Quote:
Originally Posted by Leto
Maybe because it's just another battle game. waiting for the gaming industry to come out with something really engaging.
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My current problem with gaming in general (but with MMOs in specific) is lack of immersion, much of which could be solved with better storytelling, better acting, and more processing power.
We have already reached a point in gaming where we can make game worlds look really nice. Even indie or amateur designers can make eye candy that blow games away made circa 2005.
What's missing—with a few exceptions—is that quality of production that rivals film in terms of scope, storytelling, and immersion. A few examples are games like
Dragon Age and
Mass Effect. But there is a huge space for improvement.
The challenges up to now have been manifold. There are issues of technology and economics. Game machines can only do so much with regard to processing and rendering fantasy worlds with any semblance to realism. Producers only have limited budgets. It's nice to know that some big producers are throwing lots of resources at titles now, which is how you get games like
Dragon Age whose voice acting and soundtrack blows my mind.
The tech issue I think is the bigger issue at the moment, but we're getting there. When we move beyond duo-core as the standard for most machines (even consoles), then we will see the next phase in gaming: worlds that
act differently. When you can dedicate entire cores each to physics, AI, etc., you suddenly have more options in terms of how to get the world to operate both dynamically and seamlessly. Currently, most games run on one or two cores. That's limiting in terms of the number of calculations that can operate simultaneously, which puts a cap on the number of AI units and how diverse they can respond to inputs related to cause and effect.
I see lots of games coming out these days. But many of them are reiterations of the same game. Sometimes the graphics look nicer or maybe the setting is unique and the story is really good. But the game is basically the same.
Remember the movie industry before supercomputers? The size of the shift I see coming in the gaming industry is the same size in the shift we saw with filming with regard to CG, etc. Compare movies such as the original
Star Wars films (which were mind-blowing at the time) to films such as the most recent
Star Trek.
That's the kind of shift I hope is coming in gaming in terms of magnitude. We'll soon look at the best games produced today as being populated by pretty ragdolls. The game characters in the future will look and act more human than you can imagine.