What would the hypothetical PS6, XboxSX+, Switch2 need to do to impress you in 2027?

Just noticed how a lot of people with PS5s etc arent as impressed as the leap from say PS2 to PS3. Obviously, its cause graphics can get so good...though I think we have a ways to go before we realize photorealistic graphics

What would they need to do to get the juices flowing in our current jaded gaming landscape? Have we hit the top. Are fun gimmicks gone after this ( sensor bars, portables, motion controls, grip, vr, ar, etc. )

Maybe improved AI, all batman games now include a nemesis system with real-time stories created by AI for you to have a rouge gallery of nemesis fighters, or the ability to sneak around a splinter cell level with 100 people dropping into the bodies of the ai to stop you in real-time in levels, maybe all fps deathmatch games are 100 players minimum, Levels that randomly generate so all games are infinite, the ability to download updates on the fly while your playing so graphics upgrade day one - day 100. Sound off.

Launch without product shortages.

This is more of my elevator pitch for my dream game, but I think it applies here:

Deep, variable simulation spy game. The flexibility of binding of Isaac, style of MGS5/hitman. You are on an island, every person on it is on their own cycles and the game systems are very flexible.

AI is going to need a big jump, to impress me. I’m not too confident that is happening anytime soon though.

For me, I wanted these to bring back some of my beloved 1st party driving game IPs are RalliSport Challenge, Project Gotham Racing, MotorStorm, F-Zero and WipEout.

Controllers have to evolve at some point. We've been using various combinations of buttons and sticks for almost half a century now. The current controllers we have are great and fit the games we currently play, but they do seem to be a barrier for true innovation.

Motion controls with the Wii, Kinect and PlayStation Move weren't all that great and didn't really work with most games. But I do look back at that era sometimes and think of all the experimentation we saw in gaming. We've seen more of that innovation lately with motion controls in VR games. I'd even say that I'd rather play most of the more interesting VR games on a normal TV with motion controls rather than in VR with a normal controller.

I'm not saying that we need to bring back the sorts of motion controls we've already seen and I don't know what a controller of the future would be. Maybe it's some sort system that plugs straight into the neurological impulses of your brain or the next generation of the Power Glove. Hopefully it's something more advanced and innovative than what I can imagine.

Unfortunately I do think we've reached some sort of peak in graphical quality. Of course there will be higher frame-rates and more pixels, but the workload on developers to produce art at this level seems to be at it's limit. Technologies like photogrammetry and the use of AI will help to produce more graphics, but I'm not sure they will help to achieve better graphics. I still want to see an artistic touch in graphics, unless we're talking about a pure simulation game like a flight or racing sim.

FULL backwards compat, but it'll never happen

I wanna put in ANY Xbox game ever and be able to play it. The fact that the best version of Street Fighter 2 ever is held hostage on the 360 is a crime.

Since graphic capability is being stretched thin, which the latest Nvidia and AMD presentations proved, the next best thing is data and information in games. I mean, creating seriously lived in worlds where the NPC characters are very intelligent and seemingly never run out of things to say unless really pushed by the player. They should also have nearly endless things to do as well. Enemies should be always thinking and intelligent, not based on random rng, but based on having actual thought and tactics. The worlds should be completely interactive, meaning you can pick up everything, push every button, and destroy every environment. Basically make it as close to real physics as possible. For this to happen, a lot of memory is needed and that should be the focus of the future consoles.

As far as full backwards compatibility, it seems like all major consoles will have some type of full paid service in place that will be more advanced than what we have now by the time 2027 gets here.

I think it's less the consoles for me and more the devs taking advantage of them. Granted, it's only been a year, but so far the most disappointing part of the new generation is that devs haven't really done anything interesting from a gameplay perspective with all the new power they have available. I don't want another COD-like with a slightly better coat of paint. I want COD to use the processing power to evolve past "left trigger, right trigger, shoot all the things."

About the only game I can think of where I said "they couldn't have done that last gen" is Ratchet & Clank's dimension hopping thing. Maybe Returnal, although that has more to do with super-fast load times being so central to the experience than anything particularly innovative in terms of gameplay.

2027, huh?

120 FPS becoming standard at 4K resolution. Graphics can look so good now that frame rate should be priority. And smarter NPC’s.

Also, 2027 seems a bit soon, no?

