Making Future Proof Games

Games
1

Most DOS games are lost to us. To play say Master of Magic, you have to ju p back into the realm of QEMM and other fun stuff.

But Windows is going to be here awhile. So how would you make a game that will withstand the tests of time? My area of game programming is in strategy games so I’ll stick with that for this post.

First, the strategy game should support whatever screen resolutions that the system says it can support above a certain threshld (i.e. 1024x768 or higher).

Next, the game should be fully 3D. Not because of fancy graphics but because it allows the game to scale up in resolution easier without looking blocky. Wacraft III does a nice job with this. One thing that would be nice would be to allow the user to choose in advanced options the DPI (dots per inch) so that you can choose to get more map space or more detail or a combination of both.

In addition, make the game expandable by users. Especially in the single player arena. That means making your website support submissions of mods and have moderators to handle the mods. Have your website support a community that can take care of itself once the game is no longer financially viable to do support for. Look at how well Total Annihilation has done and that’s despite Cavedog no longer existing.

I think strategy games generally age better than action games (with some exceptions – Counterstrike). Action games, like HL2 or DOOM3 appeal largely because of their cutting edge technology. The # of polygons they can support. Now, if the engine can support scaling the detail of everything so that when future cards come out that can support a zillion polygons on screen at once and the game supports that then that’s great.

Strategy games, by contrast, are purely about the game play. A lot of people are clamoring for a Master of Magic 2 because the game itself is great. Same for a TA 2. We’d be happy with it running on Windows XP at a decent resolution with nice graphics. If Master of Magic had been done on Windows and could run at any supported resolutions, many people would probably still be running it. But it was written for DOS and at 320x200 it’s too blocky to for most people.

So that’s my 2 cents on that. If Making a strategy game to last over the long haul is mainly about making sure that the game will continue to be able to run at higher resolutions. in 5 years, we’ll be running at least 1440x1080 or 1920x1080 (“THE resoluton of the future”) with lots of people running at 1800x1350 or 2400x1350 (When Longhorn comes out – the dirty secret about Longhorn is that one of the driving forces about it is to “fix” the DPI problems of the current Windows display system – we’re stuck at 96DPI and going higher breaks programs because of the way it’s all implemented).

2

I don’t think making a game “future proof” is just about technical aspects. Thats a part of it but a big reason is simply wether or not people still like to play it. Does the game have good AI as the case of TB strategy games? Do players like the MP? This can keep a game around for years afterword as seen with RTS games like TA, Starcraft, and Age of Empires. For FPS its the MP and the modding support the game has. Case in point would be Half-Life.

3

Alternatively, you could just try “Being Dave Perry and Claiming That Your Game Will Improve In Looks Every Year Until It’s Photo Realistic Quality, Kinda, Maybe, Cough, Cough, Bullshit, Bullshit”. It worked for Messiah ;-)

4

I don’t know if I agree that a “future proof” game (not that such a thing really exists, but theoretically) must be 3D. It might be more important to have a graphics engine that allows users to import new art, much as “Full Canvas Jacket” is said to update Red Baron II. I don’t see any reason why a “future proof” Civilization must have 3D graphics.

Secondly I agree with Jason Becker that making a game “future proof” has a lot more components than the graphics. Indeed, I’d say that most games expire years before their graphics become unwatchable.

The reasons games expire are:

  1. for solo play the AI becomes too predictable, while limitations, bugs, or bad design decisions become more apparent through familiarity with the engine
  2. multiplayer communities die out or become irritating in character (cheaters, player-killers, fanatically good players, stupendously bad players…).

As far as solo games I think, then, that for a game to be “future proof” it needs to have an AI that is at the very least tweakable by the end user, and more likely needs to have an AI that is able to be completely modified. For example, if you could download new AI’s for Rise of Nations that people were writing and play against them, it would substantially freshen the solo playing experience. Finally, it should go without saying that a strategy game must actually provide a ruleset that allows creative, unpredictable strategies to be employed, so that the game doesn’t become an exercise in perfectionism.

I don’t really believe a game can be made “future proof”, but I think if you tried to make a game “future proof” you’d make a game that was a lot better in the present tense.

5

It might be nice to make a game “future-proof”, but I suspect there aren’t many gamers who would play old games regardless.

Total Annihilation still looks ok and has some great gameplay, but it’s also missing a lot that subsequent RTS games have. I played it a few months ago, but only for a couple of nights. I’d rather play something new. That happens with every game I love. At some point, I want to play something new no matter how good the old game is, and the old game tends to be forgotten.

In a way you already have some future-proof games, though – Ultima Online, EverQuest, etc. Can you think of another 1997 game like UO that has a couple hundred thousand people still playing it? Certainly not TA. I’d wager the active TA community is no more than several thousand, at best, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was in the low hundreds.

6

I agree. Games that rely on heavy amounts of scripting don’t age well unless the multiplayer is exceptionally good, or if the mod community flourishes. Sometimes handing out an editor isn’t enough (Dungeon Seige), and sometimes it’s a gamble that pays off (NWN).

7

“Sometimes handing out an editor isn’t enough (Dungeon Seige), and sometimes it’s a gamble that pays off (NWN).”

