"What would Molydeux?" - Molyjam 2012

[James]

http://www.whatwouldmolydeux.com/

Some background:
Gamejams are an exercise to develop a videogame within a short limited time within a collaboration with many developers. The Molyjam's rules are to base your game off videogame ideas/imagination from Molydeux. The idea is to explore game concepts.

Who is Molydeux?, @PeterMolydeux (https://twitter.com/#!/petermolydeux) is a Twitter parody of Peter Molyneux, in the vein of excited outlandish imaginative videogame ideas. Molyneux himself endores this and is bored of the industry himself, also wanting to hire the talent from submissions for his new indie studio.

[Psychotic]

I don't get why he has to use cover systems in his example as to why "video games haven't changed". I understand where he's coming from and, overall, I actually agree with him, but I don't think there's anything inherently bad about the way cover systems have evolved.

Have you ever tried defending yourself from a pack of people with fully automatic weapons without cover? Would you even want to, knowing you'd be shot heaps of times (in real-life, mercs don't tend to be shitty shooters like the AI of a video game).

Of course, "realism" doesn't make much sense in some video games, but I still don't see what's so bad about cover systems so long as the controls for it are done right (or, in other words, don't have the same button used for entering cover and for rolling, like ME3 did).

The main ideas around cover systems, in my opinion, should be to de-emphasize combat, and that's where some games can absolutely fail at it. If your game is designed to be heavily combat oriented then adding cover into it in the standard sense (as it's defined today) is probably not the best idea.

Other than that little nitpick yeah, I kind of agree with him. The crap we're being sold today really isn't that much different from the crap we were being sold 10-20 years ago. Sure, it looks a bit fancier but when I can do this to enemies, then clearly certain systems haven't evolved much:



"What if the pause button was a weapon?"

I also laughed at how stupid this sounds.

You could make a weapon called "Pause" that freezes time or the actions of the enemy for a certain amount of time, but you couldn't turn the actual pause function into a "weapon" and still continue to call it a pause function.

If it doesn't pause the game, thereby stopping all activity within the game until it's unpaused, then it isn't a pause button. It's a weapon or some other gameplay feature, and therefore it'd have to be added in addition to an actual pause function found in some singleplayer games. Seriously, don't screw with things that don't need fixing, because that'll piss people off.