Four areas off the top of my head: AI, Control, Design, Gameplay.

(( Warning: Half-baked rant coming on. ))

AI: It's getting better but, if we compared it to graphics, its roughly on pair with "8-bit" sprites.
In the next 10 years, hopefully we can move beyond simple pathfinding and state machines.

Control: The Wii-mote is cool, but limited.
How about a standard interface where you could use any control (joystick, laser-pointer, lightgun, etc.) with any game?
Or no control at all, just use a video camera to track player movement (they could do this in 1997, but it required a lot of computing).

Design: Even with 3DGameStudio (shameless plug ), its too hard to make great games.
Creating games should be as easy (or easier) than writing a book.

Gameplay: There are a lot of fun games out there, but there still isn't anything as popular as the "real" game of golf.
When you can create a game that is still played 100-years later by millions of people, that's good gameplay.

I didnt read most of the last part of this thread, but I also think about when you first start making games.

anybody start with game maker? i started at v 3.2 and played around with it, and the first day I made a small stick figure game, that not only worked, but was a distributable exe file, I mean, I must rock.

now I'm making 3d models, baking 3d textures, thinking about how I'm going to implement pathfinding, and searching for libraries, and to be honest, its not as fun as it used to be.


I know all this is really not that related to the original post but a similar concept.

sPlKe: Tetris is a great example. Not nearly as popular as golf, but I could see people playing something like it 80 or 800 years in the future.
But I hope we have more to offer future generations.

Quote:

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and to be honest, its not as fun as it used to be.

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lostclimate: I don't think this is what Dan was talking about.
I think he misses the "adventure" of blazing new ground with graphics and wonders what's next. The stuff you are doing has already been done.

For me, my adventure is people like you.
Why on earth should you have to implement pathfinding if you don't want to? I'm guessing you'd rather come up with interesting ways for your AI to react to the player (i.e. find them, hide from them, chuck rocks at them, etc.).

Yeah, templates and development tools are nothing new. But there is still a lot of room to grow here.

Oh, creating real-time 3D content is still fun and there is still a bit o' the adventure, for sure. I suppose I just miss the attitude of the "new frontier" that many of us experienced back in "the day". At one time, when Quake and Unreal were new, there were level editors, model editors and WAD editors popping up everyone like crazy. The creators of these tools had a following and they freely offered what they created to those that wanted them. It seemed that many of us hung on with deep anticipation for each update so that we could try our hand at creating content for these new, evolving realities. Programmers were developing engines and actively looking for graphical help. Graphic artists and graphic artist wanna-bes were looking for ways they could help. It was like we were all on equal footing. It was like there was a sense of "brotherhood". If you were "daring" enough to join the adventure then those already on the trail would haply lend you a hand.

Most of that appears to be gone. Many are not developing an engine for the sake of the adventure, but in the hopes of turning a buck. Perhaps they can make the next GameStudio competitor or perhaps some big company will take notice and pay them to develop for them or purchase the rights to their engine. I certainly have no problem with people earning from their hard work. It just seems the spirit is missing that once permeated almost every aspect of real-time 3D content creation. The "esprit decor" of the early days of real-time 3D seems to have gone away.

I am not necessarily saying any of this is bad. I am just saying I miss this "spirit" and the original adventure. I just wonder if there will be something in the near future that will generate the same sort of adventure or if this was simply a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Well, you pretty much always get that "tingling" sensation when experiencing and experimenting with something new, it's the human nature. You become like a kid - overwhelmed, happy, maybe even a bit crazy! But I can't say, that the industry has lost it's spirit, it has just reached it's limit, both in graphical discoveries and in human capacity (how many people can make a decent playable game these days?)! I know, someone will say, that we haven't reached the graphical discovery limit until we get total realism, but as mentioned earlier, it is all just improvements on a known technology, not a totally new discovery.

What would make me personally get a "tingling" sensation, is a totally open-source gamedev community. Free engine, free models, free scripts etc. and all that on a massive scale - 10 of thousands of people who create games for fun, not money, cooperating and sharing, discussing and helping each other Now I don't approve of illegal p2p file sharing, but while watching "Steal this movie" part I&II, I actually saw this as the future of sharing - whether the items are ideas, models, scripts.... Because, let's agree, the feeling is gone because nowadays a lot of people pretty much look at the GameDev companies as greedy, money-hungry corporations. By the way, I'm not saying that's a bad thing and that we all feel like this. ^^

Leonardo

Isn't this adventure right here, under our own noses?

Aren't we living it right now?

Back in the 1990s, indie game design in real time 3D was out of our reach. Now we have some of the same technology used in commercial games right now. I see mind blowing 3D realtime games here and made with Torque and other engines. This is marking a big change in how games are being made now, and how they will be made in the future.

I'm convinced that the indie game production process is going to become easier and easier as more tools become accessible, and eventually come to a point where the game designer focuses more on content than on technology. I think there's a golden age afoot and we might not be able to see ourseles standing right there in its early stages. At some point, being a game designer is going to be more like being an author working alone on a book, and the days of huge production teams will dwindle. At least that is how it seems to me.