Game developers are trying to push your video game experience to the next level, making it feel more real than ever. They do this with graphical upgrades, leveraging tools like Unreal Engine 5 and Unity to make gameplay footage nearly indiscernible from real life. The next generation of realistic physics in games is here, and these are the games setting the tone.
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Donkey Kong Bananza was one of the Switch 2’s strongest launch titles, and while it does not have the photorealistic graphics and capabilities of shooter game tech, it offers a satisfying, destruction-focused gameplay loop. Few games have the programming and memory to allow players to destroy nearly everything in the game.
The team used Voxel technology, which takes pixels and turns them into aesthetically pleasing 3D shapes. Kazuya Takahashi from Entertainment Planning and Development said, “Thanks to the creation of this toolset, we were able to craft Layers that feel truly unique to this game, with terrain that features a rich variety of visual styles and physical properties, along with underground areas and fully destructible environments, down to the smallest detail.”
The abilities of the destruction physics in Call of Duty Black Ops 7also set a standard for next-gen gaming powerhouses. The game’s Lead Producer, Natalie Phorski, mentioned how the game’s design is supposed to provide “players with new twists and mind-bending experiences, where you don’t know who you can trust, or even what’s real.”
While this highlights the game’s narrative, these feelings also translate to the way explosions, gunshots and psychics feel in the world. Everything, from how particles spread to the haptic feedback in the controller, contributes to feeling engrossed in the characters and landscape as they react to your inputs in real time.
Unrecord is another first-person shooter defying how people perceive player characters in gaming worlds. The technology behind Unrecord makes it incredibly immersive, homing in on a more niche bodycam perspective for even greater authenticity. The realism tech in Unrecord will make players feel like they are in the scene, increasing tension and affecting their ability to respond to stimuli.
Other titles like War Thunder and Beyond All Reason take real-time strategy and multiplayer combat to another realm with their physics. Developers need to review these elements as if they were conducting real ballistics tests, observing how harsh conditions and stress affect how events unfold. This informs how they manage projectiles and design damaged models.
Game developers still have a ways to go before they perfect these elements. Hardware components, such as volatile memory, still hinder designers from creating the extremely adaptive, dynamic games they want. Eventually, they will be able to make already exceptional physics even better by making them more responsive to environmental conditions with advanced game engines.
Everything from huge explosions to crumbling building facades is expected to resemble reality more than ever in modern video games because of the tools developers have available to them. Your investment in a title is a vote of confidence in the developer to create all-encompassing, gripping stories and gameplay loops. Many of these qualities stem from these details, making them feel powerful and real.