Spoiler alert - I'm going to come to the conclusion "sort of" at the end of this.

Five hours spent playing "Neverwinter" yesterday (after two hours loading the game) prodded me into action.

What I'm about to say isn't earth shattering or off the wall in any way since the same fears have been expressed about the film industry.

See my review for the full dissection but I honestly felt that "Neverwinter" was bland to the point of bering monumentally dull. It was the flavour of a game where someone acquired the expensive franchise rights first and built the game later.

But like movies AAA games have no got too big to fail. The biggest games now have multiple hundreds of millions of dollars budgets and no-one can let that money go down the drain without it hurting a lot. So we no have computer gaming like the movies - sequelitis to the extent that "What's On at the Movies" now reads like an NFL result list and constant reboots of yesteryear franchises. In games that means all the big boys are playing safe. And worryingly in the case of Rockstar and Bethesda they seem to have stopped playing entirely. They haven't just not released GTA VI and Elder Scrolls VI yet - they haven't even started work on them.

So, moving away from the low end dregs and permanent EAG disasters to what as a gamer I dislike, like and want.

Firstly for developers of AAA games you need to be able to answer this question "What makes my game unique, better than anything anyone has played before, and a must experience event ?" Because until your game is providing solid answers to all of those questions you need to go back to the drawing board before you start spending serious money.

Secondly ambience and atmosphere. The best games have stand out ambience. What makes Team Fortress 2 great isn't just the exceptionally difficult to achieve (and nearly overbalanced with the Pyro update) perfect gameplay. It's the back story of the characters. The characters' backstory is so strong that over time Team Fortress 2 has developed into a very gay dysfunctional family sit com. But it makes a difference to play knowing that the Heavy is more than a big man with a big gun, that the Pyro exists in a make believe world of pastel jollity, and that what could have been a cliched soldier is in fact an extremely stupid psychopath with a collection of severed heads.

Beyond Team Fortress 2 Borderlands is Mad Max on LSD giving Pandora a credible backstory for being primarily full of gun toting psycopaths - and other psychopaths. Even the "good" NPCs are all mentally damaged for the most part which gives them a real sense of identity. Borderlands gets quest givers right, Neverwinter gets them very wrong. And the cell shaded graphics make the game in the same way that the similar process made "A Scanner Darkly" a far better film than it would have been had it been live action.

Mass Effect - Star Trek with guns not phasers. Tropico - one of the reasons that it's so much better than Sim City (various incarnations) is that being the President of a tropical island has miles more personality than being in charge of Blandville, computer world.

Thirdly and overlapping character and characters. I've already used some of my best examples above but the opening line of the first inkeeper in Baldur's Gate "My inn's as clean as an Elven♥♥♥♥♥♥ shows the trouble that the developers went to when creating a ground breaking physical environment to give it great personality too. In fairness even the great BG has the odd generic quest giver but there's such strong personality in the rest of the game that I forgive the occasional lapse.

(Interlude for mods - look I'm going on forever on this one, the ideas are all over the place, and it needs editing which it isn't going to get. But bluntly the discussion pages have been a bit crap recently and a big discussion on what makes computer games great, what makes them bad, and what gamers are now looking for would be both interesting and relevant. So go with it and don't lock me).

Fourthly - pacing. Here I'm going to compare "Titanfall" which I think does it badly with "Castle Crashers" who I think does it well. This is not a universally held opinion but in retrospect too much of "Titanfall" is beige. The quest givers are the blandest type of NPC imaginable. The game is go a short distance, kill some monsters, take their treasure, go a futher short distance, kill some more monsters, take their treasure, go a futher short distance, kill some more monsters, take their treasure, beam, sorry teleport, back to the merchant to sell your treasure, go a futher short distance, kill some more monsters, take their treasure...

The boss battles are just bigger versions of the smaller battles and largely rely on find the sweet zone where the enemy gets confused between returning to its lair and continuing to chase you so you can hit it without it hitting you.

Castle Crashers does something similar but there's such a variety of enemy, locations, and fighting styles that the game just feels far better. There are individual peaks where you rescue each princess and the bosses have definite personality.

So what do I as a gamer want from future games ?

Electronic Arts to be liquidated.

Electronic Arts own some great franchises that to be honest they are totally fracking up.

