On The Future of Video Games - There is hope! (Euclideon, Star Citizen Beyond)

f you are a developer, or just a gamer, modern titles can be quite depressing. The feeling of "this is as good as games are gonna get" is enough to make anyone a little nauseous. Admittedly, we felt the same feeling half a decade ago... and half a decade before that.
It seems inconceivable though, that visuals will take any more leaps forward. We're limited by VRAM and face-count. That will never change. New CPU/GPUs come out and the game market scuttles after it. Thats how it's always been right?

With the emergence of Australian company 'Euclideon' and their witchcraft there's been new hope. Unfortunately unless your in the point-cloud data industry their technology is very much useless, or will be for years to come. Why? Well in the process of slaying the evil polygon-based-rendering system its dragged video game graphics back 10 years. We will all need to re-think how to use and implement textures, shaders and any other system you care to name. Not a great trade-off is it?
So yeah, Euclideon might be the future... in the future. If you were hoping for unlimited detail with all the bells and whistles developed for polygon based rendering before 2020 then don't hold your breath.

Thats a blow. However it's certainly not all bad news! The rabid desire to chew data that video card developers have stroked since the early 2000's is a seriously great thing. Its accelerated computer hardware like nothing else could. The mainstream consumer has become a hardware manufacturers dream. No longer will they have to rely on the audio-visual studios!

But that was then, and this is now.
Star Citizen is a game I will be referencing for the next few articles. If you don't know what it is then I suggest you consult the "webby-nets"

Star Citizen, developed by Cloud Imperium games is a great example of the future of this medium. Its a space sim and for those who don't like space simulators you're bum outta luck.

Over the last 2 years what have we seen as the trend for gaming genres? Zombies right? DayZ, The Last of Us, Infestation: SS, project Zombiod and so, so many others. Before that? MMS games, Call of Duty being the leader in that day and age.
And now? Well that'd be Space Sim games. Why?
Quite simple, two of the worlds largest entertainment studios are developing Star Wars. DICE is working on Battlefront III and the new triligy by Lucasfilm Ltd. I don't remember when the original Star Wars movies came out, something to do with "not being born yet" i'm told, by going by the most recent, it caused quite the curfuffle. Hype loves hype so you can bet on the blessed grandmothers whiskers (thanks Christopher Paolini) that the popular market will love this upcoming space excitement.

Yeah so?

Star Citizen will set the stage for the Space hype, just as DayZ did. The revolutionary "modular" approach will become the new norm in large-scale game development. But in reference to my earlier points regarding the hardware market here is what this new genre will present us with. Scale.

Scale
The size of these new games will overshadow anything you care to imagine. Actually its hard to imagine scale in the current pool of titles. Nothing with anything like what we will see in the next 2+ years come close.
Expect everything from building an empire with your mates to tax dodging and planet exploring. Space exploration presents some of the most beautiful potential for much-needed verity on open-world games that we have seen yet. Forget a snowy landscape of dragons and surly nordic farmers.

Hows that possible, scale isn't an Engine?
I firmly believe that procedural generation capabilities put in the hands of artists this coming year will revolutionize how games are made. If you have a space sim its all well and good to model ships and characters the traditional way but how to you provide hundreds of planets and thousands of cities?? You generate it virtually.
Take a look at some of the current planet engines, here on this very asset store. Proof enough its possible?
All you need is hardware capable of calculating vast amounts of data like temperatures, rock mineral content, types of foliage and so on.
A team of artists can create 20,000 different species of flora and come up with 1000 textures for the generation engine to combine but it's completely impossible for those artists to place that data by hand on hundreds of life-sized worlds.

What have we learnt today?
That scale and detail is the future of gaming. That space-based titles will be everywhere in the next few years and that Euclideon isn't quite what some people where hoping. Might be one day though, fingers crossed.