I might sound like a lack of ambition but I think what I would want because it’s what we can get is likely just what the PS5 is promising but not what every game is achieving

Think of it this way, it won't be these following technologies:

VR - Virtual reality will come it’s like Thanos said, "I am inevitable" they he snaps his fingers and it is "but not yet". Maybe ion 20 years VR will be iniquitous enough to make a VR console inevitable, but now next time.

AI - Better AI is not a console or hardware issue as much as a software issue. What will needed to occur is a Unity AI, Lumber Yard AI, Unreal AI, etc. that is built to be drop in realistic human Turing passing, autonomous within game world AI. And, before we get ahead of ourselves -- I mean something we call an AI that is not actually an AI. It feels like an intelligent bit of code, it acts like an intelligent being that is not script with actions, it fools the player very well...but strictly speaking not an AI NPC. Smoke & Mirrors, but damn convincing and extensible smokes and mirrors. That said such software is what needs to happen, and nobody is doing that yet - it only in a programmers "to do" list. And, yeah, it will be Google, Amazon, or Honda that does it.

Motion Controls - I hate to say it, but you cannot beat the joypad. It’s like a steering wheel in car, there are more precise options but their downside is too big. The first automobiles had a 'tiller', that was replaced quickly the wheel - it took over. We still use a steering wheel, but why. There are all sorts of studies that show in some ways a "joystick like a jet fighter would have advantages for steering and driver fatigue, so why don't we switch. It’s because a flight stick has too many downsides if the driver is jostled. That same is true for joypads, they are crude, but the dexterity needed is within a wider swath of users than any motion controls would ever be, and increasingly the tech to allow people with mobility issues to use less expensive devices that map to standard joypads. The joypad is a better "greater commonly useful" input method, just as steering wheels is in a car. More precise or single handed controls are not always better, sometimes K.I. S. S. is better (keep it simple ______)

So, I think PS6 and PS7 will just advance only in the realm of higher resolution, more realistic scene lighting and faster frames per second. Likely hand in hand with that will be faster media drives, faster storage retrievals and writes, and faster processing, all working on a faster data BUS. Could consoles/pcs run cooler? Possibly, but I'd better on hotter with better cooling. Could consoles/pcs be quieter? Possibly but my bet is on better insulated from noise.

Well, PS4/Xbone were 2013 and PS5/Series were 2020. So, conceptually, 2027 doesn't seem crazy. Considering that we're going to have chip shortages at least through 2023 though, I would say putting out a new console in 2027 seems insane.

That would be great. College football is held hostage to the 360 as well.

exist

Just because we don't see the same giant steps we saw in the past it doesn't mean things aren't moving forward. I'm currently doing a From Soft marathon and it's such a good illustration of how games have been evolving, not just through graphics, but through gameplay as well. Go play other long lasting franchises like Assassin's Creed and it gets pretty obvious that the games themselves DO actually get better, and standard game practices DO evolve.

The big change that people don't really think about is how insanely many more games come out now than they did before. Every game gets a twenty iterations in just a few years time, and each of them tries small and different changes. So you don't have the thing where you get one major shooter every 2 years that does a ton of new things, iterating on the ideas from the last game, you get a constant flow of small improvements that over time makes all the games better. It makes it seem like nothing is really changing, but when you step back and take a look at the whole picture things definitely are improving.

So, no, I don't need there to be any major revolutionary changes. Just keep the industry alive and innovation and iteration will keep going strong.

Support for 21:9 resolutions.

I think the next big thing will be a Switch-like device with Tensor Cores. Imagine a Steam Deck "Pro," but with DLSS that can make the most demanding game run at 40-ish fps at 1440p with a VRR display.

As for Sony and Xbox consoles, I imagine next gen consoles will be able to run the Matrix demo at 4k/60 fps, maybe they'll add more haptic feedback options. It seems like the future is ultra-realism, perhaps VR, and always online content. Living, breathing worlds that dynamically change with your IRL seasons, big events that change small thing for everyone. GTA 6 will essentially be the final GTA that keeps changing every year. Sadly, I'm not too interested in that future, it sounds a bit dystopian (always online, no privacy, extreme addiction). Hope for the best, expect the worst.

For me PS6 and XboxSX+ would need the following things. First off I would want both systems to come with a 2TB hard drive installed rather a 1TB. Launch with just one base model and have enough systems at launch. Graphics wise, I would predict 8K gaming with games in the future being able to look realistic.

Games directly inserted into my brain.

