Gaming innovations since 2005

[Pifanjr]

None of them are about graphics. Physics engines are all about how things move. (Optics, electromagnetics, thermodynamics, and plenty of other physics topics aren't physics to gamers, as I understand it.) So the motion of solids, fluids, and cloth are the big ones.

The first car explosion I remember that actually had bits flying off was in City of Heroes' 'hazard' missions, where they had your villain run around town smashing stuff. You could smash a car and BOOM! Wheels fly off and various other pieces go flying - how many depended on how good your CPU was. You were best off with a dedicated physics card, though. Now'a'days we can kick over bikes and not think twice about it.

Physics engines could use a lot more work, too. Waves on water look a lot better now but are still too regular. I haven't ever seen a believable surf hit a beach.

I would consider all of those "graphics", unless the pieces that come off of the car have an impact on the gameplay. Wavy hair and clothing is all physics too, but is just there to make the game prettier.

Happy to be corrected, but I'm happy to No True Scotsman touch screens and float away merrily in that bubble.

I agree, touchscreen controls, while a major innovation for the gaming market as a whole, have not had a big impact on PC or console gaming.

If you went back to 2005 and showed someone from that time some of the games we have available now their minds would be totally blown.

But what would their minds be blown by, besides graphics and scale? That's really the core question here.

 

[ZedClampet]

Wanders off thinking about Wave Race 64.

Wave Racer on N64 is one of my all-time favorites. That was such a great console. Played Golden Eye on it. Mario 64 was extremely fun, too. But I probably put more hours in Wave Racer than anything. A few years ago I actually downloaded an emulator just to play Wave Racer, but it was a little clunky on the emulator, and I didn't enjoy it as much.

 

[ZedClampet]

I would consider all of those "graphics", unless the pieces that come off of the car have an impact on the gameplay. Wavy hair and clothing is all physics too, but is just there to make the game prettier.



I agree, touchscreen controls, while a major innovation for the gaming market as a whole, have not had a big impact on PC or console gaming.



But what would their minds be blown by, besides graphics and scale? That's really the core question here.

How about Steam in 2024 with tens of thousands of games, user reviews, streaming, Voip, Remote Play, and on and on. Going completely digital may be the biggest (positive) change since 2005.

I don't think, other than Steam, scale and connectivity, that I, in 2005, would have been blown away by anything including graphics. By that time, it was clear that near picture perfect graphics were on the horizon. What wasn't clear, at least to me, was that games would be able to create an entire galaxy with no loading screens. Or an entire, earth-sized planet. That's still blowing me away right now, much less in 2005.

 

[Kaamos_Llama]

But what would their minds be blown by, besides graphics and scale? That's really the core question here.

Something like Doom/Doom Eternal, I'd never played a single player game that was that hectic and brutal before, with the kind of combat puzzle of using certain weapons against certain enemies.

The scale and amount of interactivity in Baldurs Gate 3 was is ahead of any CRPG before, and it was amazingly well polished in terms of voice and characters.

Before the new Xcom in 2012(?) that kind of turn based game was basically dead and theres a whole host of games that have riffed off of that now.

The melee combat of a Dark Souls or Elden Ring didnt exist back then nor did the art work and vision of the weird Lovecraftian worlds that went into them.

Disco Elysium whether people like it or not is unique in that it has no combat and uses dice rolls with incredible art work and story choices that adapt around failures as well as successes.

Wildermyth does weird narrative lego (thanks Ken) stuff that was new.

TitanFall 2, Dishonered 2, Alan Wake 2 and Control all had weird timey wimey trippy dippy levels that shift around the player, voluntarily or not.

Returnal is a third person shooter with Bullet Hell gameplay translated from 2d. Remnant: From the Ashes used templates to proc gen levels in 3d that made every playtghrough slightly different with different bosses.

Not to mention a whole host of weirdo games like Loop Hero or Undertale and probably a million other indies I've never heard of.

Just off the top of my head from looking at my Steam library. Maybe none of those are sea changes, but if you put me in front of any of those in 2005 I would have been pretty amazed.

 

[Brian Boru]

whats this got to do with innovation?

You described the foundation of innovation! If you don't lie how the priorities work, change them. Mostly works in say the pharma industry—very difficult to release a half-finished and untested drug on the market. Because we the people decided we wouldn't put up with that.

That said, pharma isn't perfect by a long shot either, so don't bother knocking it—I agree Anyway, point is, WE are the problem, not the companies responding to our demands.

