i want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and i’m not kidding
Same. Be cool if there was some kind of “ethically made without worker exploitation” seal of approval for games.
We already have that, it’s called FOSS.
Facetiousness aside, I really don’t think there are any commercially released games that fit the bill.
I don’t think the whole “free labour” part of FOSS fits the “fair wage” requirement though :')
Yeah, honestly the F is the biggest reason I’m not hardline into FOSS. As a socialist I’m well aware of the benefits of decommodification, and I strongly believe in open sourcing software, but we live in a capitalist world and people are often stingy with donations. It’s part of the reason why I wouldn’t mind a subscription fee for using my instance, paying my admin enough to keep the server on and to compensate them for the labor they do feels reasonable to me.
I dont know, a number of Indie studios could probably qualify.
KSP 1 was, at least at first, and Stardew Valley was made entirely by one guy
After playing Battlefield 3 and feeling an indescribable emptyness for AAA games, I turned to indie developers. The desire for more profits can really suck the uniqueness and character from a game when it’s designed for accessibility to as many people as possible.
Bonus points if the game supports modding. It’s a great way to extend the life of a game as well. Some of my first online gaming memories are from Quake and it’s modding scene. Even Sven Co-op is still developing their mod for Half-Life to this very year.
Games like that seem to have a bit more passion behind it which gives it a bit more charm. It’s been a bit sad watching old titles milked dry throughout the years in the name of the mighty dollar. Unfortunately the struggle now is finding those gems in a sea of mediocrity as gaming became more mainstream.
I mean, look at Silica and compare it COD or Battlefield. Smaller indie project, supported by a bigger publisher and filled with heart. It looks like a dream game from when I was a kid.
Battlezone meets Starcraft.
I’m not really up for adding more games to my library currently, and my gameplay preference has changes to co-op games over the years.
I did check out Silica and it reminds me of Natural Selection. An old mod for Half-Life which combined FPS and RTS. Really interesting to see old ideas still given new life and just another reason why I think games which allow modding is so great.
It looks great! Definitely going to give it a try.
Same for me, most of my favorite games nowadays are indies. Like Valheim, Stardew Valley and more
Sometimes I will just go through the Steam Discovery Queue for like half an hour, it does a pretty good job if you properly give steam your opinion on the games.
Best video recently about this from Yahtzee: https://youtu.be/4LplgYMiLhM
This seems like this is going to be heavily counteracted by better engines, and AI generation.
I wonder how it’ll play out though.
I think so too. The process of content creation will become more efficient. I hope it will allow companies to try new and weird things with less risk.
It’ll at the very least make indie studios capable of insane things.
That also. I’ve been keeping an eye on this kind of technology for my one person projects.
I believe that, to an extent, this has actually caused some of these problems we’re seeing. When tools become easier to use, more is expected from the devs, particularly in the AAA space.
A tool is made that, in theory, helps you do 12 months worth of work in 6, so they make the game twice as big. However, in reality you still have to deal with various unforseen problems, especially those caused by overconfidence in those tools. The real-world time is actually 9 months, but they’re still expected to make that huge game in 12.
Crunch ensues, which burns people out, which means less quality work and damage to health.
I think it’s generally up to responsible indie devs to use such tools well and control the scope of their projects. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
I think this has always been the case, though. Engines haven’t just suddenly got better, they’ve been getting better and better for decades now. Some of those improvements give you features “out of the box” that you used to have to implement yourself. One of the reasons Unity became so popular with smaller developers is because it lets you focus on building your game - most of the tech is there, you’ve got an asset store for additional models, plugins, etc. so save you time but ultimately making a (good) game still takes time. Making a game is a very iterative process and a lot of the quality of a game these days is less to do with developing the engine and more to develop the mechanics of the game itself - the way your characters move, the responsiveness of the controls, the UI layout and so on. All of that stuff is hard to be given to you by an Engine, because it’s specific to your game.
Exactly, we’ve been getting better engines, tools and educated game devs for the past decade too and it’s what led to current situation. I don’t think AI is going to help with anything, it will just result in more soulless cash grabs if it’s used the same way ChatGPT has been lately.
