Will New Technology for Next Generation Hardware Drive Innovations in Gameplay?
March 31, 2005 As the interactive entertainment industry gets ready to enter a new platform transition, DFC Intelligence is taking a close look at technology trends in the upcoming report The State of Game Technology. Considering that March is the time of the annual Game Developers Conference (GDC), we thought it would be appropriate to give some of our thoughts on some of the technology trends. There was an interesting comment made at GDC by an Electronic Arts programmer on the team working on Will Wright’s current in-development project. To paraphrase, his bottom line was that the next-generation of systems were technically optimized for media and graphics but poorly if not detrimentally optimized for AI, game logic, and the other important types of code that determine good games. This is a crucial point because once we’ve gotten past the beauty of next-generation graphics and audio, many aspects of next-generation gaming will be the result of next-generation AI, physics, story-engin