The 4th Dimensional Console

THE SETUP
We are all familiar with the point in time in which polygons and 3D modeling and movement helped move console game experiences from two dimensional movement, gameplay, and strategy to three dimensional gameplay. There's no denying it was a transformative time, characterized by watershed releases like Super Mario 64 that redefined gameplay interaction in a 3D space.

I propose a console that tackles and grapples with movement, gameplay, and strategy along the dimension of time.

THE FOURTH DIMENSION?
Yes I know full well the 4th dimension is not time, but rather something I cannot even conceive of. I watched that video where this high school kid put me in my place by being way more brilliant and able to understand actual physics, and you can too:

So, yes, I know "The World's First 4D Console... It's About Time!" is pure marketing drivel. Brilliant, earth-shaking marketing drivel.

THE MOCKUPS

IMAGE(http://www.imbarkus.com/images/Controller_concept_4thdimension.jpg)

And for fans of offset sticks I made this one:

IMAGE(http://www.imbarkus.com/images/Controller_concept_4thdimoffset.jpg)

THE SKINNY
Essentially the console "records" all of your gameplay progress and activities in a game, and this information is kept on your console and available the next time you visit the game. This is not a video recording, but rather a recording of 3D positioning and movement data, game variables and world data, game choices.

We've seen a couple of seconds of this concept executed in various racing games, or other games with a "rewind" feature. Think "Braid, the Console." That time-rewind feature is the concept of this console taken to the Nth degree, using it to solve a number of pernicious gameplay challenges that have plagued both 2D and 3D games, and maybe unlock games that take new forms.

This is why the Play/Record button is a combined entity. When you move forward you are playing and "laying down gameplay." Scrub back through that gameplay if you didn't like how you did, and play it differently, and lay down a new history of your exploits!

PROBLEMS SOLVED

  • Why a Console? - Nothing is unique about a game console now that they play the same games as PC's, patch and require online like PCs, use the same controllers as PCs, etc. Significant engineering would be required to support this "4th dimensional" feature, something for which a dedicated console engineered for the purpose is best.
  • Save Points - Eliminated, hit the stop button to stop the game. Come back, and pick up where you left off, or rewind from that point. Maybe a few seconds "lead-in" replay would get the player going. You could also add "Chapter Points" for people to use to be able to skip back to specific points in their playthough, if such a thing ends up needed.
  • Checkpoints - ditto, in fact this development would actually, by necessity, change the whole concept of game difficulty (if in EVERY game you could rewind to just before you made a mistake).
  • Branching Narrative - Easing the ability to "see" the whole game ensures branching narrative development is not wasted on players who "don't want to replay." Games could even safely shift to shorter experiences with more possibilities for where it could go, leaving whole sections of content unseen on a typical playthrough, knowing the game would be rewound and re-attempted.
  • Streaming and Media - How about a rich video recording and editing suite with full camera control allowing you to build flythroughs or machinima of your playthrough?

PROBLEMS REMAINING

  • Engineering - I don't even
    Online Gaming - Um, well, this is why Nintendo is the first company that comes to mind with this. You could always disable those features online and still have the playthrough recorded for makin' videos of the exploits.
  • VR - No reason why this concept wouldn't work with it, but given it's status as Big Buzz right now I should probably assume Nintendo is already work on "WiiR"
  • Motion Control - Like above, this concept pretty much ignores all that and pretends that the unnamed Nintendo-like console maker is focused on controller-based console-gaming and what can be done in that area that can innovate and create excitement.
  • No, Seriously. Engineering - I'm not sure of the challenges of "record all gameplay" but I imagine it would take a top-down engineered framework for tracking variables, items, whatever is recorded. I know PS3 Skyrim issues came from the amount of stuff recorded in the game saves and limits on memory. So put 128 GB of RAM into the thing or something I dunno I'm the idea guy. If it limits the amount of graphics whiz-bangs, then Nintendo's the shop to do it. Make it a handheld and you limit the graphics a bit, and yes, you could call it The 4DS.

THE CLOSE
It takes a little bit of thinking about this idea before you look into the ways it could change games. Development has become so expensive that houses are reluctant to put together content that is off the "critical path," yet at the same time all this development cost dumped into a roller-coaster thrill-ride game seems to impress less and less. So much discussion is about game length that you would think we are working a a one-dimension media! Let's spur some discussion of breadth, on depth.

My hypothesis here is that a console can come into this space with a dedicated, engineered function spurring a round of gameplay innovation from a top-down level in a way the PC can't. The N64 analog stick took an existing innovation and made it the centerpiece of a transformation in the way we interacted with our games, spurring innovation in the way we navigate 3D spaces.

I propose someone should do the same with the way we navigate our game TIME.

THE DEFENCE
i.e. some selections from my arguments on GAF

I'm not sure why everyone is hung up on whether this justifies new hardware. Nintendo could have arguably released Wii motion control as a peripheral for Gamecube. But that would have doomed the initiative and ensured its lack of success, instead of its huge success.

