| BeatdownBrigade said: Better AI, more AI on the screen at once, originally when weather effects and other similar immersion effects are all things you seem to be taken for granted and ignoring that all this comes first from better hardware. There is far more creativity in terms of software due to better hardware than from lesser hardware where you are stuck with very little processing power available beyond needed to run the basics of the game. |
Rarely do developers ever use resources for better AI. The Last of Us and Final Fantasy XV are modern examples of high-production games that ran on powerful hardware with some of the same AI problems that have plagued their genres for generations. AI is CPU-bound anyway, and groundbreaking innovative techniques deal more with algorithmic optimization than hardware optimization. Many video game developers are pretty lazy though, and just proceed with the standard if-then-else scripts that they've been using for decades.
The most immersive game for me this generation has been Undertale, a game with intentionally 8-bit visuals. Games like Super Metroid and Earthbound also have more immersive worlds than plenty of modern titles with movie-esque unrealistic scenarios and characterizations. Sure, visual fidelity can aid immersion, but only at the margins. If your game is unimersive from the start, you're not going to make it so with pretty visuals.
And this is the problem I have with value priorities of modern video game publishers. A game is only better to them if they can say that it has more, regardless of whether or not there is a noticeable affect on the gameplay. Does it have better AI? Great! Does it make the game more than marginally better? Who cares? We can say that it has better AI! Does it have 8k textures? Great! Does it make the game more than marginally better? Who cares? Does the game have twenty modes? Great! Are any of those modes unique from the others or are all twenty of them fun to play? Who cares! It has twenty!
It is all about quantitative list checking and very rarely about a fun and cohesive full package. Often the publisher's idea of better, is better production values and assets. And while this can aid creativity for those who have some grand ideas, more often than that it aids publishers to release boring eye-candy.
