Brothers In Arms goes next-gen News

World War II: The Real Next Gen!! ;-)

Next-Gen? Does this mean we see limbs and entrails? Nasty tho the sight of the stuff is, I can't see how much more that can be done to make the WWII experience any different from Last-Gen. If they can put the "I've been hit so I can't react whilst the enemy continues to pump bullets in me" annoyance in this genre, surely body parts is next on the agenda?

Is it just me who thinks that a current-gen engine will never produce a *genuine* next-gen game?
What do these people even mean by next gen anyway? - It plays just like the old one, but it so pretty you're fooled into thinking it's another step beyond?
/Sigh

Matt Baker? Not the Blue Peter presenter, surely...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/cbbc/bluepeter/presenters/matt/

I hear that tucker!
For me the 'closest' we've come is probably FNR3. A genuinely different way to play games, where the graphical hyperbole and animations actually conveyed the status of your character and the opponent. People who put on the heath bars obviously didn't get the point.
When will the graphical details in a game actually start conveying more useful information that fjust eye candy!?

Next Gen is the games industry version of Web 2.0.

it's fluffy marketing bull for 'same old stuff, slightly shinier' far as i can tell.

My brother;s a *massive* fan of the series, I've just told him this news, he's going bananas.

Thanks EG :D

best news i have heard all week. love BIA!

Imagine, if you will a 3rdPS where you get shot at and you can see blood oozing out of wounds/ your character looses the ability to use certain limbs/mobility/motor function etc. You can also see individual bullet holes in your body armor etc. The amount of blood reflects how badly you're hurt, you start to degrade and limp even more, on the brink of nausea and passing out etc.

Now let's go further. When you get healed or heal yourself, you actually plug the wounds with bandages/patch the body armor etc. and you can see them right there. It lets you know that you’ve been badly hurt. If you push the character too hard you start to see them stain with blood, and again the animation tells you that you’ve got to ease off.

Take it further, you can see from the equipment how many magazines you have left, you can get a close-up of the weapon to see (via the holes we see all the time in anime/films) about how many rounds there are left in the clip. You can tell by what the guy’s got slung on his back what other gadgets/weaponry your character has (obviously wouldn’t work for RPGs unless you had a big droppable sac!).

This is all possible. But obviously a lot harder than taking an old game, making everything shiny and blurry and calling it ‘next-gen’ (PDZ, I’m having a go at your annoying visuals here).

These things I described I can imagine appearing on the X360 and PS3, but NOT on the Xbox or PS2. This is why they would truly be next gen.

@jamesphilp

Hehe. Sounds like Sony PS3 marketing to me... You been attending one of their "this is what we hope to see on our machines" talks? :) The "Defining moment" of what makes a machine stand out: GTA, God of War etc.

Though I do agree with your comments about FNR3. Totally appreciate that seeing how your virtual self behaves on screen through their physical appearance does lend more to the experience than a stats bar.

>Now let's go further

Dude.. maybe you just just join the real army ;)

Dizzy,
No thanks:
i) I don't want to die
ii) I don't want to fight for things I don't believe in
iii) The real army is a lot more dull than most people realise :)
EDIT: Oh and:
iv) I like playing games

Don't get me wrong though - I really liked BIA. I won't say I enjoyed it, because I actulally found it quite creepy (real locations, scenarios, people etc).
I do think it's time to move on from WWII though. Not that this will ever happen while America still dominates the market, as WWII is about the only military escapade that they can feel truly proud about; a real enemy, well defined good/bad boundaries, genuine evil-doings going on and a genereally well-fought war with well trained soldiers.

this pic was on xboxyde about 2 months ago

"Getting sick of these glossed up "next gen" ports now."

My sentiments exactly. I am totally underwhelmed by next-gen so far. I'd rather stick to playing solid current-gen games like Dragon Quest or Shadow of the Colossus for the time being.

re: jamesphilp... did you ever play The Getaway? A flawed game, its true, but it had many of the elements you talked about. No health bars, no direction arrows.

The character would get more and more bloody and limp around the more damaged he got. No instantaneous medipacks either (Tho he could lean against a wall to regain some health) To tell you where to go while driving, your indicators would tell you which turn to take.

I really enjoyed these elements, but they're hardly "next-gen"...they're simply a well executed idea by a novel-thinking developer.

Similarly, Condemned used the feature of checking an ammo clip.

Just because you remove the health bars and HUD, doesn't mean you have a next-gen game.

Thing with next gen is that you have to wonder where games can go from here. racing games? Shooters? RPGs? People complain that the next generation is not really next gen, but how many amazing advances did we get in the last gen?

re jamesphillip blood etc-
Wouldn't this take all the fun out of running around shooting people? It's a little too much like hard work having to constantly sew your legs back on. I think it would make a good DS game though

Sorta like trauma center except you cause the trauma?

"Is it just me who thinks that a current-gen engine will never produce a *genuine* next-gen game? "

I thought real next gen was pre-rendered movies????

@ Helios- pretty much yes (:

coojam,
good points, well made.
I have never played that game, but yes that does sound like some of the stuff I'm talking about. And I forgot about that thing in condemed (though you only ever had to count to 5!)
It certainly is hard to define the "gen" we're in!
But a era where no games have heath bars and everything is so intuative you just know what's going on without prompts or stat bars would be a different "gen" i guess.

Certainly I think if a developer wanted to put the correct ammount of effort in, build things from the ground up and really define this new generation of consoles' benchmark the opportunity is right there, and a lot of people are waiting.

Suffice to say that a cross-platform BIA sequel will only be called "next gen" because it will be co-currently developed for the PS3/360. I doubt it will include any real next-gen content, but hey, I'd love to be proved wrong!

I think we have reached a level in gaming now (with PS2 and xbox) where a lot more people are starting to realise that a lot of "new" games are in fact simply tarted-up copies of old gameplay mechanic, and actiually it serves no additional purpose to have graphics better than a well-implemented xbox game (beyond definition of course). People are looking for gameplay innovation more and more it seems, and I guess this is also Nintendo's POV with both the DS and Rev.

And yes, a touchscreen in the middle of the controller where you can tie knots for bandages etc would be ver cool! :P

Let's hope it is "next gen" enough that one can actually climb 2 1/2 foot fences in the next version, and everything is not layed out in neat squares like Pacman for the AI, and it is not so linear as the last one.