Loading . . .
What’s one thing you can’t escape from in games, no matter how great your machine is? Loading. Play Half-Life 2, and you’ll load between levels. Morrowind? Lots of loading, as it threads the cells to simulate a seamless world. Pixel shading, bump mapping, vertex shading, mip-mapping, and all those other buzzwords are wonderful eye candy, but can’t we take a break? Both the Doom3 and Source engines look great. Oblivion’s engine looks fantastic. Slow down with the shaders and shiny stuff, and start putting your rendering power into seamless worlds.
I have no qualms with games looking the same for another couple of years, because they look incredible enough. So far, the Massive genre seems to have it. World of WarCraft? It loads for instances, and that’s fine for instances. Gothic didn’t load very much, and the game world was richer for it. I’m glad my Radeon X800 has a whole mess of texture memory and pixel piplelines, but let’s start putting that high-speed memory to better use than just huge textures, and start caching worlds. I’m sure this will all come to pass anyway, as the technology is reworked toward perfection, but I want it now, or at the very least really soon.