Check out my other articles ​

▌ ► Visual Effect Over Saturation in Modern Games - When Will it Stop?
▌ ► Unity 3D is Missing a Trick - Here's Why.
▌ ► On The Future of Video Games - There is hope! (Euclideon, Star Citizen Beyond)
▌ ► Modular Approach to Video Game Design Content Addition.
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Last of Us really isn't a classic zombie game. It has some small parts with mushroom infected, but the majority of the game is vs humans, and doesn't serve as a good example for the zombie genre. It's more of a story of how low humanity can fall, and the relationship between joel and ellie.

Earlier examples of procedural work, which would benefit your article would be referring to the all time classic Elite.

 

Thats true although I believe the game can be classed in the "Zombie" genre if viewed from the outside.

Yeah, I didn't expand much on that this time, i'll be sure to do so in the future.

 

Why should I put any hope toward Star Citizen over, say, Elite: Dangerous, when the only thing we've actually seen from Star Citizen is a very barebones hangar demo? The only thing SC is doing right now is turning all the settings up in CryEngine to maximum and using some incredibly basic scripting. Elite: Dangerous at least has us seeing actual gameplay demos.

edit: Hell, why should I assume that space sims are going to be the next big thing when nothing has come out to actually show that'll be as huge a market as you say?

 

For last plus five years or so we have had more variety, more volume, more platforms, more experimental designs and more business models than ever before. So... nope. It has been pretty darn exciting.

But yeah space sims seems like the hottest hot. Although I too would wager on Elite. Going forward I'm guessing we will also see alot of CCGs and adventure games. CCGs because Hearthstone has been ridiculously popular and lots of people are going to want a piece of that pie. Adventure games because of Telltale Games' recent success, really. But it hasn't been just them (Gone Home is great, good job lads). It will be also interesting to see how this whole old school CRPG thing will pan out.

 

@ The duck,

What exactly are we talking about here? Current gen consoles or top of the line desktops? There's still a huge gap between to two, whilst on the fly VRay style rendering can't be run in realtime as is.. It's just a matter of time.

On the matter of scale, a fair few games from ages past needed at least 50 hours to complete a game if you bypassed all the side missions. Some games being released currently can be over before the game even appears to begin, so it all depends on what the developer is doing.

 

Hi,
I was just discussing the form future titles will take. I'm not talking about how "fun or interesting" current ones are merely what for future games will take. The general consensus is Space-based simulators.

@Yoska
By depressing I mean its hard to see a future easily. Its always: "this is as good as it gets" although that feeling seems to re-occur every year.

@Murgilod
I did not base my research on SC, it was simply a great example of this upcoming era in gaming. Use any thing like EVE: Valkyrie, Elite: Dangerous or Star Citizen if you want but once you start looking into the polls, forums and crowd-funding projects its easy to see the truth.
For instance: Space based games raised more money through crowd funding over two years than any other genre. The margin continues to grow as SC and other SBG become more and more popular online, hence they raise more and more money.

 

I'm not sure anyone is actually saying "this is as good as it gets" though. It's not even something that most folk will think about. The point of a good game isn't its size or scope or even its genre or technology but simply how fun it is to play. To achieve that "fun factor" you can employ anything you want, new game mechanics, a new game idea, graphics, proceduralism, storyline, etc, but it doesn't have to be everything all at once.

If your beef is simply with the state of graphics, well then what would it actually matter if it were as good as it could possibly get? (Not that it's anywhere near close to that currently). The real world is as good as it gets visually, pen and paper was as good as it got for writing for thousands of years, didn't seem to stop anyone from writing the classics or writing full stop. Paints are as good as it gets and still don't stop traditional artists from being creative or exploring the limits of their imagination. The tools are not as important as the hands that wield them, and their limitations are often the launching ground for the very creativity that we value in their respective fields. There is no reason to believe that computer graphics or game making will be any different in this should such a plateau in technology ever be reached.

 

Crowdfunding doesn't mean anything if the finished product tanks. These are all based on expectations, especially since nothing you've mentioned is actually out yet.