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Games Creating the World Versus New “Advancements”?
The internet has been ablaze recently with talk of map products from Google and Microsoft. These additions are really cool to look at but do not seem to offer real value or things to do in the worlds. As an avid gamer, I was questioning, haven’t we seen similar things from games in the past. Last year we saw the release of True Crimes: Streets of L.A. and The Getaway (based in London). This year we will see True Crimes: NYC Bound and have already seen GTA:SA, more of a real city feel than a complete real world city.
These and others were all smaller areas. However, more recently I have heard about new expansion packs for Microsoft Flight Simulator that take the base generic world and fix it up to allow you to fly through your city the way it really looks. FSQuality is offering the flight sim expansion covering Europe and Scenery Solutions has just released products for Canada and the United States.
Now, these are just simulator expansions. But with the next generation of hardware being so much more powerful, do you think we will see 1) game environments that are sizeably larger 2) developers relying on more sources, like the ones used for the expansion packs above, rather than starting from scratch of collecting it themselves (just doesn’t seem like a developers strong point)?
If you look at the size of these expansion packs, they take quite a bit of storage, which may be one of the reasons we have not seen them in the past, but this should not be a problem for the next-gen consoles. Game developers have historically built games in much the same fashion. It has only been with the current generation that we saw a real push towards middleware packages. We are already seeing developers grateful for the new Sony development platforms and XNA. It is only reasonable that we will also see them look for cost savings and expanded environments by using other technologies/sources.
[…] The details seen in GT4 are incredible, and the next version will no doubt be better yet. Is this the direction the gaming consumer wants the industry ton continue? Yes and No. Games like Gran Turismo and the PS3 demos of upcoming Fight Night push the edge of fantasy and reality, but some of games inline with these as high selling titles (e.g. GTA) take a different approach. The next generation of games should be even more interesting. […]
[…] Games Creating the World Versus New “Advancements”? […]
These add-ons are really cool. I bought the expansion for Europe a few months ago, and it is great. You won’t believe the difference this makes. It was kind of hard to find, but I did a little checking and found the expansion pack that improves all of Europe in MS Flight Sim under a different name from JustFlight. According to a press release from E3, JustFlight and FSQuality signed a publishing deal that allowed JustFlight to rebrand the expansion.
[…] Games Creating the World Versus New “Advancements”? […]
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