The PS3 son - oh so true...

I like it very much: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R98qC0fd_1w

It's all too true ^^

Edit: the title should read PS3 song, not son :-P

i like it too.

Heh, I agree with the Blu Ray comment. I neither need or want it.

But it will allow PS3 to be the best system graphically in the long run.

Makepool.... So?

Does being capable of pushing the most bland off-grey polygons worth of 'realism' make it more fun?

How exactly does the Blu Ray laser in the disc reader improve the graphics?

It doesn't. Large storage space doesn't necessarily mean good
graphic quality. Smart programmers and good artists can use
the space available on a single cd to make a beautiful game.

<BeginSuperRant>
Though, I'm very biased because I'm in love with procedural
texturing, animating, etc. (Ken Perlin's my hero! and Will
Wright's Spore will change the world!)

> Smart programmers and good artists can use
the space available on a single cd to make a beautiful game.

True, but those same smart people should be able to do more with even more space.

Not that I'm buying a PS3 anytime soon.

Remember "Rise of the Robots"? It had, hands down the best graphics in any computer game at the time. It was one of the first games to come on a CD and/or a ridiculous (13) amount of floppy discs.

It was of course as Jonathan Davies so elegantly put it: Terrible. It got a score of 5% in Amiga Power and 19% in Amiga Format, earning it the somewhat embarrassing title of worst game ever.

Not really. There is a limit to how much content you can put in a game before it gets tedious and repetitive. There is also a limit to how complex a game you can write and at the same time keep it relatively demonstrably bug free.

> Not really. There is a limit to how much content you can put in a game before it gets tedious and repetitive.

One has nothing to do with the other.

@dynaman - yep

LMAO. Sony did well with PS2 but the polts went squiffy with PS3... nintendo wins the handheld and console market.

I would wait a year or more before I declare a winner, but
yeah, they are doing surprisingly, fantastically well, aren't
they?

Last generation, right before I bought my PS2, I was sorrily
thinking to myself "Well Ninty, it's been good. Nice knowing ya"

But now the underdog's come out on top, and I'm visibly
happy about it. I would buy a Wii, if only I could find one.

@dynaman:


Also true, but as you increase disc space to achieve better
graphical quality, you get a diminishing return.

As FlameDuck said, when Cds first came out to replace floppies,
of course the quality increased tremendously. Dvds again
gave the benefit of being able to fit more textures, audio,
whatever, though the improvement wasn't as drastic. Now,
Blue Ray or HDDVD are admittedly an improvement over DVDs,
but it's nearly insignificant compared to the upgrades of
the past. The generation of storage mediums after this one
will likely be even more unimportant.

I mean, am I right, Or what?

@drew - couldn't agree more with your sentiment towards ninty - haven't the underdogs done well. wii - wii - I think not, a well coined, easy to say game console.

> I mean, am I right, Or what?

Partly. But modern games (good ones as well as bad ones) could not be done on 10 year old hardware. Just becuase there are bad games with a new technology does not mean the technology is at fault, or that all games using it will be no better.

More space on the CD means the ability to create more stuff, sometimes that stuff will stink, other times it will be great.

The trouble is. When CDs replaced Floppies. It was the difference between a game costing 10-20 people a some 40-80 grand to make, and 50-100 people costing between 100 and 500 grand to make.

Now. You are talking about going from 2-10 million to 20-100 million.

Vast difference there.

The result. Is that things need to be cut back on. And the first things to go are; New gameplay models, Proper testing, fine tuning, and R&D. All the things that made a game like starcraft so good.

When you are getting to the point where people are starting to not be able to notice the diffence. And outright CAN'T without an HDTV. You run into a big fat brick wall.

Then again, there's Monkey Island II, which came on 12 discs and is absolutely brilliant.

Many brilliant PSX games used multiple CDs or so much data space that simply wasn't possible on any other console at the time...

Extra space might not guarantee an excellent game, but it guarantees the possiblility of a more excellent game. Umm. Yeh.


Compare the scope of San Andreas to Vice City. I'd call that pretty drastic.

Basically, to state that more space makes games better without exception is obviously just as daft as saying more space makes games worse. But nobody ever said that the extra space will make every game ever kick ass... trolls go home.

Vice city, GTA3, and San Andreas were all on DVD. As they were all PS2 games.

A better example is that FF9 was on 4 CDs and FFX was on 1 DVD. (mind you, 90% of the data on each FF9 CD was identicle, since you had to have.. the world, the characters, the locations, and the items/monsters on all 4 discs)

So, who here is aware of the 64k demoscene?

