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Question of the Week Responses:
Technical Innovation in Next Generation Consoles
After
taking a break for coverage of Game Developers Conference 2005, the Question of the Week returns
with the replies to the question: "What hardware or software technical innovations
are going to be particularly important to game creators for the
next generation of console hardware?" As expected, the responses
were quite varied, ranging from input devices, through the return of "virtual
reality", to simply: "It doesn't matter".
It
Doesn't Matter!
A
couple of the answers we received pointed out that a great game
is a great game, regardless of technical innovation.
This
is actually a trick question. As a creator, your main focus is
just that: to create. This "Arena" has seen the coming
and going of various technologies and techniques. Some withstood
the test of time, while others faded into history. If the creator
focuses more on hardware and software, rather than focusing on
making the game better, then it won't matter how great the technology
is; they will never be satisfied with the results. Technology
is ONLY A MEANS TO AN END. Nothing more. As to answer the question,
that decision of innovation is based two-fold: one, the designer
of the software/hardware and the creator/gladiator in need of
that resource. There is no universal innovation that will appeal
to all designers, and there never will be.
-Michael Rivers
It's
the same in every studio, in every game, in every hardware cycle.
"If we had more memory...", "If we had a few more
CPU cycles...", "If we could just push a few more polys...".
Enough with the "If we had". The fact is: the original
Nintendo, the original Atari, and the original Commodore 64 games
were, and still are, lots of fun.
Given
a previous generation's AAA titles, our faster CPUs could create
more lifelike AI; more memory could hold more vibrant textures
and more fluid animations; and faster GPUs can render more lifelike
characters. But all of this "technical innovation" does
not improve the single largest selling point - the game play.
Our next great "technical innovation" is the realization
that every AAA game from the previous generation is technologically
inferior - but still more fun than - any current generation "B"
game.
-Kanon Wood, Cranky Pants Games
Greater
Realism
On
the other hand, a lot of the responses we received (one of which is particularly opinionated!) speculated that
the next generation will push realism to new highs.
Improved
physics and AI will probably be the big deal in the next generation.
With the release of high power graphics engines like Doom 3 and
Unreal 3 we should be hitting a plateau on the graphics race.
With the advent of multi-core processors and even physics co-processors,
as announced recently, we should be able to go leaps and bounds
beyond what we have done up until now. Hopefully in the next generation,
we will all focus on gameplay more, instead of just technical
innovations as many have been though.
-Derick
Eisenhardt, Electronics Boutique
Simple:
Art and code pipelines.
Everyone's
all excited about next-gen, but the reality is that next-gen games
will sell next to zero in comparison with current-gen games in
North America and Europe for the 2005 Christmas season. There
will be one Halo
equivalent that will sell a bajillion copies on Xenon, but it
will likely come from a Microsoft-sponsored developer.
The
GTA
franchise proved that gameplay is king, not good graphics. The
art is poor, but the gameplay is phenomenal. Microsoft, EA and
Activision all have loud voices when it comes to next-gen and
how good the games will be, but they're all basing their winning
strategies on re-hashing existing franchises with zero new IP.Most
developers/publishers are smart enough to recognize that they're
not going to get a big bang for their development buck for the
first iteration of next-gen, and they'll focus on the PS2 and
Xbox as their primary targets. They're all in the same boat of
making one series of textures/rendering improvements for next-gen,
then scaling them down to work on current-gen hardware at the
same time.
Some publishers are going as far as to split their
development between current and next-gen development teams, but
the end result is that they're stretching themselves thin. Once
July rolls around and they smarten up to the fact that current-gen
is running late, all those next-gen developers are going to be
poured into helping finish the current-gen titles in order to
meet the Christmas demand. As a result, the next-gen launch titles
are going to have maybe one or two cool features, but will be
generally weak in graphical and gameplay abilities.
