We've hit a budgetary ceiling with 3d graphics, and we still haven't achieved photorealism-- maybe now it's time that we put polygons on the back burner and give digitized sprites another shot.

You laugh? Well, Henri has been enjoying looking at pictures of golf recently, and I ran across this photograph. I thought to myself, "The 3DO had games with cool digitized golfers almost twenty years ago-- surely contemporary golf games must look photorealistic by now."

So I went and found a screenshot of what I assume is a modern golf game-- "Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13"-- and was amazed to find that it looks... well, terrible.

What if-- as an industry-- we shifted directions back towards digitized sprites, and developed special hardware algorithms using today's absurdly powerful GPUs to assist with animation and perspective correction? It wouldn't work for every genre, but it would work for a vast majority of them, especially if if photorealism was the desired aesthetic.

We're already spending the money on motion capturing just about everything these days-- why not just set up a bunch of cameras and record the actors instead? It'd probably be cheaper, and the end product would look much more realistic too. As much as they're paying Tiger Woods or whomever to feature in our games, I'm sure we could get a half hour of his time so they could record him swinging a golf club.

In the early 90s the industry dabbled in hand-drawn sprites, CGI pre-rendered sprites, digitized sprites, polygons, and FMV-- and it was a better industry for all of the experimentation; lots of innovation! But like everything else in the modern game industry, we've completely given up on experimentation or any even remote sort of risk-taking.