Megatrend III - Increasingly believable universes

This trend shall surprise no one. Each year we witness progress everywhere: facial animation, increasingly detailed character and background models, lifelike physics, atmospheric effects, dynamic lighting, and so forth. All of these features are must-haves for current game production.

What can we expect in the coming years? Here are some likely tendencies and their consequences for game design:

Development of outdoor environments

Today's gaming platforms are beginning to display both vast perspectives and lush worlds. It was no random chance that action games mostly occurred indoors up until now.

Far Cry for the PC was ahead of its time in terms of rendering and utilizing outdoor environments, yet still only scratched the surface, as future game design will need to take further advantage of these perspectives.

For action games, vast panoramas allow spotting one's opponents from afar, and vice-versa. New gameplay systems will thus unfold: camouflage, new remote detection mechanisms (or disruption of the latter), fusion between horizontal (on the ground) and vertical (airborn) gameplay, use of atmospheric effects, etc.

Real-time impact of atmospheric effects

Today we know how to create rain, mist or smoke, but we cannot interact with it. New gameplay applications shall appear: wind can directly impact the controls of a vehicle, or it may propagate or dissipate a smoke column, as determined by player interaction.

Rain can be channelled by a background element, perhaps though the player's actions, thus transforming into a torrent.

Automatic integration of character animation with the environment

Today, character animations are fixed according to pre-defined environment elements. Tomorrow we shall no doubt see characters whose animations will automatically adapt to the background. From a design point of view, it will become possible to make the characters act in environments completely based on reality.

Ubisoft Montreal's Assassin's Creed

Assassin's Creed shows the way. This trend seems increasingly obvious as we see more third-person action games being developed. In these games, the player sees the character and his interactions with the environment and other entities of the game. The quality of the animation becomes a key factor.

Completely interactive environments

Interaction with background elements means that said elements ought to react like the world surrounding us would. Thus, every object can be moved, flipped over or broken according to its nature and the action applied to it. The games of this current generation are starting to offer real possibilities in this realm.

Higher interactivity with the background shall doubtlessly contribute to a game's realism, but what would it bring to the game design? It will first offer the players the pleasure of wrecking whatever object they want.

While morally debatable, my own experience has shown it to be a powerful motivating agent. A game such as Burnout, for instance, greatly relies on answering this need.

Moreover, environmental interactivity will especially allow for further development of what we call "systemic game design." In this thoroughly ambitious approach to design, the player is placed into a universe led by its own rules, and it is up to him to find solutions to overcome the trials he encounters.

His only real guide thus becomes his common sense, since he knows the game's universe works like the "real" one. Many first-person shooters such as Denied Ops and Battlefield: Bad Company are developing innovative gameplay along these lines.

In my next article, I shall address the following Megatrends:

• The search for immediate playability
• Gaming as a teaching tool