i want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who are paid more to work less and i’m not kidding
Best video recently about this from Yahtzee: https://youtu.be/4LplgYMiLhM
Same. Be cool if there was some kind of “ethically made, fair hours and wages for workers” seal of approval for games.
Removed by mod
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.
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
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 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 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…
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