The
smart developers/publishers are going to put a minimal investment
into next-gen for 2005, and learn from the mistakes of
publishers like Midway, Ubisoft and Eidos who are throwing lots
of money at X2. The real players are giving lip service to Microsoft
for the time being, and making launch titles with minimal staff,
knowing that it's throwaway work until 2006. By the time the PS3
is out in 2006, Electronic Arts and Activision will have learned from the other companies, and will also have their
next-gen art and code pipelines split from today's current-gen
developments.
We
won't see the real nice graphics take over until Christmas 2006
for next gen, trust me. No one knows what to do yet except allow
engineers to flail about as they spew great technical terms that
mean squat.
-Anonymous
The
added horsepower in the consoles to come will spur a new leap
in graphics benchmarks. As increased graphics abilities (through
code and art assets) is a tangible goal, one which is relatively
easy to schedule and manage; it is an instant gratification area
of games development and something you can present to press and
investors so that it will receive attention unproportionally relevant
in relation to the importance of the advancement of computer games.
It
will not be before the second wave of "next-gen" games
that we will see the true innovation that the added processing
power and hardware capabilities will give us.
-Soeren Lund, Deadline Games
In
my opinion, it's always a matter of efficiency and quality. Graphics
are a big part of the game, as well as interactivity. The industry
has been trying to come up with several ways to innovate our interaction
with games. Always trying to find ways to put you "IN"
the game. With the way technology is headed I wouldn't be surprised
to find a whole other web of access to an independent community
dedicated solely to gaming. A good example of this is the audio
industry, with services such as Sirius. It would allow gamers to
experience a new wave of technology. Take the N-Gage as another
example of this. I believe the next generation will definitely
be defined by portability, communication, and last but not least
kick-ass graphics.
-Anonymous
Intelligent
narrative will be important. The will develop software that can
create non-linear plot lines that gives players a real sense of
immersion within the game and influence over the story.
-Hugh McAtamney, DIT
What
I'd like to see for next-gen games is less effort put on rendering
and visual effects, but instead a greater focus on character
modeling, body deformation, animation, facial expression, clothes,
etc. The levels we're making nowadays do already look very good,
but what's the point in making the environment look ultra-realistic
if the people living in it look like cyborg-zombie-puppets? Believable
characters are the next big key to great, immersive, believable
game experiences. It should also give the player a better emotional
response through better anthropomorphism. I also would like to
see even more improvement in sounds and physics, with the same
vision of creating more evenly credible virtual worlds, instead
on focusing on graphics and rendering.
-Marc-Antoine Lussier, Ubisoft Montréal
Physics.
-David Wu, Pseudo Interactive
It
Comes Down to Data
With
games becoming bigger in size, a lot of our respondents expressed
their concern on how all that data would be transferred:
Above
all else is the ability to move data around really quickly. This
means either high bandwidth or at least a huge host of bandwidth-saving
features. If next-gen gaming is driving towards HD gaming, then
the content demands are going to be enormous. While code footprints
will overall be fairly small, the fact is that textures, models,
animations, hierarchies are all going to massively increase.Similarly,
we also need that much more memory and storage capacity for the
same reasons. Bandwidth and capacity are not substitutes for one
another, though; Both are a must. Whether that will actually happen
is something I'm very pessimistic about.
-Parashar Krishnamachari
Copy
protection and load times. Companies can't ignore the very real
affect on the bottom line when their games are pirated. Although
apparently futile, this is probably a major area where developers
are focusing.Also,
as games are increasing in size, load times have also been going
up. I would think that this has to be one of the bigger considerations
for developers as well.
-Jason Pilgrim, Joy Media
Depending
on who you talk to, you can hear some terrifying predictions about
the costs and team sizes which could potentially be involved in
building next-gen titles. There is no way the industry can support
teams twice as big, or ten times as big, or whatever, than they
are now. I
think the innovations will come in the form of tools which can
make developing and distributing games more easily. The industry
seems to now be waking up to the importance of middleware, and
I would hope to see new middleware products of a higher quality
than are available now.
