Some Potentially Unpopular Ideas.

Games are at a great point right now. They’re beautiful, enthralling and tell amazing stories, but what’s the future for gaming? The graphical quality is always going to improve with time as hardware becomes more and more powerful, the stories will get better as companies have more money to employ superior writers and this will in turn make games more appealing to play.

 

I have a feeling that what I wish for games in the future will be unpopular but they may make games a lot more interesting. First of all I would like to see games that do away with a tutorial. Sure, tutorials are necessary in order to help the player navigate the game world, but what if the player was just left to work it out? What if the tutorial was just a learning curve? What if it was a room that you have to navigate towards the exit door (learning to move and interact with objects); a room with a little platform before the door (jumping) or a room with a key and a locked door (interacting with objects) and so on? I think that this style of learning will produce a more rewarding game and will therefore mean gamers that are less spoiled when it comes to gaming (especially in recent days), gamers are so used to checkpoints, dying without consequence etc. that we don’t treat games as giant puzzles, we treat games as trial and error tasks and though in some games this works I believe that it is a style of gaming which needs to be reconsidered.

 

 

Another feature I would like to see more in games is a lack of a HUD, we’ve seen it in games like Metro: 2033 where you know how many bullets you have due to being able to see them in your magazine, your health is displayed by the colour of your vision and your objectives are displayed on a notepad that you physically have to look at. I enjoy this clean, simple, realistic visual style, perhaps with the additions of a button that you press to physically remove the magazine or clip from your gun and look at how many bullets you have left, or a button that you press to check your pulse and therefore have to use a little guess-timation to determine what the state of your health is. Admittedly this would be harder on console games but still doable and would add to the atmosphere of games that are supposed to be more realistic.

 

 

My final wish for the future of games is that games that are in a trilogy should force you to play from the first game, whether that is in a slightly more deceitful form, (perhaps a randomly generated code is shown at the end of the first game which the second game requires in order for you to play it, while reading game saves a la Mass Effect) or in a more legitimate form (the game’s difficulty curve increasing exponentially over the three games in a way that means most players will only be able to cope with the difficulty of game 3 if they’ve been exposed to the learning curve of games 1 and 2).

 

 

Anyway, there are a few notes on what I’d like to see in gaming future. I admit that a few of these ideas would be very unpopular and could be used be games companies to generate more income rather than creating a more interesting game but as with many modern ideas that are now used for greed or destruction, they were often created to benefit the masses. Many thanks to Thomas Jancis for helping me with the thought process on this article. Make sure that if you haven’t you take a look at some of the other articles I’ve posted and question/comment on them as much as you feel is necessary.

I won’t see you as I’m no longer part of the heads-up display.