It’s Christmas time, and there’s no need to be afraid … of a video game shortage. Every year at this time, the mainstream industry jettisons its biggest releases on to shop shelves, ensuring that no household need contemplate the idea of a festive season without Fifa, Call of Duty, Assassin’s Creed or Skylanders. In some ways, this year should be different, marking as it does the first birthday of Sony and Microsoft’s next generation systems, and the third Xmas for the Wii U. How have they changed the face of gaming? That is a good question – with a crap answer. They haven’t, really.  Of course, history tells us that it takes at least two years for most major consoles to “bed in”. Developers need time to get to grips with new hardware, learning the idiosyncracies and figuring out how to exploit innovative features. There are exceptions, of course. Halo: Combat Evolved effectively set the whole tone and agenda for the original Xbox on launch day, while a year after the release of the PlayStation 2 we had Grand Theft Auto III and Metal Gear Solid 2, which were, well, pretty good games.  So perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that this year’s major Xbox One and PS4 releases don’t really move the design agenda on all that much. Titles like Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Dragon Age: Inquisition have fiddled with well-known formulas and conventions in fun and interesting ways; Forza Horizon 2 and DriveClub have attempted to build on the social gaming dynamics set in place by Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit; Destiny and Titanfall mixed single- and multiplayer components, but produced fairly tradition sci-fi shooters, that just happened to be easier to experience with friends.  Interestingly, when I asked Twitter for favourite innovations of the “next-gen” era so far, most of the responses were system improvements. The ability to play Wii U games on the GamePad, or to stream live TV to a tablet from Xbox One – both are about multitasking in the living room rather than gameplay. There are peripheral moments too – like the context-sensitive use of the Dual Shock light bar, or the clever way certain titles – like ZombiU, Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare and Alien Isolation – have used controller mics to extend game audio directly into the player’s personal space. Lots of people appreciated the fact that you can now plug your headphones into the PlayStation joypad – a little industrial design addition that is much more about comfort than it is about innovation.  The example of a genuinely new idea that people have kept coming back with is the nemesis system in Middle-Earth: Shadow of Mordor. If you haven’t experienced it yet, it allows enemy characters to remember their battles with the player, thereby creating little user-generated sub-plots: an injured foe will recall the encounter and their resentment will fester until your next meeting; or if your opponent defeats you, they will remember the sweet taste of victory. This gives players a strong sense of what all players want: agency in the game world. We want to feel as though we’re making a personal impact on the environment; that we’re not just joining the dots on someone else’s scripted narrative. Mordor indulges player imagination and inherent narcissism – it says, yes, you count, you made a difference.  This is interesting because the game systems themselves are built to indulge us in this way. The ability to easily take screenshots and videos on PS4 and Xbox One is a major addition bringing the dynamics of social media into the gaming experience: console manufacturers have learned that people want to tell stories as well as play them. Now developers have to catch up with that. The nemesis system is one move in this direction, but eventually we’ll see this sort of generative, personalised narrative machinery paired with other procedural systems. The likes of Crusader Kings 2, Skyrim and GTA V all build mini-quests around players, but these are usually basic tasks dosed up with a little story filler. The future is about games that observe players and create narrative systems around them.  So this Christmas, it’s all about developers toying with the fundamentals of new hardware, personalisation and social features – these are the areas to watch. Next year, titles like No Man’s Sky, Tom Clancy’s The Division and Bloodborne may have more to tell us; and perhaps we will see more of the asymmetrical multiplayer features we saw with early Wii U games like Nintendoland – certainly Evolve and Fable: Legends will be worth a look in this regard. Miiverse has also proved popular and it will be fascinating to see how that expands, and whether Sony can rethink its abandoned Home concept for something else.  The future of games is more about us than about the games themselves – or at least the future is somewhere in-between those two entities. Perhaps virtual reality will unite us at least next year; navigating the psychic dead space between player consciousness, controller and screen – maybe it’ll just be a cool new mechanic that no one saw coming. But really, after a long era of sequels and conceptual homogenisation (at least in the mainstream boxed-copy industry), the only true future for games is the one that’s different for everybody.
This month has seen a flurry of new console game releases – but they’re still not telling us much about the future of the PS4 and Xbox One. By Keith Stuart