Owyn_Merrilin said:
Long story short, higher processing power means more complicated rulesets are possible. This means everything from better AI, to better physics, to entirely new genres of gameplay that become possible because we can better simulate complicated systems.
I agree that all of those are positives for having more powerful hardware, but as you predicted, I'd argue that they're rarely used effectively in those ways.
Neither Half Life 2 nor Star Wars: The Force Unleashed would have been possible on sixth gen hardware, in both cases because of the large amount of physics processing that had to be done.
I feel the need to point out that HL2 was released on the Xbox. And I might have tried to at least pick a better example than the Force Unleashed. It had some interesting tech running under the hood, but they forgot to make a fun game with it.
And those two are just the tip of the iceberg, a pair of games that were groundbreaking (at the time) in their use of physics engines. There is so much more to a new gen than graphics.
And here's the problem I run into. One of those games was actually ground breaking in it's use of physics, true. I'd say Portal was even more ground breaking than it was. TFU I would argue against because it really wasn't that ground breaking. Much of it's use of physics was limited to tossing enemies around and the like, and HL2 did it better three years earlier.
The problem is, while everyone is using better physics simulations now than they were a generation ago, almost no one uses them well. Reason being that almost no game relies on them to make a better experience. Sim type games like Gran Turismo can benefit from better physics simulation. Does something like Uncharted, Gear of War, or Mario Galaxy? Not really. Better physics simulation is really just making it easier to animate large set piece moments at that point, but a fun game isn't just watching set piece moments.
I really can't think of many other titles that use the current hardware well. Something like Just Cause 2 certainly benefits in terms of pure scale and destructibility, as does Red Faction: Guerrilla even though I hate that game. But apparently the best we can think to do with better physics is throwing objects at enemies or blowing up buildings. And AI hasn't really seen a huge jump in quality in at least half a decade, and I'm probably being generous there. AI routines being used today are still quite simple relative to actual intelligence because simulating intelligent enemies is not only hard, but often about simulating what feels good to play against rather than actual intelligence.
I just really haven't seen much benefit from the more powerful hardware outside of graphics yet since most developers just aren't using it for much else. Or at least not being creative in how it's used in these other areas. I'm not saying I'd trade that for less powerful systems since some legitimately benefit from the better technology, but most companies don't know what to do with it aside from making things bigger, louder, and prettier.
And with game budgets inflating steadily, I'm even less interested in seeing the number of developers who can develop on new hardware shrink further while those that can take fewer risks. If budgets keep growing, we're not going to see more creative use of the new hardware yet, we'll see less. I'd actually rather see developers forced to work against the hard limits of current technology for a while longer, because you're not going to wow people with current gen graphics anymore. Time to try something new.
