PixlBit

Absolutely Mike. I was doing some reading one time learning about how to be a better designer or be a productive member of a development team, and one of the points the writer made was that everybody in a group will have different ideas, different bias', and everybody will want to be the one to come up with the solution to a problem. However the group will never get anywhere if they can't come to consensus on what the problem is in the first place. The author observed that groups of developers could easily waste months fighting over some issue, giving solutions, and they never even thought to ask what the problem was. The author said that one of the most important things to do in problem solving is so simple and logical, but most people fail to do it, and that is, to ask what the problem is in the first place.

In game design if people play a level and have some gripe with it, many designers will often just start creating solutions and arguing over which idea is best. Once somebody came in, shut them up, and told them to explain what the problem is they had different ideas of what was "wrong". People need to talk about these problems before you can hope to start creating possible solutions.

To an extent I agree with Angelo. I don't think it can be as civilized and clean as we hope it could be. The human species has evolved tremendously in the last several hundred years not only technologically but in regards to our many civilizations and cultures. The current state of things where women have rights, they aren't property, the sexes fight for either dominance or equality, our convienient tech, our culture, is all we have ever known. People growing up these days forget we are animals, and where we have been, and what the human condition has been in the past. It wasn't long ago we didn't have electricity, we were stabbing each other with pikes, defending our castles by pouring hot tar on people sieging front gates, free to rape and pillage, and forcing all women to do what we say lest they sign their own prison sentence or death sentence. We do equally savage things these days, but the point I'm making is we have always been savages, are still savages, but we are now savages trying to evolve some civilized behavior and the more progressive minds we have are trying to figure out what we need to do next.

Evolution comes over time and has many factors influencing it, but it's not caused by legislation, pleading, or censorship. It's usually cause by blood, death, and sacrifice. A lot of people think things magically got this way, that there's some magical force out there that poofed America into existence, or gave women rights, or freed the slaves. Some people think Rosa Parks was a cow on her period, some think President Lincoln was a "nigger loving traitor", some think the Native Americans deserved the genocide that came their way in order for us to expand. People died to gain the freedoms we observe today. Over thousands of years I'm sure countless billions had dreampt of freedom or equality and never saw a single scrap of it from birth till the moment their brain stopped sending signals and their heart stopped beating. Gaining things has never been civilized and never been pretty, but much has been accomplished. People forget that death and toil were the price of many freedoms, and once people forget that, they don't see anything worth fighting for. They forget how to fight, they forget that freedoms are a privlegde you have to earn and defend, not some magic divine right everybody naturally has.

I want to see sex and race discrimination gone, but that's like wishing for world peace, it's not going to happen the way hippies dream of it. The best we can hope to do is raise our children and breed them to weed out as many racist, sexist, and psychotic impulses we can. Socialize them with people of as many skin pigments, spiritualities (including people like me with no spirituality), philosophies, and people of the opposite sex. Humans aren't naturally born little angels. Kids are cute, and not all kids are monsters, but they are humans, they are animals, and they need to be nurtured and conditioned to learn compassion, empathy, sacrifice, reason, logic, and teamwork among many things. Many parents these days just think all these qualities are born in humans, that they are a given, and don't need to be addressed. Even worse, some parents just don't care about those qualities and have a much more aggressive and less civilized or peaceful demeanor.

Culture and the human condition will evolve regardless, but if we want it to veer in the directions we hope to see it go, we have to fight for it and make sure future generations understand the battle and take up the mantle for themselves one day. Too often we look at the issues of sex and race and think those issues were settled long ago, and people stop caring about them or admitting they exist. They were never "settled". They were fought over, but nothing was settled, the human condition wasn't settled. Our generation in smack dab in the middle of it, and it's messy, it's not a fairy tale and it's not settled. The people who want to better themselves and see things change on a grand scale have an uphill battle. Those other people who have the sexist and racist habits, don't have any incentive to change, especially if they're surrounded by like minded people.

The best we can do is fight for equality and freedoms in every way we can, small or big, and most likely people will suffer and die along the way if history is any indication, and if we are lucky the best we can hope to accomplish is to make life a little easier and more comfortable for future generations hundreds and possibly thousands of years from now. That's our sacrifice, our condition, and what must be done. If evolution veers in the directions we hope it does and we are successful, maybe a few hundred years from now some young people like us will realize it, be thankful for it, and be inspired to fight for themselves. Those future generations hundreds and thousands of years from now will have their own sacrifices to make and issues to debate. It's up to us to lead the way, so when they look through their history vids, texts, and libraries they will see that in the past, people from our generation suffered but still fought for what they believed in, and didn't give in to complacency.

