Topic: 2020 - Where do new consoles go from here?

[PatMan33]

For real, where do these new consoles go?

I saw an advert for the PS5 the other day and it was shilling the SSD that the system contains. Uhhhh... alright. I guess? But really? We're pushing the SSD and not anything else at all? Wow it is closer to the core processor and allows for faster memory streaming but who the **** cares? You are still going to try to promise me a 60fps game that runs at 48fps on average, with slow load times, and an occasional glitch that erases my save file.

I am wondering where the consoles go. The "more power" angle is just not good enough and has not been for a couple generations now. Nintendo seemed to understand this but Nintendo makes Nintendo-tier mistakes. So the whole industry is still kind of half-baked in terms of utilizing modern technology to deliver a great experience.

And VR isn't an option. That whole sector has been disappointing and mediocre to say the least. What a joke.

[martyk]

I hear the new Xbox is apparently going to double as a Keurig.  Really a gamechanger in the console space.

But on a more serious note, what I'm finding interesting is we're rapidly approaching a point where the major bottleneck is going to be storage again.  Was thinking about it when watching the recent Unreal Engine announcement.  Rendering infinite verticies and perfect lighting on 16k textures is great and all, super impressive, but who has the 500GB to install that ****.

[PatMan33]

Storage is a big worry of mine as well. It seriously kneecaps my enjoyment of being able to download games. We had that sweet spot a few years back where games weren't too too big and it was very convenient to download them. Nowadays it's a 50 gig download, then the 80 gig day one patch, and then if you want the "real" experience you need to get the highres texture pack (free... sometimes) and the high res voice pack. Maybe it's a bit of an exaggeration on my part, but you get the point.

Games looked gorgeous last generation. And now they look about the same... and was there ever anything wrong with three generations ago? Yeah the resolution was a bit low but some of those older styled games still look phenomenal. Storage... yeah I think you hit the nail on the head with that one, Marty.

Well, storage and then "can they make good games" hahaha that's the trick, isn't it?

[Oviraptor]

Well it certainly *can* be done. But it's always going to be a tug of war between hand-crafted assets and procedural assets. Anything hand-crafted is necessarily going to take up more space, but it's also going to look better.

I'm not tying to compare the style of game or the quality here, but GTA V takes up 89GB. No Man's Sky takes up 12GB.

[PatMan33]

I've been hearing that No Man's Sky is actually becoming quite good, too. It's on my list.

You raise an excellent point though. As our tech becomes better and better, procedural generation is more viable. Maybe Spore was ahead of its time and under-cooked, but it was that necessary step we needed to get the ball rolling on development of procedural algorithms in video games. And who can argue about the masterpiece that is GTAV, say what you will about the monetization but that is separate.

I do love those hand-crafted assets though. Those games (at least for now) feel like a more succinct experience. To go off of what I said about Sim City in the PC topic, procedural generation has that "Unity Engine" feel about it. It's so hard to explain but when I play a procedurally generated game (just like when I play a Unity game) I can just tell. That's really my complaint with the engine and the development technique.

Now, Star Citizen is doing some interesting things with procedural. They generate the scene and then go in and hand craft many aspects of it, using procedural as a template. But I mean... where the **** has that gotten those guys? So we'll have to see.

[Inkling]

I'm interested to see how the next gen and maybe the one after that go.  We're getting close to a peak, I think.  Folks like us might geek out over billions of triangles and dynamic lighting or whatever, but is it really gonna make that big of a difference for the next fifa or call of duty or whatever?