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Halo Infinite
We’ve now seen the first showcase of the new generation of games, at least in part, from Microsoft and Xbox Series X, and it seems “overwhelmed” is the word of the day. It’s on all social media right now and illustrates the general reaction to Microsoft’s live feed. It was good, it had some good things, it wasn’t disappointing, it wasn’t overwhelming. It was spinning. It did not have so many shocking moments, a product of the format, transmission limitations and some basic truths. But even though we have bigger games to come,Halo: Infinity It needs to do more than just whelm, and the PS5 should have some heavy hitting, it also raises a basic truth about the next generation of consoles that will be difficult for people who sell them.
It’s all about diminishing returns – for years, manufacturers have relied on brilliant new graphics to sell new consoles, but that has become more difficult for years. Graphics will improve with Xbox Series X and PS5, that’s true. But they will improve in ways that are easier to see in side-to-side shots, and that’s a problem.
Diminishing returns have been with us for a couple of generations now. Arguably the most dramatic leap in graphics came with PlayStation and Nintendo 64, with the start of the 3D era, though NES to SNES was impressive, too. There was no mistaking what was getting there: here was Mario, suddenly rendered in 3D, running in all directions. PS2 was a little less dramatic, but still awesome: I still remember my jaw drop when I first played Tekken Tag Tournament, it’s still not such a bad game.
From there, a family pattern emerges. The Xbox 360 and PS3 offer remarkable and impressive improvements, but not as big a jump as what we saw from PS1 to PS2. The same goes for Xbox One and PS4. At launch, the games looked good but not entirely amazing. Ryse: Son of Rome It delivered some awesome character models, for example, but it did with some pretty intense game limitations that made them harder to appreciate. Killzone: Shadow Fall, on PS4, it was a first-person shooter that was a bit more impressive than the first-person shooter we’ve seen before.
And that brings us to the PS5 and Xbox Series X, of which we have already seen the first moments of the game. Sure, they are awesome! But the graphics have already improved so much over the course of the last generation that it can be difficult to determine how impressive they are, especially with the presence of Xbox One X and PS4 Pro. We’ve already had Red Dead Redemption 2, after all, and The last of us part 2 is on the way. The colossal effort required to make a game look so beautiful means that few can reach such a high level.
This is reflected elsewhere: Years ago, every game had to chase ever better graphics because that was a big part of the marketing landscape. Now, only dropped graphics is really just a selling point for a small number of gigantic AAA games, and the world’s largest games generally come with more limited images that allow them to play across a wider range of devices. Fortnite It looks good on a high-end PC, but for most gamers, superior hardware for that game is more about better performance than better fidelity. Some of the world’s most popular games are over 5 years old or even older, and they clearly don’t look as technically impressive as their modern counterparts. People are fine with that.
Xbox Series X and PS5 will be great for games of all kinds, from load times to performance, quality-of-life improvements and what seems like an experience with many softened weaknesses. The developers seem excited, and that’s exciting. Eventually, it looks like they’ll be able to take great strides forward in the way they present uninterrupted worlds, more complex simulations, and all sorts of other benefits of more powerful hardware. But everything is more difficult to show, and that makes selling these things more difficult.
I have a feeling that both Sony and Microsoft are ready for this. They are driving the ecosystem on individual machines, and they have many ways to make money beyond hardware sales. But it will make the launch of these new machines feel different than we’ve had in the past, more similar to the launch of PS4 Pro and Xbox One X than the Xbox 360 and PS3 have, for example.
There is still time to bring in the heat, and rest assured it will bring in the heat. But the spectrum of diminishing returns is not going to disappear.
