I was watching some videos of some games today that aren’t due out for awhile, and was trying to figure out what their design vision was for each game, and I’m seeing a lot of “gotcha” game mechanics that are their vision.  I can imagine green-light committees at game companies sitting around a table, trying to come up with the next hook for their IP:

• Massive Destruction (Black, Stranglehold, Bad Company)
• Terrain Manipulation (Fracture)
• Robust Multiplayer Community (WoW, Halo3)
• Unique Abilities (Creed [parkour], Bionic Commando [swinging], Jumpers [teleportation])
• Squad Based Combat (RB6:Vegas, CoD4)
• Cover Based Combat (Gears)
• Co-op Gameplay (Rock Band, Halo3)

But what I’m not really seeing is content being the design vision.  And by content, I really mean giving the player options.  Allow me to explore your story/world instead of ride your rollercoaster track.  We’re knee deep in the “Next Gen” era (at least this next gen era), and all I’ve been seeing is a lot of hooks or bells/whistles, but no real content to speak of.

The minute you leave a game’s core content featureset today you are either shunted by a wall or an ocean or simply allowed to list out in boringsville, population you.  Crysis has perhaps come the closest for me, since even though I am technically playing a game on rails in an exceedingly wide hallway (I’m still being forced to complete it one objective at a time in a linear fashion), I find the multiple ways to take on any single objective is enough to make me feel as if the game is open ended and more sandbox than it is scripted.  If I go for a swim in the ocean there are fish “living” in there or sometimes a sea turtle.  There’s life going on around nearly every corner.  The sun sets and rises on its own real schedule.  The world is fully realized and I am going for a stroll (albeit a lethally armed one) in it.  The only thing that seems to break the immersion is the lack of civilians, but I’ll give them that for the time being.

What I really want to see is a game that focuses on truly open ended gameplay.  Something that works more like a Dungeon Master, who takes your input and subtly guides you back on task; reading how you play the game and attempting to find hooks that get you back into the storyline, or hell, give me Oblivion where I have multiple storylines or the side stories are more interesting than the main plotline.  Give me a game that has five plots that intertwine a bit here and there and let me just go play what suits my playstyle, give me a bunch of tools to choose from, and don’t dictate to me where I should go.  If I wander from the path, let me visit.  Don’t make the NPCs brain dead.  Allow me to interact with them.  Hear their stories.  Watch where they go to work, see where they live.  I want to experience your virtual world and participate in the events happening around me, and not just play an interactive movie.
Obviously, I don’t think we’re going to see much of that in this generation.  However, I do think that will be the focus of the X720/PS4 generation.  I have a feeling that the game design will become more “meta” in that engines will already have all of those “gotcha” features listed up there built into them, and designers can focus more on the content and giving players unique experiences within their fully realized worlds for them to choose between, rather than giving them an interactive albeit linear storyline.  I’d hope, at the very least, that the next generation of game engines out there (Say UE4 for instance) would take everything from the previous versions of the engine and leverage it into the new engine, with a decent graphical upgrade, so that teams and companies can keep using the tech from this generation rather than be forced to rebuild all of these same systems over and over.

If we don’t focus on that angle as an industry, I don’t think we’re going to grow the game medium much from this generation to the next.