Gaming has come a long way from pong. Whether you’re still playing Dwarf Fortress or constantly chasing the thrill of playing the latest and greatest releases, there’s no doubt that the world’s tech innovations have found their way into your experience.
Much of the future of gaming depends on the applicability of some of the most advanced tech in the world and making its way into your games. Whether this is the smaller form factor of powerful CPUs and GPUs, AI or even the mixed reality of VR and AR, this tech is inevitable and has even already been applied to many of the next generations of video gaming classics.
Table of Contents
1. Increasingly Portable Tech:
As touched upon just a little earlier, things are getting smaller. Just looking at a stick of 128- megabyte RAM from a decade ago and comparing it with a 64-gigabyte stick tells you the whole story. While performance goes up actual size remains the same or, sometimes, even smaller.
Steam Deck
This could never be more true than in Valve’s Steam Deck. Whilst similarly sized platforms like the Nintendo Switch can, at best, run Witcher 3 at low res, the Steam Deck is pushing graphically demanding titles like Cyberpunk 2077 and giving them a run for their money.
Although not a faultless piece of tech, the Steam Deck shows the world that portable gaming is maturing. This is largely driven by the incredible advancements in hardware that allow such powerful specifications to be held comfortably between your palms, together with increasing support from the largest gaming platform in the world, Steam themselves.
Mobile games
Although the Western market might not be ready for it, mobile gaming is here to stay. Phones have been releasing with more and more powerful tech, even on budget devices.
This allows games like graphically advanced titles like Genshin Impact, Diablo Immortal and even online casinos with some of the best online pokies to function well portably. The truth is that affording a whole computer or the time investment is not always available, which makes mobile gaming both highly in demand and now viable with advancing tech.
2. Bending Reality – the future of immersion:
Gaming is no longer screen-bound. The age of a single CRT monitor providing all your gaming needs is long gone, especially with the advent of many games using both virtual and augmented reality to improve your experience. Immersion, after all, is the entire point of certain titles.
VR – Virtual Reality
Virtual reality is almost a tired topic at this point, but it is nonetheless still relevant. Virtual reality can be applied to a number of corporate, productivity-based problems, but what about gaming?
With hits like Beat Saber, Resident Evil 4 and No Man’s Sky, the library of good VR titles is rising surprisingly fast, although not yet in competition with consoles. With the tech becoming cheaper and more accessible, VR gaming is sure to skyrocket as demand, in turn, increases.
AR – Augmented Reality
As interesting of a technical advancement as can ever be made. Your reality and the world of the games you play are beginning to meld together as depth preceptors and 3D modelling tech bring elements of your game to the physical world that you can actually see interacting together.
DualSense – Haptics
The PlayStation 5, surprisingly, launched two years ago. This has given us enough time to truly digest the main features of its new DualSense controller: haptic feedback and adaptive triggers.
Neither of these is really a new concept. Haptic feedback has been the little rumble emanating from your phone when you type a letter for years. But how does it feel on the PS5? Both features allow the PlayStation 5 to have an incredibly immersive feel, where not only the sound design and graphical fidelity of a game are advanced, but the physical sensory experience too.
Voice Recognition
Once again, not necessarily a new concept. But as it is adapted in Phasmaphobia? Fantastic. The horror-puzzle game brings your mic and real voice to the forefront of your detective work.
Entering a new era of adaptive gaming, voice recognition allows the user to verbally lure or communicate with ghouls and ghosts by saying their names or other associated phrases. This enveloping experience ups the fear factor of the game by a vast amount.
3. Graphical fidelity: rising as ever
Graphical elements of games are about to take a huge turn, not only in accessibility for the developer but likewise for the user who is playing through the games themselves. Both Software and hardware have gone leaps and bounds to bring us truly revolutionary experiences.
Unreal Engine 5
Perhaps the most exciting news for graphics enthusiasts since the launch of its predecessor, Unreal Engine 5 promises to be the next big leap in gaming fidelity. Game engines, much like their car counterparts, are the core of any gaming experience, providing the actual feeling of a game as one traverses the world.
UE5 adds an incredible new layer to its design with lighting, shadow, character creation and even a world partition tool. The latter of which allows even larger and more expansive game worlds to be created without the need for constant loading screens. All of this and more is free for any studio willing to give it a try, with UE5-using games launching in 2023.
4k, 120 FPS gaming!
If you looked at any TV a decade ago, there’s a good chance it would have been 1080P full HD. Fast forward, and you have the 4K TV and all of its high-resolution goodness.
This, eventually, will be translated into the gaming experience. As more people are getting advanced graphical hardware and the actual power to run games better, 4K, high-FPS monitors will eventually become economically viable for the consumer to purchase and ogle at!
4. AI – How will this impact my gaming?
NPCs – No Longer Stupid!
Non-player characters have historically been developed by code monkeys pre-programming their entire route to be infinitely repeatable at the whim of the player. Naturally, this experience becomes dull after the 1000th time seeing the same behaviour over and over.
Artificial intelligence, with the vast advancement of neural networks and deep learning technology, might soon be able to change it all. Servers are already starting to run the tech that allows perceiving and synthesizing intelligence to begin creating wholly unique reactions to player actions and movements.
Procedurally Generated Environments
On top of creating the non-player characters that make game environments feel full and bustling, AI can create the world itself, too. Soon, game worlds may even be player-unique.
AI-generated art is already all the rage, and a digital environment that reacts to the player organically shouldn’t be too difficult to follow up with. Developers can begin to create games with a sole focus on combat and story, with the environment and enemies an afterthought as AI can do that in a manner totally unique to each player.
The Future of the Video Gaming World
Video games are not the fad we once thought they were. These days gaming is as popular as it ever was, with more and more people hopping on the train daily. Video is, after all, one part of video games and the premier form of communication.
Hopefully, in the next few years, we will finally get to see the outcomes of most of this new technology still unfortunately in its infancy. Perhaps the most interesting advancement is the way that gaming is seeping into the physical world, with modern games more immersive than ever before.
