How Far Has PC Gaming Come?

The Crimson Dynamo

However, that’s not to say that MMOs are innately more cutting edge than all other types of games, as even though MMOs feel like a fairly recent idea MUDs and virtual communities actually predate most other genres by a hefty margin.

What we are saying is that most other genres, especially shooters, are looking at long last at developing their stories and not how to take huge steps forward. Most of them anyway, as there are definitely some interesting non-story ideas on the horizon – episodic gaming being the most notable new feature that’s starting to show up.

Episodic gaming isn’t strictly a mechanic per se, but it could carry them with it if you let your imagination run away with you for a moment and imagine what an episodic adventure could be if it ever strove to be more than just a new pricing model. Games with branching paths that are closely based on community feedback are possible using an episodic model, as the almost criminally unknown Masq proves.


As technology continues to improve though, some games are starting to move away from the idea of mechanics anyway and instead favouring dynamics. Decades ago Rogue was considered groundbreaking for its completely randomly generated world, but nowadays we don’t need to randomly generate these scenarios – we can create systems to intelligently manage them for us!

The personified AI Director in Left 4 Dead is a great example of this as it allows us to keep the bespoke elements of a carefully designed world and unpredictable feel of a random one, without conceding to the impersonal feel of most generated games. Consider Spore too, with its procedurally generated content and animations. It’s so easy to disregard these ideas now because we’ve all played Left 4 Dead to death and Spore wasn’t all that great – but holy monkey bladders these ideas are bordering on the revolutionary! Discard your feelings about the game itself and just consider the potential there!


Even when a random or managed element isn’t introduced then games are still capable of some fantastic things. The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion’s AI system may not have lived up to its promises of creating a believable world thanks to a lack of voice actors and dialogue lines, but even it has moments of brilliance. More recently the open worlds of games like GTA: IV are built on much more believable and well-tuned systems, with fully fleshed out communities and personalities. As is nearly always the case though, you need to go to small indie games like Façade if you want to see the idea take to its more extreme conclusion.

Actually, thinking about it, conclusion is perhaps the wrong word to use. A conclusion is something final and complete – a fully formed reply or riposte. This isn’t that though; and how could it be when the truly thrilling thing about this train of thought isn’t that we’ve developed all these new ideas. The exciting bit is that we haven’t even got properly started yet and, with games forever attracting more profits, attention and legitimacy, the industry could be on the cusp of a singularity.

That’s the really great thing about all this; we’ve come this far and we’re not even within sight of our final destination yet. It begs the question, where do we go from here?

Got an idea for what you think might be coming next in the games industry, or do you still think games aren’t as good as they used to be? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.