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
And for fans of offset sticks I made this one:
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!
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.
Sell me.
Ditto.
Your passion for this certainly shines through.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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".
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.
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.
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