Imagine if the guys responsible for this were to create a game
that filled 1/4th of a cd, say 150Mb. This game would have
10+ times the content of a standard game that fills all 4.7
Gb of a DVD (And it could look just as good).

When a developer fills up an entire dvd and still needs more
space, it's likely the case that they could have been alot
less wasteful.

I stand by what I said about the next, next generation of
storage mediums "Sony's New Fuschia-Ray Disc, holds 1.8
Terrabytes!" No one but the technophiles will really care,
let alone notice.

(That is, unless by then we've got 3-Dimensional holographic
HD movies or something crazy like that - because that would
change everything, now wouldn't it)

Nope. But it doesn't preclude the possibility either. I assume when playing a truly good game like Half-Life 2 you don't drop it down to the lowest possible settings even though your PC can run it at maximum quality while cursing the developers names for stopping you getting it to look as bad as the original Half-Life for fear the better graphics will suck out the gameplay? I understand that pushing graphics too far too fast has caused a lot of good developers to either go out of business, and I sympathise greatly but I think too many people have the wrong end of the stick and criticise improving graphics as the cause of bad gameplay as if there is a slide bar with playability at one end and good graphics at the other. You can have one but not the other...Rubbish!

As for why it can allow better looking games, think about how much space is taken up by textures these days. Think about how many PC games already require over 4.6GB of hard drive space to install on. Pretty soon some games will require more than a dual layer worth of textures on a long game if the makers don't want the game to look samey. Blu-ray will in the long run allow developers to what can't be done on the 360.

They need to put a game 2-3 times on a BR because otherwise it would need ages to load and/or would stotter very often (the BR drive of the PS3 is too slow). So the PS3 has absolutely no advantages with using BluRay. Well, at least the BR drive is quiet but it would be better to build in a fast DVD drive and make a less expensive console instead of adding over $200 in cost just to build in BluRay...

Once again. It isn't that you can't have super-fantastic graphics and good gameplay. It is that you almost always have one or the other.

Because it costs so much to make those super-amazing graphics in labor, you are forced to make cut-backs. Or, rather, the big companies DO make cutbacks because you can't promise great gameplay. Or at least most people can't promise great gameplay. But you can promise tons of polygons and high-rez textures. And the games typically end up selling just as much anyway.


You mention half-life 2... The reason the game was so good was that they spent 7 years working on it, perfecting it. And they were using on of the best games ever made as a model. If they have just cloned Half-life they would have had a good starting point. You really can't use Half-life as some example as to how games with good graphics can be good. It took 2.5 times longer than games typically take to make.

blu ray dramatically improves graphics on ps3 because you can stream an hours worth of looping sky footage for example, which no amount of texturing will ever match.



It will suck. There is a big difference between programmed graphics and designed, artistic graphics. One of them is immediately accessible and enjoyable, the other fills a role only.

I think you can have both. How about Oblivion, Gears, God of War, Resident Evil 4, Metroid Prime, Half Life 2, Halo (at the time), Metal Gear Solid 2, Far Cry, Zelda TP (well..this can be disputed..), FEAR, Okami, Psychonauts and some others that I can't remember? Whether or not you like them, these were critically acclaimed games and many can agree they were known for having good graphics and gameplay.

I don't think I've ever seen so many questionable statements in a single sentence...

1) Is an hour of moving sky a dramatic improvement?
2) What happens when the loop runs out? A big and obvious transition back to the start?
3) Procedurally generated sky textures would cut out the need for an hours worth of footage.
4) While you're streaming footage of the sky off the disc, what bandwidth will the drive have left for actual streamed content? Very little, I'd guess.


I've spent ten years reaping the advantages of procedurally generated textures for many surfaces. I beg to differ.

Not that I wholeheartedly endorse drew's sentiments, I think there's a happy medium where a combination of generated and hand-drawn textures can be used to great effect and advantage.

@Lowcs: there is only 1/3-1/2 of an Blu Ray disc available for an PS3 game. And with todays compressing algorithms (and only God knows what we will see in the future to compress data) DVD is just enough for any decent game. Don't know what will be in the next generation of consoles but this generation just doesn't has enough power to make proper use of Blu Ray or HD-DVD (at least not the PS3, the Cell just sucks as console CPU).

Spore will have more unique content than any other retail game before it and for that all it needs is a connection to the internet. Forget physical media, the future of game content is streaming. As for quality of graphics on the various systems, I think we've hit the point of diminishing returns. Future consoles will focus more on other elements to entice customers as the difference in graphics quality becomes less and less noticeable from generation to generation.

