It just had to be Bus Driver. I game that I played just TOO MUCH of on my PC back in the day ... and even on iOS when it came out there :D

Youtube Video

Rockstar just made the following announcement:

Today we're happy to announce that Red Dead Redemption will be released as part of Microsoft’s Xbox One Backward Compatibility program this coming Friday, July 8th.

Starting on Friday, every Red Dead Redemption Xbox 360 owner will be able to play the game directly on their Xbox One, regardless of which version of the game they own (Red Dead Redemption, Undead Nightmare and Red Dead Redemption: Game of the Year Edition). And for those who have yet to experience it, the game will be available to purchase on Friday from the Games Store on Xbox One.

I recently repurchased the game to replay it but couldn't get myself to keep switching between my 360 and One. This is perfect solution for me :)

So who is gonna replay the game now??

Although I do agree that a lot of indie and even AAA games take the easy way out and design sloppy games using dated mechanics, however, as @GeoFlame pointed out, the mechanics you mentioned have been gradually improving over the years.

Games like Super Meat Boy and many other pixel art games would not have been possible back in the day due to the constrains of technology. Even today, there are a lot of constraints for game developers and designing in a fully 3D environment can become VERY expensive. Hence, many developers artificially force constraints on themselves to make games within budget.

One example of a cool retro-modern design is a game I recently got to see a game dev conference. It is called Seven: Days Long Gone. Here is a short clip:

Youtube Video

The game devs said that they wanted to create an isometric game (we had those in the mid 90s at least) but soon found out that the game just felt too flat. Hence, they decided to add in beautiful panoramas. But they couldn't do them like in the Witcher or other 3D games because they already had the isometric constraint. So, they just went down and layered the game, so that you could still feel like you're playing a modern game while still maintaining their original isometric intent:

So, I guess what I want to say is that while I do agree that many game devs have become sloppy, the mechanics and game design methods you mentioned are just tools that can be used to great effect or .... NOT ;)

July is just around the corner, so I put together another Release Calendar for the month of July 2016. In case you missed it, I also created one for June.

Youtube Video

What games are you looking forward to in July?

The first time I saw screeshots of Halo years ago, I was totally blown away and felt they were totally PHOTOREALISTIC. Just look at the pic below. And I'm not talking about the HD-remake from a couple years back. I'm talking about the original from 2001 (bottom part of the screenshots below).

Three years laters in 2004, I thought the same of Half-Life 2. Just look at those epic graphics ;)

It's all about putting the graphics into context. Unfortunately everything we see today looks REALLY good but will look shitty a couple of years from now. One thing I see changing (as @michemagius already pointed out) is that we will see a move towards highly stylized games in terms of graphics.

World of Warcraft took this route years ago with their MMO. Even at the time, the graphics weren't that great. WoW came out in 2004, the same year that Far Cry was released. This game also looked epic at the time and only a few computers could run it at high settings.

Today, we have games like Overwatch, which look realistic at first glance but when you start looking at the characters and environments, you find out that they are actually heavily stylized and even the animations are often exaggerated for that COOL factor. Just check out how they animate the Victory animations (taken from an Overwatch animation talk at GDC)

In terms of game design, I am really curious about AI as @Saya mentioned above:

I'm speaking in a more AI term, for example NPCs would have more reactionary event handling to create a more visceral experience instead of the usual generic lines. This is a bit of a pipedream considering the amount of talent needed to create such an effect but with how much of a focus there is with open world games such behaviours feel archaic going all the way back to the 1980s. The idea that you could converse with some random villager akin to a MUD would be a really interesting test of immersion.

This is going to be hard to achieve but the gameplay options could be really epic if this is done correctly. One game that is playing with this a bit is Kingdom Come: Deliverance, which the Allies spoke about in their impressions from E3.

Another very interesting avenue of improvement will most likely be procedural world generation like in We Happy Few and No Man's Sky. We'll see how these games pull it off :)

@UltimateBrent Thanks so much ;) This will be very helpful :)

Starting to get into Overwatch but there aren't that many pro competitions happening yet. Maybe once they launch ranked and improve spectator mode :)

I believe Brandon at one point mentioned a small mic he uses but I don't think the team has ever published a complete rundown of the tech they use :)

Or maybe somebody else know of something they published elsewhere?

@BogusMeatFactory I completely forgot about Firewatch. Those final moments were really emotional too :crying_cat_face:

I'm so happy I got to see this early during the E3 stream last week. Awesome episode! Looking forward to more :)

Has Damiani said what is going to be on the next episode?