How Video Games Will Look in 2021

[Moonface]

I just came across this article from IGN that was published back in 2011, where at a panel hosted by Sony, various panelists such as "Kellee Santiago (Co-Founder of ThatGameCompany), Gareth Edmondson (Managing Director of Ubisoft Reflections Studio), veteran game creator Mark Cerny, Shuhei Yoshida (President of Sony Worldwide Studios) and Mick Hocking (Director of Sony WorldWide Studios 3D Team) looked into a crystal ball to forecast what 2021 might look like in the interactive gaming space."

IGN: How Video Games Will Look in 2021

Well obviously, 2021 is here, and I thought it'd be fun to look at what the predictions were, how different some of them might be from reality, and what ones haven't happened yet but maybe they could?

Going through some of the list, motion controls have improved but I don't think to the point of creating "some really dangerous-almost interactivities".
Holographics is hilarious because I don't know any product that does that. Microsoft looked like the most likely candidate to offer it in a gaming space when they were showing off Hololens, but that just one day stopped being talked about by them and even the Minecraft Hololens game that was being demonstrated with it just vanished off the airwaves and was forgotten about.
Performance capture has definitely improved, and I think the only thing that can limit that is whether the game can handle all the animations and details. I feel like the uncanny valley point a little bit later in that article falls into this same point, just because they really go hand in hand. The better the capture is, the better the animation work will be and even the models because models can be built off an existing real person rather than trying to model it from scratch. The limit again is just detail, because WWE games have done body scans of the wrestlers and yet graphically don't hold up well enough to blur the line between virtual and reality.
Single player gaming being dead is the most hilarious one to me of all though. That shit isn't going anywhere.

[Mr EliteL]

How'd you find this article from way back then?

Yeesh, holographics, consoles being your "friend", no more single player games? Don't know how VR is doing but I doubt it's able to have in-game real time interactions that isn't, er, scripted per say like they seem to suggest. Expectations were way too high/early for that much stuff . Yes we've moved on quite a bit since '11 but not that quickly. I don't know if video games have or have not surpassed film for motion capture, maybe a little behind or extremely close? Eh I haven't done any comparing.

[Moonface]

@Mr EliteL: I saw it mentioned on Twitter somewhere in a comment.

VR has definitely progressed but it isn't going to ever be able to do non-scripted stuff, and neither will any game. A game can only do what the developers program it to do, and so any specific events will always need to be scripted to some extent.

2D being retro won't be a thing since it still has a place in modern gaming and I expect it always will. Not every game can be 3D environments, and the indie scene embraces 2D because it is so much easier and cheaper to build a game with it.

[ShiraNoMai]

I think AI can get to a point where it can learn to make decisions based off of previous actions to work sort of how they mention VR can. I'm sure eventually we'll get that dystopian level of AI learning where it becomes sentient and destroys us all

A lot of this stuff did kind of come true, just not exactly the way the headlines base them. Like, "games that make you happy", there are games out there that have capabilities to track heart rate and such, and now with the PS5's haptic feedback controller, I think can begin to work that in a bit more?
Same with the "games that will school you". Like, my best friend worked for a military base making simulation games for military training. Simulation gaming is quite a thing now and is a really important asset for learning trades and such.