Major Nelson recently interviewed Mark Terrano, a video game programmer and Design Director for Hidden Path Entertainment on the progress of the industry from a technological point view, and specifically his evaluation of the current generations technical achievements and limitations for the Xbox 360 XBLA games.
Listen from the 43rd minute on the podcast.
Updates:
Transcript of Segment in Interview
Major: Looking back on all the work you've done in the industry, are you surprised at where you are today in terms of technology or do you see alot of power in the box to be unlocked - specifically for the Xbox 360..
Developer: I think we've really pushed where we can go graphically, I think realism is losing some of the luster - I would love to see some work done on what we call "non-photo realistic rendering", paint-related techniques, we do things you can do in movies but I'm more interested in what you can't do in movies...
Major: Interesting..
Developer. I thought it was sad that we had to let the Matrix to show how fun Bullet-Time could be, we (developers) have control of the camera, we have control of the content, we're not limited by lenses etc, we (the industry) can do alot more things to draw the players attention to tell a story that haven't been discovered by movie camera's.
Major: Interesting, I never really thought of it like that. Why keep pushing the photo-realism that you could do more things to make the gameplay more effective.
Developer: Right. And I think the bar could be alot higher with animation and A.I, the things really cue into when interacting with an environment to make it more believable, to just make the characters - the scenes, we interact with more fun. We're seeing really good physics now, we all know how much fun it is to drive and smash cars in BURNOUT and do alot of things to make it more fun with the physics..etc