A Report On Video Games: Genres, Players, Trends And Technologies
Video games are a thriving and growing source of entertainment for people, and with a booming fan base for video games, game developers are able to bring in some big bucks. This business brings many exciting jobs that require robust IT skills and original ideas. Some new games that come out are using new technology such as virtual reality to entice more players into something new rather than traditional games that use just a controller.
Gaming Trends and Society
Gaming has become mainstream and it’s has generated a lot of buzz. Gaming itself has become increasingly lucrative and competitive. New gaming trends are popping up and they will change the future of gaming once more. Gaming trends and society have come a long way since 1947 from the cathode ray tube amusement device to the current gen consoles such as the PlayStation 4 and the Xbox One. Since the early 2000s, Internet capabilities have enhanced and computer processor technology has improved at such a fast rate that every new batch of games, graphics and consoles seems to blow the previous generation out of the water. The cost of technology, servers and the Internet has dropped so far that Internet at lightning speeds is now accessible and commonplace, and 3. 2 billion people across the globe have access to the Internet.
Popular Genres
The most popular genre in gaming is currently FPS (First-Person Shooters), this has been a popular genre for years with many different franchises competing to be number 1. One of the most popular First-person shooters is Call of Duty, this is a franchise that has been running for over 15 years now with a new Call of Duty just around the corner. An FPS that has been competing with COD for years has been Battlefield this is yet another popular fps among the community, however battlefields approach to an FPS is different, it has a different playstyle where you battle in much larger maps with many more players that can go up to 64 players in one match.
Another popular genre that is on the rise is Battle Royale games, this genre has blown up and grown since the release of Fortnite, however there have been many more Battle Royale games before this such as H1Z1 and PUBG, however Fortnite had taken the world by storm as it was one of the first free to play Battle Royale games, with 125 million players worldwide in June 2018. The approach that Epic Games has taken has made them some big bucks with over $300 million, it has generated so much revenue from being on all gaming platforms from mobile iOS/Android to gaming systems to the PC. This is due to using a free to play approach, allowing people to purchase a battle pass for each season which grants gamers the ability to get more challenges and rank up though the tiers up to 100. Unlocking cosmetic items along the way such as pickaxes, gliders, skins, emotes and much more.
Also, sports games are a popular genre amongst gamers, with one of the most popular games being FIFA, this is a franchise that has been around for a decade with one of its first releases being FIFA International Soccer that released in July 15, 1993 to the newest game being FIFA 19 which released on the 28th September of 2018. Currently, EA develops and publishes games including EA Sports titles FIFA, Madden NFL, NHL, NCAA Football, NBA Live, and SSX. Other EA established franchises includes Battlefield, Need for Speed, The Sims, Medal of Honor, Command & Conquer, as well as newer franchises such as Crysis, Dead Space, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Army of Two, Titanfall and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, produced in partnership with LucasArts. EA has generated over $800 million from the Ultimate Team. Ultimate Team started out as a mode in FIFA, and EA has now implemented it in several of its sports franchises.
Racing games are popular amongst petrol heads whether it be Arcade racing games such as Need for Speed that offer amazing visual customization for cars and a huge vehicle selection to choose from or simulator racing games such Assetto Corsa, that allow you to drive around the track and get that number 1 spot on the podium. The racing game genre is popular amongst all age ranges. Need for Speeds biggest competitor is Forza. Forza is an Xbox/PC exclusive game which has two different types of racing games. Forza motorsport being the circuit, track racing game and Forza Horizon the open world free roam game with tons of customization. Emerging technology has made Forza much better as newer hardware has been released making graphics look a lot better, such as when driving in the cockpit camera with working mirrors, this shows that emerging technology has improved the gaming experience as older hardware such as the Xbox 360 would struggle to render everything in at once.
Another prevalent genre is RPG (Role- Playing Game), Role playing games have been popular prior to games being created digitally. Classic pen & paper games such as Dungeons & Dragons. Now role-playing games have changed a lot, with emerging technology role playing games have got much better and more intuitive for players. Games such as Skyrim have had massive success due to it being an open-world RPG game. You can walk literally everywhere on the map. There are hundreds of dungeons and character voices and a very appealing story. But what makes this game even more interesting is the inclusion of unscripted moments using the “radiant story” technology. This technology acts as the narrator in the game; the story adapts according to your actions, adjusts the level of difficulty based on your skills and changes questions asked depending on how you play. Even though the main quests are already scripted, radiant story enriches and proposes new side quests.
Types of Players
As video games titles are categorised into different genres, it is also important to consider different types of players. When game developers bring new ideas to the table they also have to consider the audience of the game they want to produce. It is nearly impossible to create a game that is perfect and that everyone loves as everyone wants different features or have different taste that other people may not agree on.
Gaming is commonly considered to be a “boy thing”. However, gamers are split between male and female with 60% of gamers being male and 40% being female. Game designers often design children’s games for specific gender. But the older the target audience gets, the less targeted to a particular gender the content becomes. There are two types of players, the casual players who play for shorter periods of times and prefer much more simple types of games, and are much more relaxed when playing. Then there are the competitive players, these are players that grind games that they play trying to achieve the maximum score they can and be the best on the leaderboards, this is very common in games such as Call of Duty.
