"Unique gaming moments" the industry's future

The CEO of development tools company Natural Motion has told GamesIndustry.biz that the future for creating realism in videogames lies not with lots of animated routines, but with CPU synthesis.

Torsten Reil, speaking in an interview at GDC, believes that in order to capture the imagination of the pubic moving forwards it's important to provide "unique gaming moments" - in other words that 'never the same twice' feeling.

His company is working with the likes of LucasArts on Indiana Jones and Star Wars titles, and with Rockstar on Grand Theft Auto IV, and of the latter title explained:

"There is a drinking mini-game in very detailed form where you can get drunk and he can actually then stumble around and you have to get home," he said. "But all of that is fully simulated.

"So, it is not based on animation any more. It is actually all synthesized on the CPU. Which means that it has a completely different outcome every time you play."

Crucially, providing those different outcomes enables developers to "actually create a live world" and draw on the much-improved power of modern CPUs.

"The big thing for us, the core mission that we've always had behind this, is the quality of unique gaming moments," he added. "So, rather than really treating it as a nice cosmetic effect where the animation looks slightly nicer — which you could do — we want people to use it in a way that actually opens up the game.

"So that every time you play the game something different happens. And that's obviously much more like real life than playing just back pre-existing assets."

The full interview with Torsten Reil is available on GamesIndustry.biz now.