Geri said:
First, explain the developers what a polygon and a for cycle is, so they can stop using glorified wasd modelviewers as game engines, and then maybe they could write real games.
Sounds you think games were awesome back then just because devs had to know about some tech details they nowadays don't?
I rather guess such tech details are not relevant to game design at all.
gamedev2084 said:
What mechanics
Not sure if we all talk about the same topic here. What i meant is ‘outdated’ 2D action game mechanics vs. ‘modern’ 3D action game mechanics in general.
It's not possible to have an intuitive mapping from player input to 3D rotations. We deal with this by removing one degree of freedom, which has some limitations.
3D in FP or TP games lack spatial oversight and give only an approximated sense of distance, so no tactically advanced planning and action is possible. Modern games have aim and shoot, or button mash melee. Neither is very interesting. Compare this to older 2D sidescrollers, enabling lots of tactics in each moment, having jump'n'run on moving platforms, or the rich options of interactions and creative gameplay seen in Super Mario. 3D just looses this point, and often falls back to top down (2D) for tactical reasons, or abstracting (faking) complexity into immersion breaking GUI menus like RPGs do.
3d is better for immersion, but for everything else it's clearly much worse than 2D.
Surely a big reason Indie games are often 2D with a retro flavor. Because there still is a need for all those good 2D mechanics.
To me, addressing those 3D limitations is a promising direction regarding game design. It's just rarely discussed, because people assume solutions are impossible, but there must be a way.
