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Monday, June 24, 2013

Not Impressed With Next-Gen Graphics

Yeah I said it. I'm completely unimpressed with the "next generation" of gaming graphics. I thought I was the only one who thought this, but comments from the gaming community have assured me otherwise. Perhaps it's too early to say, but the PS4 and Xbox One are getting ready for launch. Here's a trailer of some of the upcoming titles...


Pretty damn impressive, right? But honestly, is this the next-generation?  To put it as nicely as I can, it's just a tad bit better than the current gen. Maybe we're just used to the enormous leaps that have occurred in previous generations. I mean, we went from this...

to this...

And then from this...

 to this..

Perhaps we've hit a plateau? I think perhaps we're not quite ready to take that enormous leap. It's merely due to the rules of marketing that Sony/Microsoft had to release new hardware to compete with after so many years. It's hard to argue with that, but there's a part of me that thinks maybe we can wait a few more years. 

I think the main reason so many of us are unimpressed is that it's hard for us to detect the minute improvements with our lousy human eyes. The difference between 8-bit and 64-bit is obvious, but what about super high polygon HD graphics and super-super high polygon HD graphics with better lighting effects? Yeah, it's getting a little less obvious. 

To be fair, the trailer just shows a bunch of development footage and pre-rendered scenes. Just like with the current gen, the graphics will improve once developers get a hang of the new hardware. But for now, all I can say is that I'm underwhelmed. What do you guys think? 

3 comments:

  1. Maybe they're afraid of hitting uncanny valley levels of creepiness? haha! But to be fair, I think because of the internet we're always up to date with new graphics where in the old days every what? 5 or 10 years? we're presented with something amazing that blows our socks off. I dunno maybe that's why everything seems less of a leap nowadays..

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  2. To be fair, the graphics of the first PS3 games look quite outdated compared to the ones released recently. This Kotaku article kinda shows what those games were like back in 2006.

    I think that the computer graphics are constantly improving, but it becomes more and more realistic / detailed that it is beginning hard to define or determine how much improvement there has been already. Sure, 2D to 3D, as well as increasing polygons from those in FF7 to those of FF8 is a big jump, but later games are really becoming hard to notice the differences.

    Maybe the comparison of next generation console games will become more obvious in another 5-10 years' time?

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    Replies
    1. Like I mentioned, it IS true that graphics constantly get improved throughout a console generation, so it would be fair to wait a bit before handing out a final judgment. Though, I still feel like the graphics jump was way more noticeable with previous generations.

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