Can games...really get any better than they are now?

[Yumi_and_Erea]

Yes.

That's all I'm willing to say on the subject.

 

[PhantomCritic]

Gameplay wise, I would say it's pretty much at it's peak. Graphics and storylines can get better though. So yes.

 

[Ekonk]

YES

 

[open trap]

Ya its called virtual reality. have you ever wanted to be an unstopable badass achillies like soldiers completly invulnerable. i have. have you ever wanted to be some sort of demon tasked with destroying the world piece by piece. i have. and that is the next step

 

[MetallicaRulez0]

Graphics can still get much, much better. For example you couldn't run Crysis at full settings with a 360, it just doesn't have the power to do it. The PS3 might though. Mass Effect was a BEAUTIFUL game, but it's frame rate and texture loads suffered greatly on the 360 because of it.

As for story telling and things of that nature, no I don't see them getting too much better than they are currently. Games like Bioshock and Mass Effect immediately spring to mind as good examples of the future of storytelling in games.

 

[Glademaster_v1legacy]

Well for starters mods made for players by players so you have access to them on consoles and use of key board and mouse in games now that would make consoles the best.

 

[zehydra]

The Matrix. It IS possible to create, it's not just science fiction.

 

[Dr. Love]

There's lots to improve on. To be honest, most games these days are really shallow and there's lots of interactions we just flat-out haven't explored. People talk about whether or not games used to be better or whether they look through nostalgia goggles, but there's a handful of cases where we geniunely did have deeper interaction before the current console generation. To give you an idea...

Mass Effect vs. Baldur's Gate:
Yes, Mass Effect is prettier and has physics and voice acting, but Baldur's Gate has deeper interactions. Just as one example, there's one way to open locks in Mass Effect, and that's hacking them--and occasionally to find a keycard. In Baldur's Gate you can have someone pick the lock, you can try to force it open, you may have a number of spells at your disposal for magically unlocking them, and you can almost always count on a key being hidden somewhere. In Mass Effect you either have enough hackers around to open the door or you don't. Solution: go back to the ship, grab another tecchie, and go back. In Baldur's Gate you have resources at your disposal and must choose how to best employ them. Is it worth using the Knock spell on this lock or that lock? Is it worth taking the time to find that key? This is one example of how Baldur's Gate's really simple user interface was a lot more versatile and bred a lot more creative thinking on the player's part. It seems that since Knights of the Old Republic Bioware's been confining themselves into a smaller and smaller box, depending on a checklist of "standard Bioware features" more than anything else.

Dungeon Keeper:
An innovative and unique game where it was good to be bad. Players took on the role of the eponymous Dungeon Keeper, who, from the Dungeon Heart, commanded imps to dig tunnels and built rooms for storing gold, training demons, feeding them, torturing and imprisoning heroes, and more. Your dungeon served a dual-purpose as you built it to attract more fiends, managed your minions to keep them from fighting or hogging too many resources to themselves, and fortified it against impending invasion by the heroes. In addition to managing the denizens of your dungeon you could put them to work, having imps mine gold and jewels from the rock and soil around your dungeon and putting dark wizards to work researching spells for you to use. It's difficult to describe this game as anything other than "Dungeon Keeper," but if I had to pick some games it plays like I'd say it's like a combination of Viva Pinata and Black and White--and that doesn't really do it justice. Few--possibly even NO games since its time--have even approached its versatility, and you'd be surprised at how many senses of pleasure it speaks to. On one hand, you got to manage evil minions in a game somewhere halfway between an RTS and a demented hotel simulator of some kind, with the demons actually having their own behavior and social infrastructure--certain monsters hate certain other demons and you have to keep them from fighting, and different monsters tend to like doing certain things and fight harder if you can keep them happy. On the other, you got the pleasure of building and even exploring, with hidden passages and forgotten temples lying in unexplored portions of each level. If you can point me at a modern game that can give me the depth of the Dungeon Keeper games, I'll be surprised.

Believe me, games today have LOTS of catching up to do. It says a lot that most gamers could STILL imagine a better Bioshock than what the developers actually came up with...

If Dungeon Keeper were a woman, she would be my proverbial "pre-crack lindsey lohan" I've played that game far more then I care to admit even after all these years. Well i haven't been able to get a hold of the first but only have played the 2nd, which I've heard is good but not as good as the first so thinking of hoping on Ebay and getting me a copy of the first.

 

[justhereforthemoney]

This reminds me of a Pendragon book I read once where this one world lives hooked up to computers where their living functions are taken care of and they can do anything they want in their individual computer worlds.

 

[internetzealot1]

Graphics will get better and online matches will get bigger, but, for most games, things won't change.

 

[Woodsey]

I find it odd when you talk about how much consoles can do and that being the limit...

Tell me child, have you ever heard the legend of the COMPUTER?

 

[Piorn]

Photorealistic graphics suck, the shadows look blurry and random, the water looks just like water, the surfaces are unspectacular etc etc. We don't need photorealistic graphics, we need beautiful graphics.
Also,there is always a way to improve something, whether it's just the graphics or something like a revolutionary AI.

 

[RatRace123]

Probably within the next 2 console generations we'll have reached photorealism.

I'm not keen on motion sensors, at least not the upcoming ones. I forsee the 360 and PS3 suffer the same shovelware problem the Wii had (and by all accounts still does have)

 

[AWAR]

..If you look at the 360 and PS3 graphics, there nearly life-like!

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAHAHAH!

 

[Sgtkillalot0]

None of them have Gears of Halo Theft Auto 4.5.

 

[DrDeath3191]

There is always some way to improve.

 

[theultimateend]

To be honest I think we are at the peak (or where recently) of gaming, the only way is down.

This is largely true and it has nothing to do with technological limits.

Creatively most companies have switched from making entertaining games to marketing products.

CEO's are out for quick cash grabs off of non returnable purchases. It is the dream industry for anyone with the money to market.

People will continually buy games that are prettier but otherwise inferior to predecessors and marketing will continue to get stronger to help manipulate people's opinions of what is quality.

If you can convince kids that the brand name matters on clothes and that they aren't paying premiums to be walking billboards, if you can convince adults that mass murder is necessary for safety, then you can reasonably assume that you can also tell people what to like and get a pretty consistent return.