Launching the concept AS a console is the way to "mean it," and ensure ubiquitous and consistency in the feature. Finding a seemingly innocuous "gimmick" feature, like the DS' second touch screen, which in fact transforms the way games are developed on the system is something that is right in Nintendo's wheelhouse when it comes to consoles.

It is what they failed to do with the WiiU, whose gimmick in truth felt like nothing new but a repeat of the trick the DS pulled.

The larger argument here is a console that, in its basic feature set, solves all the problems that lead publishers to favor linearity in games, as well repetition in games as a gameplay consequence.

The shame of this is that I can envision, but not properly articulate all the things this could effect. I imagine open world games sans the towers and icons driving one all over the map to ensure every corner is seen. Instead the world would be filled with stories, as many as could be made without fear of fitting them together or structuring the linear narrative. Each one could be a narrative, taking you to different places in the world, without concern that you walk by all the other places.

If you choose to join, oh I don't know, the Assassin's guild, you would see a completely different world, story, game even then if you chose to join the Mage's guild. You wouldn't have to have a "critical Path" with a sprinkled selection of Mage's Guild content, for flavoring of the same experience everyone else is having.

And these diversions could be everywhere throughout the story you do play, these permutations. Because you wouldn't have to balance it for subsequent playthroughs to avoid having a player repeat half of the story before the game-changing choice. You wouldn't have to figure out a save system, or how to notate progress or significant plot-changing choice points to the player so they could understand how not to miss them on subsequent playthroughs.

I think all these factors together might push games to be actually developed a bit differently, giving the console and its games a unique identity. So that's why new hardware.

But if it also meant Nintendo was dropping other gimmicks for a straight-up controller-gaming console of modern graphic spec with some killer Mario games, while focusing their "gimmick" on an area that, at the very least, would standardize and make simpler the checkpoints and save points and stuff I detailed above, that's also a win in my book.

But it might actually do a lot more than that.

Maybe you could put a standalone microphone in each controller, too, to record an audio track to go along with the gameplay, as well as to enable speech recognition.

I picked up Lost Treasures of Infocom on iOS the other day and have been playing it using voice recognition. It's gotten me thinking how close we could be to a revolution in adventure gaming with natural voice recognition interfaces parsing input text in newer, advanced ways and presenting stories and scenes with all the modern beauty possible.

It's really adventure games that currently take advantage of branching narratives more than any other. Have I invented the adventure game console? Or would a Mario game now be free to also be an adventure game?

I think the quick rewind feature would be a big help in any implementation of voice control. Really minimize the frustration of misrecognition while the program is training to your voice.

Screw Nintendo. I should Kickstart the thing and call it Twouya.

Folks I'm not really a regular here but I don't know I'm just not feeling it over at NeoGAF like I used to. I flotaed this over there and it didn't get any interest so I thought, what they hey, I'll try the folks over at GWJ. I'd love to know your thoughts. Thanks!

One more, sorry:

I'll bet if the rewind button just had LED lighting under it you could toggle the feature on and off for multiplayer without much confusion.

The entire match being recorded reliably and ubiquitously every time would seem to be a boon to local multiplayer. You could augment that with some intuitive editing software or even some "highlight detecting" work to automate the process to get a good "brag video."

Maybe a camera and some sort of video recording along with the audio is necessary to complete the metaphor of recording and provide what is necessary for streaming/video culture these days. All simple stuff, really.

The software/OS architecture to make it happen (I don't remember saying it had to be a hardware-based solution, just new hardware) and the dev environment it would require that would somehow standardize all these variable is indeed a challenge. But having standards for a lot of those things might also open things up in other ways.

I fell like Peter Molytrois... Peter Troislyneux? eesh nevermind...

Turn-based games basically already have this thanks to their static nature. You can save every turn. If you truly want some sort of smooth rewind/fast forward in games that employ active AI algorithms or dynamic animation that's a hell of a lot of storage as you would need to take per-frame snapshots of the memory state and dump it off somewhere. Then what happens if there is a random element? Stuff would be different, and you just created two branches. Massive storage hog.
So... the question in my mind would be, why bother? PC games have employed quick-save for ages, it's developers that drifted away from providing it. Just quick-save manually, or the dev can checkpoint-save every ten seconds if they feel its needed.

Sorry, just don't see it. Pushing developers to design save-anywhere systems is more bang for the buck.

I'm with Japan on this one and I still don't see why you'd need dedicated hardware for this. I mean, this is basically how I play Bethesda games. What you're describing here is a game-changing mechanic that doesn't fit every game, and is kind of a weird thing to base an entire system around.

As far as making "brag videos" goes, the PS4 already has a button that lets you easily post the last... X-seconds of gameplay, I honestly don't know because I never use it. Right there in the hardware and on the controller.

Then again, it's entirely possible I'm just not "getting it." You ought to throw that pitch up on Kickstarter and see if it sticks.

My hypothesis here is that a console can come into this space with a dedicated, engineered function spurring a round of gameplay innovation from a top-down level in a way the PC can't. The N64 analog stick took an existing innovation and made it the centerpiece of a transformation in the way we interacted with our games, spurring innovation in the way we navigate 3D spaces with a controller.

