The Triumphant Return of Video Game Physics

Let’s smash and break stuff like it’s 2007

You can bash up a bunch of structures like this in the new Doom: The Dark Ages. It might be the best thing about the game? PC screenshot taken by the author.

Twenty years ago, the Xbox 360 and PS3 were the hottest new consoles, and they came packed with amazing new multi-core processors that enabled all sorts of exciting graphical effects. Inspired by things like the famous gravity gun in Half-Life 2, game developers used that newfound CPU grunt to push accelerated physics objects into the corners of every video game.

You couldn’t walk more than a few steps in any game world on those platforms without running into things that you could topple, crumple, or send ragdolling away. Decent physics simulations became a normal part of game engines, and showed up even in lower budget titles. Games like BioShock, Oblivion, Borderlands 2, and Red Faction Guerilla were full of dynamic props that helped sell the realism of their worlds in areas where the raw visual rendering fell short.

But then something silly happened. The PS4 and the Xbox One launched with wildly underpowered AMD “Jaguar” CPU cores. I’m sure the hardware manufacturers hoped that development studios would use GPU resources for things like physics instead of higher resolutions or better framerates — but they didn’t. There was a brief explosion of GPU particles everywhere in 2013 (see old launch games like Knack or Killer Instinct), but the worlds…