In honor of the Xbox One reveal that won the hearts of developers and core gamers everywhere, I thought I would give away some random ideas for features you can steal for your PS4 games.  By extension the WiiU pad as well; come on people somebody make a game for WiiU please.

1. Nathan Drake and Lara Croft can sweep the dirt off of items they discover to unveil more details.
2. Brush it to clear out the cob webs or wipe your mask in an FPS game. (Metro?)
3. Tap it as a taunt/gesture in a game; non-critical type interactions.
4. Position the player’s flashlight.
5. Scan the screen in 2D or FPS games.
6. Make sweeping gestures for magic spells, tied to visual icons on screen.  Perhaps like connect-the-dots type of spell casting.
7. 4 corners of touch pad can be 4 additional inventory or load-outs other than the D-pad.
8. RTS-like marquee selection for many top-down management games.
9. Drag finger to plot paths for AI in RTS view.
10. Give macro instructions to FPS companions without moving redicule onto target by tapping the touch pad.
11. BONUS! Use the touch pad X dimension [min,max] to orient an object you are inspecting or placing instead of fixed orientations or ambiguous analog stick rotation. Xmin=0 degrees, Xmax=360 degrees.  Dragging left and right will give a fixed known orientation instead of spin-to-win.

Games Industry, let’s please stop talking about games as art.  It doesn’t matter!!  Go to Google right now..  Go..  Do it, I’ll wait…

…

Image search the word “art” and browse through the countless images of people putting feathers on on their finger nails, painting their bodies to look like living statues, kids draw crayon pictures of their family, high or fine art paintings, graffiti depictions of Ronald McDonald vomiting, a torso made out of Legos, and a sculpture (in a gallery) of a bull slamming a man against a wall with the thrust of its own flatulence…

Who cares if it is art?!  Who are we trying to convince?!  Does it matter?  Will the craft of creating a game somehow be justified if we can somehow call the grind of everyday game development a form of artistic expression?  Can we finally tell our parents that what we do is meaningful if we can tell them that the world accepts us as artists?  Who cares.

Games Industry, put your insecurities away and get back to work.

Over these last years I must admit that many of us have become complacent with modern graphics.  If you ask most games journalists and general enthusiasts, they will tell you that the graphics are okay but aesthetic has become the new buzzword.  Many people don’t bother to read the specs for video cards anymore or dig through the internet for obscure facts like how many giga-flops it can crunch or how many raw triangles per second it can transform.

The fact is that if you’ve purchased an decent gaming PC at any point as far back as 2007 you probably have a PC that will play most console ports.  Another trend that has slowed the progress of technology is a strong presence of 2D games on mobile devices finding their way to PC as well.  It’s no secret that creating a product for the lowest common denominator is a surefire way to be as mainstream as possible.  What better way to play on grandma’s 1990 Tandy PC than to hold back your technical ambitions to the barest of drawing techniques?

It’s not all bad to push technology to the side and give the reins to the artists, but there is an argument to be made for pulling back on those reins and shifting control back towards the engineering marvels we saw in the early days of hardware acceleration.  My justification for this comes from the fears that many developers have about the next generation.  You have some developers claiming that budgets will increase anywhere from 50% to 100%, meaning that we could be seeing your average game budgets in the $100M+ range.  Much of this cost will have to do with the sheer amount of content and the level of detail for that content.  It will take a small country to produce the content we need under the technical constraints of most real-time systems.

But what if the technical constraints were alleviated (to a degree)?  Instead of the NextBox or the PS4 being a mainstream 1.5 version of their predecessors, what if these devices were absolute powerhouses instead?  My reasoning here is simply this; no one is crazy enough to spend $150M or more on a game that is of risk of completely failing but if games could be made on the same scale or less, and more effort could be put into better lighting, shadowing, real-time effects, truly intelligent AI, the line is blurred.  Games can creep closer to film quality visuals but it doesn’t have to mean more triangles.

It is shocking what a couple of post process effects can do for an image, or enabling 16x+ anti-aliasing, or a completely dynamic lighting system over the oft standard of costly and time consuming baked environments.  This thought that we need to continually toss more triangles at a problem feels like an old trope that we’ve trained ourselves to believe.  More content is not the solution to cutting budgets, I feel that a smarter use of that power to procedurally improve the look of the game will result in a game that feels next generation without costing like a next generation game.

