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, 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.
Best video recently about this from Yahtzee: https://youtu.be/4LplgYMiLhM
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.
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.
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…
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
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 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.
They took an entire year for just polishing up the game. I’m sure everything else took great time too lol.
Meaning that graphics really are not the reason for why games have such long development cycles at all.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
we all know this is nonsense, right? like, the development cycles have gotten so long because theyve just decided that its better that way
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.
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.
