[News] Our boldest predictions for PC gaming in 2024

[Angel of Death]

Predicting the future of something as volatile and changeable as videogames truly is a mug's game. Well, fill us up with coffee because we are apparently mugs. In 2023, the most talked-about game of the year was a CRPG with turn-based combat, and the most quickly forgotten one was a new Bethesda open world. While award shows patted the industry on its back for a bumper year of quality games, studios closed, publishers were acquired, and layoffs were rampant. After all that, imagining what 2024 could possibly have in store for us is a daunting task, but we'll give it a shot anyway. We can drop the difficulty down to Story for this bit, right? No? Ah.

Once again we're gazing into the web of possible futures to determine what the year ahead will bring. We've got our deck of self-made tarot cards right out of The Cosmic Wheel Sisterhood and our crew of divination wizards have rolled their portent dice. Here are our best, or at least boldest, guesses at what will happen to PC gaming in 2024.

Chris Livingston, Senior Editor: I saw it twice in 2023 and we're going to see more of it in the year ahead. At GDC in March, Brendan Greene showed me a demo of Project Artemis, which is (or will be) a digital planet the size of a real planet. Then at The Game Awards, Sean Murray of Hello Games revealed the next project for the No Man's Sky studio, a digital planet—you guessed it, the size of a real planet—in the trailer for Light No Fire.

Maybe thanks to games like No Man's Sky, Elite Dangerous, and most recently Starfield, we're all just a little burned out on tons and tons of (mostly uninteresting) procedurally generated planets, so sticking with one planet, but making it utterly humongous, is our gaming future. I bet we get two or three more game announcements this coming year about digital planets as big as Earth. A good AI-powered game will release Tyler Wilde, Executive Editor: When I spoke to Unity exec Marc Whitten at GDC in March of last year, he was all in on the idea of runtime AI: That's generative AI not as a game production tool, but running live while you play, doing things like speech recognition or object detection, and even potentially generating dialogue or imagery or maps or anything else a machine learning algorithm can be trained to produce and remix. It was all a bit speculative, and there wound up being bigger Unity happenings to report on in 2023, but I think this is the year we see runtime AI used in games that actually demand serious attention.

So far, experiments in the field have been novel oddities, like the ChatGPT-powered Skyrim companion who tried to murder Chris' character with bad advice, or remarkable only for illuminating the ethical quagmire generative AI is mired in. But at least one upcoming game I know about, a multiplayer storytelling platform called Hidden Door, looks like it could actually be fun, and although it can't totally escape hard questions about the whole generative AI pursuit, its developer is approaching machine learning as responsibly as any I've seen, with plans to license worlds and writing styles from their authors. In a recent article, Josh compellingly argued that we shouldn't and don't have to accept the notion that generative AI will inevitably replace creative workers with fancy Xeroxes of the art they used to be paid for. I don't think that's an inevitable nor desirable outcome, either. But AI development will certainly continue, and in 2024, I think we'll start interacting with machine learning systems in mainstream games (beyond using DLSS for a framerate boost), and we might even discover that we like it. It isn't clear what generative AI will be capable of in just a year's time: As explained to me by a Stanford researcher last April, because the abilities of modern machine learning systems are emergent (in the systems theory sense), there's no way to confidently predict how rapidly it will advance.

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