Zoned in
The
Future of Gaming - Part II
by
The Bearer
Part Uno + Uno =Unos or “Innovate or Die”
Welcome back intrepid gamers. When we last parted company, we had been discussing the upcoming blessed events of the launch of multiple, shiny, super-duper sexy, awesomely awesome consoles that will be so doggone cool that your fingers will get six flavors of frostbite from merely caressing the power cable. ‘Scuse me a moment while I dab the long, slimy tendrils of drool from my mouth.
There now, that’s better. So, back to the business at hand of trying to lie out the roadmap of the hopefully soon to be here launches from Sony, Nintendo, and Microsoft. And the very first thing I’m going to hit you with is my prediction that the days of there being a discernable difference in the performance from one machine to the next are over. As a matter of fact, we’re already beginning to see this take shape as the current generation of consoles reach their twilight. I can already hear the pained screams, as well as the huffing and puffing coming from the fanboy contingent. While there is nothing that anyone can do to get them to see any differently from that which they’ve worked so hard to convince themselves and anyone else within earshot of (The insert console here rules and everyone else sucks), I offer the real gamers of the world a challenge. Take the best games from each of the three consoles and compare them side to side to side. There’s not a whole lot of difference is there? Why is that?
There are many reasons, but the biggest has absolutely nothing to do with architecture, brand, programmer, and so on. It’s simply because there is a ceiling to the type of visuals we can get from games. You can only improve visuals so much until we cross that magic threshold of photo-realistic images and while that threshold is certainly within sight, it remains maddeningly out of reach for the foreseeable future. You can have all of the computing power in the world, but you’re only going to be able to do so much to make a polygon look better. While we know very little about the architecture and real power of the next consoles, we can safely assume that each is going to render a polygon in ways and methods that take it to the limit. For the first time ever, each console will be capable of doing everything that its competitors can do and do it as well. Does this mean that we’re going to have three identical machines? Well, they’ll physically look different from each other and they may have different ways of creating the end result, but they’ll all reach the same results. The easiest way to look at it is to look at the way people compare Super Bowl winning football teams from different eras. Each one was physically different from the others and played differing styles of football, but ultimately they still played with eleven players on each side of ball and achieved the same goal. Which leads me to my next prediction, CONTENT WILL BE KING.
With three machines capable of virtually the same visuals, content will decide the winners and losers of the next war, which means that we as gamers are the ultimate victors. To survive the next generation, the Big 3 will have to pull out all of the stops when it comes to content and this means innovation. “Innovate or die,” will become the mantra of the day. After what has been far too long, gaming will be taken to the next level and we’ll finally begin to see truly revolutionary games and ways to play them. “Next Generation” gaming will finally have real meaning. What kind of innovation and revolution are we going to see? Beats me, that’s why it’ll be innovative and revolutionary, but rest assured, people far smarter and more visionary than I, are already cooking up ways to blow our collective gaming socks right off our feet. It’s definitely an exciting time to be a gamer.
The biggest side effect of the actual games taking their rightful place at the forefront of gaming, is that mad amounts of money are going to be spent not only by the Big 3 to buy up development houses, but the EA’s and Square Enix’s of the world will do the same, swallowing up and integrating smaller developers. Gaming like every other competitive business is cutthroat and this will likely be taken to new heights in the next generation. Developers and intellectual rights will be bought up in droves, not necessarily based on their merits, but to keep them from showing up on the other guys’ systems. While this is good in the sense that the smaller and often times more innovative development houses will have the luxury of having a budget several times the size of anything they would have had on their own to bring their visions to fruition, it also means that we’re likely to have a lot less games released on multiple platforms.
Continuing on the software front, I think we’ll probably begin to realize the promises of episodic content that have yet to come to fruition. Downloading new levels, chapters, content, and sequels will become far more commonplace. In that vein, episodic content may become vital to the developers’ bottom line. With all of this new power and technology games are going to cost much more to produce and take much longer to complete. If you’re having to spend more money to create games and having to wait longer before you begin to see any kind of profit, game companies will probably begin leaning towards releasing levels/chapters as they complete them to generate revenue while they continue working on completing the game.
I also believe that we’ll begin to see much better writing, storytelling, and voice work in the games. Games will no doubt eventually become productions that rival the biggest Hollywood efforts. You’ve got to have higher quality all across the board if you’re going to have out-of-this-world visuals. This combined with the innovation factor is going to create games with an immersion factor the likes of which we’ve never seen. All of us can name off movies or books that we’ve indulged in that made us forget that we were reading/watching a movie. We sometimes get so engrossed that we forget that the world continues to exist all around us. With that said, we all know how much greater the personal investment and immersion is in games versus these other forms of entertainment. How much greater yet will it be when the visuals, story, and sound are on par with the best movies and books?
Speaking of games becoming larger productions, Hollywood and videogames will become closer than ever. I’ve already written a Zoned In article concerning just this matter. Since I’ve already written about this, I won’t reenter the debate of whether it’s good or not, but it will become a bigger fact of life. With Hollywood having already taken notice of gaming as a viable way of extending their reach and gaming becoming more mainstream everyday, this relationship will only continue to blossom and develop. We’ll probably begin to see more of the in depth, intricately intertwined projects such as what we witnessed with the Matrix. Games offer directors, producers, and studios an entirely different media with which to either continue their story and or to flesh out their story in ways that film and books cannot. It’s not entirely inconceivable that we’ll begin to see long awaited sequels to movies bypass film altogether and head for gaming. I’m not talking about some pseudo sequel that has absolutely no one from the film involved, we’ve been seeing this for quite some time, but rather productions that maintain total continuity from the big screen to the little screen. I’m talking games that become big Hollywood events.
Another aspect that I believe we’ll see with the next generation goes back to the thought that graphics can only get so much better, and that is the idea that the lifecycle of the next generation of consoles will be the longest ever. With machines finally hitting technological peaks in relation to graphics and sound, there won’t be a need to roll out a new machine every five years. This in and of itself, could be the greatest development to come out of the next generation simply because developers will finally have all the time they need to exploit the architecture. With a longer lifecycle developers will have more time to perfect their programming, allowing them to get everything humanly possible out of the machine. This will no doubt result in better games, graphically and gameplay wise. With the way things are now, developers no sooner begin to unravel the secrets of a machine’s capabilities and they then have to begin learning how to develop for a new system. How can you be truly innovative and efficient if you’ve yet to master the current machine? This used to leave a very small window of “perfection” available per lifecycle that should now turn into gaping wide chasm.
Tune in next time for what the next round of consoles wars could mean for the Big 3 and my boldest prediction yet. Want a hint? Three combatants enter the ring, only two come out. See ya!
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