I had an idea the other day. It was Will Wright's, but I'm claiming credit for the application.
Widely accepted as fact:
The games industry is locked in a graphics arms race. You can sell big numbers if you've got the best graphics, but each new advance in visual fidelity raises the consumer's expectations. Games need more and higher quality content every year. As this pushes the price of development up, as the price of failure continues to rise, publishers grow more conservative. They won't try unproven concepts and won't endorse decisions which could restrict a game's appeal. The former doesn't bother RPG fans - the RPG achieved perfection in 1997 - but they don't care for the latter at all.
A reasonable but unsubstantiated prediction:
I expect diminishing returns to impose soft ceilings on the price of game development. For a given artistic style, developers will reach a point beyond which more detail and special effects will no longer pay for themselves, as they won't make enough of an impact to sell enough additional copies. (A soft ceiling, because other forces like the skill base of a company would still drive graphical development.) The folks chasing photorealism, and realistic human expression in particular, have a long road ahead of them, but I believe that some of the simple and cartoony styles could finish up in this generation. Playing the new Sam & Max from Telltale, a 2D game in 3D, I found myself thinking that a few more polys on those curved surfaces would make it look as good as I could want it to. In general, I think we have lower expectations, or
fewer expectations of games which don't try to mimic reality.
I love you, Will!:
At GDC05, Will Wright
revealed his solution to the content problem, that players would create it for him. His team of rockstar programmers made this possible by constructing editors which automate away over 99% of the work in modeling and animating a character. The user snaps together body parts, molds them with simple controls, and picks colors and textures for the final product. Procedural animation brings it to life. The programmers sacrificed the flexibility of a modeling package for extreme ease of use.
Wholly baseless speculation:
I believe that untold thousands of artists would make the same trade, flexibility for convenience,
right now. Games which would never compete on their graphics could use modularly modeled and procedurally animated characters as a basis for further customisation. The limitations of such a toolset would suit it to simple, cartoonish styles, but as the technology matured, when developers could buy royalty-free licenses for parts and animation routines as easily as ad companies buy Poser models, the variety of uses could expand until only the reality fetishists could afford to do it the old-fashioned way. And it would have terrific benefits for the productivity of a small team. I've followed the FPS modding scene from the beginning, and for years modeler/animators have been THE limiting resource. When models make themselves, all things become possible. Even real RPGs.
It just seems so obvious to me. I mean, how many games have hunched-over green humanoids with tusks and pointy ears? Which the artists built one polygon at a time? And animated frame-by-frame?
Stupid. Waste is stupid.
What do you think? What have I missed?
[Edit: One obvious objection is that I only talked about character generation, since modeler/animators are just nowhere, but there's an equivalent (and similarly hypothetical) procedural genesis tool for any other organic element of a game. The entire natural world was created procedurally, after all.]
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