For the self-serving bottom line, 2013 was – and in most ways should have been – a banner year for the Electronic Entertainment Expo. Consumers want to know about next-gen hardware. They want to know what they’ll be playing when they get a PS4 or Xbox One, to see what these allegedly new game experiences are capable of.

I’m interested in next-gen tech, too, though my curiosity involves pushing it beyond the surface level titillation of multi-million dollar videogames that look one step removed from CG. What might developers do with that power? The potential implications next-gen could have on artificial intelligence, for example, are enormous.

AI has always been something of a means to an end. It’s rare to hear PR reps talk about revolutionary steps forward with its implementation, aside from simply highlighting how this new product is a ruler’s length smarter or more adaptable than whatever it was in the last title the developers worked on. After a while, videogames become a series of systems laid bare for any observant player to see: a network of if/thens, branching paths and executable decisions based on user input. It has been a long time since the grunts in 1998’s original Half-Life worked together to outwit and outflank you, a frightening prospect back then that revolutionized the sophistication capable from first-person shooters.

I wouldn’t have expected Microsoft to be the one company seeming to push AI advancement. They took a lot of shit over their seemingly ironclad policy on a required continuous internet connection (“Fortunately, we have a have a product for people who aren’t able to get some form of connectivity,” smirked then-Microsoft president of interactive entertainment business Don Mattrick in an interview during the show. “It’s called the Xbox 360.”), the cloud usage of which could be used in any number of ways. Surprisingly, Forza 5 seemed to be leading the pack for AI by allocating just that.

Forza 5's Driveatar system races for you when you’re not around, as though alive. Maybe.

Rather than resorting to typical AI, which in racing games usually means a sliding scale of aggressive-to-unfair behavior from rival computer-controlled drivers, Forza 5 uses the ridiculously named “Driveatar” system, which replaces AI with actual data from other players connected through a cloud server. Every player in Forza has a Driveatar that continues to drive around (whether you’re actively playing the game at the moment or not) gathering data in your absence. Instead of driving against computer opponents when you take control, you’re driving against other Driveatars. Though I’m not totally sold on Forza 5 as the “end of AI” as MS handily touted it, you take these sorts of things with a grain of salt. It’s certainly an interesting prospect.

Or, it might have been. In the weeks following E3, Microsoft reversed nearly all contentious policies for the Xbox One – no more draconian restrictions on used games that would limit the number of friends you could lend a disc to (or the number of times a game could be so lent), no publishers determining how many consoles a game could run on, no activation fees if someone wanted to play a used game. Rules for reselling used games are no longer in the hands of publishers, either, and you don’t have to be on someone’s Xbox Live friends list in order to borrow a game from them. In addition, with the always-online connection and 24-hour online check-in requirements abolished, plans developers may have had to utilize the Xbox One’s cloud storage to free up memory for weird experimentations like Forza 5’s Driveatar may no longer be applicable.

The degree to which MS is now backpedaling away from their crazier notions for the cloud is anyone’s guess, but considering the way major videogames are viewed only as a business these days, I wouldn’t put much stock in a robust plan for online innovation.

In general, AI wasn’t a major concern for companies with next-gen titles on display. To be fair, it’s hard to judge what you see in an E3 presentation as totally representative of what a game may actually end up being. These are carefully controlled exhibitions, sliced out to give you a general impression of whatever they’re showing off, an information drip that lasts from one conference or media event to the next. It takes any developer awhile – as in, a number of years, usually – to learn and gain control over the programming parameters of new hardware. But I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a little disappointing to see the future of videogames as depicted solely by sexier graphics. Shooters now had newly intense particle effects but stealth games still sported rudimentary sentry paths. Not exactly a vast technological sea change.

Admittedly I will probably play Battlefield 4 when it releases, because everyone who plays games likes indulging in the shallow joy of sexier graphics every once in a great while. I doubt I’ll pick up another military shooter, though, until someone makes the videogame equivalent of War, Sebastian Junger’s sobering account of 15 months spent embedded with a platoon of American troops in Afghanistan’s hostile Korengal valley. Maybe the Call of Duty dog, as wonderful as its existence may be, is the signal that the modern military genre has jumped the shark and that it’s time to find some new trendy bandwagon to jump on and eventually get sick of.