Looks spectacular, but why does it have to be a shooter?
I still hope that someone will eventually make a large scale world exploration game. Journey on steroids, basically.
I still hope that someone will eventually make a large scale world exploration game. Journey on steroids, basically.
For multiplayer-centric shooters, the cost of maps and levels can be spread across a relatively long lifetime, millions of matches.
An exploration-based game by definition cannot recycle its content. Attempts to proceduralize world generation have been mixed - Diablo did it, but the world itself is not the focus there either, and other games have been torn to shreds for their repeated, boring automatically generated content.
Even open-world games like GTA are focused on specific locations in the game world, and you can see the amount of detail drop off precipitously outside of these areas.
Content is really, really expensive - today moreso than ever. An exploration-based, AAA-level game would have to solve a lot of completely unprecedented problems.
For example, the artist specifies that he wants a road going one way, a river crossing it and a cliff that runs along one side and the terrain generator creates the level.
I have a video of this process here. The input is a graph specified by the artist as well as a bunch of other metadata that he specifies in text files: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PRsHyyFoaM
I have done a talk on the terrain generator as well which you can see here if you like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcM9Ynfzll0
Higher level tools really do speed up content creation. It was a long time ago, but when I worked at Angel Studios, we put a huge effort into infrastructure tools.
A high level scripting language driven generator with good fix-up editing capabilities sounds good.
All that said, I would imagine that large entertainment companies have great smart creation/editing tools, but they are probably kept under wraps.
(I don't play it, so I'm not sure if that content is interesting for "explorative" gameplay, or if it's more a series of novelty locations of varying quality.)
While I'm known to play the occasional FPS now and again, I'm really bored of the format and want something new.
Everyone else is kept in the cold. No games for us. This is a nice tactic but terrible strategy, games will only be seen as a stupid and shallow thing for teenagers and they'll not have the next audience once those get fed.
The same is happening with action movies (most of non-independent movies actually).
Yeah, there are also MMOs but they shut off most would be gamers too.
Shooters are the new platformers. If you don't like them, you won't like most games. But there are other games.
That sounds incredibly dull.
- Terry Pratchett, Only You Can Save Mankind
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Tellers_Smoke_and_Mirr...
Unfortunately, the sole developer seems more interested in developing the engine for commercial use first before making the game.
I believe the main reason that Minecraft is so popular is that there are other interesting things to do besides combat.
Too bad I'm just a software engineer with no money.