Travis is right, Bungie built up a new engine for Reach. I thought Reach was gorgeous, it still is actually. When I played Crysis 2 it took things to the next level and CryEngine3 made many of the effects in the Reach engine look like child's play, but still, Reach is amazing.

Every one of these particular entries in the series is excellent, but I think this one was always my favorite because it opened my eyes to a possible future that I never considered. Whenever I looked at the variables and/or "state of gaming" (development costs, chasing the "ultra-real", always looking forward to tech taking the next step "up", and all the other trends we can observe over the decades) on my own, it never occured to me that it's quite logical to predict we will eventually finally reach the "graphics" (vague term just to keep it simple) our industry has been looking for since ever. Over the course of the past few generations I've just stayed in the present, wondered at what current tech can do, and wonder what it will do next.

I always knew that we were chasing better visuals and "photo-real", but until your blog entry here, I never wondered, "Ever since I started gaming we have been chasing all these things. So what? What happens once we achieve them?" Thankfully you asked those questions and I saw it from a fresh perspective.

It was a big "Doh!" moment for me and I felt silly that I never wondered the same thing. Looking forward to new tech and seeing what cool things can be done next, has been one of the greatest things about following the industry over the years. Whenever new consoles come I don't get involved in console wars, but I do love speculating over increasing tech and what you could do with it. "What it all actually means", you could say. One day we won't have that same experience. Young gamers 20 years from now probably won't have any clue what it was like for people like us to see the big jumps in visuals like PS2 to PS3 or anything. People 20 years from now probably won't have the same buzzwords that we do, they won't get excited about a triple core processor, how many polygons you can create, etc. Talking about all those kinds of things has been all I've ever known, so it was hard for me to look outside that box.

I'm very optimistic and see this as an art, so I imagine 20 years from now, kids will be more concerned about the content and less about some piece of tech. In the future of gaming, having some sweet lighting effect or physics simulation in your game won't put you "on top" of the world and make you bleeding edge. Everybody else will be able to do it too, so what will really matter is what you choose to do with it. The creativity will matter more than anything else.

Homebrew developers will likely have more and more sophisticated tech available to them at affordable prices as time goes on. If that happens to come true, and the line between distinguishing AAA and Indie becomes practically non-existent, what will happen to our concepts of AAA gaming, or dev costs, or the developer/publisher relationship?

I'm a very visual person, not much makes sense to me when I just read something, so when I think about this whole situation, all the variables, and the possible outcomes I visualize it roughly like a tree growing, and the tree represents a timeline of sorts and when you look at it you can see our current stage of evolution as well as where we've been and where we could possibly go. At our current moment we are a very young industry and art form. We aren't fully matured, and haven't branched out, or exploded in all directions quite like tree branches do. We are more around the trunk still, and you can see more branches starting to develop, but we are still near the lower parts of the tree. To better illustrate our current stage of evolution, when I think about the console wars, tech chasing, ultra real chasing, all the companies who have come and gone, and all the new ones who are starting, I see it like a triangular mountain and everybody is climbing to get to the top.

By the way I'm not high as shit, I just have to visualize things to make better sense of them, when I do I find everything simplified and much easier. Some people are climbing up that metaphorical mountain together, some are climbing over eachother, some are being left behind, some are dying, some new are emerging, but inevitably the big players in this mountain race are still heading to the top. The goals at the top include photo real visuals among many things. Many of the things at the top aren't impossible to achieve, so we will eventually begin reaching them. Once people can't make visuals more "real", they will be stuck with asking themselves, "How do we make this more awesome?" In the end it won't be about how fast your hot rod drives, everybody's hardware will be a beast too, so what will matter is if you know how to use it best.