I can still navigate spaces just fine with a mouse and keyboard, which predated Mario 64 by quite a bit.

It takes a little bit of thinking about this idea before you look into the ways it could change games.

You haven't sold me on this at all.

Basically, you're saying "hey, think about this a lot and you'll see how it'll be awesome" instead of showing me.

Maybe I don't want to rewind over and over again. In fact, I don't play Elder Scrolls games this way (ie. mult saves) because I like making choices and just sticking with them, results be damned. I'm not seeing how having the ability to rewind significant chunks of time would make my experiences better.

Sell me.

Also maybe leave the high-schooler out of your pitch. It's a neat clip but I'm not entirely sure how it relates. Your pitch is already plenty long on its own. Some people might see the "smart kid talking about cool stuff" video as a sort of bait-and-switch if it's not essential to understanding your idea.

You've got quite an idea here.

My immediate reaction is that it assumes a particular view of games that I personally don't think is universally applicable: there are games where saving and reloading don't make any sense. On the other hand, all games can be looked at as a negotiation between the player's external timeline and the game's internal timeline, with reloading being one of the interactions between them. So there's some precedent for it.

My personal preference is actually for games that are intentionally designed to function without requiring or allowing the player to reload an earlier state. This takes some design work on the part of the developer, because you can't just cut the save-reload loop out of most games without breaking the difficulty curve. I'd like to see games handle failure better, in general.

That said, there are times when I certainly appreciate being able to go back to an earlier state, because perma-choice is a really hard thing to balance for and I don't have time to grind through stupid hard challenges.

A word of warning: the technical challenges in deterministically recording the entire game state are not trivial, though there are certain approaches that can mitigate that to an extent.

garion333 wrote:

Sell me.

Ditto.

Your passion for this certainly shines through.

Okay guys I'll try to find some time to post more cogent arguments. In the meantime some videos to show what's possible with highlight editing tools that other specific individual games have had this full world/game data recording, ONLY for this purpose.

I'm pretty sure the XBox One and the PS4 are just recording static video of the last few seconds of gameplay. If the OS and architecture ensures games are developed in a way that enables accurate tracking and recording of the game world independant of the player camera, HUD tricks, etc. it enables free camera in all footage.

It also eases things like spectator mode and spectator camera functions, which could figure into E-Sports type situations. Free camera in instant replay is built-in enabled by the OS for all games. And this is just for games where the player themselves only navigates forward in time, multiplayer, etc.

More later if time permits. Also here is something that writing this up has happily introduced to me:

IMAGE(http://i.imgur.com/VIbdNEd.png)

Imbarkus wrote:

I'm pretty sure the XBox One and the PS4 are just recording static video of the last few seconds of gameplay. If the OS and architecture ensures games are developed in a way that enables accurate tracking and recording of the game world independant of the player camera, HUD tricks, etc. it enables free camera in all footage.

It also eases things like spectator mode and spectator camera functions, which could figure into E-Sports type situations. Free camera in instant replay is built-in enabled by the OS for all games. And this is just for games where the player themselves only navigates forward in time, multiplayer, etc.

Great. All great.

Now how would this change how I play?

We've shifted from "gameplay" to "replay" here, which has limited utility outside of the multiplayer e-sports realm. Once again it seems like you'd be fitting a very costly and extraordinarily complex square peg into a round hole that only specific games will derive benefit from. Again, better to let developers build bespoke methods of approaching these needs.

As far as what it means for solitary experiences, let's go back to Skyrim - I think the question remains, do I gain any benefit by being able to "pause", swing across the world and watch something happening, that saving frequently does not provide? What would that happening be? A ongoing battle with active AI characters? An NPC in an idle animation? Nothing, because that section of the world was expunged from RAM? From a single-player perspective you seem to be taking this from the perspective that everything in the game world is active at once, which from a practical standpoint is just not how games work, nor how they should work. Resource requirements notwithstanding, you'd be left with a nearly unplayable mess of unpredictable variables with countless but largely meaningless branches, many of which are horribly buggy (remember, human beings are still expected to program this)? It might be cool from a life simulation perspective, but a game it does not make, and even then you need established parameters to create meaning. It brings me back to the old argument of "realistic" AI. While it sounds like a fantastic goal nobody actually wants realistic AI because in game it become completely unpredictable, and likely boring as a sense of mastery will be hard to come by.

Really though, what it comes down to is... I'll buy in if the console also automatically overlays terrible post-grunge music on top of my real-time replays and brag videos.

There are MOBA and RTS games that already do this. It saves a copy of the actual game that you can replay, spectate, rewind, pause, whatever you please. The way they can do that is by recording inputs rather than recording footage, like recreating a chess game move by move. You end up with a perfect, flexible replay with a surprisingly small resource footprint. Theoretically, there's no reason they couldn't let you pick a moment in that replay and start actually playing from there.

I'm still not seeing where the new console comes in.

I'm *not* an ideas guy, so I won't weigh in on whether this is a good idea or not... but I will say that we're a long way from hardware to do this for long periods of gameplay. At least, from it being remotely affordable.

