I would hope it is more of the magic of dreaming of the future of video game graphics. It was so exciting to see the next generation of graphics come out.
I am hoping to see the same with VR. But unless there is some kind of technological break through that they are willing to sell to consumers, I don’t see it jumping forward very fast over the next few decades.
Personally and as a gamer since the 80s (and nowadays making games myself), I think the last great breakthrough improvement was procedurally generated game spaces, and that stuff dates back to Minecraft in 2009.
The improvements in visuals are well into the diminishing returns part of the curve, the richness and size of custom crafted game spaces has hit a cost ceiling (hence budgets in the $100 million mark for AA games, even with partial authomatisation of things like model generation and painting via stuff like Houdini and Substance), and the only direction of growth I can see is gameplay where the improvements from the natural the emergent gameplay of multi-player are more or less stuck on the same point for a decade.
For a while I had some hope that AI (specifically LLMs) would yield a massive jump in the richness of the game world in story terms (imagine an RPG were all NPCs have genuine complex stories with realistic interactions, all generated on the fly and even influenced by you) but plain LLMs have large hardware requirements merelly to interact with one person (powerful GPUs, at least 12GB of VRAM) on top of the requirements to run the game itself, so that seems unlikely before the end of the decade.
I would hope it is more of the magic of dreaming of the future of video game graphics. It was so exciting to see the next generation of graphics come out.
I am hoping to see the same with VR. But unless there is some kind of technological break through that they are willing to sell to consumers, I don’t see it jumping forward very fast over the next few decades.
Personally and as a gamer since the 80s (and nowadays making games myself), I think the last great breakthrough improvement was procedurally generated game spaces, and that stuff dates back to Minecraft in 2009.
The improvements in visuals are well into the diminishing returns part of the curve, the richness and size of custom crafted game spaces has hit a cost ceiling (hence budgets in the $100 million mark for AA games, even with partial authomatisation of things like model generation and painting via stuff like Houdini and Substance), and the only direction of growth I can see is gameplay where the improvements from the natural the emergent gameplay of multi-player are more or less stuck on the same point for a decade.
For a while I had some hope that AI (specifically LLMs) would yield a massive jump in the richness of the game world in story terms (imagine an RPG were all NPCs have genuine complex stories with realistic interactions, all generated on the fly and even influenced by you) but plain LLMs have large hardware requirements merelly to interact with one person (powerful GPUs, at least 12GB of VRAM) on top of the requirements to run the game itself, so that seems unlikely before the end of the decade.