Welly well well... guess who comes crawling back?

Renzatic on 9/3/2011 at 22:07

I'd guess half and half. The next generation of consoles won't be as dramatic a leap as the last, so everyone, consumer and hardware manufacturers alike, are holding onto the current platforms as long as they can. There's not as much pressure to push the envelope anymore.

And even when the next generation of consoles inevitably arrive, the only thing Sony and MS will have to do is up the RAM and slap in a better GPU on the hardware they've already got, then bam...PS4 and Xbox 720. They won't have to engineer a whole new system to cater to the latest and greatest in graphics technology.

Pyrian on 9/3/2011 at 22:20

Quote Posted by Renzatic

I mean what's left by this point?

Popping.

I'm sick to death of wandering around with whole large buildings fading in and out, landscapes constantly shifting, colors changing, and so on. Oh, and I especially hate being seen (nevermind shot) by opponents that aren't even rendering. Once upon a time it was the new thing, we could have enormous maps except that draw distances interfered. Well, it's been a decade, and it still kind of sucks. :grr: Looking good at any given moment is no replacement for looking good in motion.

lost_soul on 9/3/2011 at 23:08

Yeah the draw distance problem is as old as 3D gaming its self. It was fixed for racing games back in 2001 or so, but for games like GTA it may not be fixed for a long, LONG time. This is especially true if you want a lighting engine that doesn't suck. Imagine a huge open world where you can see from one town to another, including every building, vehicle and pedestrian. Imagine all of these things casting realistic shadows and having individual blades of grass all rendered too. I doubt even modern hardware could do this.

I thought GTA4 was a good balance here. It had quite excellent lighting, reflective water, and a respectable draw distance.

One thing I hope I never see again is blob shadows. They *detract* from the realism of a game and just look completely ugly. If you can't do a shadow in the shape of the object, don't render one at all.

ZylonBane on 9/3/2011 at 23:50

I've been playing the hell out of Fallout 3 the last month or so, and I'm almost used to the way buildings pop and fade into existence.

This is just the price you pay when dealing with a huge world, finite RAM, and no load screens.

gunsmoke on 9/3/2011 at 23:53

Quote Posted by ZylonBane

I'm a non-console-owning reasonably dedicated PC gamer, and even I consider the current long console hardware cycle to be a good thing. The more elaborate game graphics are, the more expensive they are to create, the less risks game makers take, and thus gaming as a whole suffers.

Quoted. For. Absolute. Truth.

gunsmoke on 10/3/2011 at 00:54

I don't agree.

gunsmoke on 10/3/2011 at 01:04

Thank you for clarifying, because it was a rather straw man argument before (as I interpreted it). I see your point now.

ZylonBane on 10/3/2011 at 01:09

It's occasionally true. Something like Dead Rising wouldn't have been possible in any sort of aesthetically tolerable sense on older 3D hardware. But I'm not seeing any more plateaus like that coming up. Seems like we're now we've leveled off at the MORE, BETTER stage of technological advance in rendering. Higher screen resolutions, higher-res textures, higher-poly models, better lighting, better frame rates, better draw distances, etc.

Here's a thought experiment-- Try to think of a sequence from any big-budget Hollywood action movie that couldn't be recognizably rendered into videogame form on a 360 or PS3.

gunsmoke on 10/3/2011 at 01:42

I agree again^^^.

What I, personally, would like to see advance is simple. A-fucking-I. Increase the AI of NPCs, companions, enemies. It is the last facet of game development that stands out as archaic in 90%+ of recent games. Attention to animation wouldn't hurt either...BETHESDA.

june gloom on 10/3/2011 at 02:49

Bethesda is waaaay behind the curve in animation, to be fair.

What I'd like to see is an end to the plastic look of people. By which I mean having light reflect realistically off of skin, and make sure that skin has all the pores and imperfections of real people, and light is scattered appropriately. Some Source engine games make motions towards this, but not completely. I've yet to see it happen.