Esquoret said:
Good question, but I doubt it. In terms of quality, HD is already very good - any better than this, the human eye won't be able to tell much difference. There will be new ways to play, but I think in terms of substance there won't be as much difference than for the past 10 years. We're truly living at the end of the world here.
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Well, that's not really true.
Yes, you look at Killzone 2 and Crysis and Uncharted 2, and it's hard to get better than that. But still not impossible, of course. And then you look at games like inFamous and Kane and Lynch 2, and quite frankly, they look pretty awful. Hopefully, next gen (this decade), games will look like Killzone, Uncharted and Crysis across the board.
On top of that, if a game looks really good (again, like KZ2), the framerate is often pretty terrible. So that could be improved - 1080p 60fps as standard.
But increased resolution and framerate aren't really massive changes.
3D will be a big one in the coming years, as the price decreases and glasses are phased out. Motion control will also continue to improvew, and we should have lag-free 1:1 motion by the end of the decade - though, of course, a motion-only control scheme will still be impossible for most games.
Back on the creative side of things, I think (hope) that we can see more changing storylines this decade, i.e. games in which your choices affect the game world and, better yet, the actual events in the game's campaign. A game which is the same every time you play it will hopefully be uncommon by 2020. Heavy Rain-like story changes should be even clearer, more common and with a wider variety of gameplay to support them (no negative sentiment towards Heavy Rain, of course).
Integrating multiplayer and single-player could be another one. Jump in, jump out multiplayer has been starting to appear over the last few years - games like Demon's Souls, Burnout Paradise and to some extent Red Dead Redemption. Multiplayer on the whole should improve a fair bit, too, as developers feel less need to degrade technical aspects to prevent lag - internet speeds should get faster and faster.
On the whole, it will be hard to top the last decade, which really brought in proper 3D games, with camera control, online gameplay on consoles, digital distribution, mainstream motion control and much more, but there's plenty of promise for the next ten years.