Yeah I have to agree, I am hoping developers begin to advertise more than just great graphics. I was watching a video of a game at Walmart the other day, I think it was Motor Storm. Sure it had great graphics and all, but what really caught my attention was the cars falling apart on the track, parts going everywhere. I think even with less graphics, the game would be great fun to play, with such things happening.

I think the significance of having larger media space will be much less significant this time around. Consider the fact that, before CDs were released, some games came on 10 or more floppy disks. CDs lifted a restriction which developers were having to work around. Developers are still getting by just fine with the space allowances of DVDs. And, on the subject of streaming media, if reading a blu-ray disk is significantly slower than reading from a DVD, streaming media may not be very feasible.

> Consider the fact that, before CDs were released, some games came on 10 or more floppy disks. CDs lifted a restriction which developers were having to work around

Lots of games these days are coming on 5 or 6 CDs though. Whenever there is a choice I buy the DVD version of a game rather then the mutliple CD version. 2 or 3 is more standard still, but I don't think for much longer.

"Oblivion, Gears, God of War, Resident Evil 4, Metroid Prime, Half Life 2, Halo (at the time), Metal Gear Solid 2, Far Cry, Zelda TP (well..this can be disputed..), FEAR, Okami, Psychonauts"

Oblivion. Uses about 2-300 preset 'parts' for ALL levels, dungeons and areas, uses a character generator for all NPCs, the same one, essentially, the player uses to make his character.

Gears. very standard TPS gameplay with a few hooks. Also, High-def high-poly graphics, but not very creativly utilized.

God of War. Long development time in a relatively small development house.

Resident Evil 4. I found it unplayable... Sure, it is a lot better than previous survival horror games... But it isn't hard to improve on total shite.

Metroid Prime. Nintendo doesn't count.

Half-Life 2. Took 7 years to develope, based on one of the greatest games of all time.

Halo. Uses a LOT of repeat objects and textures creatively re-used in levels. Things like this speed up development time and use less resources. Also, is at it's heart a basic FPS with 3 advancements that could have been the result of a high-level design team's brainstorming in a single night.

MGS2. Getting pretty old, here... aren't we? The farther back you go, the more good games with good-for-the-time graphics you will see. Why? I already explained why.

FarCry. I wouldn't call this basic run-of-the-mill FPS a great game... About the only thing new gameplay wise was a supposed open-ended island structure.....

Zelda. Again... Nintendo doesn't count.. Also, this game is very weak compared to any game on the 360. Means it costs less to make the graphics, which means they could put all the effort into making a good, fun, game.

FEAR. Redfaction + Doom 3.

Okami. What is so amazing about cell-shaded 2d sprite tree graphics? The art style is amazing, the gameplay is amazing. But it could have been made by a 30 man team. It isn't about pushing tons of polygons... which is made clear by the use of Doom-1 style sprites for trees and objects.

Psychonauts. Took something like 8 years to make... They started working on it shortly after Grim Fandango came out.. Also an indie game... or mostly indie..


Name a SINGLE game that took 3 years or less to make, came out in the last 3 years, and had both great, new gameplay and fantastic graphics, made fantastic by power, and not creativity.. (meaning, it looks great because of technology, not like how Okami looks great.)

Did you ever stop to think that maybe 3 years is not enough to create such a game? Power and creativity go hand in hand, without power you are limited in what you can create and without creativity you have nothing. It's not like the PS3 can magically make textures up for you. Also man hours used exponentially grows with power utilisation.


GTA3 and Vice City fit on two CDs, as was evident by the PC versions (and with larger textures).


The thing is DVD has been around forever now and companies are only JUST starting to make use of dual layered discs. It will be at least one or two generations further down the line before companies need more than 10GB of data storage space on a console anyway. So it's rather a moot point right at this moment.


Doesn't stop the likes of EA promising all sorts of things. They're worse than politicians.


That's great. Meanwhile, you can't possibly be streaming anything else because the drive is too slow, which means you have a fancy sky texture and the rest of everything looks dated.


Well, gee, generally the loop would make sure it looks the same at the end as it does in the beginning, or I'd be firing your texture 'artists' if I were you.


Yeh, cuz 6 cores must be a bad thing.