Instead of chasing some particular tech benchmark (quad core at 3 GHZ, quad core at 3.8 GHZ, six cores at X, etc) in the future we will be able to all have amazing tech, and the prime directive will be to make the best content. Great tech, great engines, stability, and efficiency will always be key parts to making solid games, and solid platforms, but those qualities will no longer be something that define a system and let you "win" some kind of economic battle with competitors. Nobody is going to buy Playstation 10 because of its processing power, by then it won't matter, everything will have incredible processing power at more affordable prices. What will sell platforms and make or break companies will be creative content you can experience using any particular platform. That's one of the reasons why I've always said I couldn't care less about Sony, Microsoft, or Nintendo's quarterly statements. To me it doesn't matter who's at the wheel, who's in the "lead", or what company logo I'm seeing. What matters to me is game design, games, and gamers. Those things will always be around in some form or another, regardless of the companies that come and go.

@Julian. I remember you saying that one time and I agreed with you at first. I wouldn't mind waiting another year or two to see a Halo that takes advantage of some next-gen hardware and engine work, but lately I've realized they will inevitably end up giving us both, and it could be the best of both worlds. Halo 4 is part one of the new Forerunner Trilogy, and it would make perfect sense for this game to come out and capitalize on the huge user base of the 360, the excitement people have, and the holiday season it'll be releasing in. There's not really an apparent achilles heel to launching it on 360, so it would seem.

Once Halo 4 ships and banks in on holiday 2012 for 360, it will free up the whole team to get to work on Halo 5 which will most certainly be for the next-gen. I would even speculate that a small team may already be doing some brainstorming on Halo 5. From what I've heard, 343i is squarely in crunch mode on Halo 4 right now, but it seems like they are a lot closer to finishing than most people would think. As more groups finish, more people will be able to be allocated to Halo 5 (if that's the kind of workflow they operate, this is.) I'm not saying Halo 5 could or should be a next-gen launch title in 2013, but there have been rumors that Microsoft might want to make Halo do yearly installments. However, Frank O'Connor, franchise director at 343i, denied that. So for now, yearly installments don't seem likely.

At the very least, Halo 4 should do great this holiday season on 360, and the next 2 titles in the trilogy will most likely take advantage of next-gen. There may or may not be work on Halo 5 happening, they may even just take time to build the new engine for the next-gen entries, or maybe all of the above. I honestly can't recall the resources Mircosoft stocks 343i with, but it's most definitely huge (like 200 or more people) and Halo is their bread and butter, so I wouldn't be surprised if they're pulling out all the stops and being ridiculous with their workflow, budgets, manpower, etc.

Yea screw the election, I have a threesome with Cortana and John to get to. Lots of great games coming out this year that I'm going to love, but Halo and I are best friends forever.

I do this all the time and I've always wondered how many other people's brains do the same thing. This was a brilliant blog idea. Memories and emotions can be triggered in so many different ways like through scent, sound, sight (all the senses basically) and I get a mix of all of them. My memories around games are mostly defined by the season of the year I play them, whatever the weather is, the music I'm listening to at that moment, and sometimes smells get mixed in as well. My brain pulls all these different stimuli together to make as "whole" of memories as possible, to likely paint the most distinct picture in my head, and make it easier to remember.

In regards to the music sensory trigger theme you have, I associate music with my particular game experiences all the time. For example whenever I listen to the Finnish metal band Children of Bodom I always think of the Halo series in general because I made memories listening to them while I played. When I listen to Korn I think of Gears of War. I think of Half Life 2 whenever I listen to the dance/pop band Groove Coverage.

I'll usually remember the season and weather too, so my memories of Portal 2 involve the green, rainy, cloudy image of spring since it was spring time here in Colorado when I got the game. Scent triggers are extremely common in memory creation and such studies have shown. I can smell a particular food dish like baked shells with cheese, and it transports me back to being in after-school care when I was in elementary school, because my teachers made that dish for us and it left an impact on my brain. Getting to the scent triggers I mentioned, one example of those in regard to gaming is that there's a particular brand and scent of disinfectant spray/air sanitizer, and whenever I smell that air sanitizer it triggers memories of Halo 3 specifically. The reason why is because I've often bought that brand of stuff, and way back in 2007 when I was playing Halo 3 for the first time I had to take a break to clean my room and I used that air sanitizer when I was cleaning my room. My memories are quite robust, detailed, and pull information from lots of sources and senses.

