Are you ready for next gen consoles?

Where are you getting that this console generation couldn't hit 1080p/30 FPS? Forza 5 launched with the standard Xbox One at 1080p and a rock-solid 60 FPS, even in 16-player online races. There were only a handful of games I can recall dipping below 1080p or upscaling on the base Xbox One, and most of those only did so in the interest of staying at/near 60 FPS or just weren't well-optimized while developers were still figuring out the hardware early on. I certainly recall people complaining (non-console gamers jeering would be a more accurate description), but it was when games on the base consoles weren't 1080p/60 FPS, not 30 FPS. Games largely haven't had much trouble doing 1080/30 on the base consoles outside of a few exceptions, to the point that one very well could call that this gen's baseline. As for the current hardware, the One X plays literally hundreds of games in native 4K. Not checkerboarding, not upscaling, native 2160p 4K. Here's the list.

HITMAN and Forza Horizon 4 are my personal standouts. I stress-tested the shit out of HITMAN via various shenanigans on my launch Xbox One, and it holds up. Alternatively, playing it on the One X maintains 50-60 FPS in performance mode or an absolute visual treat in 4K at a solid 30 FPS. Both HITMAN and Horizon 4 have the option of 4K/30 FPS or 1080p/60 FPS. Horizon 4 hits all those benchmarks flawlessly, confirmed by DF. It's native 4K that doesn't dip below 30 FPS, or if framerate is your thing, it's 1080p and a rock-solid 60 FPS. And to the point of scaling, the base Xbox One still runs Horizon 4 at 1080p/30 FPS. This is a fine example of a game that offers quality gameplay at 4K/30, 1080/60, or at worst, 1080/30 if you still have a base console, which is plenty "playable". The claim that we've hit some point where games are being limited by this gen's base consoles is bunk.

I'm not going to sit here and claim that the base consoles were amazingly powerful, but they were mostly fine. The platform war stuff from the PC elitist crowd mocking the consoles got way out of hand, and it appears that you assumed whatever exaggerations people spouted off there were accurate. Sure, the base consoles are fairly underpowered now, but the One X (and to a slightly lesser extent, the PS4 Pro) really aren't, short of unfairly comparing them against high-end gaming PCs where the video card alone costs more than the consoles. Still, the base consoles aren't underpowered enough to be an actual problem yet, as evidenced by games still being capable of delivering on both the base and the upgraded consoles, and the One X/PS4 Pro both currently have games with very impressive visuals/performance, which is why we don't need another generation yet.

Not really, I still have plenty of games I haven't played on my XBONE, and I'm still taking the time to go through those. Hell, I haven't even started playing Red Dead Redemption 2 or The Witcher 3, even though I've owned them for a while now.

Besides, I'm always skeptical about the performance of new consoles right after launch, I don't want to live another "Xbox 360" crisis with consoles breaking down because they are not optimized from the start. I'm also waiting to see the price point for these new consoles. If they go for anything around the $500 price tag at launch, then I definitely will be taking my time to see how they play out, how they perform and most of all, how much of an upgrade they really are over what we currently have.

I remember an interview with Phil Spencer where he said that he didn't need people to buy Scarlett because: "The business is around software and service growth. That is the profitable part of the business; selling the hardware is not the profitable part of the business." So it seems like if you don't buy a Scarlett right at launch, you won't be missing much, specially because a big game like Halo Infinite will also be available for Xbox One. So it seems like Microsoft is not giving much incentive to move soon to the next generation, it seems more like the transition to next generation will be a slow one. At least for me, I'm not that motivated to buy new hardware only for improved graphics.

Maybe my opinion is biased because I'm an Xbox-only gamer, but if Sony moves more aggressively, and announces great games for PS5 launch, then I might consider switching, specially if PS5 becomes backwards compatible with PS3 and PS4, then I guess it would be a no brainer to switch to PS5.

My backlog is full of awesome games I have yet to complete, the Switch is still a treasure trove of shiny and new games for me, and judging from past experience with the PS4 and Xbox One, next-gen won't bring any actual gameplay improvements and is gonna take 3 or so years to have anything even worth looking at.

I'll pass for a few years, thanks.

I haven't owned a console since I transitioned to PC (my last system was a Wii U). Even though I likely still won't get a console, I am actually quite excited for this next generation of hardware!

Let's be clear: these new consoles probably won't actually do DXR-level ray tracing, and they DEFINITELY won't run any games at 8k. That said, I'm looking forward to the chance to finally be able to afford an upgrade from a measly 4-core i5 4690k. Demand for things like new memory standards (DDR5 hopefully soon) and 7nm chip manufacturing processes will make newer, more powerful processors much more affordable than they are now. Outside the realm of consoles, I'm sure that Nvidia's RTX tech will continue to mature and get better, and I'll be interested to see what AMD brings to the table on that front.

I'm also looking forward to games that finally take advantage of SSD tech that PCs have had for ages. Imagine if those Mass Effect elevator rides took as long as normal elevator rides!

Beyond the hardware, which I have confidence will be a significant improvement, I hope we get more experimental games from big publishers. the indie scene is alive and well, but it feels like we haven't really had any big-budget original IPs like Katamari pop up in this last decade or so.

Oh and one last thing! I kind of hope we can avoid the whole cross-gen game period this time, personally. This one was pretty insane, with big titles being released cross-gen from the system launches in 2013 to well into 2015. I couldn't help but think that some games were held back tech-wise because of it. We only saw rendering techniques like global illumination and physically-based material systems become widely adopted late into this generation, in the last couple of years or so. Heck, Call of Duty is just now getting its first engine overhaul in ages.