NWN’s editor is a far better piece of software than DS’s though. Bioware also was and is %100 behind it. HL’s great single player success certainly helped the MOD scene for the engine, but Valve also showed how great active support of the community can keep a game around for years well after its compeitiors have left people hard drives.

8

But everyone knew that the game Bioware made wasn’t their best, and yet they wanted others to makes good games? No matter how good the editor/builder is that’s a gamble. What if it hadn’t cught on? NWN would have been another Black and White. Or, Dungeon Seige, I guess.

9

Dungeon Siege sold plenty of copies, but you pretty much have to be able to write code to use the editor to do more than mod weapons and stuff. It’s not user-friendly at all for non-programmers. NWN is, though the scripting can get complicated.

10

Also DS’ editor shipped months after the game did.

11

As far as graphics are concerned, I think it’s important to make them as unique as possible. There’s nothing wrong with “photorealistic” graphics, but they’re only photorealistic until something that looks better comes along. Graphically, Zelda-cube, Rez, and Jet Grind Radio will never age because they each have their own completely unique graphical style that doesn’t doesn’t concern itself with reality.

12

Yeah, a lot of it is just good art direction. If it’s flashy, but generic, no one will be impressed in a few years, but if it has a lot of character and a nice style, it will still be charming in a decade. And if there’s a good game underneath it all, that makes forgiving any visual shortcomings really easy.

13

As others have mentioned, future-proofing isn’t necessarily about the technical production values of a game. It’s good to see that you’re thinking about the issue, but realistically, is it a good use of development resources? Sure, if you can start from the initial phase of the development cycle and incorporate scalability into the design, great. Otherwise it can be a lot of work tha tthe majority of users will never care about or even notice. As it is, people jump through hoops to get classic titles to run. Future-proofing those games might make the process of running those games less painful, but I doubt it would have much of an impact on whether or not people are motivated to return to the old games in the first place. In this respect, you are correct that strategy games are often driven by gameplay before production values, so again, I feel like trying to future-proof the graphics should take a backseat to future-proofing the interface and/or gameplay.

In particular, the comment about 3D seems like it would cause more issues than it would fix. I mean, have you seen the fully 3D graphics of, say Jedi Knight or Thief lately? They were accepted at the time because that’s what the hardware would support, and the gameplay helped to offset the blocky graphics. Nowadays, those graphics alone aren’t nearly sufficent to drive popularity. People still dabble with those titles in spite of the 3D graphics, not because of them. OF course, I think 3D is overrated, but that’s a whole separate issue.

Higher resolutions are great, if the visual style supports them. Again, remember that games that look good on a console can look unpolished on a PC, mostly owing to the sharper resolution of a monitor. A texture that looks good on at low television-grade resolutions can look fuzzy or washed-out on a high resolution screen. In addition, remember that a linear increase in the diagonal results in a squared increase in pixel space/memory. Of course, with the way hardware is advancing, that may not be a problem.

Modding is fine, but quality control disappears. For every good mod, there are probably two medicore ones, and I imagine the problem only gets worse as you make the editing process more accessible.

Yeah, okay, in many respects I’m just refuting your points for the sake of arguement. Still, I can’t believe that the mere presence of scalability is enough to movitate gamers to revive old games.

  • Alan
14

I’d be more inclined to play a good-looking, stylish 2D game of yore than a 3D game (except for Quake) from 5-10 years ago.

15

Agree with most things mentioned above. A certain level of uniqueness (not only graphical) guarentees a longer life of a game. I still fire up Mad TV (not related to the MAD magazine or its tv spin-off) once every years because there’s no other management game/business sim on that topic. (At least not a good one as far as I know.) Another example of that would be Incubation, which actually still looks nice these days. I wish there were more games like this, and that certain lack is what makes me go back to the game occasionally.

16

MoM runs great on DOSBox.

If graphics make an old game “unwatchable”, you’re missing out on a lot of good stuff.

17

Sorry. :oops:

18

[quote=“theboywolfie”]

Sorry. :oops:[/quote]

Heh.

I think multiplayer communities die out due to lack of new content and boredom with the game. Gamers want a new gaming experience. I don’t care how great an older game is, it’s going to get played less and less as time passes. How many CS players moved on to BF1942?

19

Sorry. :oops:[/quote]

Heh.

I think multiplayer communities die out due to lack of new content and boredom with the game. Gamers want a new gaming experience. I don’t care how great an older game is, it’s going to get played less and less as time passes. How many CS players moved on to BF1942?[/quote]

I think this is true, as each new game comes out, people will keep moving on until the old game becomes something you dig out for nostalgia or just to remind yourself how good it was. Obviously some diehards will stick with it come hell or high water but more ‘casual’ players will move on to the next game and the next.

20

IMHO, I think the ones that survive over the years are the ones that offer a different experience every time you play, lots of people and places to see, lots of toys to play with (whether it’s an RTS army, an RPG inventory or an FPS weapon loadout) and perhaps a theme song or catchphrase that gets stuck in your head. Picture a husky-voiced guy saying, “War…war never changes,” and you probably know what game I’m referring to, for example. That game doesn’t look too pretty at 640x480 stretched across a big monitor, but it has everything I need for a timeless experience. Plus, I’m a sucker for sci-fi RPGs.