3rd person immersion

[Karis]

I was thinking... As we all know, valve has us stuck in 1st person through the whole game for reasons of immersion. This does work, with it being a fps and all, but what about those beat-em-ups, rpg's, and rts's?

An idea... Make it where the player can customize the look of his character, even for single player. (I searched the forums using immersion and custom, but didn't find anything) Although the player will obviously not look like the thing he creates, he will have put a certain amount of creative intuition into it, and it could ,therefore, become a reflection of himself.


And an addational things for other companies, modders, ect. to look into for the future that are not necissarly 3rd-person related. Have npc's respond to a few words of the user, at lest the things expected from a user, if he uses a mic. Imagine something like this in an rpg...

User: Hi
NPC: Hello! Would you like to book a room for the night?
User: How much does it cost?
NPC: A room for one, for one night is fourty Dollars.
User: Guess so.
NPC: May I see the money?
User: (Presses a button)
NPC: Thank you and have a nice night!

One possible way would be to ignore most the words, but if he says a key-word like "Cost", "money", "ok", "shure" or "no" then they respond.

Please note, as I am not (yet) a developer, I wouldn't know how possible this is, but it would explore an area not yet traveled upon by game makers / modders yet...

 

[Cyanide]

I think that immersion is really based on the entire enviroment in the game, not just the view of the in-game camera. Immersion comes when the game is fun enough, detailed enough, polished enough, and active enough to make the player forget about everything that's around him. Enough to make his monitor seem to encompass his entire field of view and his speakers seem to drown out all other sounds. That's immersion. I really don't think it's got anything to do with 1st person, or 3rd person, or top-down.

As for the voice driven NPC interaction, I think games are a few years away from that. I know we've got voice recognition technology, but it's just not that good yet. You've got to "train" existing voice recognition so that it can accurately identify words - even if you've got a really thick accent or something - and that's not something that I could see many players wanting to do just to play a game. Imagine if you said one thing and the game thought you said another thing, and it took your dialog in the opposite direction you wanted. That would be incredibly frustrating for the player. When the technology gets a bit more sofisticated a few years down the road, I can almost gaurantee that you'll see voice interaction in games.

 

[Synthos]

it'd be 2x times inaccurate, first you'd have to have voice recognition to turn it into text.. which is hard enough sometimes...
THEN, you have to get the AI to give the right response to certain words and word-combinations... which is less hard, but inaccurate sometimes

 

[Karis]

Yea, the voice thing wasn't ment for immediate use, but it's a relatively new technology in which might be possible in the semi-near future. Many things in hl2 are completely new, but remember, it's been in development for five years. Back in 1999 in-game play being almost exctly like cg animation was thought of as impossible as well.

Just something to keep in mind...