uh, because a spec for a specific piece of hardware cuts your potential market in half or more.

I mean, it's not like PC devs aren't already doing this; they're already saying "let's make our game runnable on a P4 2.4 Ghz, and that'll be our min. requirements" or "let's target a Core 2 Duo as our recommended machine". It's more along the lines of "there are miniscule differences between the Intel x86 instruction set and the AMD implementation of the x86 instruction set, and there are differences between ATi's and nVidia's rendering of certain DirectX commands, so we have to support all of those". PC hardware isn't just a linear scale of speed, nor is it even fully backwards compatible a lot of the time (see, DX10).

Datheron

As a big fan of TLOZ: The Wind Waker, I would love to see developers go for the equally beautiful, cel-shaded look once in a while. If done right it looks great, and im sure it would cut in production costs and time.
Im not talking about a children's game, but something closer to TF2's looks. Think The Wind Waker with a lot of gore maybe?

okrangerbob

@Thorax: Bingo, that's it: Game Informer, not EGM. Thanks.

AtomicPlayboy

@vig0r: By time he means money, and by money he means that he <3's yours.

KafkaTamura

@Tiber: There is no such thing as a turing test. Behaviour is not the same as sentience. End of story.

KafkaTamura

"My third game-design wish then is that an automated partnering device be created, analyzing the hidden potential within all game newbies to become hardcore gamers and then matching them automatically with a game they'll know is worth their time overcoming initial accessibility hurdles. Hardcore sales would outpace casual, the industry would be less constrained by focus testing, the best-selling game of the year would not be the lowest rated, and creativity would drive the industry, rather than dollars."

Amen.

KafkaTamura

@Datheron: To a certain degree true, but its not just an issue that the graphics are better, but also an issue of the games getting overly simplified. A lot of the immersion came simply from being far more involved with the game. If you have to make your way through a 200 page manual and have to practice basic skills like landing a plane you simply have a much better feeling for your actions. Today landings are in most cases done on autopilot and if not they are way to easy to be interesting.

There are simply way to many games these days that I can sleep may way through, I don't have to learn the terrain, the weapons, my squad members or anything, none of that matters because some big green arrow will point me into the direction were there are more enemies that I have to shoot. Now I don't mind some guidance and many games 10 or 15 years ago where rather horrible in that aspect, but I find it incredible annoying when a game degrades to a meaningless run and shoot exercise where neither the story nor my actions matter.

grumbel

@grumbel: Well, I guess it's just the natural evolution of game design. As we're trying to do more with games and place increasing numerous burdens on the player, it's natural that some of the extraneous parts of the game are simplified to allow the player to get to the "meat" of the game faster. I mean, these decisions are carefully designed and implemented so that the majority of the player base can get to why they bought the game in the first place, whether it's shooting in an FPS or dogfighting in a flight psuedo-sim.

Not to say games that skimp on the core aspects of their genre get away with it - see Simcity Societies and the attempt to throw away the micromanagement Simcity fans simply love. That said, I'm not sure you'd want to see developers tackle either the kitchen sink (with 200 page manuals - look up one Derek Smart and his crazy ideas) or frustrate players with simple obfuscation via not telling them where to go next; if anything, it's a cheap sense of accomplishment, akin to jacking up a boss's HP levels in an RPG just so he's harder. In that sense, I prefer my immersion to come not from making things artificially difficult, but from well-thought-out design.

Datheron

@Datheron: No different to changing it to run on the different consoles really. They should be complaining how the PS3 is so different which means it takes forever to port rather than innovate.

Hdfisise

@Datheron: I'm gonna stop arguing my point here, as tbh that last comment has pretty much screwed me over :D

Hdfisise

@Hdfisise: Yea, except 360 + PS3 = two distinct architectures. CPU + GPU + MoBo = many, many distinct architectures.

Datheron

@Datheron: The point isn't to frustrate players by not telling him where to go next, but to require him to understand why he should go there and where that 'there' actually is.

In way to many of todays games I do what I do because a 'big blinking arrow' told me so, not because I understood the situation, the terrain or because I communicated with the NPCs and that is something I find incredible annoying, since it simply destroys the immersion and also makes it way to easy to just ignore basically all of the game except that blinking arrow. Prescripted events and other things do of course their fair bit of damage too.

Anyway, I don't want games to frustrate the player, I want games to teach the player. If something is hard, it should stay hard, but the game should provide enough help for the player to still solve it. If landing a plane is hard, provide some decent landing practice missions and tell the player what he is doing wrong, instead ripping out the manual landing and replacing it with a stupid cutscene.
I don't even mind the 'big blinking arrow' when it is used as an optional help and not as a sole mean to find your way around in the game world.

grumbel

hahahah that picture of homer!!

