Depends. While i perhaps gave a poor example initially, consider the difference between SMB1 and SMB3.
The latter have all kinds of one off and crazy mechanics (walking behind the apparent background, a sun that attacks, windup shoes one and enter and exit) that keep the various worlds fresh, in part because they show off the greater understanding the developers have of how to work the hardware available.
Then again i may be that working with two dimensions provided the ability to put in more elaborate game mechanics because the player had better situational awareness.
3D games seems to have a severe issue with this because enemies can walk behind the camera. Thus many games with free camera movement and/or zoom ends up being played in a kind of overhead position at the furthest zoom possible to improve situational awareness.
something that ends up defeating all the work put into elaborate detailing on both characters and enemies unless there is heavy use of cinematic pans etc.
> "Depends. While i perhaps gave a poor example initially, consider the difference between SMB1 and SMB3.
The latter have all kinds of one off and crazy mechanics (walking behind the apparent background, a sun that attacks, windup shoes one and enter and exit) that keep the various worlds fresh, in part because they show off the greater understanding the developers have of how to work the hardware available."
For the most part, the evolution of game mechanics doesn't rely on improving hardware usage.
Using the SMB1 vs. SMB3 example, the ideas from SMB3 could've existed in SMB1, they might not have looked as good but they could've been done.
If the 'hardware enabling game mechanics' hypothesis was correct, every new console generation would be able to add new mechanics just by being faster. Taking 2D gaming as a whole, I'd suggest the horsepower needed for 2D gaming peaked around the Dreamcast/PS2 era, I don't envision any 2D game type being built that couldn't exist on those consoles.
If VR is to take off, gaming hardware will need to evolve, but beyond that we won't need new hardware to enable new game types anymore. VR/AR is the end of the road.
The original assertion of "developers working the hardware better", and your rebuttal, are both incorrect. There was a literal constraint enforcing SMB1's design: ROM space. The developers of the first game had already had several years of experience on the platform, and they were straining to squeeze in the amount of content they had. It fits in 40kB. SMB3 uses 384kB, in comparison: 9.6 times bigger. Essentially, each world in SMB3 can contain 1.2 copies of SMB1.
What changed was not a matter of experience, but that cartridge game technology grew massively more powerful and changed the whole nature of the platform within the span of a few years. This was very much a case of "more is more." You could get a few of the ideas in SMB3 in the space of SMB1, but not all of them at once. And development costs rose sharply in the latter half of the 1980's for precisely this reason - you could feasibly make a "big" game that evoked a whole world with a variety of interactions, and doing so was a huge spectacle which necessitated a team dedicated to content creation, rather than a solo dev, yet was also largely independent of the graphics fidelity. Sierra Online built its name in this period by capitalizing on exactly this quality - presenting a world just a little more fully realized than the text adventures preceding it. It was a golden era for role-playing games, too - Ultima, Wizardry, Dragon Quest, and Final Fantasy all had big entries during this period.
The picture changes as you get into the 1990's. Most of the advances are pretty firmly on the side of "graphics treadmill." Games do keep getting more complex, but by the end of the decade, with stuff like Baldur's Gate, Jagged Alliance 2, Starcraft, Counter-Strike, or Deus Ex, you can find pretty much all of the design templates that AAA leans on. Design has mostly trended towards efficiency and simplification since then.
We've only seen the tip of the iceberg, in my opinion. AAA is in the process of a slow-motion collapse, despite its best efforts, because the nature of retail has changed to favor digital distribution, triggering an erosion of price points and upending the balance sheet. (no shelf space, no distributor lock-in, etc.) This was set in motion in the 2000's, but only became a life-or-death issue more recently. Console gaming hasn't had it this bad since 1984.
And indies have always had it tough, but they've experienced a sudden shift from a private market with the most prized audiences available only to the well-positioned and connected(e.g. get on XBLA in 2008, or Steam in 2011), to a market that is saturated everywhere, with few opportunities to stand out of the crowd. In theory, this means people should be more creative and adventurous. Anyone who intends to make a business of it is obligated to shrink scope, derisk and focus on getting a great promotional story together, though, and so it's hard to remain optimistic if your approach is more technically-inclined and favors design risks. I got to be in the thick of all of it as it happened and gradually concluded in the past year that I couldn't make it work full-time, not within the context of the projects I genuinely wanted to work on.
There is still room for AAA where it feeds into the F2P business. So MMOs will definitely stick around, and competitive games like League and DOTA. But that model doesn't favor the typical single-player campaign experience. All the paths to sustainable, growing success in gaming right now lead to something that involves F2P marketing tactics, community-building, platform ownership, or preferably a combination. Anything less than that faces a huge uphill battle to not simply get lost in the shuffle.
All of that said, the market is not dead by any means. The graphics race is on its way out - it'll continue to be advanced by dedicated engine devs, but the ability to render things is entirely a commodity now, borne witness by the frenzied price wars between Unreal and Unity. That, along with the shift to digital, has shaken the industry's dynamic into something way more unpredictable. It's great if you're enterprising enough, but most devs aren't, when it comes down to it.
One idea you couldn't do in SMB1 was going backwards. SMB1 was a game that was going to be included with almost every console that was sold so the cost of the cartridge really mattered to the corporate bottom line. Not only was the rom chips for the SMB1 cartridge a fraction of the size of SMB3 (and a fraction of the price), but SMB1's cartridge contained no expensive SRAM chip.
On SMB3 you will find the level data stored at 6000+ which is inside the SRAM. This level data is what allowed you to go back to areas in the level you had already played and find consistency. In SMB1 you couldn't go back because it didn't store that data and so the bad guy you killed and the blocks you destroyed would have to appear again.
The latter have all kinds of one off and crazy mechanics (walking behind the apparent background, a sun that attacks, windup shoes one and enter and exit) that keep the various worlds fresh, in part because they show off the greater understanding the developers have of how to work the hardware available.
Then again i may be that working with two dimensions provided the ability to put in more elaborate game mechanics because the player had better situational awareness.
3D games seems to have a severe issue with this because enemies can walk behind the camera. Thus many games with free camera movement and/or zoom ends up being played in a kind of overhead position at the furthest zoom possible to improve situational awareness.
something that ends up defeating all the work put into elaborate detailing on both characters and enemies unless there is heavy use of cinematic pans etc.