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 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.
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.
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.
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?)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!)
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.
And the thing about price is, people in the 70s were paying $40 for Atari cartridges. Do you have any idea how much money that was? The $40-60 standard has been around for a long time now. In the SNES era some games were cheaper, but really big RPGs could cost as much as $60 and that was more like $120 today.