I don't know if you are discussing this as a "pie in the sky, fun idea to talk about" or "no seriously who wants to pursue this as a business idea" as your pitch blurs the lines a little, mixing hardware mockups with very high-level ideas. For sake of discussion, could you clarify?

I support beeporama's idea of a console that delivers aerial pies, as long as there's a button on the controller to launch the pie drone. Maybe a toggle to switch between sweet pies (dessert) and savory pies (pizzas, pot pies, Shepard's pie, etc.).

I like pie. I support pie delivery.

Okay maybe the 'shops gave a bad impression, like I had this all thought out. It's more of a early concept that I was hoping could spur some imagination as much as evaluation.

So the best I can do is still explore the idea, see if there's merit, and try to add the fruits of that to this, the harshest of living design documents.

DEFINITIONS:
Temporal Support
- The level of support each game has for "4D Features," or use of the rewind/fast forward features of the console/OS/framework.
Function
Recordable - Games record gameplay history while played, that can be reviewed, edited, mixed, and shared. Pause and rewind functions may not be available at all times during gameplay, particularly during online games. Record history may be limited to a specific length of time or individual rounds or matches of gameplay.
or
Rewritable - Games permit forward Play movement through time from a rewind point "rewriting," or creating a new gameplay history and set of choices. Existing gameplay history can be reviewed, edited, mixed, and shared. Rewrite function can take different forms:
Form
Open - All points in time are available for pausing, stopping, rewinding, and fast-forwarding throughout full gameplay history. Rewriting is available from any moment in time in past gameplay, at which point (obviously) fast-forwarding is no longer available in the new timeline until it is laid down.
or
Structured - All points in time are available for pausing, stopping, rewinding, and fast-forwarding throughout full gameplay and cutscene history. Limited "choice points" in history, indicated clearly in the UI while accessing temporal controls, allow progression into a new history of gameplay. This accomodates skipping cutscenes and non-interactive or non-significant gameplay sections, and the choice points can be visually mapped, and directly skipped among, in the UI for these titles.
or
Mixed - Full pausing, stopping, rewinding, and fast-forwarding support. Games with segments of mixed gameplay styles may operate in Open or Sturctured mode at different times, with real-time, arcade, and reflex-based gameplay segments supporting Rewrite at any time, while conversational, navigational, or other segments present Structured Temporal navigation..

USE CASE:
"The Walking Dead"

Rewritable - Mixed
Adventure games like The Walking Dead from Telltale, with consequential choices, are a logical fit for the platform. A Walking Dead game on the platform could use the built-in UI for the functions of tracking and representing choice points in the story, currently indicated in-game with prompts of "So-and-so will remember that." These prompts could use UI system notification nomenclature, and a player can turn them on and off as needed as with achievement notifications. Though I would think if you could achieve some consistency with notification behavior you could relax consistency with color, graphics, sound, etc. and let that vary per game.

Being able to rewind to any significant decision without complete replaying of chapters or from save points will ease that process for players and Telltale, as the behavior is standard and a no-brainer across games. It will stimulate players to explore different choices. Yet The Walking Dead will still ensure that choices have real-to-the-player consequences by ensuring the decisions can fester and/or pay off well after they are made.

It will also ensure immediate consequences with far-reaching implications that will also mean a good deal of skipping back or rewinding to undo. In the beginning of The Walking Dead, the player must choose one of two characters with which to ally himself. Depending on the choice, the rest of the game will be set in the city of Atlanta or in the surrounding countryside. Halfway through the countryside storyline, the player can set out to sea on an ill-fated voyage using a discovered sailboat. Alternate settings and storylines like these can vary in length, and in The Walking Dead for this new platform, some storylines are shorter and some are longer. This offsets additional development costs of the varying story and settings, as does the standardized structure for all the meta (temporal) functions of the game.

For The Walking Dead, the rewind/pause anytime function is a great boon to players who otherwise would find themselves playing with subtitles to ensure they didn't miss any dialog, due to an accent in the voice acting or a distraction. The "Previously on The Walking Dead" segment for each episode would be informed directly by the stored play data of previous chapters, replaying even navigational or arcade section performance exactly as part of the highlight reel. Your game is your game in all ways.

But the ease of rewinding and rewriting history will also bring back "Early The End" nature of the old Choose Your Own Adventure books, allowing you in The Walking Dead to tell Leroy he's a big psycho at the wrong moment and have him shoot you down. Ha ha no big whoop, skip back that choice and try it again. Let's face it. We all have the option of quitting out of the game, reloading it, and trying the conversation again, if the time limit made us hit the wrong thing. If you don't want to play like that, don't hit rewind. But don't expect The Walking Dead to remain so predictable that a simple conversation choice can't have immediate deadly consequences.

Speaking of deadly consequences, how would the arcade seqments of The Walking Dead hit you if you never had to replay any more than a few seconds by missing them. What is the consequence of "messing up" during gameplay? A selected length of the player's time is forfeit, enough for them to reach that section and try again. So what is the real harm of lessening that time, and giving the player control of it?

