In actual face, HL2 has considerable aesthetic latency as you turn - the gun swings behind the turn by a good few degrees, which really does add a nice touch once you notice it (although it has no gameplay impact). I think Crysis has something similar - a more mobile, fluid gun, but it was still stuck to your screen.Baby Tea said:
Now, if we were to have a head tracker combined with a hand held targeter you could look in one direction whilst shooting in another! Point your gun around corners for real blind firing, not some 'switch to 3D person for the camera peeks out' gimmick that some games employ! Think about it - how fast can you personally run sideways? Anything like as fast as you can forwards? Didn't think so. If however you could aim independent of the facing of the camera then you would be able to more realistically fire sideways whilst running past your target. This would significantly change gameplay dynamics in the majority of fps games, which would be pretty interesting.
Nintendo's peripherals are mostly gimmicks in the true sense in that most of their functions can be performed equally well with the standard remote, with perhaps the nunchuck. However, a dedicated peripheral set for fps games, around which games could be designed, could offer games designers new innovative ways for the player to interact with their worlds, and potentially create different gameplay dynamics and ideas than those which can be achieved with the current peripherals.
That all said, all of this is not really necessary in order to produce an innovative fps. All it would take would be a great deal of imagination, creative gameplay and game design, and a strong resistance to large publishers demanding mainstream, high cash return tripe. Developers shouldn't be afraid to add a few layers of complexity to their games - every fps should have levels of enemy awareness, allowing stealth kills and sneaking when appropriate, not merely specific sneaking/sleeping enemy sections.
Limited arsenals and on the fly weapon customisation worked excellently in Crysis, but has the potential to be further developed with a more creative weapon set - think Painkiller, only you can dynamically customise your weapons' ammo types, combos, various modifiers, etc (A crossbow that shoots explosive bolts and electrified shuriken, perhaps?)
Inventive use of physics and gravity manipulators - gravity grapnels, areas where 'down' regularly changes direction (did deaspace do something like that?)
A reintroduction of geo-mod style deformation, coupled with bullet penetration - I want to be able to blow a hole through a wall using a HEAP round firing minigun ]
Ok, so there's a few ideas that I picked out from a range of games that have only been used in one or two titles, and never properly together - and why not? Innovation doesn't have to be purely invention - after all, there's not much now that hasn't been done before in this genre. Where innovation will lie will be in using the ideas and lessons learnt from the past and developing them and combining them to produce a creative final product.
