Have we seen the end of the generational leap for consoles?

[bluegate]

The increased storage of the BluRay/HDDVD (the latter being a massive dud, though) also allowed for more raw game. A lot of that was more graphics sure, but higher quality audio, more audio in general and more complex level design were all things that were suddenly enabled when the 8gb per disk restriction was pushed to upwards of 40gb in one stroke.

Feel free to leave HD-DVD out of this story in future versions as it had nothing to do with gaming in that era.

PS4 to PS4 Pro...minimal differences slightly better resolution and frame rate, But basically the games look the same.

PS4 Pro was never meant to be a generational leap for the PS4, its main purpose is to provide better support for 4K television sets.

 

[Aiddon_v1legacy]

VR is the next big leap

LMFAO!

they sure are taking their sweet time getting that dead horse off the ground then it seems. VR was big for like 5 minutes and then for the last 2 years, people have barely talked about it LMAO!

Pretty much. All it's really capable of are "experiences" that are just tech demos or at best what are essentially old Lucasarts adventure games. VR is admittedly nothing new, it's just that we've finally gotten to the point where a headset "only" costs as much as a console (there's a priority; getting the costs down) and even with that the tech is STILL in its infancy.

But topic at hand, the point where I realized that the generational gaps are now smaller was when devs had to TELL us what the big leaps supposedly were instead of being able to SHOW us. And usually when they said what the (supposed) big innovations were, it was a string of numbers or a bunch of technical gobbledygook that made me want to say "Translate, ************!" That's when it was clear we'd finally hit the plateau. As such, it's possible we'll not see another "wow" moment in gaming for a couple generations because now it's really going to be about refinement and relying on raw design instead of letting power carry things.

 

[Insideout Ink Demon]

PS1 to PS2 graphical leap
PS2 to PS3 open world games leap
PS3 to PS4 loot box leap

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Not to belittle the RAM leaps of the last couple of generations but nothing has ever quite changed the way people play and experience a videogame like going from 2D to 3D. Everything this side of the 5th gen has felt like a natural evolution of mastering fully 3D graphics and enviroments. There was of course such a thing as faux 3D or 2.5D graphics (ie. Doom) before *actual* 3D though I think that was mostly (exclusively?) on PC. As far as consoles go, the way we relate to games has changed very little on a basic interactive level. I really believe VR - however it's packaged - is going to be the next leap but like I said there's a ways to go before studios master the form, let alone make it into the norm.

You're right and I never meant to imply that the 5th gen wasn't the most pivotal upgrade in terms of console generations. My quarrel was with the idea that the 7th gen was just about graphics, when it was the generation that brought with it most of the gameplay and game systems that we still use 10 year laters. It is not as pivotal as the switch to 3D, but it is way, way more significant then the relatively incremental upgrade in graphics between the 7th and 8th gen.

Sure, absolutely. Compare Red Dead Revolver (PS2) to Red Dead Redemption (PS3) to Red Dead Redemption 2 (PS4) and the three games chart an evolution in design that goes beyond graphical fidelity. It's all about versatility. No game could've been accomplished on the preceding console, HD prettiness aside. I just think that said evolution has been somewhat predictable so far. You can probably boil it down to how many algorithms can your console juggle at the same time, how many ways can they interact with each other and how seamless are these interactions. It's a titanic effort on behalf of devs as things gets bigger and simultaneously minute, but everything's still along the same pattern.

There's a ways to go with VR but just as 3D gaming felt like sci-fi pipe dream before we had it, VR may some day play out like the fantasies we have about it right now.

 

[Chewster]

I have PSVR and could they make it less cumbersome or wireless or whatever, and once the cost evens out a bit, I could totally see it being the future. I live in Asia and maybe it's just a fad but VR Cafes are all the rage these days, at least in Seoul.

The biggest problem for people would be motion sickness I reckon. I'm lucky in that I don't get it but I've had a bunch of people over to play that couldn't hack even the simplest games.

 

[Squilookle]

GTA IV stands as the testament to how significant the improved hardware of the 7th gen was. A world much bigger than previous games, a fully implemented physics engine, procedural reactive animations, a metric fuck ton of radio channels and licensed music, TV shows within the game and seamless transitions between open world activities and open world traversal, just to name a few things that weren't related to the graphics. There's a reason why GTA IV got such rave reviews at launch, because it was the game that showed just what the hardware of the 7th gen was capable of doing. GTA IV has also aged terribly and is today a mediocre game at best, with a lot of people questioning how it could ever get such unanimous praise, which shows how commonplace the revolutionary features of GTA IV have become. People tend to forget how constrained games of the PS2/Xbox era actually were in terms of design space, because the paltry memory and processing power at the tail end of the 6th gen put a pretty low roof on how complex games could be.

Really not sure what you're getting at here-

GTA IV was a smaller world, and contained less activity to do, and with fewer modes of transport than San Andreas had in the previous generation. TV shows aside, the radio and licensed music were a sandbox standard before IV arrived. And I'm pretty sure that even at launch, for everyone praising the euphoria physics there were just as many pointing out how your in-foot turning circle was bigger than a coffee table and all the cars handled like absolute ass.

If anything, IV was only a leap forward in graphics, at the expense of everything else. Oh and being the first GTA to introduce online multiplayer. Well, apart from the first GTA at least.