In Structured Mode, even in action and arcade gameplay, I suppose you could establish the choice points in much the same way checkpoints are now, manually. Alternatively, require at least :xx seconds or rewind before rewrite becomes available again, if the rise and fall of repeatedly gameplay vs. player time is the consequence loop you must establish for a player in your game.

But for The Walking Dead, I have placed the title at Mixed mode because the arcade gameplay segment of The Walkind Dead and the like can sure as hell be done in Open mode allowing full rewind and rewrite. In The Walking Dead players will of course make mistakes and die, but special extra care is given to a large variety of gruesome zombie death animations in each scenario. If a player dies, the environment being less consequential to their time allows them to return to that challenge quickly, after watching and enjoying the unique death animation. The experience stays fun and positive for the player. No one played Dragon's Lair for the gameplay; they played it partly to see Dirk's death animations, but that fun is lost when your adult time is at stake. Once a player sees a repeat death animation, they then skip it, hitting that rewind button as soon as they can. If need be, the gameplay loop to beat that moment of challenge is honed to a few seconds, repeated over and over until beaten.

Right now, having tried for months to get her to play it, I have to sit down some time and do the arcade gameplay segments for my wife to get her past them in Season 1 of The Walking Dead. Mystical future Walking Dead on this platform rarely gets put down and given up on due to player frustration with difficulty spikes. 4D platform Walking Dead is pulling in more players without changing the fundamental nature of the gameplay--just changing the fundamental nature of all the peripheral gameplay contrivances that waste the time of both developers and gamers.

If you needed a nice custom gameplay engine/OS integration to make this happen, well then you might stand a pretty good chance of getting Telltale on a new engine, too. So, there's that.

----------------

Okay so that's one use case argument. I call dibs on Pikmin 4D (Rewritable - Open) and Black Ops 4D (Recordable) for an upcoming post. I'm not sure any of us are Nintendo enough to come up with Super Mario 4D World (Rewritable - Open) which would have to be the brillant Braid-like Mario-does-it-even-better where gameplay elements defy the mechanic and other stuff only Ninty can get away with.

Thanks if you read this. Also trying lately to kind of reawaken the writer/thinker inside. But I would totally buy this Nintendo console in my head you guys.

Being able to rewind to any significant decision without complete replaying of chapters or from save points will ease that process for players and Telltale, as the behavior is standard and a no-brainer across games. It will stimulate players to explore different choices.
or The Walking Dead, the rewind/pause anytime function is a great boon to players who otherwise would find themselves playing with subtitles to ensure they didn't miss any dialog, due to an accent in the voice acting or a distraction.

"Great boon" is marketing speak. It would be a useful and nice feature. One that potentially could be solved by allowing us to rewind up to 30 seconds of a time at any point, much like many racing games have. I don't see why we would need full and complete control of every second ever played. And the potential abuse of the rewind feature brings me to:

So what is the real harm of lessening that time, and giving the player control of it?

It takes away consequence? It seems interesting to me your idea is being put forth during the Great Difficulty Renaissance tied to the Souls series and roguelikes.

What makes a Souls game is the fear of death and the consequences of your actions. Players need to kearn from their mistakes to progress. If we aren't learning from our mistakes then why have fight encounters at all? Why have difficulties higher than Easy or Very Easy if we can just rewind gameplay whenever we want? Why have challenge at all?

Sure, the rewind feature would be great for certain types of games, but I'm still not seeing why a new console would be needed. You don't need to record every second of Walking Dead to get back to different branching paths, a save will already do that and does record your choices. Sure, it doesn't record every little move, but why should it? That seems like overkill.

Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together implemented a feature which allowed you to go back and explore the different plot points to see how the story would've been if you had chosen differently. So this idea is something that's been done before, sorta. I get that you're thinking bigger, but I'm not seeing the revolution you do.

If you don't want to play like that, don't hit rewind.

Sure, because people don't usually take the easy way out.

But don't expect The Walking Dead to remain so predictable that a simple conversation choice can't have immediate deadly consequences.

"Oh great, another gotcha death. Rewind it again. This is annoying. Why is there all these stupid deaths all over the place? Let me play the damn story!"


So, I get why you would want the console to handle the background aspects, it would make the actual recording ubiquitous and therefore potentially make it easier on the devs to develop within that feature set. But I can't shake the feeling that where hardware and software limitations and whatnot meet is where this idea dies. The Xbox One records everything you do all the time up to 30 seconds, but it's just an audio/visual recording. It's not recording inside the game engine, but outside of it. I can't help but think shoehorning all games and game engines to work in conjunction with the built in record feature seems like a hard sell. Perhaps this is why you think Nintendo should do it, they're willing to be the odd man out on hardware.

At the end of the day it seems like you're addressing two things:

(1) Game time (making it so it's easier to play more games in limited amount of time)
(2) Exploring choices

I still don't see where I'm playing the games any differently.

This is what I want you to sell me on. Easing the save/reload function is nice, but I want to play my games differently.

