Geekomon

10 Predictions for the Gaming and PC world. Within 5 years.
1)Microsoft Loses the console war, retreats back to Windows, readies Xbox 360 2.0.

2)Apples loses the personal computing war, retreats back to consumer products and software for Windows. Steve Jobs can't live forever.

3)Playstation owns the hard core gaming world. Casual gaming market balloons up. Nintendo creates a cellphone, and buys Nvidia.

4)Intel capsizes. Microsoft creates their own Processor and Semiconductor company.

5)Playstation loses all their exclusives. Procedural programming methods are popularized. EA capsizes. Old directors lose their prominence. Hideo Kojima's new games tank.

6) In order to combat piracy, more games include hardware in their software. Guitar Villain. Guitar Heroes 4. FBI Fingerprinter DS.

7)DS Advance demolishes PSP 2.0. PSP 3.0 finally includes dual analog sticks. PSP always one step behind DS.

8)PC trends will change. Laptops will become Dual screened. Nintendo starts making more than just electronic games. They get a shitload of money from their outsourcing wii and dual screen patents to the PC industry.

9)Movies become completely greenscreened. The massive competition between the movie and the gaming industry begins. Government starts to crack down on the gaming industry even more at the behest of the MPAA.

10)A Raping Simulator made on a HomeBrew Wii sells 50 million Wii consoles.

Let's atomize the requirements.

1) Difficulty. It has to reflect the new market. No hard core Devil May Cry enemies/bosses. No slow dungeon tutorial. Instant action. Make every level, every mini-game, every sub-level a mission ala GTA ala Devil May Cry. You can adjust the difficulty mode for each mission.

2) Control. Remove the shield. Let Link Dual wield. Turn the Wiimote sideways to go into parry mode. Dual wielding creates more combat moves with less button memorization.

3)Combat. Remove all long-range weapons. It's time to replace it with superpowers/magic. Naturally, the puzzles should reflect these powers.

Zelda games are defined by their puzzles, controls, level designs, and gameplay. It all meshes to create an almost gradual slope for the player to go from swordless Link to multi-move super-puzzle solving menu hopping Princess saver.

The next Zelda game should reflect all these core elements. But it should also include something new. Something to invigorate the franchise. Maybe co-op, maybe multiplayer combat, maybe even having Mii's in the villages.

What makes a game worth that 60 dollar price tag?
It has to be a software leap. By definition is has to be the evolution of previous gen software.

Let's atomize a game to see what needs to evolve.

Texture Mapping - the bumps on a surface. It fools your eyes into thinking a 2D image is made of marble or skin. Current-gen games use normal mapping--basically making a Low Polygon character walk around in the skin of a High Polygon character. Parallax Mapping is the next level technique. It involves doppler effect of light. Textures look bigger closer, smaller farther. Only Crysis and Conan seem to support this extensively.

Light Sources: The problem with Parallax mapping is that it takes a lot of registers in your GPU to use properly. Registers that can be doing more light sources. More light sources, better graphics. You could probably fake it if you had to.

A.I - true AI isn't just a big chunk of If else statements. It should take user tactics, asign a template, respond, simulate, and repeat. Full A.I.

Procedural Assets - Using functions to create assets on the fly instead of pre-compiled. On the fly assets can be modded on the fly. Bullet holes can actually be bullet holes. Not just a 2d texture map repeated over and over again.

In conclusion, what does this mean for games?
A) Wank off to better looking breasts.
B) Multiple Light Sources. Better shadows.
C) AI, single player experience.
D) Procedural will let you create your own characters, buildings, vehicles. It also supposedly lets you generate your own actions by combining others (supposedly).

The hardware needs to be dual+ core Out of Order Cores for AI and a huge L1/L2 cache for procedural. The 360 has 1MB L2 but that's shared between all 3 cores. The PS3 has individual caches but it's non cached (slower) 256 KB with the main PPE with only 512KB L2. Either use a faster PPE with half a gig, or a slower Xenon with a shared Gigabyte. And the only saving point of the Wii in all of this is that it uses an Out of Order single processor but by Chris Hecker's(Will Wright team) admission, the Wii CP can't even lead in the AI department.

So the only truly next-gen platform is your upgradeable PC.