Streaming media is fine, but it has to be very carefully controlled. You can't just have a bunch of files on the disc and assume the head can skip to reach them in time. PS3 games with heavy streaming will probably have to 'interleave' many of the streams between each other. For games like GTA, I wouldn't know how that's possible... Still, it's 'only' 2x slower than a 16x DVD drive.

3 years USED to be enough. The problem is that rather than developing good tools that will be useful from game to game, or at least through multiple games. And rather than creating good over-all tools that are easy to use. The industry throws money and people at problems.

Fact is. Games take longer and cost more. Fact is, the easiest to see aspect of a game is the graphics. Fact is, the big companies look to graphics more than gameplay.

It is very logical for them to do so. It just also means the side-effect of samey games and poorly tested games, and bad design choices.

The Wii is doing so well, because it appears to promise something OTHER than graphics. Which the 2 other appear to ONLY offer.

The point is people are giving examples of excellent games and you are dismissing them because of your unrealistic selection criteria.


Except the Wii is not.

Six cores sounds like a great idea, but the problem is that programmers are all used to building programs that use a single processor. Making good use of 6 processor cores instead of just one will be very challenging, and creating a professional, five-star, highly appealing game with this approach will be hard to do. Plus, considering the networking between the cores necessary for everything to work, there may not be many benefits at all.

In my books, any video - musical or not - that contains 5 minutes of Windows Movie Maker text is not worth watching.

It's a bunch of (very slow!) fading with not even an interesting transition in sight... and all to sustain an equally boring song?

Really, I just don't get it. My favourite kind of screwdriver outsold your favourite kind of screwdriver. Do I care? No!
If you actually came and told me "Slot-head screwdrivers suck", maybe I would be annoyed and convinced to make a 4 minute long video containing still sales charts, vague references to how peoples' use of star-head screws vs. slot-head screws has some bearing on the superiority of slot-head, boring business-person quotes ("with this new factory, we are going to supply 10 of them a second!"), unfavourable pictures of the stupid kid-loving star shaped competitors, the word "arrogant" and a constant reminder that "all the real carpenters use slot-head!", but the fact is I am not a carpenter and I could not tell a real carpenter from a hole in the wall.
Besides that, I frankly should not care and I don't think the person who made this video should either.

If I had a YouTube account, I would retaliate against this pitiful collage of 80s-quality advertising.

Man, I've never seen anyone care so much about not caring :)

The Cell does NOT have 6 cores. The Cell has 1 DualCore PPC CPU and 7 so-called SPUs. They're vector computing units which just suck at normal integer calculation. So not nearly 6 cores...

Actually, Okami's technically not cell-shaded. I noticed
this while playing a while ago, but all they've done is put
a solid-black shell with flipped normals around most game
objects. (Think about it, this would make a black outline
around everything - the thickness of this line is controlled
by the space between the game model and it's shell) The
world is drawn and the resulting image is put through a sort
of high-pass filter, making any dark details darker, (ie it
helps make black outlines)

It's really quite clever.

This has got to be 10x faster than actually cell-shading
everything too. And to top it off, apparently no one can
tell the difference!

Black outlines have nothing to do with cel-shading. The only people who can't tell the difference are those that don't know what cel-shading is.

I played okami when it first came out, beat it, and haven't even looked at it. Excuse me for not going back to inspect it.

Never played Okami to be honest. My third PS2 got broken last year and I won't get a new one. Too much fun with Wii60 ^^

So what you're saying is, is that 6 cores is a problem because programmers are too lazy to educate themselves on how to utilise more than 1 processor.


Oh, I just had a revolutionary idea : why not just use the main core and leave the rest alone? No one is forcing devs to use them. 1 ghz or whatever it is for that main core cpu power is still good performance for a console. Still better than the PS2s... of course the resulting game might not be AAA material compared to the all gfx no gameplay launch titles, but it could still be flogged off on PSN for a pretty penny.


It's not boring in the slightest. I had a very troubled time listening to the horrible wailing that apparently passed for lyrics.


It did not! Your screw driver has attachments that no one can be bothered to figure out how to use!


I could tell a hole in the wall from a carpenter. Does that make me special? =]


Actually it's the other way around. How can you screw up basic integer operations in a CPU (oh fine, SPU, whatever)? =] IBM state the SPUs arithmetic was designed for multimedia (primarily game) calculations, where the floating point operations do not (need to) comply to IEEE specs.


So everyone calling them cores in polite discussion should be corrected every time? Or, you could just let the conversation flow.

