Controversial Prediction
A new Xbox console will be announced and hotly anticipated before the PS3 gets a proper "foothold" in the market with AAA exclusive games.
Microsoft must want to bring out a more powerful iteration of the Xbox because:
- they want to 'steal the thunder' of the second wave of quality PS3 exclusive games
- they want to capitalize on the success of the 360 (so it will be backwards compatible)
- they want to prevent their games console looking substantially inferior to their perceived competitor
- they want to stop manufacturing a machine that they rushed out and which has known design faults (RRoD)
- they want to give it a large internal hard-drive to encourage developers to program 'persistent environments'
- they want to give it an optional removable hard-drive for user-created, downloaded content (movies, music, television)
- they want to give it WiFi and will make it simpler to stream content from your personal computer (Windows, Mac, or Linux)
- they want to give it an HDMI out
- they want to have it run Crysis
However, it is unlikely that they will update the gamepad, or include 'motion-sensing' - if they do it will be with a separate peripheral that has to be bought separately and which will only work on the new machine. Hence, the force-feedback steering wheel you spent all that money on will work just fine. The games will still come on DVDs (which will shock some), but the developers will have realized the cost/benefit ratio of filling a Blu-ray disc with oodles of HD textures isn't justified by the sales to a shrinking market (as consumer spending dwindles...), so will rediscover and reinvigorate the old techniques procedural generation that allowed David Braben to put eight Galaxies on a single Floppy disc in Elite.
Procedural generation was used in Oblivion (see: the Environment section in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblivion_(Elder_Scrolls) ), as part of the production process, creating the assets that became the final "build" that was put on the DVD. What I mean is that this 'generating stuff by calculation' takes place at runtime, when you install the game (i.e. it partially unpacks part of its environment), or dynamically as you play the game - so as you focus your attention on a rock the graphics engine will consistent decide what higher resolution texture to supplant the previous texture with as the Level-of-Detail (LoD) changes with your observation (i.e. closer distance/focus). Actually, there is no reason why this cannot be applied to trees, plants, even city plans (see: Subversion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversion_(computer_game) ). Then you have games like Borderlands that have 1000s of guns, as you can construct them from parts - here you are probably getting into reusing prefabricated components which allow themselves to be plugged together in a multitude of 'sensible' ways to yield behavior dependent on the scripts they contain and "forces" they transform/transmute.
This will all be supplemented by a little sprinkle of artistic detail. Every environment will have to be visited by the developers and then carefully adjusted. So a future GTA would let you walk into any unsecured building, but without the developer making an extra effort the spaces would seem rather humdrum and repetitive. So, if a mission involved you going to a bar and winning a game of pool, you would drive across the city, park, enter the bar and discover lower than normal light levels, tints, and volumetric smoke coming from the back parlour where the pool table was kept along with the incidental canned dialogue of a couple of 'out of towners' complaining to the barkeep about health code violations only if they were sat close enough to notice a significant density of tobacco smoke, only if the developer had added this character by adjusting with a few contextual sliders in each room - i.e. % probability of customers, % of which were from out of town, % Hue/Saturation/Brilliance of room's illumination, % smoke density, etc. The important point about all this is that you would only need to tweak some of the settings for some locations. You could have someone in your art department design street graffiti and someone else go around 'tagging' buildings/subway cars (obviously, this could be an extended mini game for the player, but you would need to start off with some for the environment to feel lived in - unless you're doing something like: Mirror's Edge).
So, for this reason there is no need to switch to Blu-ray. This means that Microsoft could bring out a new console that was almost as pricey as the PS3 would be at that time, but put all that money into the components and build quality (probably two graphics cards and a lot more RAM). Adding an extra hard-drive to store movie downloads would make it more expensive, but at this point it would easily rival the best Media Center PCs. This hard-drive would be optional because gamers wouldn't need it (gamers are being forced to buy components they may not use with the PS3), although some may use it for digital distribution of more obscure titles (I think a deal with SEGA to put their back catalogue of retro titles on a comprehensive emulator would help the Virtual Arcade enormously - translating some Japanese ones), or XNA developed ones, with Microsoft supporting art and innovation in gameplay with a prize ceremony that would accept amateurs and professionals on equal terms, but set a limit on the budget so the rich publishers didn't tend to win year after year with their major titles. A removable hard-drive can also be upgraded to a larger size, although they will need to find a way of letting you transfer/backup your stuff without stealing it - and I see no reason why you can't download a movie rental, get invited around to someone's house who also has a new Xbox and you can suggest watching the movie there, by swapping out the hardware. Sky+ HD lets you rent a Box Office movie with you only actually paying for it once you start watching it - you could change your mind and delete it with no charges made; you can even watch it multiple times within a 24 hour period from when you began watching it the first time (given that Sky can't control me seeing a movie and inviting a friend over to see it again before it automatically deletes itself, I don't see any problem with Microsoft allowing the reverse: getting some digital content and taking it on the removable drive to be seen by others). I anticipate extended demos of games being available for rental (say: the first three levels of a AAA game for a week of real time or a weekend or 5 non-consecutive hours of 'game time' which could be spread-out over a month). Obviously, with procedurally generated, open-world environments the games either become multiplayer "mini-games" (like Skate, or Jet Set Radio Future, or a Mirror's Edge game of competitive parkour package delivery), or they become quests (like in Oblivion), or they become missions (in an over-arching narrative), yet in all three cases these 'games' can be retrofitted to the environment and rented/sold as downloadable episodes. Don't know if you'll like skateboarding? Rent before you commit to a purchase you may regret.
This model of production also lowers the risk of the publication of games that have taken 1000s of man-years to create. Developers seem quite prepared to buy in graphics/physics/AI engines, yet persist in building the environment from scratch by hand in a 3D modeling program even though the city they need for Hulk, is barely any different than the one in Transformers. Just grow it.
