Even without Full Dive VR, I’m surprised how little gaming interaction has fundamentally changed in 20 years

I keep thinking about something that bothers me independently of whether Full Dive VR becomes possible anytime soon. What surprises me is how little the fundamental way we interact with games has changed over the last 20+ years, despite all the attempts to move beyond the traditional monitor, mouse, keyboard and gamepad.

If you compare 1980 to 2005, the difference is enormous. Gaming went from the likes of Pac-Man, Defender and Akalabeth to... World of Warcraft, Star Wars: Battlefront II and Guitar Hero. Relatively large 3D worlds, online multiplayer, sometimes even relatively advanced physics and definitely completely different levels of complexity. Back then I assumed that by 2025–2030 we would see another jump of a similar magnitude, not just better graphics, lighting, resolution, framerate and larger worlds, but a fundamentally different way of playing and existing inside virtual environments.

Instead, in 2026 we are still largely using the same basic interaction model as in 2005. World of Warcraft and many other older games are still around and active, various titles have been remastered or remade, Age of Empires is still receiving new content, and relatively old games remain popular (Minecraft and League of Legends are from 2009). Obviously technology has advanced significantly, but most of that progress seems to have improved and extended the existing paradigm rather than replaced it.

VR looked like the most obvious candidate to change this, and there have been serious attempts with Kinect, PS Move, Oculus, Vive, Index, Quest, PSVR and now devices like Steam Frame, but it still has not become the new default way of interacting with games. Full Dive VR is obviously a much more difficult and distant goal, but even before reaching anything close to that, I expected conventional gaming itself to evolve much more radically (this is shown e.g. in the animated series Pantheon).

That is probably the part I find most disappointing. I never expected only more sophisticated (not necessarily prettier) graphics, higher framerate and more content. I expected that by now we would have some new category of interactive experience that would make gaming from 2005 feel as technologically distant as gaming from 1980 felt in 2005.

Artificial intelligence is the #1 candidate for transforming the current situation into a much more advanced and interactive experience.

Does anyone else here feel the same way, and did you also expect VR or some other technology to transform gaming much more fundamentally by now?