Rob is right, it's great to get to know everybody with "outside of gaming" discussions. Echoing what Julian said, these kinds of episodes help provide more context and knowledge of a person. Case in point, I now know why Julian likes wrestling. I never heard somebody say that wrestling was the closest thing to watching a comic book play out in real life, and it makes sense, so I understand where Jules is coming from now. I'm not into wrestling anymore, but my cousins and I were crazy about it as kids. We were obsessed with WCW and WWF. My favorite wrestlers back then were Sting and Shawn Michaels. I would freak out when Shawn Michael's intro music started up and it was even better when he'd use the sweet chin music to kick people in the face and win a match. Who ever thought a simple kick could become such a big deal? When I'd play wrestling video games I'd be Shawn and use that move on people all the time, and I thought the animation was the coolest thing ever.

When I was a kid my friends across the street and I would go to the park next to us and play baseball all the time. A big chunk of my youth was basically like the movie The Sandlot lol. I love playing baseball but I don't follow pro or minor baseball at all. Where I live we enjoy the game itself but we don't have a good team to follow. Here we have the Colorado Rockies here but they've always sucked a chode and a half. I've been to a few Rockies games and whenever people go they hardly pay attention to the game. Coors Field is one of the most beautiful places ever so when you go there people don't watch the game much, it's all about the field, and the view you get. The only sport I go crazy for is hockey and I'm a huge Colorado Avalanche fan. We grew up here watching the team win two Stanley Cups and that's like sacred to us. I watch hockey analysis everyday, follow several other teams besides Colorado, and I just plain like to follow hockey, watch it, play the video games, etc.

I do indeed follow you all on twitter...including Patrick lol. I've just been Sam Fisher about it and stayed in the shadows. A funny story about Patrick's twitter is that his avatar is a picture of a jester playing with a chicken right, well, it's always been like an illusion to my brain. Everytime I see it, for the first second my brain wrongly interpets the photo and it looks like a dog to me if you can believe it. At a glance it's like a brown and black bloodhound or something. It takes just a second, than I see it and remember it's the jester and his chicken. It's crazy and it happens everytime I see it.

It's probably hard to tell it's me because my handle is like different everywhere I go. On Pixlbit and 1UP I'm Michael117 (the 117 is a blatant reference to Halo lore) because it was available. On twitter that was taken so I'm Teras117 (teras is the name of a song I practice on guitar all the time). My real name is Michael Alvarado (rhymes with Colorado or Silverado) and I've never considered going by that lol. You can call me whatever you like. Travis Hawks here at the site called me Mr. 117 a few days ago. Whatever floats the boat and finds the lost remote, that's what I say!

In all seriousness I do like the crew a lot, including Patrick (have to single you out lol), and I still have yet to listen to a show I didn't like. Patrick is a big Zelda fan, as am I, and Zelda fans gotta stick together. I think Pat's Zelda knowledge and experience is far deeper than mine though, and I like hearing him talk about the series. In that one episode when everybody was talking about the Zelda timeline and Pat was going off about the symbology of it all and how he interpreted it, I was like, "Yep, Patties that real deal, he likes his Zelda, and I like him." Patrick is incredibly sharp. He's better read than 10 of me put together, and I get the feeling he's complex and skinned like an onion. You get to gingerly peel his stuff back, interesting layer by interesting layer, as you get to know him. If that came across as sexual, believe me, it was meant to. Just kidding lol. I like Patrick's episode ideas, his old man voice (by far the best in the group), his reviews, and the pictures of jester chicken duos he puts up on social media.

Rob is brilliant, hilarious, likewise better read than 10 of me put together, and he manages to bring the vulgarity, laughs, and passion while still being intensely respectful, open minded, fair, and ready to drop knowledge or give credit where it's due. He's always been great, but I knew he was awesome when I heard him explain why he loves Halo Reach so much and how much he would love to play through it co-op with Julian. Reach got to me emotionally and I'm a big fan of the series. I think it's awesome you met some girls at the geek speed dating. Any trips to the bone zone Rob? Did they check in at hotel Rob, stay at the meat suite, have a laycation (as opposed to vacation)? Sorry those are quotes from one of my favorite shows ever, Delocated on Adult Swim. I drop lines from that show all the time. I call it the bone zone, and I'm a child about it lol. I'm the only person I know who literally got geekier and weirder since I lost my virginity. Back in school all the kids would shoot the shit and theorize that everything changed when you got laid and suddenly you'd be super cool and suave. It was the opposite for me because when I was a virgin I tried to act like the coolest dude around in order to attract a mate, and once I finally started getting laid I became exponentially more nerdy and uncool Lol. When I was in high school my friends and I were punk rock skaters on the edge, getting high, running away from home, and saying "dood" all the time. Now I'm 23, total square, sober, law abiding, and I get off talking about geology, astronomy, or hearing John Carmack talk about aerospace engineering. At the moment in my browser I have a few tabs open like Pixlbit and Youtube, but I'm also on Armadillo Aerospace's website reading all about their second flight of their Stiga rocket.