 

[Brian Boru]

what would their minds be blown by, besides graphics and scale?

I mostly agree with you, apart from the exceptions mentioned in my earlier post "emergence and quick dominance of digital delivery via Steam et al … birth and steamroll of mobile gaming"

Other than that, let's see [taking some liberty with 2005 constraint]:

4X—done differently and bigger sure, but better than Civ4?

RTS—No, definitely no blow-aways.

FPS—Crysis graphics stand up today, had destructible environment, interesting tactical gameplay, as much boom-boom as you wanted—drive tank, call air strike. Didn't have strategic elements of today's best, but certainly not blown away by anything today.

RPG—Not blown away by how much worse it is today, so that's another disappointment… dang things are getting better, if anything.

Builders—I'll give the whole Factorio and Satisfactory genre props, their wildest constructions are genuinely impressive.

Summary—as industries mature, innovation slows down as what's good becomes more apparent. Video games aren't mature yet by a long way, but maybe halfway there from the days of Spacewar and Pong.

 

[Colif]

Wave Racer on N64 is one of my all-time favorites. That was such a great console.

i only stopped playing that game when the battery on the cart died and it wouldn't save my scores anymore. That took a few years though. It was a fun game, and there really aren't many games like it now. Two of these are Wave race and rest look like mobile games... whats with that, are people afraid of the water?

Jet Ski Games: Top 10 Games You Should Have to Try! [Video] - JetDrift

Are you looking for the best jet ski games for PC, PS2, PS4, or XBox? We've collected the 10 best jet ski racing games for you!

www.jetdrift.com

Ideal game to use water physics in.

 

[ZedClampet]

i only stopped playing that game when the battery on the cart died and it wouldn't save my scores anymore. That took a few years though. It was a fun game, and there really aren't many games like it now. Two of these are Wave race and rest look like mobile games... whats with that, are people afraid of the water?

Jet Ski Games: Top 10 Games You Should Have to Try! [Video] - JetDrift

Are you looking for the best jet ski games for PC, PS2, PS4, or XBox? We've collected the 10 best jet ski racing games for you!

www.jetdrift.com

Ideal game to use water physics in.

Those two Riptide games look good to me and have pretty good reviews. I may just give them a try.

 

[Colif]

I seem to remember having it on my phone a few years ago, but I didn't play it.

 

[BeardyHat]

Accessibility of both game development and game availability in general.

More types of people are creating games these days and while many are in already defined genres, there's so many weird things I'm able to play these days that I wouldn't have imagined in the past. Snowrunner? Who'd have thought I'd just enjoy strategizing how I'm going to drive a truck from one end of a map to another to deliver a thing.

Rimworld? Similar to old style RTS games, sure, but I can pause anytime and I'm focused on just a few people and seeing if they can survive for a long period of time.

Monster Train? Building a deck of creatures and figuring out how to get them to stack their various buffs to complete a level.

I could keep going, but you get the idea. There are so many easy ways to create games these days and access to computing hardware is so affordable, that there are so many people able to create games for the rest of us to enjoy.

Of course, all of this and pretty much all of gaming history is at my finger tips at any given moment. Hear about a game I missed on a podcast? Bing-Bam-Boom, it's now in my library. No need to write it down, head on over to Best Buy or EBGames and hope that they might have heard of it and it's in stock for a fair price. Moreover, I might already have it in my library and all I need to do is double click and walk away; no need to insert or change disks, select hardware, etc, etc.

Then we also have emulation: Now we have access to an even greater library of games and emulation is only getting better and encompassing more games and more systems than ever before. Going hand in hand with the above paragraph, I can access whatever I want, whenever I want it, it's just a few clicks away.

It seems like a less exciting 20-years from 2005 to now, but I'd argue that's because 1985-2005 saw a complete rewrite of what games could be and how they were presented. We went from Zork to Resident Evil 4 in that time, it was a huge change. Now, the changes are less obvious as a lot of things has calcified, but there is still plenty happening, even if it's less obvious.

 

[Brian Boru]

It seems like a less exciting 20-years from 2005 to now, but I'd argue that's because 1985-2005 saw a complete rewrite

That's the typical progression of any new industry. There were ~200 auto makers 100 years ago, trying all kinds of approaches.

The next 20 years of AI dev will be a lot more dynamic than the following 20 years—same for machine learning, robotics, fusion and any other newish adventures.