The Xbox One X - more power to be less creative?

Did the world need the XBox One X? What sort of games is it likely to herald? And will there be an ounce of originality in any of them?

Microsoft has released the details of its new Xbox One X console, which it's hyping as the ‘world's most powerful console'.

That claim is borne out by the system's specs and overall power, though it remains to be seen if customers are willing to fork out £449 for what is only a fairly marginal upgrade over the Xbox One S - a system which itself wasn't exactly what the world had been begging for upon its release.

It's all starting to feel a bit like post-Jobs Apple. There's little innovation, just the same product released over and again, each time with a new veneer of slightly better graphics and really, not a whole lot else.

But that's not why we're here. The bit that interested me was the comment from Star Wars: Battlefront II producer Matt Webster. He told the BBC that the machine would enable the industry to be more creative.

"The gaming industry is going to change more in the next five years than it has done in the past 30.

"Not just more powerful hardware so we can get visual fidelity up, but also audio and how the game feels - the physical fidelity.

"Those things are really exciting. Having more power gives us more freedom to be more creative," he said.

It's that last sentence that makes me pause. More power, means developers can be more creative. I think actually the opposite is true.

Let's start by looking at trends in games releases. If we're looking at AAA titles, there are plenty of decent games out there, but I don't see much creativity. In fact, what I mostly see is a whole bunch of essentially the same open world game, reskinned to look sci fi (Mass Effect series), historical (Assassin's Creed), or high fantasy (Witcher 3, Dragon Age, Shadow or Mordor and about 40 others).

Or they're racing games (Forza series, Project Cars), MOBAs (Dota 2, League of Legends, Heroes of the Storm), or team-based shooters (Call of Duty, Overwatch, others too yawn-inducing to list).

None of these games are especially limited by the technology they're designed to run on, yet now they have an even more powerful platform, which will supposedly unleash an extra swathe of creativity.

It's all a bit like a dubious Kickstarter project. Meet the funding target and we'll make the game for you. Give us some extra dough and hit this stretch goal and we'll make it ‘more creative'.

Creativity is far more likely happen in the face of restrictions, than given a blank slate. Woody Allen lamented a few years ago that he's allowed to do, film-wise, whatever he wants. This means that according to Woody: "The only thing between me and a great movie is me." And when was his best work? Many would argue it was his early films, where he was less well-known, and more likely to suffer from limited budgets, locations, size of crew, and God knows what else.

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The Xbox One X - more power to be less creative?

Did the world need the XBox One X? What sort of games is it likely to herald? And will there be an ounce of originality in any of them?

The same concept applies to games. The golden age for gaming creativity was the early years, and not just because genres and mechanics were being invented practically with every release.

Knight Lore for instance - released on the ZX Spectrum in 1984. Besides popularising the isometric view which was to become de rigeur for games of the ilk for decades, the developers had to invent a new coding technique called Filmation so the character could move in front of objects without inexplicably (from a narrative sense) becoming their colour. I don't think EA had to worry about that too much when they were developing FIFA 17.

Or Manic Miner, from 1983. It allowed persistent in-game music. Today's gamers expect a constant, dynamic orchestral tapestry woven around their every sweaty moment, but in the early ‘80s your digital watch of a computer could manage either to move a sprite on screen or emit a beep. Not both. Manic Miner solved the problem by rapidly alternating CPU attention between the sound and the game itself. Ingenious.

That's creativity. And those games, along with countless other classics, had to run on a machine with 48 kilobytes of RAM. That's the sort of restriction which forces you to innovate. Removing those barriers almost always results in less creativity, not more.

I could've just said necessity is the mother of invention, but then I wouldn't have got to talk about Spectrum games.

Anyway, the games industry has greater issues to confront than increasingly powerful hardware. Not least of all the public's buying habits. Do they really want creativity? Turtle Rock Studios tried to reimagine the team-based shooter with Evolve, which introduced asymmetry to the teams. It did okay, selling a little over 2.5 million units - but rather less than publisher 2K Games had hoped. To put that into perspective, Activision Blizzard's Overwatch, a typically Blizzard game in that it's a hyper-polished take on games to have gone before it, in its case namely Team Fortress 2, surpassed the $1bn revenue mark in May 2017.

So maybe the games industry is spurning innovation because the public's not demanding it. But that's another conversation for another day. The take-home point is: if you want to paint an original picture, you don't need a bigger easel, just a bigger idea.