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Tag Archives: PlayStation 4

PS4 wishlist, part 3

Here’s another good one for my personal PlayStation 4 wishlist, and all the Pigeon Forge vacation rentals in the wold isn’t going to make me right with the world if PS4 is released without this addressed and dealt with:

3) Stupid glitches in otherwise near-perfect games.

I know this one has less to do with hardware power and more to do with developer discipline and publisher scheduling, but it’s annoying nonetheless.

Take a nice next-gen game like Oblivion for example. Is it a great game with unparalleled depth? Sure. But it has many flaws that take the bloom off the rose after a while.

For example, after hours and hours of laboring in the game to become the head of the thieves guild, your payoff is *spoiler alert* becoming the Grey Fox yourself. Well, that’s fine… except that then there’s simply no more to it than that. You can enter the hidden thieves guild meeting places, but nothing ever goes on there. The quests and subplots are at an then. It’s merely, “oh, you’re the Gray Fox now” and that’s it.

You mean I put in all those hours just to have nothing happen after I become the Gray Fox? Forget that!

This sense of emptiness after a lot of work invades many other professions, also. Become the head of the assassin’s guild and get paid… about 200 gold a month ferrying orders from the Night Mother to the guild leader. That’s what I became the head of the assassin’s guild for? A mere 200 gp per month, after all that work and I already have tens and hundreds of thousands in gold already earned? Bite me. That’s just not a good payoff.

Things like this could stand improvement, even in games that, otherwise, are masterpieces.

PS4 wishlist, part 2

Continuing my PS4 wishlist, here’s another feature I long for, and you won’t need experience in Branson real estate to understand its appeal:

2) The end of in-game loading times, after the initial game has loaded. This has plagued such “top” next-gen titles as Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, so it’s not solved yet. Despite the great detail to the world of Oblivion, every minute or so while roaming the world, your character runs into an invisible border and the action pauses as the next “segment” of world loads into machine memory. Reportedly, Bethesda had to trash plans for a flight ability in the game because the “loading area” borders were so close together. The frustrating part is, the algorithm that solves this – background streaming data – has been around since the original PlayStation. Developed by Crystal Dynamics for the Soul Reaver series, published by Eidos, they overcame the loading times problem by having the game constantly streaming data into memory as a player moves through the game world.

But has Eidos or Crystal Dynamics ever shared this technology, even for a licensing fee? Not that I’m aware of. If they are licensing it, clearly it’s priced so that not many other companies are using it, even within the Eidos family.

It’s time Sony either licensed this code so it’s available to every developer as part of a standard Sony SDK, or they invent something similar and make it part of a new Sony SDK.

C’mon, Sony and other software publishers… get the LOAD out!

PS4 wishlist

It’s way early to be talking about a PlayStation 4 wish list. Which is the best reason to do just that. Right here, right now. before someone else does it.

Now, I’m not talking about just raw stats. I’m talking about, “what would I like to see from PS4 games, in concept, that probably won’t be possible on a PS3?”

So put on your Wiley X shades and get ready:

1) The end of collision detection problems: Every generation, this is promised as part of the power of each new generation of hardware. And every generation, we still have sports titles that have running backs literally walking through guards after a play, during a post-play cut-scene. We still have characters getting caught in obscure areas programmers never quite made safe for adventurous, “explore every nook and cranny” gamers to roam around in. Every generation, we have too many look-alike character models roaming around while their arms pass through each other instead of bumping into one another. And there’s always some poor schmuck whose AI was so poor that you run into this NPC trying to walk, walk, walk forward through a wall that, sure, won’t let him pass, but doesn’t self-correct his path, ever… he just keeps trying to forever walk through that wall that’s never going to give.

That’s one of the first things that has to go. I’ll have more coming!