3. Weather Should Matter
Again, this is about taking something extremely familiar and giving it a new significance. Games love to place our characters in fantastical scenarios, from blazing volcanos to bug-ridden swamps, but it almost never matters in terms of how we play. Both practically and psychologically, environment should be a constant concern, with its own rewards and risks. If next-gen games could start giving us this, it would feel revolutionary indeed. For example, water. In real life, being wet in instantly changes a person's game plan. Water absorbs body heat 25 times faster than air does; it ruins dry goods, destroys electronics, rusts metal, adds weight, and takes a long time to go away. In games, water is a little dripping effect that happens on your character for a few seconds as you climb out of it. It would take a bit of proper game design to account for all the consequences of various weathers and environmental conditions, but the end result would be a game that demands respect. I remember the first time I saw rain in Grand Theft Auto III. Watching the sky randomly get cloudy and start raining was crazy -- but when I got in a car and realized that it actually changed the car's handling, I felt like I had stepped into the future. Now that I'm in the future, I'm disappointed by the game industry's assumption that environments are the sole domain of art departments, not programmers. Commandos 2: Men of Courage also had a moment of environmental enlightenment in the "White Death" mission, where the player have to sneak around an arctic Nazi encampment searching for winter clothes, ducking into warm (but risky) spots to keep from being frozen. It made me realize there's something more terrifying than being unarmed and naked in a Nazi encampment, and it's wind.