this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2023
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Gaming

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From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!

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[–] [email protected] 70 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

I wonder how it'll play out though.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 29 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago

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

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 61 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Same. Be cool if there was some kind of "ethically made, fair hours and wages for workers" seal of approval for games.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

I want to upvote this twice

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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] 4 points 1 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] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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] 3 points 1 year ago

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

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

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!)

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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] 3 points 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 done from the last Space Shuttle flight (July 8, 2011) to the first noon landing since Apollo (2025-2026) before ESVI is released. Crazy.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Absolutely agreed. What are your favorite stylized games?

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 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] 10 points 1 year ago (4 children)

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..

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They get larger, have more features, content and better graphics but they don't seem to be getting any more fun to actually play

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 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.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 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.

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 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] 5 points 1 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] 4 points 1 year ago (3 children)

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.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

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

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Yet they're the ones making a new flight simulator while everyone was expecting them to stick to the current one and make it better over time for at least 10 years (as Microsoft said)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I mean I'm a fan of elder scrolls. What's going to happen it its development cycle?

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[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

If games will take so long to create, we will probably also see price increases. They will have to fund that development time in some way. I think I do prefer the games like Skyrim where they did take their time to develop the whole world with a broad storyline and many small things that you can do, instead of rushing out a game in a year or two that has no replay value after playing the main story once.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

I think we are already seeing price increases on many games that are starting at $70 (USD) these days. I don’t think we’ll see another increase for quite a while.

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