Small Steps or Giant Leaps? The True Next Gen Battle

Now that E3 is finished for another year, the show has left us with a blur of new information regarding the coming year. There were some new Ips, some long dormant franchises are being resurrected, existing series’ are being continued, but this was no ordinary year for E3, it was a transition year. The big news from the show was a more formal detailing of the next generation consoles – Microsoft in one corner with their Xbox One, and Sony in the other with Playstation 4. While the reveals of new consoles and their software are usually an even to savor, much of the spectacle this year fell flat. People didn’t seem to be wowed by executive’s espousing the ways in which the leap from one generation to the next will transform the way we play (and experience) games. No, people seemed to find awe in the smallest of details…

Maybe the big draw for gamers moving into the next generation of consoles won’t be the amount of polygons being thrown around on screen, or even expressly the visual fidelity at which our new games are going to be rendered. Instead, maybe the big advantage of next gen hardware will lie in the ways in which they circumvent both our expectations regarding how games provide us with visual feedback, but perhaps more importantly, sidestep the technical limitations of aging hardware whose interference with our gaming immersion is so common to the core experience of playing games, that we can barely consciously register their interruptions anymore.

At this point, it would seem appropriate to mention Ubisoft’s impressive demo of ‘The Division,’ a title attached to Ubi’s long-standing and highly regarded stable of Tom Clancy games. While the game was certainly noteworthy for its ambitious blending of single-player and multi-player modes into a singular mmo experience, many journalists and gamers alike were fascinated instead with the visual cohesion of the title as opposed to the ambitiousness of its larger design. Two common moments that were commonly seized upon were a sequence when a character slides along the side of a stationary police cruiser and closes the slightly ajar door as he passes by. The second moment came a couple of minutes later when the player is faced with a variety of pick-ups, and visibly grabs, and appears to take, a bottle of water. So why then, when faced with a variety of impressive design goals are we fascinated by two cool, but seemingly inconsequential moments? The answer might be more complicated (but far less trivial) than it appears – they directly contradict the tropes of game design that we implicitly adopt to suspend our disbelief in games. Not in the stylistic or narrative content of games themselves, but the technical shorthand developers employ that stands in the way of our full immersion within the experiences they deliver us.