My main misery is that the Sims belong to E.A. The game was such a brilliant idea. And given a developer whose total preoccupation wasn't solely making vast amounts of money it could be so good. The problem is that E.A. thinks that the Sims is about things when the Sims is about people. So all their work on Sims 3 and 4 went to putting the most useful household items behind pay walls rather than increasing personality ranges and encouraging interactions with other characters. Given a developer prepared to encourage modding the capacity for what could be done with the Sims exceeds by a long way Minecraft. Also EA's developers are now so wealthy that the game is now Sim Preppy rather than resembling real characters lives. Add to that the fact that the complete game now costs the amount of a recently illegally harvested human kidney and its become a minority interest for the possession obsessed.

Mass Effect. If Masss Effect Andromeda had been a Steam release rather than an Origin release it could have been released Early Access where it would have received good to great reviews and a couple of years down the line would possibly have been hgailed as a classic. Instead EA took the cynical decision to withhold review copies, release the game half finished, but not put any more working into it, thus destroying a much loved franchise in the progress.

Star Wars Battlefront - someone else would have done it better.

Bots of improved human level.

I was doing some research online when a company secretary suddenly popped up and asked if she could help. Due to the time of day I asked if she was a bot and sure enough she was. But the level of conversation wasn't that far off human. Bots are coming very close to passing the Turing test already.

The reason that I suggest improved human rather than human is, in an observation that will hold no surprises, a lot of people online are ♥♥♥♥♥. Rude, aggressive, and barely coherent they generally make other gamers lives miserable.

Surely it musn't be too hard now to program bots that could replicate the better aspects of human players ? The issue is that in an arena game the environment is so much more limited. Imagine how much better TF 2 could be if teams got uneven and the game could just drop two bots into the smaller team. At least in a game if you've messed up you're not going to kill anyone in real life. Already in Depth sometimes the diver bots are better than most human players.

Wider fuzzier victory outcomes and added content

Here I'm think about Sim games - Rollercoaster Tycoon, Jurassic Park Operastion Genesis etc. Firstly I'd like the peeps to have more needs and desires - these would effectively just be added number bars. Then I'd like to meta the experience. Wouldn't it be brilliant if your park had an in game website where peeps could post their thoughts and photos about their day out - like Trip Advisor reports ? And rather just earning x money in x time there'd be basic achievements on each park but you could keep adding more to the park to unlock higher achievements - this has been one before but it's so much better than having to restart because a clock ran out.

Also the holy grail of all Sim games - I want to be able to travel around my own world and experience it as a Sim. In fairness you could already do a lot of this in Jurassic Park Operation Genesis so this has got to be threshold already.

Also I have an idea that combines "Viva Pinata", "Stardew Valley" and the TV show "Quantum Leap". There are a series of worlds and locations. Once thriving they're now broken and derelict. You have a series of missions to go in and repair each world to get it up and working again. Each world may put you in as a different character with different abilities and different challenges. And there will be sentient beings to help as well as things to do. The game could have virtually endless DLC.

Various extras that didn't fit in anywhere else.

This should have been a series of games built on from L.A. Noire but since Rockstar has its thumb up its♥♥♥♥♥they haven't been made. I'd take the L.A. Noire concept and move it through time a decadeish per episode. So you'd still have "Crime and the City" but imagine what you could do with the late 1950s as the hard faced cops have to deal with Rock and Roll and Bobby Socksers, the mid 60s - hippies, drugs, and the counterculture, the 70s where the dream goes sour - gang culture, ethnic minority gangs, the eighties - cocaine, fast money, and excess, the nineties, the hangover from the party, grunge - the two thousands ... the rise of tech, and modern day - terrorism, including state sponsored assasinations. But imagine the fun the designers would have with the music, the vehicles, and the fashions.

This would be an awesome series because via policing you'd be able to see social attitudes evolve - race, sex, sexuality. And using the same "world" you could have a separate Private Eye series of stories. Obviously I'd originally thought of L.A. as the setting but the genre would still work in San Francisco or even New York.

I'm glad that Creative Arts used my idea (or came up with it in parallel) to make smaller scale scenarios based on their Total War engines. The American Civil War has to be ripe for Total War treatment. And whilst this might take some rights negotiations you've virtually got all the pieces for "Game of Thrones Total War" already. Also a Chinese version of Shogun Total War - you'd sell a ton in China.

Could someone have a look at "Megalomania" and make a modern day version. Maybe triple the number of epochs.

In another example of heresy I'd be prepared to sacrifice some freedom for a better narrative. It's far more difficult to design a world not knowing whether your protagonist is a holy paladin or an evil mage. Limiting some of the character options enables far more meaningful interactions.

Conclusion

At last.

This underlines what has in fact been the core complaint about games recently on the forums - that money has got in the way of making great games. I hope this will start a discussion of what makes a great game and where gamers want the industry to head in future - what they like (great games) and what they don't (microtransactions and lootboxes)

S.x.