Forget this replay nonsense, this is what a 4th Dimensional Console should offer us in gameplay terms

Achron had some good ideas in there. Shame it wasn't very fun.

garion333 wrote:

Achron had some good ideas in there. Shame it wasn't very fun.

My impression when I played it was that they were trying to do a traditional RTS plus the time thing, and it was just too complicated to learn all the counters plus the time mechanics.

Still want to do some multiplayer matches, though.

Garion you'll have to pardon me, and yet still tolerate, Marketing speak from me this that's my day job. And I get your point about a Souls game but the always online multi-player of that already prevents even pausing--that game or anything like it would certainly be deployed in Recordable mode, with replay but no rewrite.

More to come later. The Pikmin one should present a case more tailored to the environment's strengths.

garion333 wrote:

Achron had some good ideas in there. Shame it wasn't very fun.

I actually haven't played it; I struggle enough with RTS's as it is, adding a brain-bending layer on top of that is just too much for me.

But the possibilities of the 4th dimension as a gameplay element are intriguing.

Imagine Mario Kart with the timewave; you travel back in time to deploy a banana in the way of your opponent so that they will not have actually been in position to hit your with a red shell, then return to the moment where you then will have not been hit with the shell. But then another opponent travels backwards from further in the future to drop a bob-omb in your way, so when the timewave catches up suddenly you find yourself back behind the red-shell tote-r who avoided the bob-omb.

OMG TIME PARADOXES

Imbarkus wrote:

Garion you'll have to pardon me, and yet still tolerate, Marketing speak from me this that's my day job. And I get your point about a Souls game but the always online multi-player of that already prevents even pausing--that game or anything like it would certainly be deployed in Recordable mode, with replay but no rewrite.

I don't believe the always on mp (which isn't entirely true, it's only always on when you're connected to the internet) aspects are as central to a Souls games as some think. It's the combat, level building and lore obscurity that makes a Souls game. The asynchronous mp is cool, but you can play through the entire game without it.

I'd love for you to address my points about difficulty and consequence. Saying "you don't have to use rewind" seems too much of a cop out to me. Perhaps your point is that a Souls game wouldn't need to use the feature ever (recordable as you say), which is certainly a possibility, but I'm still left wondering what value is added overall.

I keep thinking about this concept and it clearly would have some value, or a lot of value for a select group of people (content creators [omg let's not even begin talking about the copyright issues, ugh]), but I'm not sold on why this would need to be new hardware and why it would be so revolutionary as to change how people play, games are developed or designed.

Well I'm getting there Garion and I admittedly may just not be able to make a case. This is as much a thought experiment with an early idea as it is anything else. And I still am working on the use case for the feature tightly integrated into gameplay in the Rewitable-Open type of structure, but it may be a tough sell. Part of what appeals to me most about this idea is that it is so outside of the box with traditional game consequence loop structure.

Sure, games would come out for the system that could eschew the mechanic entirely and be recordable, whether they are always online or not. But in essence that would be like putting out a DS game with the static pause and options menu just always hanging out on the lower screen.

More interesting and in line with the mechanic would be taking a Souls-style game, and limiting the mechanic in that you can rewind exactly five minutes of gameplay if you die. Work it into the game's lore if you like. If that five minutes just happens to drop you into the middle of the least opportune moment in the previous boss fight, or mid-jump over a chasm, well... good luck. Because if you die again it's five minutes further back from that point.

See, Souls games are about consequence and penalty through repetition of gameplay, from the latest bonfire in the Dark variety and back to the Nexus in the Demon's variety, if you die. A collection of souls could still be left at death point, immune to rewind's effects to up the stakes greater than the last five minutes worth of collection, if necessary. But many of the awkward secondary decisions about monster respawning are made redundant here--everything respawns when it is rewound. Work it into the lore of the game and make it a curse on the player.

So then you can freely modify your sole-game design so that nothing respawns in reality. The tradeoff in repeat battles extending gametime can be swapped for NPCs, crystal lizards, and other opportunities that don't respawn, leading the most obsessive and hardcore of players to willingly take the five minute penalty to get that lizard.

Sure, you'd have to patrol against players gaming the system, and maybe in reality Recordable is the only way to ensure they wouldn't just do a lot of running in circles for five minutes. But for now, that's a stab at some Souls game ideas.

For the USE CASE above, all I can say is that when I was a kid I read two series of young adult "interactive fiction" books. One was Choose Your Own Adventure, the other were Time Machine books. Most people are familiar with the nature of Choose Your Own Adventure.
IMAGE(http://gamebooks.org/gallery/time05.jpg)
Time Machine books had choices, turn to page this or turn to page that. But they only had one ending, and if you made the wrong choice, you could be sent back to an earlier time and asked to read a section of the book again. Since it was a book, you would of course skip those redundant pages and just get the the choice so you could go another way. Video games are like Time Machine books that don't let you skip repeated pages. Certainly The Walking Dead is like this, one narrative, minimal deviation, mostly for show and flavoring.
IMAGE(http://gamebooks.org/gallery/cyoa002n.jpg)
When I read Choose Your Own Adventure books, I kept a finger in the page at the last choice. If you made a choice, you certainly weren't going to filp to the page and see a two sentence passage ending in your death, and then say "darn," and flip to page one and start reading all over again. If games somehow had some more time getting comfortable with interactive narrative, branching narrative--because doing so was a lot more automated and consequence-free__I'd like to think that narrative could take on new forms and start showing more variety.