Procedural terrain generation in Deep Rock Galactic is pretty cool. I could see also using it for textures and NPCs to make a game more varied for not much more work.
The problem with procgen for variety is that it’s almost always a few procedural changes layered onto a finite, typically small, set of “types”. You can see this in games like No Man’s Sky, where there are technically billions of different animals that you might encounter on a planet, but a lot of them are pretty similar. Even in DRG with their terrain gen, they’re building on room templates that you’ll start to recognize the more you play.
It’s kind of like those ad campaigns about how many millions of ways you can make a burger. Sure, a 1/4 lb cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato, onions, and ketchup on a sesame seed bun is technically different from a 1/4 lb cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato, onions, and mustard on a sesame seed bun, but they’re both still burgers. You might hit onto some unique combinations (e.g. meat, cheese, and toast on the bottom, with no top bun -> patty melt) but you’re ultimately still just seeing burgers everywhere, and the system that generated the burger isn’t ever going to generate aloo gobi.
It’s pretty good, agreed, but we’ve had procedural generation since before minecraft. It doesn’t have anything to do with ML/AI afaik.
Wouldn’t count on that. Those techniques will help indie developers a lot, but AAA gaming is a constant race of trying to deliver more and more. AAA games are always hopelessly over engineered and once you throw AI into the mix they just raise the bar that AAA games have to hit. Expect ChatGPT flavor-text on every empty beer can you can find in the world. Auto generated quest lines and a whole lot of more stuff.
Indie developer in contrast can focus much more on actually delivering a game, with story, characters and game play. But AAA games are just ginormous piles of meaningless content and AI will help them get even bigger.
Who is setting this standard? Is the general gaming population really upset if the graphics of the new CoD or sportsgame iteration is not hyperrealistic?z
this, i despise the focus on polygon and texture counts so goddamn much
games from a decade ago are still popular and still look good, can we please just focus on performance and actual mechanics
And story/worldbuilding.
I don’t want a game of a movie of a book, but I like when there are reasons behind the actions and choices.
I want to upvote this twice
Eh, I think we’re about to hit complete photorealism on those things without it mattering at all anyway
What we really need is easier access to assets.
I know, Tears of the Kingdom the most graphically intensive game of all time took 6 years to make. I bet they could have cranked out that bad boy out in like 3 years if they had just used the same graphics as Breath of the Wild
I suspect a lot of the development time was qa. A game that relies on physics takes a lot of work to get right, and an open world makes it way more open to things that go wrong.
The time sink was probably in prototyping for new ideas to serve as the core of the game, then in generating content that would be considered innovative and fun for people to use that core with. Games are often a moving target where they need to try things that don’t work before finding ideas that will last.
Meaning that graphics really are not the reason for why games have such long development cycles at all.
They took an entire year for just polishing up the game. I’m sure everything else took great time too lol.
I believe they also said they spent a year on final gameplay tweaks alone before releasing; TotK is a great example of why we shouldn’t be mad when a game is delayed again in again
I want more games like valheim. Could care less about the graphic HD quality. Just give me a good game that looks good enough I can forget about my actual life for a while.
Valheim took 4 years to make.
I work in gamedev. Even with simple graphics, making a successful game generally takes a lot of time to make. It’s not just graphics. Design, writing, QA, art, console compliance, and a huge amount of engineering effort especially in multiplayer games. It takes time to get right. And we’ve all seen what happens when “AAA” games are released before they’re ready just because a bean counter said they had to.
The blockbuster hits with simple graphics that a solo dev made in a few months are the exception, not the rule.
Exactly. I’ve been working for several years in the industry and the most time consuming part of the development is not graphics; it’s design (in all shapes) + implementation + iteration until all is polished and the game is good no matter how it looks.
Same. I really appreciate the hyperrealistic, amazing graphics of stuff like Cyberpunk 2077 don’t get me wrong, but I would be more than happy to accept a game with even like Half-Life 1 levels of graphics as long as it has amazing gameplay and story and lots of real hand-crafted content. Obviously, you can have both (CP2077 again!) but you have to really pay for that, and I’d be okay with those games being rarer and having more games like I described.
