Back in my day we didn't have X but did have Y. Gaming edition.
"This game only voices the main story sections" is a paraphrasing of a hack request thread the other day, the game in question was a mid size developer effort for a lower powered console. Back when I were a lad then a piece of digitised voice outside of silly money audio workstations was practically unheard of, and skipping forward some years the famous blast of "Sega" when you fired up Sonic the Hedgehog was no small feat.
Today even small independent titles, handheld titles and more commonly feature extensive voice acting. Indeed most will only note it on the latest handheld release if it is bad, not that it is there at all, and back of the box features will tend not to gush about their voice acting, or the extent thereof, and only maybe note they have a particular actor involved. In the future text to voice synthesis (already available today with what amounts to minimal training data) will likely mean no voices in a game with characters is a stylistic or throwback choice like making a silent film is in cinema today, and if AI generation of text even vaguely matches pace then it will get even more fun and open world might actually mean something a bit different.
To go another then while many among us have had to explain that you can't pause an online game then fewer will have left a game on while going for dinner, school or overnight and hope power held, busy others in the house didn't mess it up or some other fate would not see your progress lost. Saves are then an expected feature. Some might limit them, only be available in certain locations, or have side effects for saving but still saves are readily available.
Let us not even pause too long considering how the "save icon" is probably just that to a lot of kids and they may never have even seen a floppy disc; around me USB (or SD+SD reader as it was far cheaper) became dominant about 17 years ago, though legacy things saw floppies stick around a few years after that for some.
As we don't want to be too depressing we will not ponder the fate of local co-op (or indeed local multiplayer) beyond this line. Direct neural induction will happen before "traditional" smellovision though.
A framing question for this thread for those that want one then is what features are either expected or ubiquitous today that were not back when, and what do you imagine is high end today that will be common as dirt in the future? What concepts do you expect to vanish? Or if we need to match the style of the title then "You kids don't you are born, back in the day...." and "If this keeps up then we will be seeing ... in every game".
This is part of a series on GBAtemp where we discuss gaming concepts, industry trends and gaming culture. Previously we discussed what would $20 get you in your preferred gaming genre.
games you play by your own rules., the state of VR and 3D and whether they had once more failed to take hold, the last game skill you unlearned, The game you invested the most money in, times where people said gameplay styles would not work for a platform, the value of online play, emulation vs hardware, a favoured game style that might have become less common in recent times, skills one might have learned or honed because of a game, games on the PS4 and Xbone that will stand the test of time, games that got better after launch, cancelled games and shuttered devs, and story canon in games.