That's strange because many developers said that the Cell is not nearly an "optimal console CPU". It's meant for streaming operations and server tasks. But I guess IBM would be so honest to tell that on their website, right? -.-
It doesn't matter though: there will be very good games on the PS3 as well as on all other consoles. But there won't be an technical superiority. Just look at Assassins Creed: the AI of the XBox 360 version is actually better than the PS3 version. How can this be if the PS3 is that uberpowerful? Also the nVidia RSX is a weaker GPU compared to the 360s ATI GPU. And I didn't even mention the RAM superiority of the 360...

I will get myself an PS3 as soon as the price is reasonable, they provide rumble AND there are games that justify an PS3. Because currently there are no games out there that could get me from my 360...

But fact is...so what? Developers are still gonna develop games. Graphics are gonna get better and better. And people are still gonna buy it. People are still gonna have fun.



And whats the problem with that? Just because you don't like any of the newer games (aside from the simple Wii stuff) doesn't mean that the rest of the gamers out there don't. They can take 20 years and 100 million dollars to develop a game for all I care. If its good, and i feel its worth it, then I'll buy it. And many others will too. Simple as that. If the developers don't make any money, then thats their problem, not mine.

well.. it is your problem if the developers don't make money... cause if they don't, they will stop making the games.

This is what will ultimately happen.

It isn't that fancy graphics suck, it is that we don't have the proper tools or know-how to really use it yet.

It is much like building giant sky-scrapers without any understanding of how to do it. You'll have many many buildings falling down.

More people should be working on new tools. Tools that can be used for many many years without being completely changed.

Right now, you have tools like Maya and 3DStudioMax being the standard.. When they are absolute abominations of design.

If these tools were improved, Or if other tools that are actually better replaced them. Then you would see everything become cheaper and easier to do.

If ALL the tools were updated.. and new ones invented to do tasks that right now take forever. You might actually see indie games compete with the AAA games for a change.

Yeah, I know. But when people see outlines they automatically call it cell shading.

Linkies?


Why would IBM, a highly technological and industrial company, misrepresent their new technology as being aimed at a different market to the ones they are currently targeting? If the Cell was great at high end server stuff (which it probably is too, with so much raw power and the ease of increasing it), wouldn't it be that direction that they spin their marketing?


Linkies to the dev team's comments on that, please?


Lack of understanding of multitasking? Or just plum bad coding? I don't see how AI can be affected by a type of CPU, isn't it the code that drives it that's the problem?


That I agree with - ATIs this gen tech is much more exciting than nVidia's this gen tech.


Seems to me that if devvers all took the easy way out and produced mainstream crap with small budgets and small timeframes and no excellence that I'm in exactly the same position anyway.

Nope, if one company fails, another will happily take its place capitalizing on the mistakes of the former. This happens all the time. And gamers will still spend money and buy games.


Its been happening.



Wait a minute...I think you almost see...the light!! :)

He said "sky footage" which "no amount of texturing will ever match". I assumed, you know, he wasn't referring to textures, but actual filmed sky footage.

I never said fancy graphics suck. Just that making them requires making a lamer-game or spending crazy ammounts of money and time.

There is a wall. We will hit it. Where the graphics cost more to make than the game can sell for.

No specific links right now, sorry. Google will help you though.


Ask IBM, not me.


Search for the X06 video where the devteam presents Assassins Creed for the XBox 360.


Well, the 360 has 3 CPUs and every one can run 2 threads so no lack of understanding. And by the way: multitasking != multithreading. I guess there are 2 possibilities:
1. The PS3 is simply not that powerful
2. The PS3 is too hard to program
Chose, but both are very bad for future PS3 games. Even if the PS3 is 20% more powerful than the XBox 360, where is the point if the maximum the most game developers will reach are 80% of it's power with hardcore-coding while they can release 100% of the XBox 360s power with total ease?

Of course theres gonna be a wall. They hit some type of wall with core process development and what did they do? They went to multicore parrallel processing. Granted, now software have to be code in a certain way to take advantage of it, but thats the way its heading now to improve CPU processing performance.

The same will happen with "graphics" that you're so worried about. When or IF they ever hit that "wall", it'll drive the need to develop better "tools" and cost efficent methods to create better graphics. Its probably already happening. Don't worry my friend, when theres a will, theres a way.

*Cough* Procedural content generation is how they'll do it *cough*

Me too, but it generally has to be used a texture in game for it to be displayed. If you have movie sky footage, I would assume you would loop it around at a point that it looks unnoticably dissimilar - like, blue sky for instance.


I think we're very close, if not there.


I don't have time to search for nonsense comments, only rubbish them. ;]


It was kind of rhetorical.


