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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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
Hell yeah, I’m waiting for the first sale of Diablo 4 on the console. (cross fingers it’s this coming holiday)
Ooo nice nice, though I’ve heard the microtransactions are awful (gotta love Blizzard, eh?)
Yeah, I saw that too. But if not buying into microtransactions will not hinder me from finishing the campaign and also affect my endgame, then I’ll just ignore it. I hope it’s all cosmetics,
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.
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.