Competitive players have grown majorly with the introduction of Esports, small gaming clans such as Faze have become a massive success through playing in popular tournaments that have brought not only the Call of Duty community together, but many other gamers. These competitive events are run by MLG and Call of Duty Championship, which is a Call of Duty tournament held at the end of the season to determine the World Champion of the Year. To determine qualification, teams must qualify through events before the World Championship.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Artificial intelligence or commonly known as AI is the name given to the programming that makes machines (or non-playable characters (NPC’S), in the context of games) seem like they’re thinking for themselves. Programmers should have to think about how an NPC in a game should react where they are or what they’re supposed to be doing. For example, a solider guarding a gate should be looking in certain directions however there should be moments where their attention lapses so that a player can act. All of this behaviour has to be coded into the game. Modern game AI has developed to the point where enemies are able to have realistic actions to players: such as an enemy blocking an attack in a fighting game, or more strategic behaviour such as enemies responding to patterns in the players choices by avoiding a ‘duck and cover’ attack. The more sophisticated the AI, the more complicated the programming required to create it.
Since its inception in 2005, the Forza series has favoured a learning neural network to traditional AI design for controlling non-human drivers. This Drivatar system watches you play and imitates your driving style. In the most recent iterations the Drivatar system is hooked in to Microsoft's cloud services, where it can pull in AI racers based on other human players as well as crunch greater amounts of data from each player. Now your AI opponents mimic other players from around the globe — their silly mistakes, quirks, strengths, and weaknesses — which makes for a more unpredictable experience. The good side of this is that AI drivers learn to do all sorts of complex manoeuvres and each exhibit a distinct racing style, which makes them seem more human. Unfortunately, it also means that even with the difficulty maxed out, racing sim purists have a tougher time finding non-human opponents to practice against — because few Drivatar’s actually drive anything like a professional race car driver. The Division's enemy AI has had a mixed reception — at one moment they'll stand out in the open, completely unprotected, then the next they'll sneak around the back and give you a surprise bonk on the head. Its attempts to step up from the highs set by F. E. A. R. a decade ago are well worth closer examination, but the real star of The Division's AI routines is its path finding for changing cover. Like in Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon, players can scan for cover, but here they can also hold down the cover button and their character will automatically run to the new spot. Essentially, this means that movement between covers is automated so that the player can concentrate on tactics. And since the path is shown on-screen ahead of time (it's drawn in a thin white line), the player can see exactly how they'll get there — which further helps in sorting out tactics because they can guess how long it'll take to make the automated dash.
Virtual Reality (VR)
Virtual reality or commonly know as VR was first introduced in the 1990s, and it was set to be the next big thing however the headsets were very expensive and the processing power was too slow back then so the technology never took off. However, more recently crowdfunding has brought the first version of the oculus rift headset which has proved to be an incredible success, but was then taken over by the HTC Vive which has been an even better headset and spawned imitators from Valve and Sony.
VR headsets use either two feeds sent to one display or two LCD displays, one per eye. There are also lenses which are placed between your eyes and the pixels, which is why the devices are often called goggles. In some instances, these can be adjusted to match the distance between your eyes, varying from person to person.
These lenses focus and reshape the picture for each eye and create a stereoscopic 3D image by angling the two 2D images to mimic how each of our two eyes views the world ever-so-slightly differently. Try closing one eye then the other to see individual objects dance about from side to side and you get the idea behind this. Head tracking means that when you wear a VR headset, the picture in front of you shifts as you look up, down and side to side or angle your head. A system called 6DoF (six degrees of freedom) plots your head in terms of your X, Y and Z axis to measure head movements forward and backwards, side to side and shoulder to shoulder, otherwise known as pitch, yaw and roll.
Streaming
Streaming has become a huge part of games culture with websites such as Twitch and YouTube making gameplay videos highly popular because they enable people with limited budgets the opportunity to preview a game that they are interested in buying. Many people are used to streaming music and films to different devices and games can be streamed too, using services such as PlayStation Now. Subscribers are able to play a select library of games and download them to their device if their internet is not strong enough to stream it. There is also a similar type of service available on the Xbox and PC called EA Access, however it is limited to games developed by EA only.
Games Engines
Writing a computer game from scratch is a large undertaking and can involve writing thousands of lines of code. One way to make this easier is to use a games engine. A games engine is a piece of software, which is designed to make games. Most games engines are combination of designer and programming environments in which the user is able to place all of the graphical assets for a level and then the write the code that makes it interactive. There are a number of popular games engines in use today. Some of these are proprietary, meaning that they are only available to particular publishers or the large games studios that own them. However, some other are available to anyone, either for free or for a subscription fee. Popular games engines for multiple platforms are Unreal Engine 4 or Unity, which are to build games for PC, consoles, the web or mobile device. Other engines are designed for one particular platform, for example XCode is designed for Apple’s iOS.
