What is the future of voxel games in your opinion? Minecraft is a juggernaut which spawned a new genre. What might happen next? What would you like to see in such games?
Voxel games will never be genuinely mainstream. Voxels have massive overheads for graphics calculations unless the voxels are static. Minecraft made this work by having that just become part of how the world functions. Minecraft is really the exception and not the rule.
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I won’t go so far as to say it’ll never go mainstream, I can see it becoming the dominant form of graphical representation, but not in the near future. As absolute_disgrace said, the computing power is not nearly enough yet, but in a few decades maybe… If the voxel are all dynamic and are so small that they are not noticeable, effectively becoming a point cloud, then we might see very realistic forms of environmental change and destruction, something that polygons struggle with due to their nature. The problem then will be where to get the data for a voxel object, because it’s not enough to just model the outside like one would do for a polygon mesh.
I disagree, voxels are an excellent and indeed optimized method for representing volumetric geometry and in the last few years huge advancements in things like LOD and runtime optimizations have lead to a spike in the number of games using this tech.
From a game design perspective, voxels are not a game mechanic. In general, they are more of a Terrain system, although other uses including dynamic objects are possible.
Except for a few edge cases, voxels are a good supporting system for primary mechanics, a common misconception about Minecraft is that the game is about voxels but I would contend that it is more about problem solving and discovery, and the voxels are simply a technology that facilitates that.
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I see it expanding into the use of tessellation shaders or compute shaders to dynamically turn much simpler geometry into a vocalized view in realtime. There are already shaders to do this, instead of storing huge amounts of block-specific data.
I think voxels are one answer to a bigger conceptual problem - have you ever noticed how most games are about killing something?
Minecraft was different - instead of destruction, you’re encouraged to mine, craft, and build.
Thus, I think if you want to put some lightning in a bottle, try making a game where the main thing that you’re doing is not killing something. You don’t necessarily have to use voxels to do this. Just, intuitive controls, beautiful simplicity, and a healthy amount of luck.
Voxel has become mainstream just after minecraft, there is many successful game that take the idea and run with it, no man sky sold well (twice, it became first after the foundation update too on many digital store) and use voxel. It’s just a tool depending on the game, so it’s a focus in itself, it just have normalized a format for destruction/construction in game world, terraria is not voxel but learn from that format. Now we have game with only crafting rivaling in success game about killing, it has started a paradigm shift in interactivity of game world, its’ now expected. I think the next milestone would be better dynamic NPC.