The following is simply a personal perspective, just illustrating why I am not as interested (thus far) as I used to be in the latest and shiniest that console gaming offers.
Another year and still I have no desire of a new console. I've always played games on computers, the c64, the Amiga, then PCs, I really have no beef in the console wars. My first was the 360, moving here, to Canada. Next I got a PS4, then I upgraded it to a Pro. So, pretty even. I based my purchases on whomever upset me the least with their SDKs. And had the superior hardware design, in my eyes.
In fairness, a lot of my lack of next-gen is driven by me being older and gaming less, my TV sits basically unused in front of the sofa. It's the least used electronics in the house, by far.
But it's not just that. I'm a graphics person, I can't avoid that, I even play games mostly for their atmosphere, the storytelling, not the hardcore action, I always had. And this generation has not started yet, I can say it with confidence. Let's have a look, through a fair, thrid party lens (well, at least it used to be...). Call of duty.
Call of Duty 2 - if you haven't figured that clicking on images on the blog gives you the original, now it's time...This was the first Call of Duty to land on "gen 3": xbox 360. Call of Duty 2 in 2005, the first on a console, by Infinity Ward. Technically a "cross-platform" title, it was ready for the launch of the 360.
The next year, Treyarch will ship Call of Duty 3 on... well everything, 360, ps3, ps2, xbox, wii... Must have been... interesting times. The two games must have been developed in parallel. And I think (no idea, way before my time) that Treyarch also had spiderman to do around the same time period. Effectively one could consider 3 the first gen 3 COD, as well, the ps3 was not out by the time 2 shipped!
2007 - two titles after the console debut, Call of Duty 4 Modern Warfare, again back to IW, pretty much defines console gaming. Definitely a title developed natively for gen 3. So, we got an intial game or two being effectively "ports", then going "native" and dropping the previous generation.
Call of Duty GhostsThe first Call of Duty on gen 4 was COD:Ghosts (and the first one I helped on!). IW, 2013. Developed still primarily for gen 3 (I would say), targeted gen 4 by focusing on technology that could "generate" details on the same maps: hardware displacement mapping and subdivision surfaces.
Another screenshot.The next installment, in 2014 by Sledgehammer, will be the first to target explicitly the new consoles, with lighting and levels created with gen 4 as the priority (first COD with multiple/overlapping dynamic lights and true, high quality PBR), but still "backported" to gen 3.
Advanced Warfare on PS3.Notice the difference, the advances in both technology and authoring, on the same hardware, between the beginning of gen 3 (COD2 and COD3) and the end. It looks literally like the game is on different consoles!
Next year will come Black Ops III by Treyarch, a gen 4 exclusive. The techonolog and assets will be so far out gen 3 capabilities that it was impossible to back-port. Full deferred rendering, voxel irradiance, volumetric lighting everywhere, OIT transparency and particles - so much novel tech that would never make any sense on gen 4.
With a heroic effort, the multiplayer game will end up shipping on 360 and ps3 (with the content brute-force ported to a different engine!), but the campaign could not fit.
Modern Warfare 2019 on ps4.The last gen 4 COD will be... another Modern Warfare (and yet again, a masterpiece imho), after so many incredible achievements, from the proto-warzone of Black Ops 4 to the amazing single player in Infinite Warfare.
Again, look at the delta between the first gen 4 COD, the last, and the progression: first, a mostly "last-gen" title ported to the next, then a mostly "next-gen" title ported to the previous, then exclusivity.
Cold war, the first on ps5, 2020And you know where I'm going here. Gen 5 is different! It completely broke the pattern! There is not, to this day, an exclusive next-gen COD, after already three titles! Nor, pretty much, any other game. But there does not even seem to be many that are developed, yet, primarely for next-gen - i.e. in most cases, gen 4/mid-gen refresh and gen 5 are very close in terms of rendering algorithms (resolution and frames per second, obviously tend to be much better on gen 5).
Same COD (MW2) - gen 4 vs gen 5. Which is which?And yeah, there will be people that say this is because rendering is solved, there's nothing more to be done on graphics, whatever. We had these at every single console generation, and they were reliably wrong, the improvements between the beginning and the of a generation has always been massive.
I always say: look out of the window. Look at your TV. Can you tell that one is real, and the other is showing realtime rendering? Would it be cool to be able to play at that level of realism?
Would it be cool to be play at the level of realism, expression, atmosphere, storytelling, of a live action movie? If the answers are all yes (and they are) - rendering is not solved - and solving rendering is still valuable.
Same CODs - gen 3/gen 4.In many ways it's good that the generations are more of a "gradient" than sudden jumps, that there are so many different options to enjoy gaming.
And I don't think gen 5 is where rendering innovation will die! That is so uninteresting or lacking power that there's nothing one could do to push it to create the same level of visual improvements seen in the past. I suspect, instead, that its time has not come YET, mostly as we see games still not dropping the previous generation, and thus, being somewhat still constrained by what can be shipped on both!
But for now, for me, my PS4 pro is still good. Plus, I can't really sell it, I would lose P.T...
Bonus!
Raytracing on/off.(just j/k)
(kinda)