Julian is one of the reasons I found out about this place and came here. When him and Jesse were hired here I came right over to follow them. Jules was the first friend I made when I showed up on 1UP, coincidentally it was the same time he was getting back into writing about games, and he's been the nicest guy in the world ever since. The first day we talked we just reminisced about Mass Effect 2 and our love for Garrus. Everybody here knows by now that I write too much and it's pretty obnoxious, but trust me it didn't always use to be that way. It was way worse! When I showed up and got in discussions with Jules, my walls of text were much longer, didn't even have paragraphs, and branched out into so many topics it was out of control. Julian helped me out, gave me advice, and over time I straightened out, started formatting things, and started learning to be more structured in my writing process. Now when I write I always pace myself, pay more attention to grammar, and not waste a bunch of space branching out into a dozen topics. When you go look at my blogs here on Pixlbit you will see a certain consistent style in regards to the font, font size, picture placement, captions, etc. Basically it's all Julian. I studied his style and analyzed everything he did, replicated it, and found a style or a look that really worked for me. Not only did I rip off his entire style, but Julian is the one that encouraged me to start writing blogs at all, and become a productive member. For a long time I would just lurk around silently hunting for conversations, dropping messy walls of text at will, my profile itself was empty, and I was a pure nuisance I'm sure of it. But he always stopped by to check out my stuff and he was always the nicest guy in the world regardless. I'm a huge fan to say the least. I still write a lot and talk too much, but the reason why isn't simply because I have plenty to say. One of the biggest reasons is because this is one of the only places where I feel comfortable doing so. I like the people here, and I let out all that gaming talk and nerdiness I wish I could live out on a day to day basis. A lot of kids these days have this geek pride, wear it like a badge, and a part of this popularization of it. My generation just barely missed that and grew up just before it happened, I literally started seeing it grow in my city as I was in my final year of highschool. The story is completely different for the people who are just a few years younger than me. My younger cousin Katie wear it with pride, has a Yoshi backpack, goes the whole nine yards and everybody thinks it's awesome. I grew up keeping it all to myself, nobody thought it was cool, or wanted to hear about it. Around here I don't have to worry about it, it's the greatest environment ever!

I should probably get some gaming in here before I go, since you guys talked games a little. The last couple days I've been playing the 2006 Sonic reboot, I even wrote a blog about it here on Pixlbit describing the pain I've endured doing it, and Esteban was letting me know it gets even worse. Other than Sonic, I've been dancing around playing a mix of Star Ocean The Last Hope, Fable 3, MW3, NHL 12, and War in the North.

Thanks for helping me out guys. I think I'll try to get both NG Black since it plays on 360, and I'll get NG2 as well.

@Esteban  GAH Spoilers lol! Just kidding, I was afraid it would be a love story dude, I started getting that idea last night because I went back into the game like I said I would you know, and I finally beat that first "Wave Ocean" area and made some progress for an hour. I finished a couple areas and did some boss battle with an Egg-Cerberus (I laughed when I saw the name, the actual battle wasn't the worst ever but it wasn't anything special). Eventually I came across this cutscene where Sonic is carrying Elise across some fields (I have no clue why, or where they were going) but at one point they stop have a bunch of really creepy dialogue and animation that has these romantic tones to it and everything.

There was a moment when Sonic was trying to cheer her up and he gave her some kind of cheesy romantic line and they smiled at eachother and had this "chemistry" and I was like, "But he's a fucking hedgehog, why is this happening?!" I was thinking to myself that if a romance builds between Sonic and Elise this game is going to take it to the next level in the weird factor. If the story was just bad I might be able to deal with it, but now it's being taken into the bone zone, there's animals and humans flirting, and everytime I see a new cutscene I hope to heaven they don't kiss or make this any worse.