🚀 go-pugleaf

On Sun, 16 Jul 2017 21:09:18 -0400, Spalls Hurgenson
<spallsh...@gmail.com> wrote:

>This is going to be a shorter ramble. It's about what I thought games
>of the future would look like, in the heady days of the mid 90s.

Around the mid 90s, I think many of us looked at the current rate of
advancement in gaming innovation and believed that the pace would
continue long enough to produce some incredible experiences.  So much
for that -- the more things change the more they stay the same :)  Who
knew that in the year 2017 we would be wishing games were more like
they used to be.  Games like Doom 2016 and Shadow Warrior 2 are
successful because they use old school shooters as a point of
reference for what makes games fun, adding updated graphics to an
existing (proven) formula.

There are a number of reasons for the discrepancy between our
predictions and reality.  Single-threaded processing speeds really
stagnated around 2005 or so, sadly right around the same time console
sales started luring game developers onto those platforms at the
expense of innovation on the PC.  GPU speed improvements have largely
defied that limitation, and in the limited ways that parallel GPU
operations are able to help, games have gotten somewhat better looking
over the last 10 years, but GPU performance is experiencing a similar
slowdown.  Multithreaded CPU performance has of course increased, but
that rarely matters a great deal when it comes to gaming performance.
After all this time, single-threaded performance is still important to
most types of software applications including gaming.

It's not all about technical limitations, though.  When consoles made
gaming more about the mainstream consumer, the industry began getting
crapped on by marketing teams the same way the movie industry had been
for many decades, pumping a lot of hype about upcoming titles into
mainstream media.  More and more gaming became a mainstream form of
entertainment rather than a niche market for the tech savvy, leading
to dumbed-down titles that aim the gun for the player or point exactly
where they should go to progress, and a bigger investment in story
writing, cutscene cinematics / quick time events and other filler
elements that didn't require as much innovation or talent, with a
focus on keeping production costs down.  And then of course all the
DLC / seasons pass nonsense.  It's not the first time the pursuit of
money has defiled an industry.

It's not that we don't still get the occasional gem (see my recent
posts about Player Unknown's Battlegrounds), but gaming is certainly
not where we thought it would be today, when we considered the future
20 years or so ago.