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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 steroi

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.

OmarIsmail 14y ago
I think this will become a lot more prevalent after the Oculus Rift + whatever Oculus spawns gets some traction. With the Rift it feels like you're actually _there_ so just exploring becomes a lot more immersive and engaging.
- tchock23 14y ago
  I completely agree... I'm hoping the Oculus opens up a new style of gaming that isn't focused on shooting and competitive gaming and instead centers instead around immersion and cooperative gaming. While I'm known to play the occasional FPS now and again, I'm really bored of the format and want something new.
Nikolas0 14y ago
Sounds like a great idea, especially now that the idea of doing this for real is becoming a reality :)
geuis 14y ago
Agreed. I've said it before, somewhere else. I would love a persistent universe that takes place in the solar system. Navigating around Sol takes a real amount of time. To make it really interesting, the rest of the galaxy is explorable too. It would take a massive amount of effort, but eventually you can build ships that can travel to the stars. But instead of instant travel, it takes weeks or months of real time to get there. Basically this game would be very similar to Eve in many aspects. Probably one of the reasons I enjoyed playing Eve for so long.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  But instead of instant travel, it takes weeks or months of real time to get there. That sounds incredibly dull.
- ajlburke 14y ago
  "Wobbler had written an actual computer game like this once. It was called 'Journey to Alpha Centauri'. It was a screen with some dots on it. ... He'd seen on TV that it took three thousand years to get to Alpha Centauri. He had written it so that if anyone kept their computer on for three thousand years, they'd be rewarded by a little dot appearing in the middle of the screen, and then a message saying, 'Welcome to Alpha Centauri. Now go home.' " - Terry Pratchett, Only You Can Save Mankind
  - huhtenberg 14y ago
    What was that game when you had to drive for several hours on a straight road to get to the destination, only to get a bonus level of traveling back home (and then needing to swerve around a single stray dog in the last hour just to stay on the road)?
    - ajlburke 14y ago
      That would be "Desert Bus" - an attempt to make the worst video game ever. Of course people have formed leagues and tournaments to play it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Tellers_Smoke_and_Mirrors#Desert_Bus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Tellers_Smoke_and_Mirr...
    - jkubicek 14y ago
      Are you talking about Penn and Teller's Desert Bus? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Tellers_Smoke_and_Mirrors#Desert_Bus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Tellers_Smoke_and_Mirr...
- knowaveragejoe 14y ago
  You may be interested in this game: http://infinity-universe.com/ http://infinity-universe.com/ Unfortunately, the sole developer seems more interested in developing the engine for commercial use first before making the game.
  - mountaingoating 14y ago
    If you are getting antsy, you should, of course, play Space Engine! It's the ultimate exploration game. It aims to be a complete, accurate simulation of space, and you can download it for free. Of course, it's riddled with bugs, but it is absolutely worth playing anyway. http://en.spaceengine.org/ http://en.spaceengine.org/
pestaa 14y ago
