I’m talking about the Xbox Next, PlayStation 3, and Okama GameSphere.
When consoles were younger, computer games were pretty much laughed at. They were cheaper, worse looking, and often literally just knock-offs of their more popular console counterparts. When I bought my Xbox in 2001, the only computer game I was playing was Everquest, which was already 2 years old at the time, so now I don’t really have a valid reference point to judge whether or not computer games were already better by then (thought I suspect they were.)
Now, obviously, in 2004, computers dominate the uber-geek powergamer market. Games like Half-Life 2 and Doom 3 laugh at puny consoles. Will the next generation of consoles be up to par with these games? Better? Worse?
Up until the last few years we saw a HUGE jump in graphics and performance with each console. Is that slowing down now? A lot of people think that computer games are vastly ahead of console games at the moment but think of the difference between Dragon Warrior (or the original Final Fantasy if you didn’t play DW) and Donkey Kong Country. They were one generation apart and the difference was night and day. Much more improvement from DW to DKC than from Halo 2 to Half-Life 2.
What kind of improvements will we see from this generation of consoles to the next?
So make your baseless predictions here, or better yet, base them on something!
Console hardware always tends to lag a little behind PC hardware. Consoles are sold at a lower price point, and even though when a console is new it’s sold at a loss, it still won’t be quite as powerful as the high-end PC videocards coming out at the same time.
That said, the consoles have a couple of things working to their advantage. First, since the platform isn’t constantly evolving the programmers can optimize the hell out of it. A typical console title is getting much better performance out of its hardware than a typical PC title. Also, since console games sell to a larger market they tend to have bigger budgets. Bigger budgets means higher production values means a more polished look even if the graphics engine isn’t displaying any more polygons.
With the Playstation 2 and XBox now several years old its not surprising that console games are looking kind of scruffy compared to new PC titles. But that gap will vanish again when the new platforms come out soon. You can expect the first wave of PS3 and Xbox 2 titles to look as good or better than Halflife 2.
I think that the biggest difference between console and computer game advancement is that consoles advance much more in discrete jumps than do computers. One company comes out with a console, another might come out with a competitor a few months later, and then you won’t see any new advances in the consoles for a few years until the next generation system comes out. With computers, on the other hand, a new system with a couple more megahertz of processor speed, or a better graphics card, or a little more memory, will come out every few weeks. At any given time, there’s going to be a game which requires the latest and greatest, but most of the games you’ll run on that latest and greatest system will run just fine on a somewhat lesser system. And even when the computer technology does make a genuine jump (486 to Pentium, say), you can still expect to run most of your old games on the new system, unlike most consoles.