Striving for perfect graphics and improved levels of reality is the name of the game

GAMES ARE becoming smarter and more realistic as developers come up with new technology to make them more immersive and to win over a generation of gamers who demand improved higher standards from their chosen entertainment.

Developers are working constantly to create new games’ engines and improved graphics that will allow gamers to feel as if they are becoming fully immersed in a game. Get it right and your game will amass a decent following. Get it wrong and prepare for some heavy criticism.

The striving for gaming perfection is nothing new. It has seen graphics jump from boxy sprites to incredibly detailed and textured images in a relatively short space of time. Sports games, in particular, demand a level of reality that perhaps other games do not.

EA Sports has been conscious of that when tackling games that inspire such a massive following.

"We often talk about how many people buy the game. What we don't often talk about is how many people don't. For us, having 75 per cent market share with 11 million-odd sales is phenomenally good," said line producer for Fifa, David Rutter. Rutter estimates that between the different versions of Fifa that have been produced and the various platforms on which it is available – Facebook, iPhone, etc – the game probably reaches about 30 million people.

"But we believe there's about 351 million video gaming football fans in the world. So we celebrate it, and then have this reality check which is that we're only a tenth of the way there. But I dont think we'll ever get to a point where we have 351 million people playing Fifa, although it would be marvellous if we did.

“That’s the long-term vision. There’s this huge upside to making football games that we’re barely touching.”

One of the most hyped games of the year Gran Turismo 5, used its realistic shots of cars as one of its major selling points. The premium cars – about 20 per cent of the 1,000-plus in the game – were built to be as close to reality as possible. A session at last year's E3 exhibition demonstrated just how much work had gone in to building these models. Still shots of the cars from the game were shown side by side with photographs of the actual cars themselves, with some almost indistinguishable from the real thing.

But just making the games look good isn’t enough. They also have to play realistically too. In the games industry, one Irish firm has been helping to lift the standard of video games. Havok technology has found its way into some of the best known games of recent years.

“The overall drive for increased believability, realism, immersion, they’re all things that are very positive for Havok, because our technology has really been one of the key factors globally in changing the face of games over the past 10 years,” said managing director David Coughlan.

“Every key title now looks and plays differently because of the role that Havok’s technology has played over the years. Whether that particular game happens to use Havok or not, the reality is our tech has raised the bar in terms of what people expect to see in terms of how dynamic and interactive the overall game world is.”

That success was enough to see Intel swoop to acquire the Irish firm in 2007.

The latest version of Fifawill see it bring in a new game engine, known as the Impact engine. Not just an impressive name, Impact will bring the ability to add more realistic movement to players, allowing them to act and move more like real footballers.

“One of the things we needed to get done and which has been a big investment for us was the Fifa impact engine, the new physics system in the game, which . . . will continue to create these amazing feature opportunities for some time,” said Rutter of EA Sports.

Collisions between players have been improved, looking more like something you would see on a pitch on a Saturday afternoon.

And subtle changes can have a great impact. Changing the camera angle in a sports game to mimic TV shots more closely, or more obvious moves such as the TV style introduction for matches, can make gamers feel they are part of the experience, rather than simply spectating.

"Thats one of the things we're really want to try to capture in a video game. Its difficult, because youre not only trying to capture real world rivalries and atmosphere, you're also trying to capture how users are playing the game," Fifaart director Michael Day explained.

"As a first step, what we're trying to do with Fifa 12is try to raise the broadcast authenticity by including things like broadcast info overlays and trying to give users a little snippet of each team about to play. I think that goes a long way compared to what we had previously."

It's not just sports games that are getting increasingly realistic effects. Titles like Heavy Rainand Dead Space 2have managed to bring top notch graphics to gamers.

Rockstar's latest effort, LA Noire, has also been praised, not only for delivering graphics that look incredibly realistic, but also for mimicking realistic gestures and facial expressions, something that games have generally failed to do in the past.

One challenge facing games developers who want to make their products more advanced is the limitations of the consoles they are using. While far more advanced than their predecessors, the existing generation of consoles has been around for some time now.

The graphics have become more photorealistic in games, but there are areas that could be improved.

“When we produce all the art assets for our game, we produce them at a much higher resolution than we can display in-game. On the consoles especially, there’s a limit on how many textures we can hold in memory at once,” Day said. “We’re at that limit in this console cycle where anything new we add means we have to optimise something else in the game, or remove something.”

However, Havok’s Coughlan believes there is still scope for innovation on the current generation of consoles.

“I think there’s always scope for innovation. I think we’ve seen that the titles coming out on the PS3 and Xbox 360 now represent a significant step forward from the early wave launch titles on those devices,” he said.

"There's certainly scope for continued innovation on the technical side. In the last two or three years, we've seen some titles that have really pushed forward the types of things that are achievable there, whether it's an interactive story that's presented like Heavy Rain, whether it's a title like Portal 2 that's clearly pushing the boundaries in terms of the overall type of gameplay experience you can have, mixed in with a wicked sense of humour as a backdrop."

The landscape may be about to change again. Nintendo is set to unveil its latest console, the successor to the popular Wii, at the upcoming E3 exhibition in Los Angeles next month. Already speculation is mounting about what Nintendo will do to differentiate itself from the competition.

The Xbox 360 is already six years old, while the PS3 was launched just over a year later in November 2006. Until now, the consoles typically have had a five to six-year lifespan. However, there has yet to be any indication of when the next generation will hit the market.

All eyes will turn to E3 in the hope that some indication will be given about the consoles’ future.