I wanted to do that at one point, with both a huge fantasy world and my city modeled and constructed from satellite pictures. Too bad I'm just a software engineer with no money.
acgourley 14y ago
Because journey needs painstaking design of every element, and a shooter lets communities generate random and unlimited content even on randomly created landscapes.
frozenport 14y ago
If you go on a journey and bring a gun is it a shooter?
10098 14y ago
Obviously, because it's fun to shoot stuff and watch it be blown to smithereens.
- anigbrowl 14y ago
  Unless you want to do something else and can't because people keep shooting at you. I eventually lost interest in MMORPGs such as Eve because so many players just fall into a mode of competitive hostility; I'd go exploring and on the way back I'd have to deal with piles of griefers that just sit around waiting to ambush passers-by, and fending off boredom by using multiple concurrent logins. It just becomes tedious. I believe the main reason that Minecraft is so popular is that there are other interesting things to do besides combat.
confluence 14y ago
Shooters sell. Costs to produce this game will probably go into the hundreds of millions of dollars, with 350 full-time staff. You don't fuck around on that scale - it's make or break time - so you want to make sure you hit the largest possible audience and push as many copies as possible.
- guard-of-terra 14y ago
  Computer games (non-independent) seem no longer target ALL gamers. Instead every one of them is targetting the largest subset of those (those who like shooters). 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.
  - dbaupp 14y ago
    This isn't true. Almost all indy games aren't shooters (or if they are, have some interesting twist). Admittedly this may reflect that non-shooters are an area in which low-budget developers/studios can still compete.
  - chc 14y ago
    This is a huge exaggeration. Most games target the majority (which, duh), but it's not remotely all games. For example, Valve's two most recent games are a puzzle game and a MOBA/Action RTS. The highest-rated game of 2012 was The Walking Dead, an old-school adventure. Probably the most hyped game of 2012 was Assassin's Creed 3, a stealth action game. If not that, then Diablo III, a dungeon crawler. The game that AFAIK is the biggest around right now, League of Legends, is not a shooter. Shooters are the new platformers. If you don't like them, you won't like most games. But there are other games.
  - InclinedPlane 14y ago
    Shooters are like meat and potatoes, they're easier to make and easier to sell, but they aren't the entire market. Of the top 10 best-selling video games of 2012 only 4 were shooters, 3 were sports games, one was a dance game, and two were action-adventure games (assassin's creed and lego batman). This doesn't count MMO subscriptions which would have put WoW into the top 10.
potatolicious 14y ago
The problem with exploration, especially at the AAA-level is that content costs a lot of money. 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.
- Negitivefrags 14y ago
  Procedural generation doesn't have to be the generation of random content purely from algorithms alone. It can just be tools to automate artist work by allowing them to specify what content should be at a higher level. 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 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 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcM9Ynfzll0
  - mark_l_watson 14y ago
    +1 yours is the best comment I have read so far. 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.
  - 14y ago
radley 14y ago
Also, shooters are exploration games, just with AI obstacles slowing your advancement.