As developers, it's the content we're concerned
with, and we won't be able to make any more compromises in the
methods we use for creating and delivering that.The
other thing which could potentially be the start of a breakthrough
in the way we make games is any technology which can tip the developer/publisher
scales in favor of the developer again. Steam has shown that online
distribution may yet become a viable way to sell games independently,
in great enough numbers to make such a thing worthwhile. Both
the PSP and NDS are rumored to support some form of downloadable
content that can be run from memory.
Although this approach is
fraught with technical and legal difficulties, if developers can
find a way to make it work for them they could bypass the need
for such a heavy marketing investment from publishers. By reducing
that dependency and lowering the budget needed to launch a game,
I would hope game creators could feel comfortable taking more
risks and being more innovative in the games they choose to create.
That can only lead to a healthier industry.
-Anonymous
Getting
data off media fast enough, and dealing with memory limitations.
As processing power allows more data to be used, feeding the monster
will become top priority.
-Anonymous
This
is a bit of a poor question, since it really depends on the type
of game and the ability of the developers to make good use of
the hardware.For
many developers, just having vastly more processing power will
be the most useful thing because they seem to have difficulty
getting their games to run quickly enough on current hardware.
For others, having more flexible and advanced graphical capabilities
will be more important, because they desperately want to make
their games look even more real than they do now.
Still others
will find that the increased storage available (both on media
and in memory) will make a huge difference to the size of their
worlds and the depth of detail which can be included in those
worlds. And for those who are there at the cold metal face, coding
for the specific machines rather than writing generic code which
will run on anything, the most important innovations will be things
like the multi-processor nature, or the vastly increased vectorization
capabilities.
However
I suspect that the overall single most important factor will
be the limitations - there will always be one thing which limits
us more than we want it to, which will most likely be speed of
access to data, both from media (even BluRay doesn't allow you
to access data that much faster than DVD, and it still suffers
from the same horrendous seek times) and from memory (which on
some systems is apparently no faster than it was on the previous
generation, for access to data which is completely off cache).
-Robert
Dibley
New
Ways to Play
A
lot of respondents think the future will bring new ways through
new technology to play the next generation of console games.
The
Nintendo DS is hopefully a sign of things to come. The platform
allows designers to customize an interface to suit their design
and not the other way around.The
one thing we always strive for but never really achieve in games
is a sense of immersion. I'm not surprised because as complex
as games and genres have been the experience always gets simplified
with a very generic control system. The same controller we use
on Madden 2006 is the same thing we use to play racing games.
Two different games, two different experiences, yet they are played
using the same controller.
With
all this talk of Nintendo's "Revolution" the thing I'll
be looking forward to the most is the controller design. Temperature/pressure sensitive hand-grips for example, could be used to reflect the
player's mood onto the character on-screen, heightening the sense
of immersion. For game design (and gameplay) to evolve, hardware
manufacturers must also evolve the tools that the player will
use to interact with their games.
Carlo Delallana, Ubisoft
Next-gen
console innovations? What the hell are you talking about? Sony
and Microsoft are doing nothing "innovative" with their
consoles, they're just jumping on the technology train and pumping
up the power. Nintendo, however, appears to be leading a totally
different direction. As can be evidenced already with the DS,
Nintendo is trying to return the industry to creativity instead
of power.
According to some wild rumors, the Revolution will
incorporate gyroscopic technology and will not use the A or B
buttons or the D-pad, both of which most gamers likely consider
required for a game. Because of this, it has been speculated that
the controls will involve sensors that detect body movement of
some sort. This can bring a whole new breed of first-person games,
with people actually acting as if they're holding a gun or a light
saber, or actually putting their hands on the wheel of a car.
Likely, this means more realistic physics in games, especially
in sports games. Imagine a football game where the player's natural
skill in throwing a football actually makes a difference!