Personally, in the next generation I would like to see what processing power can do to improve the assets that are being created today.  Adding more GPU cores I feel would be a bigger win than adding a second screen or including a Kinect 2.0 with every console.  Raw and unadulterated processing power is just the thing to break the chains of these budget concerns and maybe spark a little movement in the PC space as well.  It sounds completely ironic because we assume that most developers will instantly consume this power with 100k triangle eyelashes for their RTS units but that is exactly what needs to be avoided if you want to stay in business.  The big win in the next generation will not be screens or motion controls, it will be the ability of each developer to find ways to look that much closer to a Pixar quality film, but do it in 33ms or less.  The only way this is going to happen in a reasonable budget is not through pure aesthetics, and definitely not more content creation, but through a strong technical pipeline that needs raw power to make that happen.

…Fingers crossed that Sony and Microsoft do the right thing.

Normally, I tend to reserve my articles for game reviews, technical tutoring, or wild and baseless opinions about the games industry =).  Today I am choosing to voice my concern as a consumer, and maybe give a little insight into why brick & mortar stores are feeling more behind the times each day.

To clue you into my grievance, the moral of this story is, “Don’t purchase Best Buy extended warranty plans.”

Having recently moved to Raleigh, I purchased a refrigerator from Best Buy because I had a few gift cards to cut down on the cost.  After some back and forth, I’m convinced to get their precious warranty.  Not one to normally splurge for superfluous warranty plans, I thought it was worth the investment this one time.

17 months later; practically minutes beyond the manufacture warranty, I’m happy to be holding a piece of paper that tells me not to fear.  I do have an extended plan after all.

Phone call #1, my wife calls and they tell her, “There is no one in NC who can help you.  It’s going to be 2 and half weeks out.”

Phone call #2, I call them back and tell them that I have a fridge full of food and some dude can wait to get the light in his fridge replaced.  Surprisingly them find someone to come out in two days.  That guy was useless and came with almost no equipment and zero parts.  Unscrewing the back panel and kicking it around for 30 minutes, he finally settles on having to replace the fan… maybe.  Of course he didn’t have the parts and that would take another week.  After we just confirmed an appointment with him in 1 week, he rushes out of the house while telling me to call them when the parts get here.  He left no phone number or contact information or invoice.  Sooo, I guess I should call Geek Squad again?!  The parts are coming to the house?!  Maybe… Actually no, because they never showed up on my doorstep.

Phone call #3, a week later I come home to a message on my machine asking us to schedule an appointment.  I thought we had an appointment.  This time my wife calls again and is on the phone for 2 hours!  By the end of that conversation they give us a date that is now 3 weeks away.  Of course by this point the refrigerator is rotting from the inside.  They give her the runaround, everything from “restructuring” to “busy season”, anything that sounds like an acceptable excuse.

Phone call #4, I walk into the local Best Buy and explain the situation…  She then calls the same damn hotline that I’ve been talking to at home.  What?!  So Best Buy has no more control or power over their warranties than the consumer does.  Again I stand at the costumer service desk for 2 more hours!  I am eventually handed the phone and get some lady named Vicky whom I’d like to personally reach into the phone and strangle.  She had a tone like Nina from Corporate Accounts Payable and her voice was salt on an already deep cut.  This woman of course pushes our appointment to 1 week away instead of 3, but by this point I’ve already been dealing with Best Buy for 2 weeks.

At this point I talk to the service woman at the counter and tell her that if they can’t fix the refrigerator in a reasonable time that they need to ship a new one, per their own policy, and take away the iron brick in my kitchen.  Despite what they told me when I purchased that plan, she tells me that the policy is a repair policy, not a replacement policy.  To qualify for a replacement they have to attempt to repair it first.  Now here’s the kicker; if they have no one to repair it then they can’t qualify it for replacement.  So all they have to do is not try to fix it.  Makes sense right?  Easy money.

Digging through their policy, there is a noticeable lack of time frames.  Of course, you as a consumer are limited to 30 days plus fees to return any sale item, but they have an undetermined period of time to service your requests.  As long as they are processing your request to repair the device or appliance they are not legally obligated to take further action.  In short, I could be waiting another 2+ months before I get my refrigerator in working condition again.

