@Aesthete18 said:
I too was rather disappointed. I remember seeing months ago one of the first gameplay of PS 4, the game was called Deep Down. I was blown away by the realism of not only the cutscenes but also what looked like gameplay. I was sold! on the 3 minutes or so trailer of it. Then they released PS 4 and watching some of the gameplay I honestly couldn't tell if it was PS3 or PS4. After 8 years they could have at least taken a leap further. It feels like PS3/Xbox was Arkham City and PS4/Xbox One is Arkham Origins.
To the guy saying it's all business, I understand that too and you're right. But do you remember when PS3/Xbox came out? It was a huge leap from PS2 and Xbox was a new console, even more experimental, there wasn't even a market for them, and most people were already loyal to Sony. I remember playing the first game I got, Gears of Wars and I was amazed at how much more superior it was to the previous console games. Even Just Cause, not a huge title, made an impression on me. And it just kept getting better. But this time they've set the bar so low, I know it's gonna get real good in a couple of years but it seems like they're still milking it.
The PS3 and Xbox 360 went from Standard Definition to High Definition outputs. Expecting to see another leap like that is unrealistic.
This new generation is going to have greater fidelity, but it's not going to be graphical fidelity so much as it will be an increase in the richness of the worlds they can create. There's simply not much more developers can do with graphics without reaching a point of diminishing returns.
What should be the focus though, is making the play space deeper and more interactive. For an example, I'll point to Dead Rising 3. At a glance, the new game doesn't look that much different from Dead Rising 2. But upon playing it, the differences stand out. This is a much richer world. More pieces of the world can be damaged or moved or blown apart. And the zombie hordes are no longer just copy/pastes of the same zombie types over and over. Go look at a screen capture from DR1. You'll see hundreds of zombies, but only about 20 different models repeated over and over. Now go look at a screen capture of Dead Rising 3 and you will never see the same zombie repeated. By procedurally generating the zombies using the new hardware they've made a world that can have thousands of on screen enemies all eager to nibble on your delicious brain at any given moment. And if you throw a bomb at them, it won't just blast the zombies and the pane of glass, you can drive through glass building and bust through fences. There are dozens more weapons and items at any given time and there are more ways to attack than ever before. Fidelity in gameplay, not just in graphics.
Now obviously not each game is going to make use of this. Assassin's Creed isn't going to write a whole special new ocean water interaction code for the 2-4 million people who may want their game on the new platforms or may not. But a year from now, two years from now, we can see this kind of stuff trickle down from first and second party developers to middle ware makers and eventually the third parties will make use of these techniques and options.
It's fine to expect a quality product for your money. But it's also important to keep your expectations in check and keep them realistic. There was no way the X1 and PS4 were going to be as big of a graphical leap as they were the last time when we went from SD to HD. It's not physically possible because that was coming out at a time of a major status change on the part of television manufacturers as well as better optical media all happening at once. This time, it'll be a bit better looking, but once we get to see the true benefits like more destructible environments or greater AI because of the high RAM count. But those things will require play time to experience rather than a screenshot to see.
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