Edited and expanded a bit:
Why do people even like dumb 'video games' so much?
I mean the candy coated bullshit that has no meaning because every aspect of it is rounded and doughy and soft so that there's little actual thought provoking worth to them.
Spore could have been a much better evolution simulator except that the voices within Maxis that wanted the game to be more sophisticated got drowned out.
Every now and then you get really great simulations and it's like.. you can see how great it could be.. but some idiot decided to screw it all up and deliver No Man's Sky instead.
Even The Sims could have been a great simulation but instead of letting the player build cities and houses, simulacra, and families that really made sense.. they made it into some silly dollhouse storybook video game.
Sigh.
With the death of Crytek thanks to EA and DICE having taken over EA it's interesting that The Sims hasn't changed at all. By which I mean EA's bigger and older studios used to make their own development tools which was silly and expensive. While Crytek and DICE were both big players in the game engine market it seemed like a hard sell to pick one over the other versus continuing to make and use their own tools (something Maxis under Will Wright was very proud of). Without that vision, motivation and direction it seems like The Sims wasn't going to go anywhere new technologically and creatively speaking. But with Crytek effectively dead and DICE's Frostbite engine powering everything.. maybe The Sims could get some of that Frostbite love. I mean they really fucked up Sim City so that's yet another knock against them making their own tools.. and with so many great people working with them at EA its mind boggling that, 1, there's still no motivation to revisit Spore, 2, make Sim City better than it ever was, and 3, get The Sims back on track to being massive and great again. Moving away from the dollhouse and pushing it back towards Sim City.
The old argument for making The Sims 'more compact so as to ensure the highest number of people would be able to play is ridiculous at this point. People should be able to afford good enough gaming PCs to play something like the Sims. Once they've invested in that gaming PC they will be much more likely to continue buying bigger and better DLC for the game. When your game is selling dozens of DLC packs you have to wonder where the money is going.
So as I was wondering recently what Frostbite would offer The Sims, given that the last Sim City has probably killed it and any possibility of another Spore getting make, the question is still what is the plan for the future.
What is Sims 5 going to be?
I mean if there were enough talented people left at Maxis and otherwise within EA, could Frostbite could power a new Sim City or Spore or something in between? that wouldn't be an utter catastrophe? maybe but I don't see EA putting the money down after Maxis is now Maxis again.. somehow having survived being shutdown as a brand.
Seeing fully destructible infrastructure and buildings in a Sim City game with all kinds of vehicles moving and flying around would be insane. How many years has it even been since Sim City 4 anyway? Most people will say that they skipped New Sim City and don't count it as a step forward. There are other studios making much better City Building simulators. There's still a market there and most of it is liveliest in Europe.
Heck if you take a look at games that have released recently, like Tomorrow Children..
One aspect of the game I liked and although I haven't played it yet because of many of the things Jim talks about.. it has one important feature. NPCs. No Man's Sky could have had NPCs too but nope. Just you and your ship.
Instead of letting you be the mayor of the town and seeing it continue to grow.. you have to move on like in vanilla No Man's Sky when you'd finished discovering everything and had to move on.
Makes me wonder what Sim City, The Sims, No Man's Sky etc would be like if powered by Microsoft's Azure cloud so that it wouldn't fall flat on it's face when people logged in to play and offered more for the player to do and more places to explore. But then that asks is Azure works well with Frostbite. And if it could if EA could make their own cloud computing platform for their games. OR if Amazon having both a good game engine, based on Crytek's CryEngine and their powerful cloud computing services. I'm not seeing that Amazon's gaming efforts are mature enough to get that kind of ball rolling, but as a company, Amazon does understand original content AND global appeal. God forbid Netflix starts making games or there could be an arms race for cloud gaming. Which would be timely as the usefulness of home game consoles is being questioned while PC gaming is hitting a revival. It would be interesting to see 'video games' finally eclipse TV. But its just hard to imagine when few games are that compelling. Would you compare any game to House of Cards? Spartacus? Game of Thrones?
A good reason that few games offer a really in depth scientifically accurate simulation of anything is that there isn't much local processing power to pull it off. Microsoft's Azure cloud is supposed to allow software developers to get some extra processing power for their games as long as players don't mind playing online. I'm assuming Amazon will have something similar if the idea ever kicks off.