Yes, a lot of the The Ends in Choose Your Own Adventures were screw-ups and one-offs and low effort gimmicks. And yes it remains to be seen whether a branching narrative can even be made that contain as much good story as a linear one. I liked Heavy Rain, for example, but it had its flaws and a lot of people didn't like it.

But I'll bet most people here have heard of Choose Your Own Adventure and not Time Machine. There were a billion more of them because they sold a billion more. I think there's a lot of room in explored territory in exploring non-linear narrative, AS gameplay.

Hey, I loved me some Greyhawk back in the day, but I don't see it changing how gaming is experienced. I honestly don't.

I like to think there's a reason that The Last Express wasn't a watershed moment in gaming. And I don't mean the financial and marketing aspects, but the game didn't seem to have much influence and it seems like the perfect example of a game that would've thrived on a 4th Dimensional Console. I'm honestly not sure what the reason is, but it may be as simple as "needlessly complicated to produce".

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DEFINITIONS:
Temporal Support

Function
Rewritable
Form
Open (Plus) - All rewind and rewrite features of Open form are available. In addition the game may include gameplay that involves laying down multiple gameplay paths or other overall metagames using 4D features.

USE CASE:
"Pikmin 4D"
aka 100 Olimars

Rewritable - Open (Plus)
Receiving a catastrophic distress signal from his compatriot Louie (who stayed behind on PNF-404 at the conclusion of Pikmin 3), Captain Olimar returns to the planet of the Pikmin to find he is too late. Despite dispatching fleets of ships to evacuate the planets indigenous life, fifteen minutes after Olimar arrives the planet's sun goes supernova, destroying the planet and all its unique life, as well as the fruit and seeds needed to provide food to his home planet of Koppai. Olimar is able to find Louie and a few Pikmin and get them aboard his ship, but his fleet arrives with 5 minutes to spare and must jump away before the explosion.

All that survives of PNF-404 are a few Pikmin and three artifacts gathered by Louie during his "research." Olimar fits the artifacts together and upon pressing two symbols on the finished piece, finds himself standing in the past, watching himself discover Louie before they escape. With the artifact (which resembles the 4D button panel from the controller), Olimar can control time, and even travel back in time exactly fifteen minutes to make another copy of himself!

Olimar decides to use this power to make an army of himself, up to 100 Olimars, working in syncopated conjunction to prepare two of each form of indigenous life for escape aboard his Ark fleet, destined to arrive with only minutes to spare.

Pikmin gameplay is at first seemingly deconstructed by full Rewritable Open form of gameplay, since any mistake in a level involving sending a group of Pikmin into battle can be rewound and immediately erased. However it can be argued the process of replaying and reattempting levels with a trial-and-error method can be off-putting. Plus, the stringent time limit of the first game, created a sense of urgency that has since been missing from the series, sadly because it involved such a significant consequence (in player's gameplay time wasted) on a doomed effort.

So during a typical level full gameplay rewind and rewrite features are available, allowing a player to quickly master the strategy and task of a level and lay down a fairly perfect run. At the conclusion of a level, if satisfied, the player then presses Play/Record and Rewind at the same time (watching Olimar do the same with his onscreen artifact), leaping back to the beginning of the game with a new Olimar.

This unlocks, essentially, MetaPikmin gameplay, where the players coordinates multiple gameplay runs with Olimar up to a certain number (average of five) inside each level (let's say 20) for a total of 100 Olimars (Olimar is pretty much an anagram of Mario right?). Eventually an interface is presented by which the players can select between Olimars and fine-tune or change the gameplay run using rewind and rewrite controls.

In world, this translates into a series of segments in one level where an Olimar leads his team of collected Pikmin and other specimens to gnaw through a rope tied to a root, seemingly randomly, on their way to a battle. The loosening of this rope weakens a rotten tree, and another Olimar running through a different area of the same level leads a squad of Pikmin with a pair of beaver-like critters to knaw at and weaken the base of this rotten tree. In an entirely different level, high up in the mountains, another Olimar has his team remove a stick, setting a stone rolling down a hill…

In another entirely different level, a desperate Olimar tries to herd a large set of pairs of unique species through a deadly swamp, pursued by a cat-like predator preying upon the endangered animals. His Pikmin dwindling, he carefully maneuvers into place luring the creature into a random spot in an opening… where it is suddenly crushed by the rotten tree nudged the final step into falling by the tap of a rock rolling from a far off hill. The triumphant Olimar gathers some one-of-a-kind moss samples from the top of the tree and moves on with his mission.

--------------------

It's easy to continue following the idea of a console from Nintendo with this set of features because it is they alone who would attempt the set of tentpole releases uniquely tailored to the 4D features. But it would take unique deployments of the features like this to sell the concept. Obviously some of the concept comes from Super Mario 128, and a Mario game on the system… might… look a little something... like this….

