Half-Life just had its 25th anniversary. It’s crazy to think there were only 5 years between those two titles.
We are as far away from that period now as that period was from the birth of video games. Tennis for Two, Space Wars, Pong, Super Mario, DOOM, Quake, Half-Life.
Compare that 20-year evolution to the evolution of gaming in the last 20 years. You can see areas where games have gotten vastly better, not just graphically or cinematically, but with level design, mission design, characterization, contextual integration, procedural elements.
But still nowhere near the explosion of the first 20 years as innovation poured in, and all of the main players were scrappy young companies, ready to innovate in an atmosphere where it still meant something to create entirely novel experiences that challenged the player.
You can also very easily see an industry-wide shift in game design after both GTA and Minecraft, which seemed so far apart at the time but really were about a decade apart. What comes next?
Not that it's not impressive; look at the PS5 tech demos (large scale areas that players can go through fast without loading times thanks to fast storage), or the Unreal Engine demos, e.g. the Matrix one you can download to the PS5 or the one where they highlight generative level creation.
But it doesn't feel as revolutionary anymore. Mind you, that may just be fatigue, or "getting used to" things quickly.
I wonder if we will live to see another such revolution in the wake of mature generative AI tools? If creating a game of the density and caliber of Red Dead Redemption 2 becomes feasible with a modest team of 10?
A new genre in the last 10 years? Probably nothing really. We're probably past the point of new genres being invented until the technology dramatically changes.
We'll see some wild Genre Fusion though. I'm excited for that. I can't wait to see what happens when we stop just stapling "RPG" to every genre and start to really innovate.
It's great for playing games based on standing in one place and blasting, but that's the same genre as Time Crisis and Duck Hunt.
That said, it's a work/life balance thing too; the Doom team did pretty much a year of grinding, pizza and coffee fueled 14+ hour workdays.
Not to mention the graphics evolution; compare G-man from HL to HL2.