The advancements that have taken place in the performance level in the world of PC and consoles They made it possible to improve many things in the world of video games. Undoubtedly, among the great contributions was the graphic part, which has advanced so much that in some cases we can find titles that offer a technical invoice that in certain respects is close to photorealism.

However, this increase in graphic quality was achieved partly at a cost sacrifice things that are also very important, and this affects both the quality of the game and the experience and realism it conveys to the player. We’ve also fallen into some of the stagnation in development and execution seen with the rise of endlessly repetitive sandbox games, and the quality and care of development has seen better times.

The latter has been a controversial topic for some time, and understandably so, as developers take less and less care to fine-tune and optimize their games before release, which means that in many cases we’re seeing titles that hit the market full of bugs and that don’t work as well as they should. I could give many examples, but without a doubt Starfield and Cyberpunk 2077 would be the two best examples in the latest phase.

Five things that should improve in video games

This reality that the video game industry is experiencing today is leaving us important shortcomings that we can group around five main keys that in general should become the main goal of developers to really improve their games, even if it means leaving graphics development a little more in the background, at least for a while.

Some of these keys could see substantial improvement in the medium to long term due to emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Although I don’t want to be an optimist in that sense, because on many occasions we’ve seen promising technologies come to fruition in the world of video games many years after they were introduced, while others never materialized.

All in all, in this article I want to share with you the five things that I think should be improved in the world of video games so that they can restore the balance they have lost between graphic quality, degree of interaction and realism. As always, I encourage you to leave your thoughts in the comments.

1.-NPC behavior

The number of NPCs shown simultaneously on the screen has seen a large increase in recent years, but their intelligence has not only not improved significantly, but in some cases has even improved. experienced regression remarkable, that is, it has gotten worse over time.

It’s a more complicated problem than it seems because we’re facing something like this has a strong dependency on the CPU, and with current console-centric development, it’s clear that their limitations are at the heart of every new video game. Consoles have processors with much lower performance than what we can find on PC, and this ultimately affects the development of video games and affects the quality of NPCs.

More realistic and fine-tuned NPC behavior would greatly improve the quality of sandbox games as well as open-world games. For example, imagine how spectacular it would be to walk around the city and see how the NPCs work They move and interact with map elements in a realistic way, go shopping, argue with each other or even edit the scenario and create new situations in real time.

2.-Degree of interaction with NPCs and scenarios

It’s another point that has diminished over time and has a lot of room for improvement. In this case, I mean permission higher degree of interaction with a script in a broad sense, such as:

• More open buildings and locationsinstead of the current model of large blocks of buildings and enclosed campuses that have no value.
• Real-time random events that can really make an impact to specific locations and open up new playable lines, even if they are short secondary missions.
• Scenarios with a high degree of destructionand reconstruction cycles to return the area to its previous state.

As for the NPC, a greater degree of interaction with the main and minor, which gives us the feeling that the localization of the game he is really alive. On this topic, we already have very interesting projects on the table, such as NVIDIA ACE, which is based on AI to improve interactions with NPCs.

3.-Quality of physics and animations

Two other aspects that have deteriorated significantly compared to previous generation titles, and which are an important backlog for developers. Interestingly, physics and animation are two things They are also heavily CPU dependent, so use everything we said above when talking about NPCs.

Even in games as advanced as Cyberpunk 2077, it is common to find aanimations that are too simple and with very improved physics, things that totally clash with the excellent graphics of the game and the quality provided by the layout of the paths. On the other hand, games as old as Batman Arkham City They already had sublime physics and animations, especially if we enabled PhysX.

I understand that taking care of the physics and animations is a significant workload and that there are some sacrifices in having to work around the limitations imposed by the CPUs of current consoles, but it is necessary to start improving in this sense, given The animations and physics are the same or worse than the games of 10 years ago in next-gen titles that represent huge advances on other fronts.

About this topic GTA 6 is likely to be an important advancement thanks to the evolution of Rockstar’s RAGE engine, which will theoretically use advanced animations and physics. What we’ve seen so far is promising, but nothing is confirmed yet, so until we see it in action, it’s best not to get our hopes up.

4.-Repetitive and monotonous secondary missions

One of the biggest problems with current games, if we talk about execution and staging, are filler missions that do not contribute to anything and eventually tire us to the point that they may even force us to quit the game. It would be much better to turn to a system of secondary missions where quality prevails over quantityand also introduce more significant differences between them.

For example, a classic side quest of going to a certain place and getting a specific thing could develop a richer model with details that can affect the main mission and deeper interactions with scenarios and NPCs producing changes in the scenario or our relationship to them so it doesn’t feel so linear and simple.

It would also be interesting to connect them with random dynamic events that can end influencing the development of the secondary mission, in such a way that although the two missions look the same at the end, ultimately these events set them apart. The possibilities are many, we just need developers to dare to show their most creative side.

5.-Optimization and final state of games

I’ve saved one of the most important issues for last, and one of the things that needs to be improved the most in today’s video games. Poorly developed and poorly finished games are nothing new, in fact I perfectly remember even in the NES phase poorly balanced titles coming out that in some cases had errors that made it nearly impossible to complete.

For example, in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on the NES, there was an area where we had to make a jump whose distance was not well calculated and it was almost impossible. However, these were exceptions and not the general rule we have today, where there are bugs and bad optimization “daily bread”.

The advent of the Internet brought about a patching model to update games and fix issues, introduce new features and improvements, as well as expand or launch new content without having to resort to the physical format. This made developers care less about the final state of the game at launch because they are aware of it they can fix it later with patches belatedly.

More of the same happens with optimization. There are titles that come well optimized, but The lack of optimization has been a concern for some time, especially in the PC world, and developer laziness is to blame. Resorting to scaling and frame generation is a big help in this sense, but optimization still remains a major unsolved problem.