Where is console gaming going?

Gaming has come leaps and bounds in ever-increasingly shorter timescales. It only feels like yesterday that I was playing Spyro and Crash Bandicoot on the PS1, but even before that, there were older gaming consoles like the Sega Mega Drive, Nintendo N64, and even consoles like the Atari Pong.

The tradition of video games goes right back to the '70s, with the Magnavox Oddysey being the first gaming console ever created. Since then, with each improvement in computer hardware and software, gaming consoles have often left people dumbfounded, with each new console reaching heights that were previously thought impossible.

My mother's husband has been regaling me with his tales of playing the first-ever Age of Empires in the late '90s and how it blew his mind, the scale of the game and the campaigns that could be played. It wasn't until after months of playing it late into the night that his friend told him that he could save the game.

Five years ago, my mum bought him an Xbox One, and he was almost frothing at the mouth whilst playing Far Cry 4. He couldn't believe the developments that gaming had undergone since his last late-night sessions on Age of Empires.

For me, this was amusing. I had grown up around video games. Countless hours sunk into games like TES: Oblivion on the Xbox 360 and Call of Duty, screaming at both my teammates and the other team. My generation has become accustomed to highly detailed and complex video games.

For this reason, we tend not to think about how far video games have come in such a short amount of time. In the space of twenty-five years, we have gone from the very much on rails game worlds like Silent Hill, Metal Gear Solid and Oddworld to fantastically fleshed out open-world games like Skyrim, The Witcher and, more recently, Red Dead Redemption, to name a few.

Of course, a lot of this is owing to the ever-improving capabilities of computer hardware and the internal components that power these gaming consoles. We also owe a lot to the pairing of both incredibly creative and technical minds behind these game development studios.

But my question is, how far can video games go? How much better can they get in terms of graphics, complexity and mind-blowing ability? How can kids these days properly appreciate the hard work and years of development that has gone into these games, and what will video games look like when these kids grow up into adults?

My nephews are 10 and 12, and all they seem to play is Fortnite and Call of Duty. I bought them a copy of Skyrim a few years back, a game released in 2011, and for them, it was dated and "boring". I don't mean to sound like an old man prematurely, but how can Skyrim be considered boring for a kid who hasn't played it?

But then again, I remember playing Mario on the Nintendo N64 when I was that age and thinking, "Wow, this game is old," because I had already become accustomed to the relative improvements of the PS2. Its age showed, even though there were only four years between the release of each console.

These days, the hardware is improving that fast that the last generation of consoles had to have multiple new versions mid-generation to keep up with the demand for higher frame rates and 4K TVs.

The Xbox One S & X and the PS4 Pro were more powerful than their younger counterparts because games had become that much more demanding mid-generation. You could feel the poorer performance in these older machines in terms of frame drops and textures not loading quick enough.

Try playing Battlefield V on an Xbox One and you will see what I'm talking about. The textures take a while to load, leaving NPCs with missing limbs and blank white clothing in place of the uniforms they should be wearing.

Now, we've got the PS5 and Xbox Series X, consoles which promise further improvements beyond the marginal improvements of mid-generation consoles like the Xbox One X and PS4 Pro.

Forgetting the improved CPU and GPU, newer hardware such as NVMe SSD drives provide much faster load times, undoubtedly the biggest upgrade in this new generation of consoles.

To put this into perspective, the throughput (the speed of data passing through) of the Xbox One and Xbox One X is 50-100Mbps and 120Mbps, respectively. The throughput of the Xbox Series X is 2.4Gbps.

This means that the newer Xbox is around 40x faster than the Xbox One and around 20x faster than the Xbox One X. The PS5 is similar in this respect, with the new NVMe SSD drive being about 55x times faster than that of the PS4 and PS4 Pro.

What this means in terms of gaming is not only faster load times, but that game developers will be able to create larger and more detailed game worlds without worrying about files not loading in time.

Gone are the days where you will have to take uncomfortably long elevator rides while the game loads around you or slowly crawl through small spaces to give the hardware time to catch up to the world that it struggles to create.

We aren't even mentioning the ray tracing capabilities that the new consoles now have, using different light dispersion techniques to add to the already astonishing realism of modern-day triple-A games.

This begs the question that if game developers can now create truly open worlds without the need for loading screens and give them enough detail to look as realistic and life-like as, well, real life, then where is the roof on this thing?

What kind of capabilities will the next-generation of gaming consoles have in ten to fifteen years time? How will the console companies further improve the already amazing gaming consoles that are available today?

Only time will tell what kind of gaming experiences we are in for in the next-generation, and it will be interesting, to say the least, to see what the future holds for gamers of all kinds.