• mint
    link
    fedilink
    English
    971 year ago

    i want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and i’m not kidding

    • Storksforlegs
      link
      fedilink
      English
      191 year ago

      Same. Be cool if there was some kind of “ethically made without worker exploitation” seal of approval for games.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        41 year ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          71 year ago

          I don’t think the whole “free labour” part of FOSS fits the “fair wage” requirement though :')

          • TheSaneWriter
            link
            fedilink
            English
            21 year ago

            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.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      81 year ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        61 year ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          11 year ago

          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.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            11 year ago

            I agree, this looks a lot like Natural Selection. In case you didn’t know, Natural Selection 2 exists and I believe still has a big enough community to find games.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        21 year ago

        Same for me, most of my favorite games nowadays are indies. Like Valheim, Stardew Valley and more

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        11 year ago

        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.

  • Communist
    link
    fedilink
    English
    611 year ago

    This seems like this is going to be heavily counteracted by better engines, and AI generation.

    I wonder how it’ll play out though.

    • Skelectus
      link
      fedilink
      English
      321 year ago

      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.

      • Communist
        link
        fedilink
        English
        311 year ago

        It’ll at the very least make indie studios capable of insane things.

        • Skelectus
          link
          fedilink
          English
          151 year ago

          That also. I’ve been keeping an eye on this kind of technology for my one person projects.

        • Denaton
          link
          fedilink
          English
          11 year ago

          It helped me to start making my first commercial game, i always looking for new AI tech to see how I can use it to make my games. I just need a better graphic card and i could generate 3D models with DreamFusion.

      • HolyDuckTurtle
        link
        fedilink
        English
        11 year ago

        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.

    • Kushan
      link
      fedilink
      English
      291 year ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        51 year ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          11 year ago

          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.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            71 year ago

            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.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            31 year ago

            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.

  • @jcgA
    link
    English
    311 year ago

    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

    • Lols
      link
      fedilink
      English
      191 year ago

      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

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        71 year ago

        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.

      • Communist
        link
        fedilink
        English
        71 year ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          21 year ago

          Photogrametry has pretty much secured photorealistic baked-in effects without any additional computational power. Just by using real photos (especially 3D scan photos) you cut out mapping, toning, and forming (all together a 1hr+ process) all in one step. That, coupled with modern engine lighting and an eye for what makes things “real” and you get that one bodycam footage game that everyone was jaw-dropped about.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      171 year ago

      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

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        51 year ago

        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

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        41 year ago

        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.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        41 year ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          81 year ago

          Meaning that graphics really are not the reason for why games have such long development cycles at all.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          41 year ago

          They took an entire year for just polishing up the game. I’m sure everything else took great time too lol.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      131 year ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        151 year ago

        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.

        • LittleKerr
          link
          fedilink
          English
          21 year ago

          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.

      • Edgerunner Alexis
        link
        fedilink
        English
        41 year ago

        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.

        • Captain Janeway
          link
          fedilink
          English
          31 year ago

          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.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    211 year ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      51 year ago

      Easier level design. I wouldn’t be surprised if 99% of open world games just had their landscape generated and then slightly tweaked afterwards.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        11 year ago

        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.

  • Lols
    link
    fedilink
    English
    181 year ago

    we all know this is nonsense, right? like, the development cycles have gotten so long because theyve just decided that its better that way

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      131 year ago

      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.

      • Lols
        link
        fedilink
        English
        41 year ago

        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

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          71 year ago

          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.

          • @[email protected]
            link
            fedilink
            English
            4
            edit-2
            1 year ago

            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.

            • @[email protected]
              link
              fedilink
              English
              21 year ago

              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.

  • Roland
    link
    fedilink
    English
    141 year ago

    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

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    131 year ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      6
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      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!)

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        11 year ago

        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.

  • Dojan
    link
    fedilink
    English
    121 year ago

    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.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    111 year ago

    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…

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      21 year ago

      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.

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        21 year ago

        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.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          English
          11 year ago

          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

          If Redfall was a one-off, I’d agree but a decline of quality is going on for years:

          • Crackdown 3: mediocre at best
          • Battletoads 2020: again, mediocre at best
          • Gears 5: merely “mostly positive” on Steam but hardly a gangbuster
          • Halo Infinite Campaign: “Mixed” on Steam
          • Deathloop: “mostly positive”

          Those “mostly positive” games are exactly the 7/10 level of quality that can be farted out on a somewhat regular bases while being good enough to justify a GamePass subscription. Redfall with its “mostly negative” (33% are positive) on Steam isn’t that far off Halo Infinite’s “mixed” single player campaign (48% positive). Sure, Microsoft would have wanted Redfall to be better but I still read the releases, especially the hyped ones, more as a getting them out the door because GamePass situation.

          Microsoft’s best releases (Pentiment and Hi-Fi Rush) are smaller-scale efforts.

  • PrivateNoob
    link
    fedilink
    English
    101 year ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      131 year ago

      Style > Graphical fidelity If a game has good style and design, it’s amazing how well it can hold up.

        • Skelectus
          link
          fedilink
          English
          31 year ago

          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.

          • PrivateNoob
            link
            fedilink
            English
            11 year ago

            It definitely caters to the OG gamers. Really respects GoldenEye 007.

        • TheRtRevKaiserM
          link
          fedilink
          English
          11 year ago

          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.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    81 year ago

    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.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      31 year ago

      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.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      3
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      They get larger, have more features, content and better graphics but they don’t seem to be getting any more fun to actually play (to me anyway but that could be ‘old’ setting in)

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        21 year ago

        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.

    • LUHG
      link
      fedilink
      English
      21 year ago

      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.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    7
    edit-2
    1 year ago

    I just assumed that AAA are going to be online-only and jammed with macro-transactions.

    COUGH Fallout76 COUGH GTA-Online

    Cheers -Henry

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    61 year ago

    AAA gaming is mostly dead for me outside a few studios that make creative and fun games. I’m so tired of FOTM that are designed to appeal to Twitch streamers. The industry kind of reminds me of superhero movies which will always be able to turn a profit by selling to children. I’d take 60FPS and a low budget fun game over 4K and advanced lighting any day, but I’m not the target audience anymore.

  • croobat
    link
    fedilink
    English
    61 year ago

    We are getting to a point where development cycles are getting longer than some consoles lifetimes.

    • Stovetop
      link
      fedilink
      English
      51 year ago

      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.

  • @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    English
    51 year ago

    It was over a long time ago for me when I realized that most AAA games were all the same. Might as well wait until they’re $20 anyway.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      21 year ago

      There are decades worth of great games already out. People should be open to trying out older games, even if it means slight hurdles in downloading compatibility mods or patches.

    • Wren 🪐
      link
      fedilink
      English
      21 year ago

      Patient gaming is the best - the bugs have (mostly) been fixed, DLC is available, and when you get stuck on something chances are there’s info online about it

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        English
        11 year ago

        Hell yeah, I’m waiting for the first sale of Diablo 4 on the console. (cross fingers it’s this coming holiday)

        • Wren 🪐
          link
          fedilink
          English
          11 year ago

          Ooo nice nice, though I’ve heard the microtransactions are awful (gotta love Blizzard, eh?)

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      1
      edit-2
      1 year ago

      It was over a long time ago for me when I realized that most AAA games were all the same.

      Do people actually believe this or is just one of those cliches that people repeat when they don’t have anything meaningful to contribute?

      I’m curious how many similarities there are between games like Diablo IV, Street Fighter 6 and Starfield? I could make the list bigger but figure that’s a good starting point.