The Escapist Bulletin: Bring on the brick wall

The seventh generation of videogame consoles is shaping up to the longest ever. EA’s CFO Eric Brown’s commented this week that current consoles prices are much higher than they were at the same point in the last cycle, and the very next day Nintendo’s Cammie Dunaway said in an interview that there was plenty of life left in the Wii.

While some may view aging hardware as cause for alarm, this extended generation might actually be good for gaming. Game makers are some of the most imaginative people working in entertainment media, creating entire worlds for us to enjoy, but much of that creativity has been invested in making games look ‘better’ - which is essentially code for ‘more photo-realistic’ - in a kind of visual arms race.

But before long we will reach a point where graphics simply cannot get any better with the current hardware, and developers and publishers will have to find new ways to impress us.

At that point, we'll hopefully begin to see some lateral movement by developers in terms of visuals, as standing out from the crowd will no longer be a case of how realistic your graphics are, but more a function of your art design as a whole.

Team Fortress 2’s design, for example, not only affects gameplay by making each class easily recognisable, even from a distance, but it also evokes the game’s 1960s-esque setting: something that would have been much more difficult to do with more realistic graphics.

Imagine the kind of games that we could have when developers are finally able to set aside photo-realism and all the creative baggage that goes along with it.

That’s not to say that the techniques and technologies that currently feature in games will suddenly become useless, but developers will have to use them in new and interesting ways. Consider the sumi-e inflected visuals of Street Fighter IV or the comic-book, illustrated look of Borderlands and then think of a world where every game has to look that interesting just to stand a chance of catching your eye.

Just as real artists began to explore new ways of depicting the world other than slavishly recreating it, giving rise to art movements like cubism, surrealism and expressionism, developers would have the chance to try new ways of engaging their audience visually.

Of course, graphics aren’t the alpha and omega of game design and there are plenty of other elements that go into making a good game, but when you change the boundaries of one, you change the boundaries of all of them, and by asking artists to be more innovative you require the same thing of the whole team.

With luck, the lack of new consoles will be like a renaissance for gaming and will see us exploring new looks, resurrecting gameplay styles that have fallen out of fashion, or trying things we might never have thought of otherwise.