The 8th Gen should be more about improving Environments, Secondary Characters and World Sizes

[Ssliasil]

Before I begin with my main point, I want to take a quick look at Ellie from The Last of Us...

 

The Last of Us:----

Ellies primary character model sports around...

15000 FACES:--- (In 3D Modeling, a Face is a single piece of geometry with zero thickness that fills in and bridges the gap between at least 3 Vertices to form a visible entity.  Verts are invisible dots in virtual space)

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15000 QUADS:-- (Quads are when a Face connects exactly 4 Vertices together; Quads are the most commonly used when sculpting models by "hand".)

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30,000 Triangles:-- (A Tri is a Face that connects exactly 3 Vertice Points.   There are always two invisible Tri for EVERY Quad, so 2 Tris make a Quad.  During the modeling process, the line that seperates the Tri's within a Quad is usually hidden so you cannot actually see the Triangles.)

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30,000 Polygons:--- (One Tri = One Polygon...Most of the time, after the primary sculpting of the model is completed, its Quads are converted to visible Tris to be better handled by the games engine)

In case you arent aware, the girl in the Photo above is Ellie from The Last of Us.  As seen above, her character model is made of around 30,000 Polygons.  While that is a very high poly count for the current generation, It is chump change for the coming generation.  The above looks AMAZING and it is hard to imagine it looking much better than it already does, with double or even triple the poly-count. 

But there is a Problem with The Last of Us, and virtually every game of the past few generations...Background characters and environments have dramtically lower poly-counts and texture quality than the Main Characters and more immediate or important objects, which often leads to either the Mains, or secondary characters feeling somewhat out of place within their own worlds.  The worlds them selves have even shrunk on average as each new generation comes. 

As a studying Game Artist I can undertand the reasoning behind doing this, players are afterall looking at the main characters more than anything else.  Not to mention that todays gamers are more and more about instant gratification from their games and that is something, whether we like it or not, that "Great graphics" provide to them.   But, do we really need to bring poly-count too much higher than they already are to give players that high?  Any more than 45,000 Polys for characters in future games seems like it would be a bit of a waste of processing power. 

I personally believe that instead of dramtically increasing the Poly-Counts of Main Characters/Objects to say 150,000 Poly's, this generation should be more about improving the overall graphical quality of secondary characters and environments, as well as improving draw distances and world sizes.  I think finally taking the time to improve these things would do so much more for the beauty of games than the traditional advancement of graphics.

We all want to play in games whose worlds feel alive, and I dont think there has ever been a better time to move toward that goal, than now.