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Virtual Reality is Pushing Gaming Into Another 'Golden Age': Xbox Co-founder (cnbc.com)
From a CNBC report:The Xbox and PS2 were two of the most popular consoles ever and now gaming is entering "another golden age," according to Otto Berkes (a pioneer of the gaming industry), driven by virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI). "One of the aspects of VR that has incredible potential is interaction and communication -- interacting with characters that are both artificial and virtual, being able to blur distance and geography, you can be anywhere and literally in any time," Berkes told CNBC in an interview on Wednesday. "We're entering another golden age of interactive content development."
This age is of DLCs
"The Xbox and PS2 were two of the most popular consoles ever"
The PS2 comes in at number 1. The xbox comes in a distant 17 and is beaten by the xbox 360 which doesn't even come into the top 5.
Very primitive with lots of promise. It's going to be awhile before development costs are going to be low enough to get down to mass market price points.
Right now it's still a singing frog. Nobody cares if it sings well, it's just incredible it sings.
I have a HTC Vive. I've had one for like... many months by now. I've tried it all. It sucks. I have no idea what people are talking about, but it's just... shit. After the first 5 minutes of "WOW", that is. There's just nothing interesting to run on it.
And AI is a pathetic joke, hardly any different from the "Alice" bot of the 1950s. Again, I have no idea what they are talking about. It's as if we are using completely different Internets and/or live in parallel dimensions. I can't relate to anything these "important people" claim in the "news".
The quotation in the CNBC report here is just a little bit disingenuous. "The Xbox and PS2 were two of the most popular consoles ever" is 50% true; with an estimated 155m units sold, the PS2 does indeed sit at the top of the pile for home-consoles (though the Nintendo DS handheld roughly level-pegs it). The Xbox, however, with sales in around the 24 million range, is very much in "also ran" territory.
It wasn't a failure by any means. It was a toe in the door for Microsoft and it did eventually beat out the Gamecube in the battle for second-place on units sold among the 6th generation consoles. But attempting to lend credibility to an argument by claiming that views are from one of the creators of "one of the most successful consoles ever" when said console was the original Xbox is simply misleading.
And as for the content of TFA... the case for VR in gaming is not yet proven. Sales of consumer VR units are ok but not spectacular and are showing some signs of diminishing now the launch-hype is over. Perhaps more importantly, there has yet to be a game that really makes the case for VR as anything other than a tech demo. A range of factors, including problems with using the headsets for an extended period and, most importantly, control problems mean that nobody has yet produced a really great VR game (Elite: Dangerous is almost certainly the most successful, but that's a fairly niche product). For the most part, VR experiences to date have fallen into one of three categories:
a) the pretty but shallow glorified tech-demo
b) the cut-down version of an existing game (e.g. Driveclub VR)
c) The existing pre-VR game which has had VR support added
Last generation's fad, motion controls, eventually faltered after people realised that they just weren't as good as regular controls for actually playing games. Nobody was ever going to be chosing to play through a Dragon Age or a Call of Duty using motion controls and, after the novelty wore off, people went back to their controllers or mouse/keyboard combos. If VR is to avoid the same trap, its best hope comes from my category c) above; but so far, that's only been made to even remotely work in the driving and space-combat genres, both of which are niche.
So, can we start getting games with good gameplay again?
Once you put your VR glasses on, you're disconnected from the world and immersed in a virtual application. That's all it has. It's a glorified 360Â screen; the things you can do are mostly the same as in a flat screen, only more nauseating and from a closer perspective.
AR on the other hand, overlays a virtual world on top of the real one, using information from the context where you are placed. It's Google Maps on steroids. Remember those old promotional "alternate reality" games for Halo 2 or Lost? New gaming could take that shape, only working in real time. Now that people have learned about Pokemon Go, which is not even proper AR, the concept can be marketed to the masses.
Oh, and it has social implications too. Read the "Vision Machine" comic if you haven't already. It's a classic, one of those Sci-fi stories that are a thinly veiled description of our current world.
http://www.visionmachine.net/
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
Golden ages are driven by great games, not by technology. The technology merely needs to be good enough to allow the games to be realized.
I am not surprised. Considering that even > 1000 years old technology (books) can create good immersion if the story is good, it is no surprise at all that even advanced technology cannot fix a bad story. Immersion is something that happens in your head, not before you eyes.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Exactly right. The golden age of gaming ended when games moved from real media to interminable downloads before one could even start gaming. They sucked all the fun right out of that balloon. It doesn't help that the new consoles are rarely designed with any serious degree of backward compatibility at this point. They love to make you have to start buying all over again. And enough people keep doing that to encourage this awful behavior.
"It's dead, Jim."
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
It's also the age of the paid power-up, "crystal", "coins", weapons, armor, etc.
Money is killing gaming faster than anything else.
And on the VR front: Give me a break. VR games to date haven't even come close to living up to the promise. Where are the titles?
Oh... right... they're coming....