These advancements will not only improve the quality of the games' looks onscreen, but also allow them to interact with the players unlike ever before. From motion controls to second-screen gaming, E3 offered a glimpse of the bright, innovative future to come in gaming.
Of all the technology on display, we've highlighted the five trends we expect to change gaming in the next few years or so. See something we missed? Share your thoughts in the comments below.
1. Motion Controls Get Smarter
While Nintendo's Wii pioneered motion controls for gaming and Microsoft's Kinect brought a whole body sensor to the Xbox 360, the current offerings on the market are far from perfect. Motion controls are often gimmicky or added in unnecessarily. Additionally, Kinect's camera often requires exaggerated movements to follow the player's action.
Microsoft's new Kinect for the Xbox One is much more precise than the demos shown at E3. Microsoft's tech demo showed how it could detect more precise movements. In order to raise your shields and deflect bullets during a first-person shooter style match, you would simply tilt the controller upward. To activate your night vision goggles, you would tap the side of your head, and simply tilt your body left or right to literally lean around corners.
"We tried to make the motions more natural to what a gamer would do," Yusef Mehdi, Microsoft's corporate vice president of marketing and strategy for Interactive Entertainment Business branch, told Mashable.
This may include any natural moves by intense gamers. For example, in a racing game, a player might lean his body into the turns, which this upgraded Kinect would detect.
Harmonix, a company adept at working with the Kinect for its Dance Central games, showed how motion controls could operate in a more abstract way during the demonstration of its upcoming title Fantasia: Music Evolved. In the game, players conduct music with motions, enhancing the world around them. It's a unique game, and we haven't seen a control scheme quite like it before.
2. The Evolved Second Screen
At this year's E3, we saw more of second-screen integration from not only console makers, but also from game publishers.
Microsoft revealed much more information on the interaction between tablets running SmartGlass and Xbox One games. In Roman action-adventure game Ryse, for example, players can use tablets to watch friends' concurrent progress through different levels, along with videos of their conquests. In Xbox One's Project Spark, a game-creation game, players can use tablets in concert with the controller to create your game world.
Publisher Ubisoft had two titles with their own apps designed for tablets, both which added value for players. In Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, an Android and iOS app functions like a GPS device, allowing players to use it as a map in-game for their quests. When the game isn't running, the app allows players to send their fleet to quests while they aren't playing.
Tom Clancy's The Division is a multiplayer, third-person action game where players are charged with controlling a pandemic crisis in a stricken New York. The drop-in/drop-out co-op allows for players to quickly join each other's games, but also allows for a player to join via tablet. That tablet player operates a drone in the game, which can aid its team by marking enemies for take down, healing allies and getting a good survey of the area.
It's impressive because the player on the tablet is actually taking part in a real-time game session. Of course, the Wii U tried to bring this idea to fruition last year, with its GamePad controller with a touch screen. While third-party games have taken full advantage of that screen's ability to convey extra information to the player, it hasn't been that widely adopted. Some of Nintendo's new first-party titles use the feature quite a bit, such as The Legend of Zelda: Wind WakerWii U remake, which uses the GamePad screen to swap items rather than pausing the game to get into a menu.3. Virtual Reality
The Oculus Rift has only been in developers hands for a few months, but already the virtual reality headset is showing promise in the creative things programmers dream up for it. Virtual reality has often felt like a gaming pipe dream that is hallmarked by goofy accessory and poorly functioning technology, but that is about to change.
Oculus Rift creator Palmer Lucky said his company has come a long way since last year's E3, where the headset was only being shown off by former id Software cofounder John Romero. With 10,000 developer kits in the wild, and more shipping, creators of all backgrounds have been working on virtual reality games, and Oculus Rift now works with some of the most commonly used engines, like Unreal 4 and Unity.
There were about five or six playable Oculus Rift games at E3. The biggest of note was EVR, created by CCP Games, the makers of EVE Online. This space fighting game was only a tech demo, according to CCP developers, but it still demonstrated the awesome, immersive power of virtual reality.
Other indie titles featuring the Oculus Rift were playable at the IndieCade booth, and each provided a different take on what virtual reality could offer players. Soundself, created by Robin Arnott, was a game about meditative chanting, where the player's tonal hums made the dizzying spirals in front of their eyes spin and pulse along with the sounds they made.
Oculus Rift is only going up. The company announced Monday it received $16 million in venture funding to continue hardware development, and OculusVR was already showing off its new HD Rift at E3, which is a first for the platform.
4. Game DVR and Streaming
It's hard to ignore the growing trend of gaming as a spectator sport, with the rise of Major League Gaming and Twitch as places fans can go to watch live streams of gaming.
Both Sony and Microsoft have recognized gamers want to share their content, so they have integrated methods in both the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One to make what once was a complicated process very easy. Both consoles include the ability to broadcast your gameplay live with minimal work; the Xbox One will stream to Twitch, while the PS4 will send live video to Ustream. Both consoles also capture gameplay continuously via game DVR, and both allow players to edit key moments and share them with their friends.
5. Cloud Computing
In order to extend the life of gaming consoles and get more out of the hardware in your living room, console makers have turned to cloud computing. Instead of the console being the entire workhorse for processing, some will be handled by remote servers.
This isn't a new idea to gaming. The now-defunct OnLive started a few years ago on the premise that players could harness server power to play a wide variety of games that their home computers didn't necessarily have downloaded, and it wasn't the only company working on that idea. In 2010, streaming company GaiKai was purchased by Sony, and its technology is now helping power the PlayStation 4's cloud services.
Sony went into more detail in its February press conference on streaming, saying that it would be used to eventually bring older PlayStation games to the next-generation console, which isn't backwards compatible due to its radical architecture change from previous generations. It would also be used to allow PlayStation 4 games to stream to the handheld PlayStation Vita.
For the Xbox One, Microsoft software engineers showed a demo in which it had harnessed the console's internal processor to render 40,000 of the asteroids in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, displaying their movement in real time. Then, they showed that with help from Microsoft's 300,000 servers, the Xbox One could render 330,000 asteroids in that same belt. The engineer explained that this technology could make games look better, increase the map size and decrease load times.
By: Marshable
No comments:
Post a Comment