Facial animation has increased greatly during this generation of consoles (see Heavy Rain, Beyond: Two Souls and L.A. Noire as examples) but it’s still not one-to-one realistic. 2K Games president Christoph Hartmann thinks that for the gaming industry to truly reach the next level of mainstream appeal, we’ll need photorealism.
“Recreating a Mission Impossible experience in gaming is easy; recreating emotions in Brokeback Mountain is going to be tough, or at least very sensitive in this country… it will be very hard to create very deep emotions like sadness or love, things that drive the movies,” said Hartmann. “Until games are photorealistic, it’ll be very hard to open up to new genres. We can really only focus on action and shooter titles; those are suitable for consoles now.”
“To dramatically change the industry to where we can insert a whole range of emotions, I feel it will only happen when we reach the point that games are photorealistic; then we will have reached an endpoint and that might be the final console,” he added.
Source: GamesIndustry International
