I'm going to make a list of things I would like to see in the next generation of games. Note that these are not things that I expect to see (far from it), just things I'd like to see:
1. Work on a lower budget, if you need to make millions of sales in the first day to make a penny of profit then there's a problem, aim to make money but don't overload yourself.
2. Fewer celebrity endorsements. I don't care if David Beckham likes Fifa or if Tony Hawk likes skateboarding games for the same reason that I don't care if Queen Elizabeth likes King's Quest.
3. lower prices for games with so many iterations. Now if a series has significant differences every time then it's not so bad, but 45 pounds for a new Dynasty Warriors game? fuck off.
4. None of this "if you pay us, we will help you win" bullshit, of course its bound to happen though.
5. Make DLC worth it. I don't mind paying some more money for more content but the price has to be reasonable, 4 pounds may sound cheap but if you get 30 minutes of playtime for it then it most likely isn't.
6. Different business models. I'm fine with a range of business models as long as they're not exploitative. I am honestly interested to see what different ideas there are. Something like episodic games or even the "season pass" idea where new content is released over time. It's a way to keep people interested and even hyped over a longer period of time. Of course this doesn't work for everything and in some cases it would be horrible, and as mentioned in number 5, it would have to be worth the cost.
7. Games with RISK! Like you know, not healing by standing behind a wall or going back 1 minute if you get killed. Also, to note, there is a difference between difficulty and risk. I want more games where I can't save everywhere. Games where I need to consider stuff outside of the 10-seconds that I'm currently playing in.
8. Fewer FPSs, speaks for itself.
9. Less masculinity. Now I'm not asking for Barbie or dress-up games (that would be even worse). Rather I'm looking for a reduction in the amount of burly men with guns in grey/brown areas and "fuck" or "shit" being used more commonly than the word "the". Some manliness is fine, love myself some Motorstorm, but c'mon! enough's enough.
10. Less concentrated focus on single games. What I mean is that is that I want to see more focus on a wider variety of games, rather than having 7 minutes of E3 dedicated to showing the first level of the next God Of War game, use that time to show a bit of a few separate more diverse games.
11. During E3, here are a couple words I want to hear spoken a lot less: "immersive" and "experience". Not every game have to be "immersive" in the sense of "feeling you are there". I want to play a game, not act out a play. Also, "experience" isn't a fancy way of saying "game".
12. Less realism. Don't be afraid to display a health bar, damage numbers, visual checkpoints and such. I love that stuff.
13. More balanced trophies and achievements. Now this is tricky cause you couldn't really balance across all developers, but getting 100% on Hannah Montana should not hold the same value as getting 100% on Star Ocean: The Last Hope.
14. More focus on indies. Sure they may work with fewer resources but creativity can strive, not that it means they're amazing of course.
15. Less open-world games, because i's better to have places that you want to go to than it is to have a ton of places to go to.
16. On the other-hand, less linear games. Remember when platform games became less linear in the PS1 days? before then you simply completed the levels as you got the them, and then you had games like Spyro and Mario 64 where you collected items to open up new areas. What happened to that?
17. More "small" games. I don't mean "short" because that's not what we need. But games that are cheap and quick to make but still enjoyable. Maybe something between the scale of an indie game and a AAA game.
18. More turn-based random-battled japanese RPGs. Just because I love them, and how many are there these days? exactly.
19. Less gimped trophies/achievements for retro games. I enjoy Sonic on PSN sure, but 12 trophies that can all be gotten so easily? Also, what with these games allowing you to save state? the game never used to let you do that. Instead why not take out the save stating and offer more trophies/achievements for things like "collect 200 rings in a level" or "complete Green Hill act 1 without collecting a ring"? That would add such much more life and interest to these games. Plus savestating is lame as hell.
20. More focus on gameplay at E3, I want to know how the game is played and not how pretty it looks.
21. Probably one of the biggest ones so I'm leaving this till last, but I want to see games with a longer life-span and I don't mean a long game particularly. Not saying all games need to last forever but I do not want a game to be "outdated" because it relies so heavily on online multiplayer or simply an "update sequel" that is designed just to be "the same but better". A good game can in most cases still be enjoyable several years after it's release. People can still play and enjoy many games from the early 90s or even the 80s (the Atari is my limit). So rather than having "the next Call Of Duty game which nobody will care about in a couple years", why can't we have instead a game that we will still cherish even after it's sequels? The fact is that the nature of games like Call Of Duty and such is that they depend on people coming back to buy the newer one and abandoning the older one every time. I don't like how in many cases, what is most popular is popular because it's "trendy" and "it's what the cool kids are playing". Not meaning to sound artsy-fartsy but I really hate how a lot of people just consume games rather than appreciate them for what they are. But business and profit is formed from the consumers and not the quality of the games themselves. What's worse I think is that there are companies that try so hard to feed off the "consumers" and regardless of actual profit, they still prefer to do it that way. (by the way, I use the word "consumer" for the type of people who play a game until it's done with and then they erase it from their mind because it's not "relevant anymore") That is one thing I would love to change, but of course it won't.