You know the same was said about the PS2... until people got their head around it. Or shipped off to Xbox land and shut the F* up. Not like there was a shortage of PS2 games...


That doesn't fix everything on its own, but it's a good start.

I'm excited about the potential in procedural generation. And in user-made content. But I haven't seen anything that does a really fantastic job yet. Aesthetic isn't easy to program.

For realism, it'll be useful. But I doubt it'll ever be truely useful to people like Blizzard. Or for games like Okami.

For that, you need really good tools. Which we don't have right now. The best proof of this is feature films. 3D animation is always of a far less quality, animation and design-wise, as 2D animation. This is because the artists doing the work have to work against very hard-to-use and hard-to-learn tools. So it is a different segment of animator that uses it, a smaller sub-section, and one with far less animation talent, and far more technical talent.

Tools can be made to do a lot of work, one of the biggest jobs I hope to see all but disappear is the texture-artist. A proper high-poly modelling software, with good tools, should be able to alter textures, procedural and photographic on the fly... I've seen apps that make photos tile perfectly and seemlessly, Maya should do this automaticly, and be able to 'fix' bad textures, randomize them and even use them as a guide to build never-repeating mega-textures based on them.

It should have a streamlined materials section that has millions of pre-set types, and if they don't match right, they should be easily fine-tuned. The system these programs use is counter-intuitive and designed by and for programmers.

If they JUST did what I said here.. You'd see at least a 20% faster development time for models... perhaps even better than that.

If they fixed all of the terrible interface issues and AWEFUL bugs... (in both maya and 3dstudiomax) Then I'd expect nothing less than a 70 or 80% time reduction.

Large-poly models should reduce to small-poly in a single button hit. Retain all the details in the high-poly model, turning all the lost geometry into alterations to the texture.

There should be some really powerful level-design tools. Specific to level-design. Think, WC3 editor, but for anything. With the ability to read and output into any format as defined by the designers. So you don't work around the format, it works around your game.

Even a lot of programming could be reduced to nothing. While programmers pride themselves on their ability to fine-tune things. There should be powerful tools, not unlike blitz, that really reduce dev-time. Perhaps not even language based.. Could be very wysiwyg even.

One of the areas that procedural models would be most useful is in getting 'close'... Say, you give it some textures, the basic idea of what you are making ... example 'mushroom' and it'll output a bunch of mushrooms. You pick whatever ones you like, and then edit them more to get them just right... Something like this could DRASTICLY speed up production.

I mean... we are talking about reduceing a dev-team from more than 200 down to 15-20. And them being able to get things done faster.

Then you can spend all your time making the best game you can... Not making content.

Something like "Band in a box" could be used to make music for a game. With a tracker-enabled version. It could make professional quality music for games... You could even then have music custom-made for the situation the player is in... as he gets in it. At least eventually.

There could be more research into off the shelf AI, really super-advanced and fine-tuned AIs that you can plug into any game. Then you can focus on the stuff that isn't the same in each game.. or focus on altering the minor things that are different.

Lets see.. what else is there...

Of course not. It would be foolish to leave it entirely to
an algorithm to design a game. But who said an algorithm
would be in charge of high-level design qualities such as
aesthetic? The procedural methods I'm referring to are the
kind that would deal with the minutiae, but allow the designer
to create at an ultra-high-level.

Take for instance, modelling a brick wall. Instead of a
modeller pushing vertices and adjusting UVs of individual
bricks, he could say "build me a wall, make the bricks out
of red clay, make it more worn here, put a stain there, poke
this brick out a little.", etc

That is just one application of procedural content generation
and there are kinds that could be much more automatic, of course.

Gosh. I hope not.
Inevitably, programs fall into a category of unsupported. If you give the publisher all of the control over when you can access media to a game, you're pretty much establishing a pretty short life for it. If the publisher sees that only 5% of the time is spent playing game X, and they need it played at least 6% to justify it's existence on their servers, it will most assuredly be on the chopping block.

And heaven forbid that a publisher releases a couple of rotten games and goes out of business (which will be more likely to happen when the expectations and risk management associated with next generation games is nightmarish). Where will the content come from then?

If that's the future, then it's a bleak one.

And it'll be worse than you think too. Games are already shipped unfinished and patched later. Imagine if publishers could get you to buy a game before all that expensive content has been finished. Not only that but they'll probably charge you for the privalage of streaming the finished content. They're already getting away with micro-transactions and episodic games so they'll try and push it as far as they can.