I personally don’t appreciate it. As someone who has always worked on a budget-mid tier PC, I find that “high end” graphics just means “don’t download”. They tend to perform terribly regardless of the quality I set and they tend to look really bad with the quality dropped; compared to games that intentionally have low res textures and simpler game engines, which look and perform much better.
I like games that are more focused on providing me with new mechanics to learn and overcome. I like puzzles. I like strategy (e.g. RimWorld).
Cyberpunk is also a good example because it was all flash and no substance. It ran terribly and had nothing new to provide to the gaming world. I liked it a bit, but downloaded dozens of gigs just to get bored in an hour or two was not super fun. I often am comparing memory usage to how many hours I’ve put in a game. CS:GO, RimWorld, CitySkylines, etc are all relatively much smaller in total size and yet I’ve poured days into them. I just feel like at a certain point, these AAA titles are just spending money on design because they don’t have the patience to value mechanics. So we end up with 100GB of textures and a re-roll of the same classic mechanics we’ve been playing for a decade.
I just want to know why everything has to be open world today. It seems like developers are just constantly increasing scope and making games almost too big now.
I can assure you it’s not the developers changing the scope…
Easier level design. I wouldn’t be surprised if 99% of open world games just had their landscape generated and then slightly tweaked afterwards.
You can do open world right, oblivion and to a slightly lesser extent Skyrim. But a huge map with not much in it just makes for tedious travel times, or lots of fast travel loading screens. At that point, you basically have separate levels.
Dark souls 1 was good too, but for a different reason: there’s nothing like opening a gate and going “WTF, how did I get all the way back here?” The way it folds in on itself makes it huge, but also gives it a very compact feeling when it comes to traveling around. I’d put it top 3 level design on my personal list.
Far cry 3 was good too. Mostly because wing suit and helicopter thing. Now that I think of it, there’s a theme here. It seems like verticality (and a way to traverse it) really helps a map feel fun. Far cry 3, BOTW, dark souls, all 3 have these huge altitude variations.
we all know this is nonsense, right? like, the development cycles have gotten so long because theyve just decided that its better that way
I’d rather have a long development cycle but deeper, more substantive games.
This isn’t anything new - the “Megagames” were famous for having crazily long development times for the era. And some of those went on to be very well received like Ultima VII, Ultima Underworld, Daggerfall, Baldur’s Gate, etc. - I remember Baldur’s Gate advertising the “90 man-years” required to create it and same for Daggerfall for the (procedurally-filled) map “the size of Great Britain”.
There are plenty of companies with short turn-around times, but they make mediocre games.
im not advocating for things like fifa, cod or NBA, but a~15 year wait between games of the same franchise like elder scrolls is pretty ridiculous
Not that elder scrolls 6 has been in development for 12 years. The long wait is for other reasons like prioritizing other games, not actual development time.
I honestly bet ESVI just started actual, large scale development recently. Like within the last year as Starfield is wrapping up. We aren’t seeing that game until like 2026-2027 imo.
We might have actually gone from the last Space Shuttle flight (July 8, 2011) to the first moon landing since Apollo (2025-2026) before ESVI is released. Crazy.
We might have actually done from the last Space Shuttle flight (July 8, 2011) to the first noon landing since Apollo (2025-2026) before ESVI is released.
Haha that puts it into a crazy perspective, who knows maybe we’ll even have the start of a human colony on mars by the time ESVI is out.
So they will crunch developers more, pay them less and/or replace some of them with AI crap. That’s why i only play indie gamesor put on my skull and crossbones patterned hat
I wish more games would release their engines and tooling as FOSS like id Software used to back in the day. It’d make it easier for games to build on top of one another like mods do.
Maybe Godot and Bevy, etc. will become good enough for full AAA-level games one day. It’s nice that Blender is pretty much already there for modelling and animation.
But it’s crazy how much great work gets thrown away when games are cancelled or code is lost.
You can just go get Unity or UE right now. With UE you can make a $1million before you need to pay a royalty and the tooling is substantially better than any of the tools id released back in the day. (And fwiw I think it’s a crying shame id tech engines are no longer open sourced too!)
