According to a segment of a question and answer section on IGN, Microsoft will be launching the successor to the Xbox, currently bedraped with the moniker Xenon, in 2005.
?Microsoft will release the successor to Xbox in 2005,? writes the site. ?And by the way, if there is still any doubt about this happening, now’s the time to put it to rest. I’ve seen some holiday 2005 plans from publishers and several of them have major Xbox 2 titles scheduled for next November. I could name specific franchises and brand new IPs. It’s really happening. And from the looks of it, there are going to be some pretty impressive launch titles.?
Panzer Dragoon Saga II, anyone? Now before the pessimism gets out of hand, just consider the possibilties here - the outlook is looking REALLY good at this point.
I think it’s too soon to releae X2 when the Xbox is only what? Three years old now? Also considering the failure of the first Xbox in japan;I can’t see
the sequel doing that well in japan or jap developers jumping at it. But I do recall somewhere that Xbox to bill gates was just an experiment to see if it could crack the market and especially Japan and the X2 was the real machine. Well all he proved is that he did n’t need jap support to make the machine a success in the west. It will be intresting because te real battle between Sony and MS has n’t really started yet until the PS3 is about to be released…
Couldn’t they come up with a more original name rather than just doing a Sony and showing complete lack of originality with their new console?
How about - Toncuboid? It’s a cuboid that…weighs a ton.
Exactly how much better than video game graphics become? I’m in the “no to photo-realism” camp, so is there really much more graphics engines can be pushed?
Wether the developers go for a realistic look or not, that’s their decision depending on the game etc. Still, do you feel that game worlds are at their best right now? You won’t be excited over games that offer, for an exagerated example, the complexity of “The Matrix”? Not excited over seamless huge worlds with more detail than anything we’ve seen so far? You wouldn’t like it if the PDSII wasn’t just a caricature symbolising an alien world but instead a place that actually seemed real while you were exploring it?
The japanese know how to present things better. So the enviroments will have so much detail and look pretty and all but it will essentially be the same game concepts all over again.Nothing really new.
How much better can they get? Have you seen Half-Life 2? Well, they go for a more photo realistic approach, but you can still take that level of detail (facial animations, environmental effects, physics, texturing, etc.) and apply it to any damn art style you want
It’s not that the Japanese are “better” artists… they just have a very minimalistic art style (manga) that is just abstract enough so you don’t notice a lot of the more ridiculous and/or unrealistic elements. US art style tends to try to be more photo realistic, and the more realistic you try to make something, the more the inconsistencies tend to stick out.
But, in defense of US artists, all I have to say is play World of Warcraft. Quite possibly one of the most beautiful games I have ever seen.
The reason I’m against photo-realism is, for me anyway, video games are a form of escaping from essays, coursework, part time work, my room needed tidyed…generally, real life. So if it becomes photo-realistic, it’ll just be like real life and therefor, not much fun at all.
If, however, Virtual Reality made a huge comeback and we could walk inside PD, then that would be very cool indeed. Until an Arachnoth flies up and makes us do something very embarassing.
I’d say there’s an important difference between a game that has photo-realistic graphics and game that is realistic, though; as the last few years have shown, games can look more and more believable whilst still portraying things that don’t happen in reality. Like novels, films, painting etc. games have always focused on genres and themes, and I can’t imagine that will change anytime soon; as long as developers don’t focus entirely on mundane games like tidy-your-room sims or shop-'em-ups, photo-realistic graphics shouldn’t be a negative thing, surely?
what Abadd said is very true, japanese are masters of minimalism.
however there is still hyperrealism that has aestheitics of its own, like the Final Fantasy movie, wich in that aspect was groundbreaking.
Oh and photorealism only means a CG image has to fool someone into believing it’s a photo. I can’t see where the point is in a game.
keep in mind though that CPU power doesn’t just mean better graphics, it also means better AI (wich is imensely CPU hungry) and better (or more complex, the average joe can’t tell the difference between a CD and 128kbit mp3, some have never heard surround sound either) sound.
Basically, all around less restriction on what the developers wish to do. They won’t need to device clever ways in making something that is kind of like what their original vision was, they will instead create just that…
Example: The reflective water of PDZwei was propably a pain to create -and a pain to think of a way to do it before actually creating it - while nowadays "real"reflections are a relative piece of cake with pixel shaders.
Meh, Arcie, for the reply you wrote to my earlier post: I’d think The Matrix (or whatever action movie you liked) was quite exciting to watch even tho it looked real and everything inside it reacted in realistic ways (meh, it’s a movie so, duh, real for a big part of it :P), why wouldn’t that apply to a video game as well…?
You also missed some of what I said I guess cos I stated the art style doesn’t have to look realistic even if it’s just as detailed as “reality”. Abadd made that point in his post as well.
I think Unreal Engine 3 is a good example of not being photo-realistic, but having realism and being very detailed- I would love to see a Panzer spec’ed up to this- could you imagine how the Float engines would look?
I partially agree with Arcie;that’s not to say I want developers to take the anime approach for example, tho.
If in a not so distant future videogames will be real as real-life or very close to it, I think part of the magic in videogaming is going to dissappear.
So long as developers continue to dream up fantastic science fiction and fantasy worlds, I think gaming should continue to keep its escapism appeal. This is one of the reasons that I mainly play RPGs and shooters over other genres, as they seem to be where the most creative worlds are in games (although not always).
Racing simulations on the other hand strive to make everything as real as possible - and they do that well - but once technology reaches a photo realistic, or almost photo realistic stage I can’t see those kinds of games evolving much.
Pushing graphics isn’t the most important part of gaming - I actually think that developers put too much focus on the graphics when they could be pushing other parts of the game forward - originality, gameplay, story telling, etc. However it never hurts to have great graphics, but it?s not the major innovation like it was in the transition between 2D and 3D.
HL2
