Many people have been talking about the concept of a 'One Console Future' lately, and whilst I do agree with some of the arguments in favour of this, I'm also a realist and know it's something that will never happen.
My own vision for the future of video games is slightly different. When you look at the ever increasing development costs of making a video game then you have to think about how the industry can possibly streamline some of the parts of development and cut costs at the same time. One part of development which takes time and resources is the game engine itself and it's becoming more and more common for studios to just buy in a completed engine and tweak it to their requirements, or in a studio like Rockstar, just develop your own engine and use it across all of your IP's.
You see some developers taking what must be an immense amount of time to accurately map an area within a game, like London in The Getaway, only for another game to spend time doing the exact same thing, like the London Circuit in GT5P for example. As HD gaming becomes the norm the amount of time put into these maps must be increasing because of the higher level of detail and texturing needed. Racing games are a prime example of this because each game like Forza, GT and even the F1 games will create their own carefully built maps to represent the same circuit. Now hearing news about the new Cry engine being able to theoretically map an area bigger than the size of our planet makes me think well why don't they map HUGE areas which can be sold on to other developers along with the game engine?
One accurately mapped city, say the size of London with surrounding areas maybe being maybe added on as updates, could be used for countless different types of games including FPS, Racing, Flight Sims etc with each games studio tweaking the map to suit their own needs.
This to me seems like an ideal solution to lower the development time and costs involved in creating some of grand scale epic games of the future.
I don't work in the video games industry in any way so there are probably countless flaws in my idea - but I would be interested to get some feedback on this all the same.
My own vision for the future of video games is slightly different. When you look at the ever increasing development costs of making a video game then you have to think about how the industry can possibly streamline some of the parts of development and cut costs at the same time. One part of development which takes time and resources is the game engine itself and it's becoming more and more common for studios to just buy in a completed engine and tweak it to their requirements, or in a studio like Rockstar, just develop your own engine and use it across all of your IP's.
You see some developers taking what must be an immense amount of time to accurately map an area within a game, like London in The Getaway, only for another game to spend time doing the exact same thing, like the London Circuit in GT5P for example. As HD gaming becomes the norm the amount of time put into these maps must be increasing because of the higher level of detail and texturing needed. Racing games are a prime example of this because each game like Forza, GT and even the F1 games will create their own carefully built maps to represent the same circuit. Now hearing news about the new Cry engine being able to theoretically map an area bigger than the size of our planet makes me think well why don't they map HUGE areas which can be sold on to other developers along with the game engine?
One accurately mapped city, say the size of London with surrounding areas maybe being maybe added on as updates, could be used for countless different types of games including FPS, Racing, Flight Sims etc with each games studio tweaking the map to suit their own needs.
This to me seems like an ideal solution to lower the development time and costs involved in creating some of grand scale epic games of the future.
I don't work in the video games industry in any way so there are probably countless flaws in my idea - but I would be interested to get some feedback on this all the same.