I am expecting a phone call today, but something tells me that I’m not going to hear the phone ringing anytime soon.  The warranty plan was hundreds of dollars gifted to Best Buy and has been many working days of my own time dealing with their excuses.  Their extended warranty plans work much like gym memberships or hotel reservations.  They don’t actually expect you to show up and act surprised when you ask them to do their jobs.

The one service that brick & mortar has to offer is speed.  Internet companies will always have a considerable delay in shipping products and sometimes responding to requests.  Many internet companies are run with very low overhead and their only form of communication may be through email which can take days to respond to.  Having a place to go into and a face to talk to is the whole point of having a physical store.  If the staff inside the store does not have the power to make things right then they shouldn’t exist.  If I can’t walk into a physical store and use it to get that instant feedback then it serves little purpose in my life.  I am done with Best Buy.

UPDATE: After my blog post and a few tweets later, I got emails from several people who suffered the same ill fate.  I even received emails from people who work(ed) for Best Buy and suggestions on how to break through the red tape.  Thanks for your advice guys and things are definitely moving faster now.  I wish it didn’t have to come to this; I wish it wasn’t the squeaky wheel that gets the grease, but that seems to be the way to get businesses to respond.  I am told that new policies are being put in place to make this process more agreeable, but I’ll believe it when I see it.  Nothing is more annoying than having spent many thousands of dollars in a place year after year, only to fall flat on the one thing that matters most in the physical world; customer service. =(  I hope there is still a future for brick & mortar; my faith is not quite yet restored.

I’ve been on a pretty bad string of luck for, oh… I’d say for the last 10 years or so.  I’ve worked on many failed prototypes throughout my career but frankly those are meant to fail early and often.  Where the wound cuts deep is when you build something that you truly believe in and it barely makes a ripple.  It hurts when you agonize over every insignificant detail of your passion project, over the course of many years of your life, and your efforts are judged and cast aside in 2 minutes or less. » Read more..

@Ben_Quintero: “Can’t think of another industry where it cost $1M to make and sells for $1. And is something buyers still mull over so much. #videogames”

I wonder if chewing gum would exist today if it cost $1M and a team of college-educated masters of their craft to stamp out 500k sticks and they sold for $0.01 each.  I kind of feel like video games might be going the way of chewing gum, sitting in the impulse isle next to People magazine and The Star (is that still around?).  The difference however is that Bubble Yum hasn’t changed in like 100 years and they are still selling it.  Video games have a very short life and often die with their target console.  Then we need to spend more money to create more entertainment value but the flavor of our gum has to be different each time.

This was, strangely, what I awoke to this morning.  I thought about all of the hours in my lifetime that I’ve put into video games.  I thought about the long nights, the tireless efforts, the mind-melting problems that needed to be solve in order to get the simplest of things to happen on the screen.  The hundreds of man-hours that go into the little things that the player is NOT supposed to notice (ie: uncanny valley, visual pops and artifacts, anything that breaks immersion).  I thought about all of it.  Then, that one quote sprung to mind.

I could be completely wrong here but I just could not think of any other industry where people put this much effort into something and ask so little in return.  The closest resemblance may be Hollywood, but even they have some luxuries that we do not.  When a film like District 9 is made on a $37M budget, or even some of the horror films being made for less than $1M it makes you think.

It seems like anyone with a Canon 5D DSLR can frame it up and take amazing video that is strikingly professional looking, even if by accident at times.  Still, following some basic rule of thirds and understanding aperture go a long way.  The beauty of nature and the talent of the people in front of the camera are key elements.  Sure, there is lighting and composition but again, lighting and shadows are practically free when you compare them to the hoops we have to jump in the digital realm.  In video games, digital artists agonize over the limitations of things like a single shadow-casting light source and a handful of fill lights while an indie film maker just needs an umbrella and a flood light from Home Depot.

I think that the video games industry are some of the brightest stars but you know what they say about the stars that burn brightest…  I do hope that we can maintain this pace and I applaud my brothers and sisters.  With budgets expected to rise again, new consoles expected to push 6x the horse power (more devilish details to UV-unwrap, paint, sculpt and light), and prices continuing to plummet, I hope we are ready for what lies ahead.  The future is a scary place, but we will manage… I hope…