The Purgatory of AAA Gaming

During my parental leave, which ends tomorrow, I played through quite a few video games - something I love and one of the easiest ways to spend time while rocking my baby daughter to sleep. And it doesn’t hurt that my amazing wife loves watching games about as much as TV or movies with me, as long as they are beautiful or cooperative in some way. All of these are.

They include, in order:

• The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap ^{Steam Deck}
• Carto ^{Steam on Windows} – also where my favorite Daddy-daughter song so far, Bond comes from.
• Tunic ^{Steam on Windows}
• Abzu ^{Steam on Windows}
• SteamWorld: Build ^{Steam on Windows}
• World of Goo 2 ^{Nintendo Switch}
• Oblivion Remastered ^{Steam on Windows}
• Balatro ^{Steam on Windows}
• Mario Kart World ^{Nintendo Switch 2}
• Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour ^{Nintendo Switch 2}
• Yoshi’s Island SNES ^{Nintendo Switch 2}
• The Alters ^{Steam on Windows}

And yes, I did pick the game from my favorite series that happens to be about miniature people as the first game my miniature daughter Alice would hear.

Most of these are indie titles, but the one I spent the most time on was the Oblivion Remaster - one which surprised me both with how good it looks and with how well it played. Oblivion is a 19 year old game, and a purely graphics-related overhaul should not have made it as good or better than modern AAA games releasing today, but in my opinion (and many others I’m reading) it absolutely did. How could this be?

Graphics

Well - I think that’s pretty clear. The only thing that has really improved about mainstream gaming in the last 20 years is graphics.

And boy have the graphics improved. Oblivion not only uses new techniques like ray-tracing and revamped 4K textures and normal maps etc, it uses the full suite of global illumination provided by Unreal Engine, which means when you turn the settings up, it depends on hardly any of the typical tricks games need to use, like baked light maps, instead lighting almost everything in the game dynamically or “procedurally”, including things like reflections of reflections and lit up dust and fog.

Yes, Oblivion still has some simplistic design in terms of how landscapes are laid out, but that simplicity might also be why people can run it with Unreal’s Lumen set up to run at ultra. Lighting is what’s really differentiating in video game graphics now, and fully simulated lighting beats or meets nearly every AAA game releasing lately that all cost tens or hundreds of millions of dollars to make.

Not Graphics

Left unstated is why nothing else has improved. Walking around Oblivion, meeting characters that have some scripted voice lines, responding to them with 1 of 4 options, holding down the left stick to sprint, and hitting a single button on your controller to watch your character animate a full scripted sword swing are all the standard gameplay of action-RPGs both 19 years ago and today. The same can be said of other genres - mechanics are largely untouched for the last 20 years outside of some common quality of life changes in how menus and inventory and HUDs work.

Here’s my theory for why: The games industry achieved the threshold of what was comfortable and possible with the current human-computer input and output mechanisms only a few years after they were technically possible. And those inputs and outputs have not changed much since the 90s. Looking at a flat screen in front of you and pressing buttons on a controller or keyboard/mouse is incredibly limiting for gaming. Increasing the amount of pixels on the screen and making that controller wireless don’t change the core gameplay. This is not really true for any other media than games. Reading, watching films, and all kinds of media in between essentially max out on one screen and limited input, but games immediately ran into forms of input and output as a barrier.

I wrote a little about this topic in my first post about VR and why I think it’s the future. The only true innovation in gameplay that is happening in two places:

• Indie, where one-man teams can come up with strange mashups and mechanics can execute on a vision spending very little. These are almost never totally genre defining, but they are inventive.
• VR, where we have only scratched the surface of mechanics that work and what is possible when the player’s entire hands and 3D field of view are in the game.

AAA game developers are excluded from the first by definition and are excluded from the second by their own financial decision makers.

So What? My predictions

Maybe people want to keep buying the same games with better graphics forever. I don’t think they do. I think those decision makers that aren’t investing in truly new AAA gameplay are short sighted. As long as we’ve been hearing that VR is the future and not seeing it totally come to fruition, at some point these companies that are milking the same game franchises for years will face the reality that people will only buy the same games reskinned with better graphics for so long. They’ll either be replaced by companies that innovate or individuals using AI that will be plenty good at recreating the same game over and over again.

I am hoping that the current hypestorm around AI re-kindles the ideas in the hearts of AAA game studio CFOs that they might need to invest in innovation and new ideas again. Some of the things that make Oblivion just like any RPG of today (Think about the four-option scripted discourse and stuffy voice lines as two) would be meaningfully different if AI was applied in the right way. And I think they’d be far more powerful experiences, just like I think VR games can be - so much higher fidelity and responsive to player input.

Here are my predictions of things we’ll see in the next decade or so, whether or not AAA studios are the ones to pioneer them:

A decade or two from now, we will look at the period of 2005 to 2025 and see that it was a period of a great stagnation in game innovation. This will be driven by a few key technological advances and the downstream game mechanics that will flow from those, stemming mainly from the areas of AI and what is now called mixed reality.

I’m going to make a few specific predictions of mechanics we will see in the future that will make the stagnation of the last 20 years totally transparent:

AI:

• In open world games, it will become standard for non-player characters to have fully generated dialogues based on motivations and incentives rather than scripts

• In open world games, players will speak directly or engage directly in some way with their own words that NPCs will understand and react to intelligently

• NPCs won’t have recorded voice lines, but will instead have voices generated in real time, and AAA games will start to make contracts with celebrity talent in order to generate their voice in games

• We will see a transition from the current minorly procedural elements of gameplay to full procedural generated worlds, especially where player actions and environmental events change landscape, buildings, etc dynamically

• Game art will go through an incredible revolution, and we will stop having massive teams of people creating 3D meshes and textures to drop around the world, with many of these meshes and textures being generated from prompts in development, but also being generated on the fly in games

Mixed Reality:

The first reasonable augmented reality glasses that consumers are willing to wear en masse will generate entirely new genres:

• A new genre of video board games, where gameplay happens in view of a group of people in the same physical space, on a table, on the ground, in a park, etc, that will incorporate video game elements such as computations that are too complicated for typical board games, with the advantages that board games have today where players can interact with the same physical pieces, point and gesture, and socialize in person

• Another new genre of exercise programs combined with games. This will go far beyond current treadmills that have built-in virtual run routes or virtual exercise classes, this will be exercise incorporated as a leveling or other mechanic that will incentivize players to get some exercise. I’ve had a lot of hope for this category for a long time, and the one major threat to it is GLP-1 drugs that may cause a serious decline in the need and desire for people to exercise daily for calorie loss

When will these happen? My specific prediction is that the next 3 years will be seen as the end of the period of stagnation we are in right now, a period that will be much more apparent looking backwards than it is from within. The combo of a decline in AAA game spending and AI hype feels like ripe conditions for innovation to return to gameplay - and my hope is that all of the other potential gameplay innovations ride the same AI wave.