- We will have smarter AI (It really doesn't lol, I think the NPC AI has peaked in 2000s and there's isn't really much improvement since then)
To be fair, this is mainly done on purpose rather than us hitting some limit with AI.
There's plenty that can be done already, with some effort. I am currently making a stealth game and having enemies increase their awareness level and change their patrol patterns when one of their squad mates disappears is pretty easy to do, and instantly circumvents the really monotonous "what was that? Must have been the wind!" gameplay of modern stealth games.
The current trend of braindead AI is more down to most gamers not being particularly interested in good games, and most game developers not being particularly interested in putting effort into their AI. At the end of the day your average player wants a power fantasy, so the AI has to be braindead to compensate (we definitely can't have AI that's more intelligent than the player).
As for the OP...
My big prediction isn't really a prediction. Instead, I have chosen something that used to be quite true and is now not true anymore, and yet everyone repeats it ad nauseum.
It's the old adage
"Consoles just work. PC Gaming is for nerds. I just want to put the disk in and play, rather than screwing around!".
I remember in the late 90s and early 2000s this rang very true. Installing games was an annoying process, especially since many of them would also require DirectX updates, and whether or not a particular game would run on a particular PC properly was an absolute crapshoot. Many games required having the disk in at all times as copy protection so a lot of the convenience of installing was gone. Playing multiplayer often required fucking around with IPX setups, making sure the right ports were opened, etc. Not to mention computers were extremely expensive - especially if you wanted 3D accelleration.
Meanwhile gaming on an N64 or a PS1 was very cheap for what you got, was relatively straightforward and was mostly a no-bullshit experience. Playing with friends was especially easy since you'd just invite them over and go into split screen mode. Young kids (as young as 5) understood you just slap the cartridge or disk in and you're essentially ready to play. As a result of this a lot of social games were console exclusives, which further incentivised people getting them because they wanted to do things like 4 player Mario Kart.
But now the convenience aspect has mostly flipped. Console gaming has lost virtually all of it's advantages - no more "put the disk in and play", because there will always be an 80GB day one update, and "putting the disk in and playing" is now the less convenient option compared to "double click the game in Steam". No more split screen because modern consoles can't handle it. Most games are multiplatform and have feature parity on every device. Modern consoles are extremely underpowered for what you get (the "subsidise the hardware" model is now considered obsolete, now they sell consoles at a profit, so they aren't as powerful for the money) so most games run at 30FPS (or less) which is often a miserable experience, many modern games have awful controls which can only be fixed on the PC version because most console games in 2023 still don't have rebindable controls, and modding games on PC has become so easy and there are so many amazing mods for so many games that consoles are desperately trying to adopt them.
If you bought a console in 1995, you made a good decision, depending on your use case. If you buy a console in 2023, you're just an idiot buying a bad product.
Reminds me the "PCs will replace consoles" I was hearing a lot from PC magazines journos at late '90s and early 2000s.
They have, people just underestimated the stupidity of gamers, so consoles are still around. A HTPC will always give you a better living room experience than a console, so their main use case (simple, TV-based game device) has been made obsolete.
Of course the person with a Jackson Pollock in the background has a trash opinion...