And that's my $0.02!

Of course this talk of new consoles soon could all end up being for naught.

All due to the concerns raised in the letter sent jointly earlier this month from Microsoft, Nintendo and Sony to the U.S. Govt. This was after they were asked to help the Administration identify more products to stick tariffs on.

Basically they warned that putting tariffs on games-related goods made in China has the very real possibility of raising the price of any new console so much as to make it beyond the reach of many households in the US.

They also noted that, in 2018, over 96% of consoles imported into the U.S. were made in China. A point that I thought most people actually realised, but now am not so sure about, if it needed to be pointed out to the Govt.

The knock-on effects of the tariffs would apparently be felt throughout the industry, not only affecting the manufacturers but also developers, retailers and obviously those ancillary jobs that surround them.

Not to mention that it would not only be US households and companies that would suffer. An expensive new product in the US usually tends to also be expensive globally thanks to the pricing models employed. So even if your country is not getting directly hit by the tariffs proposed, prepare to get some of that collateral economic damage if (as the companies called it) "a core part of the fabric of American entertainment culture" is damaged.

Absolutely! I never really bought into the PS Pro or XboxOneX though. I figured that there would be another console generation would be just around the corner and didn't see the need to upgrade. So bring it on baby!!!!

I'm still waiting for a ps4 to hit the sweet $100 price point.

There will never be a time like in the five three generation of video games where they tech changed dramatically every 4-5 years. Then again those first five genertion had winners and losers not just for the corporations, but for the players. If you choose Jaguar over Saturn or PSX you were screwed. (If you had Saturn, PSX, or N64 you were at least haunginbg in teh same class of machines...if you has 3DO or Jaguare you were %*$ked. It nice that consoles are less of a risk now - always good enough.

There will not be another revolution in gaming until the ability/drive for coders reaches to the point where they want to seriously tackle NPC/ENEMY artificial intelligence. And THAT might be why "streaming games" take off. Far easier to have a stack of servers acting as teh AI (decision making inleigence) in our games rather than running teh AI local. Truely, the advancement in AI is not go right or left anymore, what we want teh AI to do is answer the question, "If the sky is the sea, what does that make birds?" If we ask and NPC that question is it now about how fast they answer (within a second or two), but rather what they say. A very good AI might say, birds are "the fish". But a fantastic AI might say, "How high are you, man? Why are you condiering teh 'chickens' of the sea???" You see you don't need locally running AI to have good AI, it does not have to answer in 2 milliseconds. What you want is AI that gives really human-like answers to any question in the proper context, or propeley faking the wrong constest, to make them NPC AI seem real. Not fast, but very good is what you need. My guess is that an AI that could be used in hundred of online games for a thousand users of users could be just one rack of purposed built servers.

An given game might only need 'an answer' that an AI could give once every 15 minutes. That means tens of thousands of contextual queries can come to the AI Box even few minutes and the AI can handled ALL OF THEM with ease. Consider, that is the twist at the end of the movie "Her" (2013). [SPOILERS] That Scarlett Johansson AI was not talking to just Theodor for those months of their relationship, she/it was talking to thousands of people. The 'HER' AI was having an endless variety of growing relationship with thousands of men, women, non-binary, queer, straight, and asexula people all at once - all the time. Human interaction is S-L-O-W. Left, right, walk, run, shoot or don't shoot are questions that require a millisecond, but our minds don't control that, our autonomic nervous system does. Just as a game AI would not handled walking, shooting, sitting or driving. All the mindless actions of an NPC you will be handled by automincs process of code. The real thinking that is 1/100,000 making a believable Chattering Turing AI does not have to do that, just the thoughful: actions, reactions, questions & answers that require thought...

So...bottom line...the next advancement of games won't be hardware in teh local console, it won't be graphics, sound, organizing friends lists, or sending private messages. The next advance will be AI, and it will come when it makes sense.

And, it might come all of a sudden. It won't be a build up of better and better AI that seems realistic, it will be be a bullet point on a game box. All of a sudden the NPCs in your gameswill talk, listen, and answer back. All of a sudden when you make a choice in game; the game will respond to what you did, when you did it, and how.

I'm totally okay with a new generation of consoles coming out next year, but I probably won't buy them. I'm cool with it, because buying a new console every 7 years with the best affordable parts (especially as they converge on common architectures) seems in line with my past purchases. But I bought into the current generation a year or two after launch, and was generally happy with that decision. I'll likely do the same with the next generation consoles (probably the PS5, since I really dig their exclusives.) I'm not expecting anything to improve other than marginally better graphics, better framerates, and most-importantly faster load times. The games will continue to march slowly along their same evolutionary path and nothing has convinced me that better hardware will make better games.

Not in any way lol

Personally, I am looking forward to the arrival of the next generation of gaming consoles starting in 2020. It's been almost seven full years since the arrival of the Playstation 4 (2013), and I am very interested to see the advances in gaming (graphics, framerate, size/scale of games, load times, features, etc) that will be on full display with the Playstation 5 and next Xbox system (current name of Project Scarlett, but I am sure the name will be changed before release).

We have had some amazing games arrive over the years with the PS4/PS4 Pro and Xbox One/One X, so I can't wait to see what sort of games the next generation of console gaming delivers for us. Curious to see just how big of a jump the Playstation 5 and next Xbox system are over the base PS4 and Xbox One models (from their respective launch dates) and over the PS4 Pro/Xbox One X models.