1UP Grants Three Wishes

1UP has kicked up a new feature in which eighteen notable game developers share what development-related technological hurdle they’d ask to surpass if granted three wishes.

Todd Howard:

A standard platform across all consoles and PCs for games. [The time spent] supporting multiple systems, videocards, memory, and more is time we could spend innovating better gameplay and experiences. Think about a DVD — you can play it on your PC but also on your TV. Or in your car. Why not a game?

Warren Spector:

I’d create a game engine as generally useful, as easy to use, and as readily accessible as the equipment required to make a movie. The fact that we have to basically reinvent the camera every time we make a game [and] have to rework our A.I., user interface, physics, and gameplay tools with each and every game is crazy. Used to be, I thought we’d eventually reach a point where hardware development would slow down and things would stabilize on the software side as a result. After doing this for over 20 years, I no longer have such high hopes. I don’t actually expect the tech/engine situation to change any time soon — frankly, I’m not sure it can ever change. But you’re the one who mentioned magic, so there you have it. Give me a cheap, easy to use, totally flexible engine with great developer tools that don’t have to be reworked from game to game, and I’m a happy developer.

What would it change? Development would get cheaper and faster. Development teams wouldn’t have to learn new tools for every game. We could do a better job of training people in schools and universities. More time could be spent on game quality and less on tools. Everything would get better. But, remember, it isn’t going to happen — we’re in Tinkerbell territory.

Richard Garriott:

Tools that keep pace with evolving hardware and game needs that don’t require periodic rewrites and instead allow us to get content in games as fast as we can develop it. Currently, teams can waste years and millions of dollars rebuilding tools to keep up with the state of the hardware, which leaves us less than half the total time of the project to create our worlds. If we could cut out this issue, teams could focus on great gameplay for longer periods and create games more in tune with customer desires.

And the BioWare docs:

At BioWare we have only one wish, and if this one wish is fulfilled, we will be eternally satisfied. Well, not really. We’re also hoping for enduring world peace, and our talented teams are always striving for continuous improvements in gameplay and story in all of our future games. But this one would be nice as a starting point. Here it is: We’ve been striving to push the boundaries of digital acting in our games ever since we formed BioWare close to 15 years ago.

We’ve been able to capture increasingly powerful and compelling emotional moments in our recent games like Mass Effect, but we’re still haunted by the elusive level of immersion that a truly intelligent artificial intelligence could demonstrate. When we talk about intelligence, we mean A.I. smart enough to pass the Turing test: A.I. that for all intents and purposes is indistinguishable from a human. Think HAL 9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey, minus that creepy red eye. By helping us to bring our characters even closer to “life,” we believe people experiencing our games would benefit, as we could provide near-infinite variety and depth of experience plus infinite replayability.

Imagine the worlds of Mass Effect or Dragon Age, or even the world of BioWare’s as-yet-unannounced upcoming MMO, if the “people” you encounter in these worlds continually keep you on your toes?much as they do in real life, except that in real life the people don’t drive spaceships and wield blasters…or ride horses and swing longswords!