SpikyBry

@grumbel: I think you're looking much too hard for something that may not have even existed.

Now that I think about it, really, all the "big blinking arrow telling me where to go" stuff has always been with games. I mean, it's not like Doom or Quake had NPC's that told you where to go and what to do, nor were exploring their environments that immersive. I think the only examples that do exemplify that type of play are the Deus Ex's, Thiefs, and perhaps Hitmans of the world, but those are pretty niche games that still live on, sometimes making it big via the likes of Bioshock or Half Life.

As for teaching players, I think that kind of gameplay is pretty niched in hardcore sims. Even "back in the day", it wasn't like you had to learn to take off your spacecraft in Raiden or used a clutch in Cruisin' USA; you had your Microsoft Flight Simulators and Gran Turismos for "teaching" the player certain skills, and even then there was a backlash for making the barrier of entry too high. (imagine GT forcing you to ace every license test before letting you race!) I mean, it's unavoidable that as games become mainstream, they're going to have to cater to a lower denominator; it's unrealistic to expect devs to make their games knowing they'd only attract a limited audience and still come with today's high production values and costs. The standards for today's "immersion" is much higher than that of yesteryear.

Anyhoo, I think there are a few gems out there if you look hard enough; the best tend to be ones that provide a lot of handholding but lets you turn them off for the raw experience, whether it means turning off the radar in MGS or turning off assists in Forza.

Datheron

I am jumping quite a bit between genres, so yes, what I describe might not have ever existed exactly like that, but it would have existed if trends of the past would have continued.

Once up on a time flightsims pretty much where mainstream, maybe not the main-mainstream, but far from an obscure niche. Today on the other side the genre is dead on the PC and on the consoles it never existed in the first place. And there are some trends from the flightsim and other genres that never made it across to todays FPS world. In flightsims for example you had complete dynamic wars back in 1995, no prescripted mission or such, the whole war was dynamically generated by your actions, to this day I haven't seen that thing repeated outside of the flightsim genre. The closed thing was likely Operation Flashpoint, but even that is already 7 years old and didn't try it with a whole war, but just had very dynamic missions.

Anyway, yes, making everything mainstream is of course a large reason why games are getting simplified, however I don't think that is something that has to be that way. If the developers would just use a bit of their money not for shiny graphics, but on enhancing gameplay we wouldn't have the problem. A simulation isn't hard, because it has to be, but simply because not enough guidance was given to the player. Racing games are probably the best in that area, optional breaking help, turning assistance, optimal drive lines, variable damage model and all that stuff can do a lot do make a hard game much easier for the novice even without sacrificing any of the realism. I just wish more genres would go that route, instead of making the simplified version the only option available.

grumbel

@grumbel: Hm, going to wrap this up.

Driving games are special in the sense that those assists mimic reality; those helpers were created in real life over 80+ years of automotive existence so that normal citizens could drive on the streets. Games that model these options are drawing upon many decades of engineering.

But there's no such analogue in other genres...it's not like there's a DMV-like manual for flight pilots who then only require a simple quiz, vision test, and 15-minute test flight to get their licenses because so much of the complexity has been simplified. It's not like a week of training can turn you into an expert marksmen proficient with pistols, semi-autos and sniper rifles. These tasks are naturally hard, and if anything game designers have to figure out a good way to abstract the difficulties of reality so that their games are actually fun. Imagine that instead of zoning land in Simcity, you were required as mayor to sit through multiple public hearings on every single plot of land.

In the end, you're gaming, and there are plenty of instances where doing the "fun" thing was the right call over doing the "realistic" alternative. I don't think progressively realistic graphics -> progressively realistic gameplay is be the right path to go down...you may end up with a few brilliant simulations, but you'd have to find them through a sea of boring and mundane games.

Datheron

Oh wow, how strange. I was actually watching that very Treehouse of Horror episode this morning before looking on this website.

I guess programming AI truly seems to be a common leading headache source for game development.

Kiyosuki

You know if they advance AI then SkyNet will be born, and we all know what happens then!!

EbonEagle

What's the point of the Homer Simpson picture?

Skyburnbright

@Datheron: I don't think that every game should try to be a simulation, my problem is simply that these days no game tries to be a simulation. Well, maybe not 'no game', but very close to it. I simply miss that feeling of crash landing my plane over and over again and learning step by step a bit more each time. Or to make it more general, I miss the felling of failing being fun. Even with something simple looking like landing a plane, there are tons of variations, height, speed, approach vector, weight, weather, plane damage, enemy fire, etc. that can make each and every of those tries fun and interesting. When everything of those is simplified away the end result might be accessible, but it will also be boring, because all the possible variation is gone.

grumbel

since when are movies easy to make????? dumb!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

freespeech