But are we being fair with developers? What if gamer expectations are just too high? When Star Wars first debuted on the silver screen, moviegoers had never seen the special effects that George Lucas and his team had developed. These days, we see special effects like those in commercials. It's not so amazing to see space ships and lasers in a movie anymore. This disenchantment is applicable to the gamers' experience when they see new games year after year.
Some developers do think that gamers are expecting to see visuals that not even next-gen technology can pull off. The developers at Chattering Pixels observed that when gaming moved from Playstation / Saturn / Nintendo 64 to Playstation 2, GameCube and Xbox, the hardware gave developers a huge leap in quality. But the current leap we're looking at now isn't so grand.
"You could render the same polygon on the XBox and on X360 with the same shaders running and it would look exactly the same," says Fuller. "The same could not be said when we transitioned from the Playstation to the Playstation 2."
Even though there's much more power to work with when making games, it takes even more resources to take advantage of this power. Most of that power gets sapped-up quickly when a game is designed to accommodate High Definition television formats. This also poses a challenge for developers when they're hoping to budget their fill rate for sophisticated material effects like cotton, silk, skin and leather. Elements like these have an enormous impact on how good games can look.