If adjusting and synching Pikmin timelines sounds a bit fiddly well I think Pikmin is a bit fiddly as it is. But at the end of this fiddly Pikmin game you should be able to easily edit and share replay of your coordinated army of Olimars evacuating the planet, or even go back and just tweak and perfect your existing saved game to 100% all the collectibles without replaying anything more than is necessary. So let's call it efficient fiddly. Thanks for reading!

Alas, I learn a Very Nintendo Lesson: Pikmin doesn't sell systems.

I'm hesitant to even tackle the Mario 128 Use Case, though, because it has to be some Nintendo brilliant implementation of the kind of features in the use cases above, plus crap I can't conceive myself. You get the gist, though.

So how does the console handle multiplayer games? Seems like once someone rewinds or fast forwards it would become a new instance of that game. Just trying to imagine playing Diablo 3 with the features. Seems to me it would only be suited for single player experiences.

I tend to favor single-player experiences myself, but I think the ability to record and hold an entire match of multiplayer data for replays and sharing could unlock a lot of possibilities. Local coop multiplayer could be a part of the Use Case above simply by having both players also have timeline control. But something like Diablo... yeah it's pretty much just game world recording features, I think, for something like that or anything with online multiplayer.

If this were a system for a VR based interface, this kind of "game world recording" thing would almost be necessary for any sort of game for features like replay, shared footage, or streaming of gameplay to another VR interface. You could not show a player in a VR-based multiplayer game even a "Killcam" from the head-tracking viewpoint of what another player did without greatly disorienting someone. GiantBomb recently was talking on the bombcast about how you would record gameplay footage from VR for Quick Looks.

You would need to record game world events and gameplay events, and then allow someone watching or reviewing that footage to be able to do so with their own organic head-tracking occurring.

Bump.

Ah well. I'll probably get a Switch but I feel like it's solving a problem that everyone knows exists but no one particularly cares about. Maybe it's just my age: years ago I was riding the bus a lot more and playing Gameboy Advance SP, I suppose I can see the appeal of playing the same game seamlessly. Mainly I just see the appeal of Nintendo's development teams being focused on one console. I'm curious if portable games that are just smaller versions of consoles games will work. I guess we'll see.

I bumped this though because it made me think back and wish Nintendo's new jimmy was something a bit crazier like this, answering a problem that no one knew existed. Maybe this case isn't solid (though I'm not sure my Pikmin idea got full consideration there), but Nintendo's always done best when they've come out of left field--I think their stock dip might indicate that the core idea of Switch is not... Revolutionary. I hope we're all wrong.

I still love my 4th Dimensional console though for having standardized stop, play, and rewind buttons that you would at least force every cutscene to obey. Or even those in-game, computer-takes-the-camera semi-cutscenes that never seem to end up on in-game cutscene replay menus (and seem to end up part of the appeal of longplays on YouTube).

I also didn't make a strong enough case for the basic usability, instant save on stopping games and quitting, instant restart where you left off (with some review run-up if you like) like Wii VC NES games. Reviewing any past section of gameplay for clues, etc. and having the replay features well-designed, integrated and meta in the console architecture, etc.

I also think if you're going to have a future of VR support, you have to account for sharing VR experiences, not to standard video but to other VR helmets. This is only possible if you record the timeline of entire environments, and each participant can then move independent and not be sick. The concepts of recording gameplay and video etc are just not up to this task.

Your Pikmin example is Braid + Pikmin, essentially, right? Like each task is a Braid-esque part to the overall puzzle. Over here I get the X while over here I get the Y and in this third part I bring X and Y together to move on to Z.

Am I reading that correctly?

You're removing some frustration for a player by giving them shorter loops of gameplay to redo.

Plus, the stringent time limit of the first game, created a sense of urgency that has since been missing from the series, sadly because it involved such a significant consequence (in player's gameplay time wasted) on a doomed effort.

Rightfully so, though, right? Timers in games are added as an artificial restriction that rarely is enjoyable to anyone. It is, literally, one of the easiest and cheapest ways to add tension to a game.

How would being able to rewind over and over again bring back the sense of urgency? Seems like it would be removing any sense of urgency.

I also think if you're going to have a future of VR support, you have to account for sharing VR experiences, not to standard video but to other VR helmets. This is only possible if you record the timeline of entire environments, and each participant can then move independent and not be sick. The concepts of recording gameplay and video etc are just not up to this task.

You are correct that recording gameplay is simply not up to the task of re-experiencing or viewing another's experience of a VR game. You'd have to be in their playthrough in some way like a Google 360 view.

That's something many MOBAs allow for, as was mentioned earlier in this thread. MOBAs are limited by their generally static maps and whatnot, so you don't have the issue of re-inhabiting a 3D open world, but I feel like that's more a problem with scale and data management than anything. Many video games already "record" what you and everyone else does in a game, they just don't generally have the ability to go back in as a spectator and watch someone else's experience in the ways you talk about. It's gotta be something a develop has though in dev mode or whatever. Or could implement it.

Okay, I've run out of brain power.