-Alex Marsh
In
my opinion, the next generation console hardware will only be the
start for a new way in controlling games. This generation of hardware
was mainly about online gaming, but this is not as important for
gamers as publishers thought.The
real innovation of this generation was the EyeToy from Sony and
I think all next-gen consoles will come out with a built-in camera
and microphone.
-Christian Keichel
Voice
Recognition:advances
in this technology are going to revolutionize how we interface
with a computer. Even if speech doesn't completely replace the
manual controls of mouse/keyboard/controller/etc. it will at the
very least allow simultaneous control over multiple actions for
the user/player.
However,
there is a substantial chance of Voice Recognition failing miserably
in the market due to poor initial designs. As Donald Norman notes
in "The Design of Everyday Things", "...if the
product is truly revolutionary, it is unlikely that anyone will
quite know how to design it right the first time; it will take
several tries. But if a product is introduced into the marketplace
and fails, well, that is it... everyone believes it to be a failure".
I'm crossing my fingers that somebody gets it right the first
time...
-Jacob Gahn
I
would love to see biometrics incorporated into next generation
games: the ability to play a survival horror title with a controller
that can measure your pulse and perspiration rate. Also, having
a dynamic difficulty setting which increases as pulse and perspiration
increase or having the opposite occur for those who might get
too easily frustrated with a game.
-David Turkiewicz
I
hate to answer a question with a question but... how are the games
going to change in terms of playability? Are next generations just a
graphical change? Just a wrapper? More icing? Are graphics enough
to justify another $300-400 investment? I'm worried about the
developers whom can't afford to create $20 million dollar project
(don't forget marketing, which would probably be about half of
product development). Not to mention the fact that we are still fighting for the
same amount of money, if not less. Here
is another scare trend, as games begin to get more expensive to
make, the price keeps going down. Not exactly a winning ratio.
Every game is becoming a bigger and bigger gamble.
-Rhett Torgoley, Midway Games
I
believe you will find new hardware that allows for unprecedented
styles of gameplay will be the key to the next generations of
console hardware. The majority of games that come out these days
are just slightly improved remakes of games that were innovative
five years ago. (How many times do we need to buy a new football
game?) But
new hardware will revitalize all the tried-and-true formulas,
and be the easiest way to breathe new life into inevitable remakes.
Imagine
playing your football game with a device that tracks your real
world motion - so you can lean into the tackle, or picture a DS
touch screen device that lets you draw the circles and arrows
for your play from scratch, instead of choosing predefined plays.These
small innovations in hardware will be the easiest way to encourage
the kinds of unprecedented gameplay that the industry needs to
justify the upgrade.
-Warren Blyth, Naturalpoint
A return to the previously failed VR goggles. With current technology
they would actually work.
-Anonymous
The
work in Sharp research labs on flat screen (no 3D glasses) 3D
screens. Also, more
realistic ambient sound (wind in your ears, birds, etc.) and more
immersive surround sound integrated into game play and vital to
survival.
-Anonymous
And
on a lighter note for those who remember:
Without
a doubt, the single most important hardware innovation has got
to be Nintendo's Virtual Boy. It's all in red!
-Demitrius Pennebaker
Software
Tools, Platforms, and Middleware
With
the increased budgets, scale, and manpower anticipated to be necessary
in the next generation of development a lot of our respondents felt
that innovation would have to come in software solutions to streamline
the ever more complex processes.
As
with any profession, as a job gets more specialized, so do the
tools for the job. I would say that the most promising innovation
should come from the tools sector, particularly
tools that use a CVS-like Design Management system, for asset
management en masse. This, combined with other tools/plug-ins, will
definitely make software creation more efficient, reliable, and
easier to maintain as a whole.
Just
as the software development would benefit with module-like tools
that fit together with ease, so too would console hardware benefit
from the same. I can imagine all console sharing the same peripherals
and hardware protocols. In
short it would be nice to have a standard. I believe it will be
more and more important for game creators and such to work together
towards a unified standard that would benefit all parties involved.
