OT: The Future of Computer Strategy Games

[Suicide Junkie]

When they were young, my dad's friends tried to catch a gunpowder launched tennis ball.
Fortunately it missed... and they never found it.

[Yef]

Tnarg said:
Anyways back game interface development and the future. I think if this Wii thing takes off I would like to see the ability to have kits one could purchase or a shell that they could place around their Wii type controler to simulate an actual pistol, SMG, assault rifle sized weapons and weights.

I don't know about weights. It might not be fun. Sometimes too much realism is not a good thing. An M4 Carbine is pretty light, but when you add CCOs or ACOGs for sights, PEQ2 or PAC4 for night vision targetting, tactical light, forward pistol grip, hopefully not a M203 grenade launcher, etc, you get over 15 lbs easy. That ain't fun to carry around for too long.

[dogscoff]

No more critism of the video game generation having weight problems. You can get in shape and shoot your buddies all at once.

Nah, the anti-gamer crowd will just shift focus:

KILLER VIDEO GAME GAVE MY FAT-*** KID A HEART ATTACK!!!

[dmm]

Is this the future, or is it the present?
[music plays: doodoo doodoo, doodoo doodoo]

http://www.simulation-argument.com/classic.html

[Artaud]

dogscoff said:...However the one thing I think will take off hugely is voice control. Serious gamers already use VOIP systems alongside their games to communicate with other players, it's only a matter of time before someone starts coding virtual players (bots) that respond to voice commands. Of course the technical obstacle is not so much the voice recognition but reliable machine-parsing of natural language. People have been working on this for years, with varying levels of success. However gaming systems now have the spare storage and processing power available for this kind of trickery, and I think games will be the arena where it actually happens. They will be crude at first, but you know how technology snowballs, especially when it has money behind it. Maybe one day we'll hit the point where you aren't sure whether that guy on your team is human or AI. Again, this technology will be driven by the FPS experience (since that's where most of the gamers are) but once developped it will soon slosh over into strategy.

Just imagine SE if you could issue natural language commands to fleet commanders, ship captains and planetary governors...

I hope we don't go this route. For people who stutter, like me, such games will be a nightmare to play. I simply won't bother with a game that causes me the same degree of stress that daily life does.

But I realize that those of us who stutter are a very tiny minority. What everybody else wants will become the norm.

I'll just stop buying games.

[Phoenix-D]

The fun part about voice recognition is you can program it to ignore things like stutter.

Of course, then no one else will be able to play your copy of the game, because it won't be trained for them.

[Suicide Junkie]

Voice is going to be much slower and less accurate than a mouse. Its fine when there are only a few objects to control, with lots of independence such as other players in a shooter.
But something like SE? Or even just a windows desktop?

IMO, it would be better to have something like a touch sensitive screen, with a button on your thumb. That way you can reach over, and pinch the air to click and drag as if you were picking something up and dropping it somewhere.
Using two hands would make for an obvious way to stretch a window for example.

Still low on the precision, but at least it would be quick and easy to use. And it would be really useful if we ever get hologram type 3D.

[JAFisher44]

Well, in the vein of limited AI interacting with you in a game I think it would be pretty cool if in a 4x type of game you actually had AI officers. It would work kind of like strategies in SE, but instead there is a full AI that follows your orders within the scope of doctrines you set up. So, for example, you tell Fleet Admiral Jelal to take Alpha fleet to the Jubrup System and attack the aliens there. From there on out the AI handles it.

Individual AIs could have different "personalities" as well. For example, Fleet Admiral Jelal tends to be a little flamboyant and is a bit of a risk taker. He is also likely to push further than you tell him to as long as he thinks he can get away with it, where as Fleet Admiral Brix is very conservative and tends to pull back if things don't seem to be going swimmingly.

[dogscoff]

Regarding all that massively multiplayer stuff I was just talking about, take a look at this:
http://www.metaplace.com/

This could be the future of MMO, and I think has the potential to usurp closed worlds like second life.

[Artaud]

Phoenix-D said:
The fun part about voice recognition is you can program it to ignore things like stutter.

But there's no way to eliminate the internal stress that a person with a speech impediment experiences. That's the problem--not the software.

I avoid speaking over the phone or into a microphone whenever possible.

I don't know why people would even want voice capabilities in games. Many older gamers snatch an hour here and there to play--and sometimes the only hours available are when the wife and kids are asleep.

And many people have jobs that require them to wear a headset or talk a lot on the phone. Why such people would want to talk all day at work and then come home and talk talk talk during a game is beyond me.

But hey, some people like to talk. Good for them.

The computer game market has for the most part moved beyond me, so voice technology is just another nail in the coffin.

Everything these days seems to be fast-reflex FPS type games for people less than half my age. Those games that look more like interactive movies than games.

I like deep strategy games like SEIV, and I am not in love with 3D graphics because they take more away from the game experience than they bring. I've played many 3D games and have never encountered one where I thought the game experience would be worse if it was 2D rather than 3D.

I know I'm in the minority. So I just don't spend much money on computer games any more.