The Hotdog Laserhouse

This is a really broad question!

I’m not entirely sure what we’ll see in the future. I’m of the opinion that gaming hardware could stop evolving right here and I’d probably be pretty happy. Gaming has come a long way since the days of early 3D.

Instead of characters being made out of a dozen polygons with a draw distance of a few feet, we have entire worlds and characters so detailed that not only are individual fingers and toes modeled, but in some cases, so are individual layers of hair.

Can graphics look more realistic than they do now? Sure. Does it matter? Probably not as much as some want to think it does. The days of “That’s supposed to be a person, but I have to use my imagination to fill in the blanks” are basically no more. And it’s not just one person, either. Games like Dead Rising put hundreds of characters on screen at the same time.

Where do we go from here? Currently, there’s little that would really benefit from a massive generational leap - not like we had previous generations. The limitations we had on what types of games were possible are almost entirely gone. The 360 and PS3 were already the generation of “more”, too, so telling me that the next generation Dead Rising will be able to support 10000 zombies on screen instead of just 200 isn’t really that impressive. Artificial intelligence will get smarter, physics will probably get more complex… but… to what end? Goombas don’t need to be hyper intelligent to be fun to stomp.

Is it really better if we have 1:1 exact photo-realistic graphics versus something that fakes photo-realism? At some level we reach visual fidelity where nobody can tell the difference between Direct X 15 and Direct X 16, even if it comes with a mile-long list of improvements. Eventually the enhancements get to be so minor and insignificant that you need a computer science degree to understand why one type of lighting is better than the other, because to the untrained eye it will look identical regardless.

We’re not quite at that point yet, but we’re not far off. The longer I can wait to drop $500 on new console hardware, the better.