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.

OmarIsmail 14y ago

I think this will become a lot more prevalent after the Oculus Rift + whatever Oculus spawns gets some traction. With the Rift it feels like you're actually _there_ so just exploring becomes a lot more immersive and engaging.

tchock23 14y ago
I completely agree... I'm hoping the Oculus opens up a new style of gaming that isn't focused on shooting and competitive gaming and instead centers instead around immersion and cooperative gaming. While I'm known to play the occasional FPS now and again, I'm really bored of the format and want something new.

Nikolas0 14y ago

Sounds like a great idea, especially now that the idea of doing this for real is becoming a reality :)

geuis 14y ago

Agreed. I've said it before, somewhere else. I would love a persistent universe that takes place in the solar system. Navigating around Sol takes a real amount of time. To make it really interesting, the rest of the galaxy is explorable too. It would take a massive amount of effort, but eventually you can build ships that can travel to the stars. But instead of instant travel, it takes weeks or months of real time to get there. Basically this game would be very similar to Eve in many aspects. Probably one of the reasons I enjoyed playing Eve for so long.

anigbrowl 14y ago
But instead of instant travel, it takes weeks or months of real time to get there. That sounds incredibly dull.
ajlburke 14y ago
"Wobbler had written an actual computer game like this once. It was called 'Journey to Alpha Centauri'. It was a screen with some dots on it. ... He'd seen on TV that it took three thousand years to get to Alpha Centauri. He had written it so that if anyone kept their computer on for three thousand years, they'd be rewarded by a little dot appearing in the middle of the screen, and then a message saying, 'Welcome to Alpha Centauri. Now go home.' " - Terry Pratchett, Only You Can Save Mankind
- huhtenberg 14y ago
  What was that game when you had to drive for several hours on a straight road to get to the destination, only to get a bonus level of traveling back home (and then needing to swerve around a single stray dog in the last hour just to stay on the road)?
  - ajlburke 14y ago
    That would be "Desert Bus" - an attempt to make the worst video game ever. Of course people have formed leagues and tournaments to play it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Tellers_Smoke_and_Mirrors#Desert_Bus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Tellers_Smoke_and_Mirr...
  - jkubicek 14y ago
    Are you talking about Penn and Teller's Desert Bus? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Tellers_Smoke_and_Mirrors#Desert_Bus http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Tellers_Smoke_and_Mirr...
knowaveragejoe 14y ago
You may be interested in this game: http://infinity-universe.com/ http://infinity-universe.com/ Unfortunately, the sole developer seems more interested in developing the engine for commercial use first before making the game.
- mountaingoating 14y ago
  If you are getting antsy, you should, of course, play Space Engine! It's the ultimate exploration game. It aims to be a complete, accurate simulation of space, and you can download it for free. Of course, it's riddled with bugs, but it is absolutely worth playing anyway. http://en.spaceengine.org/ http://en.spaceengine.org/

pestaa 14y ago

I wanted to do that at one point, with both a huge fantasy world and my city modeled and constructed from satellite pictures. Too bad I'm just a software engineer with no money.

acgourley 14y ago

Because journey needs painstaking design of every element, and a shooter lets communities generate random and unlimited content even on randomly created landscapes.

frozenport 14y ago

If you go on a journey and bring a gun is it a shooter?

10098 14y ago

Obviously, because it's fun to shoot stuff and watch it be blown to smithereens.

anigbrowl 14y ago
Unless you want to do something else and can't because people keep shooting at you. I eventually lost interest in MMORPGs such as Eve because so many players just fall into a mode of competitive hostility; I'd go exploring and on the way back I'd have to deal with piles of griefers that just sit around waiting to ambush passers-by, and fending off boredom by using multiple concurrent logins. It just becomes tedious. I believe the main reason that Minecraft is so popular is that there are other interesting things to do besides combat.

confluence 14y ago

Shooters sell. Costs to produce this game will probably go into the hundreds of millions of dollars, with 350 full-time staff. You don't fuck around on that scale - it's make or break time - so you want to make sure you hit the largest possible audience and push as many copies as possible.

guard-of-terra 14y ago
Computer games (non-independent) seem no longer target ALL gamers. Instead every one of them is targetting the largest subset of those (those who like shooters). 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.
- dbaupp 14y ago
  This isn't true. Almost all indy games aren't shooters (or if they are, have some interesting twist). Admittedly this may reflect that non-shooters are an area in which low-budget developers/studios can still compete.
- chc 14y ago
  This is a huge exaggeration. Most games target the majority (which, duh), but it's not remotely all games. For example, Valve's two most recent games are a puzzle game and a MOBA/Action RTS. The highest-rated game of 2012 was The Walking Dead, an old-school adventure. Probably the most hyped game of 2012 was Assassin's Creed 3, a stealth action game. If not that, then Diablo III, a dungeon crawler. The game that AFAIK is the biggest around right now, League of Legends, is not a shooter. Shooters are the new platformers. If you don't like them, you won't like most games. But there are other games.
- InclinedPlane 14y ago
  Shooters are like meat and potatoes, they're easier to make and easier to sell, but they aren't the entire market. Of the top 10 best-selling video games of 2012 only 4 were shooters, 3 were sports games, one was a dance game, and two were action-adventure games (assassin's creed and lego batman). This doesn't count MMO subscriptions which would have put WoW into the top 10.

potatolicious 14y ago

The problem with exploration, especially at the AAA-level is that content costs a lot of money. 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.

Negitivefrags 14y ago
Procedural generation doesn't have to be the generation of random content purely from algorithms alone. It can just be tools to automate artist work by allowing them to specify what content should be at a higher level. 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 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 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcM9Ynfzll0
- mark_l_watson 14y ago
  +1 yours is the best comment I have read so far. 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.
- 14y ago

radley 14y ago

Also, shooters are exploration games, just with AI obstacles slowing your advancement.