Failed Gaming Concepts/Ideas That You Wish Were Successful

[Spindel]

HoloDust said:

SvennoJ said:

I wish persistent worlds / destructible, deformable terrain would finally catch on. From Dust was awesome, but very limited due to needing a lot of ram and processing power. It never really got off the ground because the maps couldn't be bigger. Crackdown promised a lot, never delivered. Still waiting on seasons in open world games, rain actually affecting the world and stuff that Populous the beginning already did in the 90s.

Still hoping for a new Motorstorm with Spin tires like persistent terrain deformation. Games can render sand, snow, water, yet still fail spectacularly when it comes to mud. And it' so much fun to play in the mud!

I'd broaden that to destructible/deformable persistent world, where every object has physical properties. We're getting there actually, albeit slowly, since consoles (being in AAA focus) don't have enough juice to run fully voxel (or something similar) worlds, so we might be seeing some PC experiments until we come to Tim Sweeney's estimate of 25-30 TFLOPS from many years ago for fully voxel worlds. Next-gen perhaps, or maybe smaller games toward the end of this gen...

My pick would be (though I don't know if it failed, since it seems it's been in development hell for at last 4-5 years) Ken Levine's "narrative LEGO" idea ("The idea was for every person’s experience with the game to be unique. Characters would react differently depending on a player’s actions, and they would be thrust into different scenarios every time they played"). I'd love to see that game, it would probably be closest to AI narrator/Game Master, which will eventually come sometimes in the future. Pair that with fully deformable persistent world...oh, boy...

The fault is focusing on shiny graphics and pushing more pixels (yeah I said it, 4K is a waste of resources) instead of stuff that might improve the games with things that can improve the gameplay.

People should not care that they can see individual pores on the face of characters or that light diffuses trough cartilage in the ear. Heck even raytracing in games is mostly just a waste of resources.

Even physics is more used as a gimmick in most games to make dead bodies slump or flags and fabrics move in a "realistic" way. At least with physics there are instances where the physics do play into actual game play but it is still mostly used as a gimmick for stuff to look nice.