I think Nintendo will continue with a Switch Pro that will be backwards compatible with Switch accessories and games. That's really one thing where Nintendo could succeed as they would have a system that was backwards compatible. 16GB of Ram memory, 64 GB of storage, 8 inch screen.

I’ve been more impressed with my PS5 than I was with my PS4. Faster loading, better frame rates, and a pretty cool controller feel like bigger jumps than my x360 to PS4, honestly.

In the spirit of writing things that would impress me, not things that are predictions (clearly, next gen will have nicer visuals, more memory, etc), I'm gonna pull a few things that have been talked about as "wouldn't it be cool if..." but are basically considered impossible for various reasons:

Your console is a computer, so why doesn't it act like one?

One of the coolest ideas from the PS3 was the Other OS capability. You just spent $600 on this hardware that's supposed to be the fastest computer in your house, of course you can run linux on it! This was removed because it enabled a lot of exploits (and because nobody used it, basically). I basically think this idea was before its time, and security/virtualization has come a long way since then.

Also, like, if I'm playing on xbox, why can't it tap into my other windows PC in the other room to do compute for my console game? Why can't they both do it for my roommate's game? Why can't I set up PiHole on it? Why doesn't it serve up downloads to everyone else in my building, bittorrent style? What happened to "rent your console's cpu time to cloud players near you?" Why can't my Series X split itself into two Series S's and stream a feed to someone else in my city? That's right, the the power of the cloud returns, Xbox One 2!

Okay, obviously it wouldn't look exactly like that. I'm mostly arguing that I think the concept of "This box only plays games" is kind of narrow-minded and we could be doing a lot more with them. Any movement here would impress me a ton.

A shift in the fundamental nature of game interfaces

This is an easy one. Controllers are a happy one-size-fits-most solution to the physical interface to software, and I think they're basically here to stay in their current form. Maybe someone adds a gimmick like adaptive triggers or something. But the actual games themselves haven't evolved much - we still have hacks like "Destiny cursors", many levels of maps, quest logs, inventories, codexes, weird combos, tabs on tabs on tabs, yellow dotted lines, etc etc. This is just the landscape of games today, and it's clunky and weird. I mean, of course games have a main menu, pause menu, options screen, system menu, stats screen and so on, right? That's the way it has to be done.

There's too many abstractions between what the user wants to do/know and what they have to do to get there. We all clowned on Kinect and motion controls (because, like, they barely worked half the time) and voice controls/assistants like siri/alexa still suck and are too slow for action games, but they are all trying to address the same problem - it's very hard to tell a computer what you want unless you're an expert or you're willing to tolerate slowness.

edit: A switch 2 could impress me by running a 5+ year old game like Witcher 3 or Doom above 144p 20fps

Raytracing got me. It seems dumb but I was genuinely stopping in Hitman 3 and thinking, "That's a nicely polished floor."

honestly (although this might sound flip to some) a box with moderately powered hardware that still allows me to run software locally that's paid for with an a la carte model (as apposed to subscription) would be most impressive to me.

i know everyone loves to say the future will be streamed, and we all love that recurrent rev drip- but to the hordes that demand SaaS or in this case GaaS i simply state- no thank you.

(i know it's a losing battle, but good lord i don't want more subscriptions just because shareholders demand it so).

Living until 2027...hilarious.

Buddy, pal, friendo...I can't even get a PS5 or Series X is I want to yet. I don't even know what I'm getting with the consoles we have now.

I mean... don't you ever try to imagine the future or dream of what is to come?

I think VR and AR are going to be increasingly important as they improve. Increasing the fidelity on your big TV only goes so far, but when the screen is that close to your eyeballs, it makes a difference. When it gets to the point where a full, immersive experience including ultra-high resolution goggles with eye tracking, hand tracking, body tracking, and haptics are all mature and integrated and available at a reasonable price... well, it's going to be an experience. I can imagine losing myself in it, and I'm not sure that's a good thing.

1080p/60fps as a baseline standard.

Yup.

Yup.

Yup.

I think(?) I'm only being half-serious here, but I'll be pretty psyched if we see an Xbox 5000/PS6 launching in 2027 or thereabouts regardless of what features they have. That would mean that a sufficiently large market exists for shiny new $500+ boxes to justify their existence, which would mean on the micro scale that game streaming has not become the de facto way to play new games, and on the macro scale that the world is in a much more stable place in 5 years than I'm anticipating.