This course drops the lowest 3 blog scores so I’ll be focusing on technology that’s a bit goofy as part of my last 3 blog posts.

Game Development has always been interesting where developers push the limits of the hardware so as to create the most beautiful product possible. This sometimes means restricting the player experience.

For example, if a player was exploring an open-world RPG perhaps it would take too much of the system memory to keep all the objects in the system environment. Sometimes, developers use the map in order to ameliorate this. A player might need to go through a canyon that allows the system to deallocate all the objects outside of the canyon in order to create an elaborate environment at the end of the canyon path.

Sometimes, like in Mass Effect, you would be forced to elevator cinematics in order to render the new environment when the player is switching from one environment to another. If that wasn’t bad enough, sometimes developers have to put all the textures for that environment within contiguous persistent storage block in previous generation consoles in order to meet runtime requirements.

These are all the issues that have supposedly been resolved in the PS5. By embracing SSDs, game developers can avoid the duplication required to render game environments because of how much faster SSD storage and retrieval is. Furthermore, game developers do not have to create as much artificial partitions in the game environment due to increased RAM.

All in all, increased hardware capability is lessening the need for game developers to push the limits of hardware via odd hacks to improve the game experience. I guess we will see how long this era lasts until the next generation.