Unity is perhaps the most important innovation of the future.
-Joseph Carr, Transplace
Given
the volume of data assets that will need to be created for next-gen
games, advanced content-creation tools will be crucial. In
particular, I think increased automation in content generation
will be required to reduce the amount of manual work involved
in creating complex environments, without compromising the final
artistic quality.
-Andrew Medlin, Ratbag Pty Ltd
First
class development tools (compilers, debuggers, performance analyzers)
are invaluable to game developers. It is especially so if the
complexity of the platform's hardware increases, as will be the
case for the next generation!
-Anonymous
Multiple-choice
NPC interactivity using not just believable, but character-specific
text to voice software and a reworking of AIML and its possibilities
in games. An
economic miniaturization of DLP projection technologies (Bringing
the TV with you) or maybe touch-screen TV interactivity. In
general, I'd like more tablet/stylus capabilities for mainstream
3D packages.
-Nick Edwards
Vertex,
Pixel Shader 3.0 and new game-controlling innovations (EyeToy,
touch-screen, microphone, etc.)
-Napan Jungpatanaprecha, Look-Kit Soft
Normal
mapping technology and Z-brush for use in making higher poly characters.
-Kyle Vannoy, Hypnotix Inc.
XNA
-Anonymous
Software
innovations: The new Unreal engine. Hardware
innovations: Nintendo's next-gen development kit.
-Anonymous
I
could see innovations, or at least more competition in the content
and asset management space. Everyone's anticipating (and showing)
huge growth in team sizes for next generation games, and if your
asset pipeline is a bottleneck, it better be on your agenda to
address, or get ready for some fun.
Real-time
collaborative content creation? Why not? Why create inconsistencies
by having separate designers building separate maps, or hitting
version control issues with map designers or artists, when you
could put two of them in the same map at the same time, either
building the scene together, building connected scenes, or bringing
in a graphic or sound artist on demand to build and/or suggest
elements. Not to mention, having a second designer on it, you
can catch problems or any bad ideas before they become problems.
And given the infrastructure, you could easily throw a QA guy
to break it, or a content reviewer (designer/QA) that's purposely
out of the loop just to identify potential problems that may have
been missed. Sure, it may be flawed if the gameplay and engine
are in flux, but in theory it could make map content crunches
more productive. Yeah,
that's my madness for this week.
-Mike Kasprzak
The
"HD Era"
One respondent in particular agreed with J Allard's GDC keynote echoing his
views on high-definition:
Rather
than any single innovation, I think that the continuing exponential
increase in processing power and available memory will have the
biggest influence on games in the future.
However,
I think the next "big innovation" will be the support
HDTV. The quality of the graphics in the upcoming round of consoles
will go beyond the limits of standard TVs and games played on
a super-sized high-resolution flat panel TV will look spectacular.
-John Bolton, Page 44 Studios
Conclusion
And
so ends this week's question of the week, hopefully filled with interesting
concepts regarding what the upcoming next-generation consoles are going to
bring. Tune in next week for new answers to a new question, and we'll leave you with this respondent's less-than-subtle salesmanship:
The
future will be online gaming real-worldism, or that's what I am
calling it. Of course, there will be animation and programming
innovations. However, the big innovation will come from the game
my company Howling Moon Designs is working on. It is a whole new
MMORPG that will integrate real world economic systems that will
allow people to virtually live a life online where they can have
a job in a game and earn real money inside that game environment.
As well inside this game players will experience an alternate
universe of love, hate, power, greed, and conquest. To learn more
about it email Lee Ing at sales@howlingdesigns.com
-Lee Ing, Howling Moon Designs
______________________________________________________
[Article
illustration by Arjan Westerdiep @ drububu.com, after Rembrandt.]
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Question
of the Week Responses: Techical Innovation in Next Generation
Consoles 
