Comment by gautamcgoel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gautamcgoel | Hacker News Reader

What a magical demo! That made my day. I had largely written off console gaming as a never-ending sequence of brain-dead first person shooters. I'm glad to see real innovation in the graphics space - coupled with advances in AI and NLP, I think we could see a crop of incredibly realistic and meaningful games in the next few years.

IMHO, a key innovation that still needs to occur is a shift away from flunky and unintuitive hand-held controllers to a more natural and vibrant method of input. I really liked the scene in the movie Her, for example, where the protagonist is playing a video game and uses hand gestures to control his avatar, all without a physical controller. Wii and Kinect were the first few steps in this direction - I'm not sure what the next steps are.

I think voice input and NLP is an incredibly fruitful space to explore - imagine what video games would be like if you could actually talk to the characters, instead of merely punching and shooting them.

To play devil's advocate - games with this kind of production value require a huge investment in asset production, which means they tend to be very conservative when it comes to gameplay, because they want to be damn sure it doesn't flop. So until the production of something like this comes way down in price, the games that look like this are likely to be clones of existing successful games, e.g. Uncharted, brain-dead first person shooters, etc.

This demo looks more like a somewhat interactive movie than a videogame.

I thought Horizon Zero Dawn hit the right balance across gameplay, visuals and story narrative in this current generation of gaming and received all the praise it deserved. Now, I’ll say in my opinion, not one thing was overwhelmingly novel in comparison to the rest, but the attention to detail given to each of those elements elevated the collective experience in that particular title, the result was a game that felt incredibly fresh and easily replayable.

Maybe, but photogrammetry is a waaaay cheaper way of producing assets, and being able to directly ingest high res models from a scan could actually drop the art costs of games a great deal.

Don't really agree with that, games like Death Stranding exist.

It certainly won't be running games that look like this, but the Oculus Quest is doing neat things with hand tracking.

Recent demo shown on Adam Savage's TESTED: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J0KhC1GpLSQ

Minority report style hand waving is a dead end. Tactile feedback is a hard requirement for a decent hand controlled interface. But that doesn't mean we need to stick with traditional game controllers. Valve Index controllers give you buttons without the requirement to hold anything, plus far better tracking than any controller free tracking system.

I kept expecting the demo to fall back into some kind of traditional combat scenario as the player character explored the environment, but I love that Epic decided to make the hypothetical game in this tech demo exclusively about exploration.

I would absolutely love to play a game like this, combining the sensibilities of indie walking-sims with the epic scale of triple-A productions.

That was my first thought- it's a shame all we have to interact with such a complex, richly rendered world is a couple of analog sticks and some buttons.

You're going to absolutely love what Oculus is working on.

What are they working on? New hardware?

Well, Microsoft tried the Kinect, but it wasn't popular.

Hand control doesn't make sense without being able to see it in your hand and conversely VR is pretty much a gimmick until they added high fidelity hand tracking (Talking Vive/Rift level).

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