You can just go get Unity or UE right now.
Making a brand new game with an existing engine is not “build on top of one another like mods do”, though. Games engines do not include the game logic of the games.
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FOTM? What is that?
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This isn’t really news anymore, and it’s not exclusive to Microsoft studios. Many games come to mind, notably GTA/RDR off the top of my head (outside the obvious Bethesda titles, since everyone’s more focused on them right now). GTA is also extremely close to the ten year mark between titles; RDR2 was eight years. These big, open world games have constantly been getting larger and taking more time to make for ages now.
I really don’t care if they have a 15 year cycle. Just keep the games fresh and build upon it.
Use destiny as an example.
They get larger, have more features, content and better graphics but they don’t seem to be getting any more fun to actually play
I think that’s subjective. While I do agree with you to some extent I think that there are people out there that love these games and they play them for a long long time. Perhaps they are catering to a different crowd.
I don’t care as long as the pipeline has enough different good games that I get one per year. I can wait years between games in a franchise as long as there’s something else to play in the interim.
I prefer quality over quantity, especially given the number of studios that are out there.
But if this just means we wait 7 years to get a Redfall, yeah… no…
I prefer quality over quantity
Microsoft has GamePass. They want continuous new releases. They didn’t release Redfall because they thought it was ready, they released it because they thought it was good enough to get with a GamePass subscription.
Even Microsoft wasn’t happy with Redfall - I don’t think it was like they decided to release it in that state because of Game Pass, it seems the whole project was a greed-driven disaster that started prior to the Microsoft acquisition.
Longer game development cycles for big-budget games are here to stay
Good! I’m sick to death of games being announced years before development starts, only for the company to crap out some half assed thing because they ran out of time.
Take the time that’s needed to make a good game.
We are getting to a point where development cycles are getting longer than some consoles lifetimes.
GTA5 and TES5 were the two most popular games of the PS3/360 generation.
Despite that, there were no new Elder Scrolls or Grand Theft Auto games released for the entire 7 years that the PS4/XB1 generation lasted.
By the time Elder Scrolls 6 is out, baby Dovahkiin will probably be old enough to vote and die for his country.
I just assumed that AAA are going to be online-only and jammed with macro-transactions.
COUGH Fallout76 COUGH GTA-Online
Cheers -Henry
Tbf we are already reaching diminishing returns with exponentially increasing the complexity of the game graphics (Polygon count) for some years now. For example, NFS Most Wanted 2012 still looks gorgeous to me to this day.
Style > Graphical fidelity If a game has good style and design, it’s amazing how well it can hold up.
Absolutely agreed. What are your favorite stylized games?
I’m not the one asked, but the ones I can think of top of my head are Killer7, which had pretty cool gradient shaders and Borderlands drawn style.
It definitely caters to the OG gamers. Really respects GoldenEye 007.
Okami and Wind Waker are the first that come to mind. Both have aged beautifully.
Morrowind, hands down.
🎶Understand (understand) the concept (the concept) of LOVE🎶 UNH!
I’m not the person you asked, but Katamari Damacy had a unique looks that still holds up perfectly, the only improvement to be made is using higher def textures for the later games and remasters.
I think Windwaker still looks fantastic, and Windwaker HD looks as good as any recent release.
Also, Hades is a more recent game with very stylized graphics that look absolutely stunning.
The next big thing are full RT graphics without rasterization. The industry will then need the next 10 years or so to fully adapt on that.
After that there won’t be any more great improvements. RT already means full realism. You can’t make it more realistic.
There can be improvements that we cant even imagine yet, but I think RT is the next Big thing and it might take some years before theres something as big. But who knows
There are many areas that can be improved upon to make games more realistic, just probably not graphical. NPCs using smarter AI, better physics, a more dynamic environment (better destruction, better NPC interaction with objects), and who knows what else that I can’t think of now. There’s still a lot of progress to be made, I just don’t know if we’ll have enough horsepower to run all of that, we’re already reaching physical limitations on chips.
