The last generation of consoles and the current one have made me realize what I truly enjoy about games: physicality and simulation fidelity, and it's something that has stagnated for the last 15+ years. These past two generations barely made any progress in that area.
I love games with solid reactive ragdoll physics and the ability to solve situations through physics. I enjoy when something accidental happens because of dynamic emergent systems. In the early 2000s, when physics in games were still in their infancy, developers experimented with fun details and interactions with the game world, creating replay value through dynamic systems. I vividly remember being amazed by Max Payne 2's ragdolls and elaborate physics setups, which made me constantly quick load to replay certain sections and enjoy its physicality. I can't remember a recent game where I did a similar thing, just messing around with new types of simulated systems or a dynamically reactive world. I love visually impressive games from this generation too, don't get me wrong, but while visuals have progressed more and more over the year, the underlying simulation complexity has dramatically stagnated over the years.
The 2000s were a great time for physicality in games. From Half-Life 2 and Garry's Mod to Crysis with its destructible world and reactive AI to GTA IV and its still-impressive Euphoria physics, at the time it felt like things could only get better and better. I remember seeing demos of DMM (molecular game-physics dependent on the material type) and new physics-driven animation concepts. However, around the early 2010s, advancements in physicality in games seemed to stall.
One of the reasons physics saw such a leap in games was due to tremendous advancements in single-threaded CPU speeds, which only seemed to go up and up. Game simulation logic (still to this day) runs mostly on a single core due to deterministic reasons. I remember Intel was expecting 10GHz CPUs by 2011, but that didn't happen because of physical, thermal, and power draw limits of the hardware. Instead, we went for multicore CPUs, which is great for pretty much all software that can operate non-sequentially in parallel. But with games running simulations at runtime, that isn't really the case. All non-game-logic essential stuff can be offloaded to other cores (which is still hard to do), but the core simulation still has to run on one fast main thread.
With the rise of the 8th generation of consoles and their admittedly weak CPUs (from a single-threaded standpoint, which is crucial for deterministic physics calculations), and because of the incredible rising costs and risks of game development, we saw a shift towards more cosmetic improvements.
Games became visually impressive but mostly static in terms of physicality. Interactables in games became specifically highlighted, and most random items were bolted to the floor for performance and simulation stability. But personally, I don't care for visual stability anymore. I want to play fun games where I can mess around and create fun within a reactive world. Game's like BOTW/TOTK felt like a continuation of the 2000's physics era, games like Red Dead Redemption 2 brought back some of this with Euphoria and solid collision modeling, but it's more of the same and not really a leap like the 5th -> 6th -> 7th gen days.
It's even worse for games like Far Cry. Crytek focused heavily on physicalized gameplay in Far Cry 1 and Crysis, and Ubisoft made a great effort with Far Cry 2. But especially after Far Cry 5, their game worlds became more static and predictable.
I'm skipping over a lot of games from that era to the current era, but you probably get my point. I get the feeling I'm not the only one noticing this. I recently finished Hellblade 2 and am currently playing Ghost of Tsushima. Even though I liked both games and they look visually spectacular (especially Hellblade 2), it's really disheartening that they (especially GoT) barely have any simulated physicality in the games. Hell, Ghost of Tsushima doesn't even have ragdoll physics, so bodies awkwardly float in the air off of a cliff, like it's 2002.
Anyway, I'm still positive and hoping for better days. Also, don't forget that indies are picking up some of the AAA stagnation slack with games like Teardown. But still, I would love to see interesting, meaningful simulation leaps in big-budget games like they used to push. That's what AAA used to stand for—pushing boundaries. This couldn't be further from the truth these days. Ubisoft is seemingly still working a leap in physicalized animation, so i'm hoping we see something like this shippable in a game.
I love games with solid reactive ragdoll physics and the ability to solve situations through physics. I enjoy when something accidental happens because of dynamic emergent systems. In the early 2000s, when physics in games were still in their infancy, developers experimented with fun details and interactions with the game world, creating replay value through dynamic systems. I vividly remember being amazed by Max Payne 2's ragdolls and elaborate physics setups, which made me constantly quick load to replay certain sections and enjoy its physicality. I can't remember a recent game where I did a similar thing, just messing around with new types of simulated systems or a dynamically reactive world. I love visually impressive games from this generation too, don't get me wrong, but while visuals have progressed more and more over the year, the underlying simulation complexity has dramatically stagnated over the years.
The 2000s were a great time for physicality in games. From Half-Life 2 and Garry's Mod to Crysis with its destructible world and reactive AI to GTA IV and its still-impressive Euphoria physics, at the time it felt like things could only get better and better. I remember seeing demos of DMM (molecular game-physics dependent on the material type) and new physics-driven animation concepts. However, around the early 2010s, advancements in physicality in games seemed to stall.
One of the reasons physics saw such a leap in games was due to tremendous advancements in single-threaded CPU speeds, which only seemed to go up and up. Game simulation logic (still to this day) runs mostly on a single core due to deterministic reasons. I remember Intel was expecting 10GHz CPUs by 2011, but that didn't happen because of physical, thermal, and power draw limits of the hardware. Instead, we went for multicore CPUs, which is great for pretty much all software that can operate non-sequentially in parallel. But with games running simulations at runtime, that isn't really the case. All non-game-logic essential stuff can be offloaded to other cores (which is still hard to do), but the core simulation still has to run on one fast main thread.
With the rise of the 8th generation of consoles and their admittedly weak CPUs (from a single-threaded standpoint, which is crucial for deterministic physics calculations), and because of the incredible rising costs and risks of game development, we saw a shift towards more cosmetic improvements.
Games became visually impressive but mostly static in terms of physicality. Interactables in games became specifically highlighted, and most random items were bolted to the floor for performance and simulation stability. But personally, I don't care for visual stability anymore. I want to play fun games where I can mess around and create fun within a reactive world. Game's like BOTW/TOTK felt like a continuation of the 2000's physics era, games like Red Dead Redemption 2 brought back some of this with Euphoria and solid collision modeling, but it's more of the same and not really a leap like the 5th -> 6th -> 7th gen days.
It's even worse for games like Far Cry. Crytek focused heavily on physicalized gameplay in Far Cry 1 and Crysis, and Ubisoft made a great effort with Far Cry 2. But especially after Far Cry 5, their game worlds became more static and predictable.
I'm skipping over a lot of games from that era to the current era, but you probably get my point. I get the feeling I'm not the only one noticing this. I recently finished Hellblade 2 and am currently playing Ghost of Tsushima. Even though I liked both games and they look visually spectacular (especially Hellblade 2), it's really disheartening that they (especially GoT) barely have any simulated physicality in the games. Hell, Ghost of Tsushima doesn't even have ragdoll physics, so bodies awkwardly float in the air off of a cliff, like it's 2002.
Anyway, I'm still positive and hoping for better days. Also, don't forget that indies are picking up some of the AAA stagnation slack with games like Teardown. But still, I would love to see interesting, meaningful simulation leaps in big-budget games like they used to push. That's what AAA used to stand for—pushing boundaries. This couldn't be further from the truth these days. Ubisoft is seemingly still working a leap in physicalized animation, so i'm hoping we see something like this shippable in a game.
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