I wouldn't mind that extra oompf while playing No Man's Sky as an MMO. Or Ark similarly as a space where thousands of NPCs could inhabit the Island, Desert and any future worlds Studio Wildcard would want to create for us to play in.
If Netflix bought Studio Wildcard or partnered with Steam or bought a majority stake in Valve so Gabe Newell could return and just help direct them and that massive probably complimentary e-commerce platform... What could Netflix do for Video Games?
The Sims typically has a chunked up world. It could be a proper planet. It could have proper transportation which a player could manage.
But for years I've been wondering if players care? Do they care to have families, neighborhoods, cities, nations, so that you have the typical The Sims Experience, while having massive worlds to play in? Given No Man's Sky's excellent depiction of a functioning massive planet and solar system.. but still also have the potential for your family or dynasties to take over the world. I'm using my imagination because Hello Games could patch No Man's Sky to be what they said it could be.. vibrant living worlds. If only the missing ingredient is cloud computing so joe average gamer dude guy can play on his laptop.
The question is what do players want. Would it appeal to them to have a much bigger experience (from an EA game).
So you could dig around in caves, build a space station and float around, run a space hotel, run an airport, or railroad (hyperloop) business to move Sims around, have them travel to other countries, planets etc if you wanted them to do that.. which they can in the current games.. but not quite. It's all chunked up in their expansion packs and load screens slow down the experience and to some degree each DLC has a slightly different flavor to the base experience. Yeah that means each DLC has some extra appeal to make you want to buy it, it sucks that some of the rules are only applicable to being in those other worlds. From what I understand that's toned down in Sims 4, but so is everything else. Each Sim could be significantly more rich internally, have even more personality, more parts, better animation, hair, clothing etc.. and where other players could come and go as they pleased.
After watching Westworld.. And I mean finishing the series and going through the IMDB forums (RIP).. it's like no where does it seem to be mentioned that this could be a video game. No one even mentions how cool the powerful 3 screened tablets are and how integral they are to the show and more than just a prop. They are perfect because they provide a great familiarity between their future world and ours (although you'd expect more from 35+ years in the future, the point is they look very real).
But is Westworld the kind of things that is coming soon. Something that you'd want to try in VR (or not if you aren't into that kind of thing).. but could only happen if video games matured a bit more and had cloud computing to offer developers more breathing room for creating bigger more compelling worlds.
If you could build and maintain all the hosts and tweak them to figure out what the hosts liked best, and watch the story scenarios play out in a massive park etc.. how close are we to actually making that kind of thing ready for VR gaming? is that a good enough reason to keep spending money on home video gaming consoles in the next 3 years? Because frankly PS4 is fine if not.
HBO of course has programming meant for adults due to the nudity, and sexual content, so obviously it would be hard to run the game and expect only adults to connect and play. The audience and the money is probably there. I've been asking since Spartacus where are the video games with HBO quality for adults? violence nudity and sex not really being the issue.. just the production values at target audience.
With Nvidia recently announcing that they want more people using GPU in the cloud, you don't even need a console or computer to be able to play. Their insane $25 for 10 hours business model is of course insane added on top of whatever HBO's costs would be.. but maybe that would be the cost of entry for something like a Westworld sim. But that type of business model surely would help video games to rocket well beyond TV subscription and ad earnings.
But some people on IMDB did mention that one of the things the show really did poorly was explain how you can afford to make Westworld and run it in the first place. Perhaps the Arnold and Ford partnership had enough money to set up the park but not keep it running for long. When they'd hand control over to a player that player would still have the money game going on in the background. It really would be interesting on both levels. To figure out what it would take for a company to run the servers and develop a game like Westworld and if a player or many players could actually run the parks with thousands or tens of thousands of daily guests (especially if some of those guests are other players and AI NPCs).
Having to contend with this ultra massive park, all the human worker NPCs (and HR issues vividly highlighted in the show), all the NPC hosts, human and animal (and their various hardware and software issues), and NPC and human guests (legal issues if they get injured or somehow die or kill each other).. just mouth watering.