- prometheus25
- |
- Exalted Mythic Member
Old school Bungie, born and raised,
In the Septagon is where I spend most of my days.
Relaxin', maxin', posting all cool,
Talking about Halo, life and some school.
Got in one little argument, and the mods got scared,
they said "You're gonna get banned and your member title'll be bare!"
Posted by: Oddley765
Posted by: prometheus25
I'm not sold on new consoles yet. The proliferation of the internet into consoles have extended their lives with updates and enhancements dramatically, and we've also seen hardware upgrades with the Xbox 360 Elite, slim, and Playstation advances (sorry, but I'm not well versed in the iterations of this console). I also haven't seen games truly push the limitations of the consoles, not like Halo 2 pushed the Xbox. Not to mention that manufacturers hemorrhage profit on consoles for several years due to the long development costs, this past generation especially. If a new generation isn't drastically needed, I don't believe it will show.
I think these clues point towards the next console generation being quite distant in the future, conservatively 3 years, but I wouldn't be surprised if they were still 5 years off.
I have to respectfully disagree. When you take into account only some of the following features you see the current generation of consoles is not up to the task anymore. Imagine if you combined all of the features?
1. Dedicated physics chips for calculations.
2. Sheer graphics improvements. Direct X11 and PC's are so far in front now it's not even funny.
3. Artificial Intelligence (AI) this truly eats up computations cycles and is the reason in the current generation we see such 'dumb AI' in almost every game. The simply have to restrict the programming techniques and resources in this vital area.
4. New features like hardware networking compression. This could lead to insane amounts of multiplayer or single universe data being pulled downstream or sent upstream as well.
5. Solid state drives to reduce or eradicate load times altogether.
6. Actual full HD 1080p support or even Blu-ray or ultra widescreen.
7. How about multi display support?
I could keep going on for ages but the reality is, yes, the current generation have been extended by things like Internet access/apps and Kinect/Move etc but with just this short list I'm already wanting a next generation console.
Personally I see a split like PS2 & PS3, the PS2 still sold in huge numbers for a very long time and during the PS3 initial-mid lifetime I might add. Sony did well for backwards compatibility there. We'll start to see this type of game engine cross generation support with new tiles and the current/next generation platforms too.
Pfft you can bring the current generation of consoles to their knees with just some real time shadow and lighting, let alone the vast array of solid state modeling, reflections and so forth. The current gen use a huge array of "cheap tricks" to make the game engines of today and recent years possible.
With new generation hardware and development tools we might actually enable developers to spend less time using cheap tricks, spend precious resources on actual gameplay or artwork etc and deliver improve games in every respect.
Yes, those are very recent cutting-edge developments in the industry, but incorporating those into a device would be expensive. Prohibitively so, in my opinion. The 3DO years ago was a marvel of a machine during the early-mid 90's, but it was $700, which was exorbitant! The company went bankrupt because no one wanted to shell out that much money.
You bring up valid points, but I don't feel the console market is ready to pay for such luxuries.