1. Red Orchestra 2 - Tanks

One of the things about Battlefield, you can just jump to third person for a full 360 degree third person view. This is exploitative and unimmersive. In Red Orchestra 2 you are totally limited to first person forced to move from spot to spot within the tank to get a better sense of your surroundings. Tanks also have specific hit models. Overall this gives the tank player a disadvantage and makes you feel more "in the game".

2. Sins Of The Solar Empire/Total War - Scale

When I think about battles with armies, I want them to be epic. Loud. With scale and chaos. Doesn't matter if it's "Feudal Japan" or fictional "Space battles". Perhaps 10-15 years ago the technology was limited. And so we were reduced to little simplistic 2d sprites. But now it's became cliche' derivatives and downright lazy. I'm sick of booting up steam and seeing 5 million shitty Paradox Interactive titles that look like a video game from 1999. Aside from looking dated it also puts people off them assuming they are "boring". Strategy games do an incredibly poor job of actually displaying scale and scope when it comes battles. It's still tied to an illusion on a isometric perspective with little lemmings you don't give a shit about.

3. Fear/Doom - Shooting

It's amazing how regardless of how convoluted the genre of first person shooters have become, most are terrible when it comes to the actual gratification of "shooting stuff". Not even just the bad ones. Fantastic titles such as Halflife 2 have outright terrible shooting. When I play Doom (the original) when you fire off a double barrel shotgun, you feel it The monster makes a moan of pain and crumbles to the ground as a crumpled mass of flesh. Shooting stuff in Doom, is awesome. And still more gratifying than more or less practically every shooter today.

Likewise with "Fear". Before it became a consolized mess that is "Fear 2" and finally covered up it's grave with "fear 3" we have the original, superior title. Much like "Max Payne" fear used a bullet time mechanic. When you hit an enemy, like doom, you get a cool over the top sound effect of pain being inflicted. While Doom uses a simple 2d animation, fear uses over the stop physics with enemy's spinning and flying across the room.

4. Homeworld - Caring

Aside from the problem mentioned above strategy titles currently face, Another one is "empathy". Actually caring about what is going on. For most strategy titles story and character is tacked on as padding. So, people don't care. It's partly why people are turned off by strategy titles. Titles such as Watcraft III and Homeworld proved strategy games could make you give a crap about the units you are playing and the overall story. Homeworld in particular was superior than Metal Gear Solid (much lauded at the time) at giving a cinematic experience. Now, everyone I log onto steam, I see 5 million crappy sterile "Paradox Interactive" that have the budget of a paper boy thrown into them and the polish of a recently dropped dog turd. 0 effect put into presentation or story. Much like scale, we need focus on story and characters to rid ourselfs of apathy and give people a reason to play.

5. Understanding what made your game good

So, a new Hitman game is coming out. You can press a button for magical "see through walls". And it will be more action focused and more forgiving, With a hype machine at work and casual reviewers praising it for being less hardcore and more "pew pew" I have no doubt it will be a success. Except it probably wont. Not really. What made Hitman great, wasn't shooting people in the face. Nor was it really the story. No. It was walking around.

Getting into a fire fight in Hitman almost always meant death. It was more like a thriller than a stealth game. Dressed in a disguise, you would walk in front of and amongst the enemy characters. Building up to a crescendo event. The game itself creating narrative similar to what you would get in sometime like "The Manchurian Candidate" or "Day Of The Jackal". It was about everything fitting in place for the special moment. If you replace that and make getting cought something trivial, the risk/reward diminishes. All the tension dissipates. This is a problem with modern games. "updating" isn't about "improving". It's about "more moneyz".

Overall I feel this is a very good blog that highlights how to improve several gaming aspects.