About the "eigth gen is only a prettier seventh gen" argument

[greenmedic88]

I will say that the jump from the NES to the SNES (as someone who lived through it) was essentially an update in technology from 8 bit to 16 bit that made the games prettier, cleaner and hey; more immersive. Most of my favorite SNES games, which remain all time favorites to date, were essentially "Super" versions of the games I played on the NES, with all its hardware limitations.

What do you know? Graphics do matter.

From a game play perspective, there weren't a huge number of advances beyond moving from 2 face buttons to 4 face buttons and 2 shoulder buttons.

Going back to the OP argument, I do see a lot of similarities between the shift from the 7th and 8th gens and from the 3rd and 4th (Master system to Genesis, NES to SNES).

The switch from low memory software, chip storage to high capacity optical media (and the unfortunate introduction of load times) was a big jump in how games could be developed. Storage space was a much smaller issue and it really did change the scope of many games.

The switch from local centric development to an online centric development also was a significant shift.

For the most part, any current game on the 8th gen could be run on 7th gen hardware, but as a stripped down experience; cross gen ports support this notion. Even the exclusives could be done on older hardware even though they would be scaled back.

I'm not really sure what sort of unrealistic expectations consumers really had for the current gen of hardware. VR gaming is coming; we'll see whether it actually delivers.

Whether it was necessary or even important for that to have been available at the onset of the 8th gen launch is highly questionable. The most important thing for the 8th gen was to increase the resource pool (memory, graphics processing, and general processing) to facilitate ease of development while keeping costs manageable on a manufacturing and retail level. I seriously doubt we would have seen even half the sales we've seen in reality had the XB1 and PS4 shipped with VR headsets adding an additional $100-200 to MSRPs.

Given the first year reality in terms of software for the XB360 and the PS3 in which the hardware was there and capable, but the games themselves were in retrospect, actually quite average with the added visual benefits of the new hardware, I'm actually fairly satisfied with the 8th gen so far.