Jeff "Ethec" Woleslagle filling in for John "Boomjack Hoskin to close out the week. Boomjack will his illustrious return to the posh Loading... chair come Monday.
One of my guilty pleasures at GDC every year is wandering around and exploring all the cool cutting edge hardware and peripherals that vendors promote, hoping the coolness factor is high enough to start a trend. We won’t call it “novelty”-ware, I think that’s trite since the gaming industry as a whole is built on creating novel experiences.
For developers, making the decision to support this more, shall we say, interesting equipment is often a bugaboo. Beyond the minimum requirements, allowing gear to alter gameplay is a good way to piss off the less fortunate, since you’re essentially letting people buy a better experience. This is especially true in an online game, where a gamer with all the amenities might go up against a minimally spec’ed player.
That doesn’t change the fact that there’s some really cool upcoming tech that, if developers can use it to increase the immersion factor without providing a gameplay advantage, well, gaming will be the better for adopting it.
My take on the Novint Falcon, an alternate controller, and why PhysX might be the next big thing in online gaming (really!), plus the funny papers and our usual awesome assortment of exclusive MMO content is but a click away.
Loading... for March 16th, 2007 [Nifty New Tech edition
Loading...
Features, InterviewsFri, Mar 23, 2007LadySirse
