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.
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.
It helped me to start making my first commercial game, i always looking for new AI tech to see how I can use it to make my games. I just need a better graphic card and i could generate 3D models with DreamFusion.
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.
It’s pretty good, agreed, but we’ve had procedural generation since before minecraft. It doesn’t have anything to do with ML/AI afaik.
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.
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.
I dont know, a number of Indie studios could probably qualify.
KSP 1 was, at least at first, and Stardew Valley was made entirely by one guy
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.
Same for me, most of my favorite games nowadays are indies. Like Valheim, Stardew Valley and more
Best video recently about this from Yahtzee: https://youtu.be/4LplgYMiLhM
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
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
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.
I want to upvote this twice
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.
Photogrametry has pretty much secured photorealistic baked-in effects without any additional computational power. Just by using real photos (especially 3D scan photos) you cut out mapping, toning, and forming (all together a 1hr+ process) all in one step. That, coupled with modern engine lighting and an eye for what makes things “real” and you get that one bodycam footage game that everyone was jaw-dropped about.
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
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.
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.
Exactly. I’ve been working for several years in the industry and the most time consuming part of the development is not graphics; it’s design (in all shapes) + implementation + iteration until all is polished and the game is good no matter how it looks.
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.
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!)
You can just go get Unity or UE right now.
Making a brand new game with an existing engine is not “build on top of one another like mods do”, though. Games engines do not include the game logic of the games.
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.
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
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.
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.
2-3 years? In the 80s devs could crank out games in weeks!
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.
Absolutely agreed. What are your favorite stylized games?
Okami and Wind Waker are the first that come to mind. Both have aged beautifully.
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.
🎶Understand (understand) the concept (the concept) of LOVE🎶 UNH!
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.
Morrowind, hands down.
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.
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…
I prefer quality over quantity
Microsoft has GamePass. They want continuous new releases. They didn’t release Redfall because they thought it was ready, they released it because they thought it was good enough to get with a GamePass subscription.
Even Microsoft wasn’t happy with Redfall - I don’t think it was like they decided to release it in that state because of Game Pass, it seems the whole project was a greed-driven disaster that started prior to the Microsoft acquisition.
Even Microsoft wasn’t happy with Redfall - I don’t think it was like they decided to release it in that state because of Game Pass
If Redfall was a one-off, I’d agree but a decline of quality is going on for years:
- Crackdown 3: mediocre at best
- Battletoads 2020: again, mediocre at best
- Gears 5: merely “mostly positive” on Steam but hardly a gangbuster
- Halo Infinite Campaign: “Mixed” on Steam
- Deathloop: “mostly positive”
Those “mostly positive” games are exactly the 7/10 level of quality that can be farted out on a somewhat regular bases while being good enough to justify a GamePass subscription. Redfall with its “mostly negative” (33% are positive) on Steam isn’t that far off Halo Infinite’s “mixed” single player campaign (48% positive). Sure, Microsoft would have wanted Redfall to be better but I still read the releases, especially the hyped ones, more as a getting them out the door because GamePass situation.
Microsoft’s best releases (Pentiment and Hi-Fi Rush) are smaller-scale efforts.
Yeah, it sounded more like an Anthem situation, where for most of the project everybody was just fucking around wasting the company’s money, until the owner put the foot down and forced them to actually work on it and finish the game, quality be damned
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.
FOTM? What is that?
Flavour of the month.
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.
They get larger, have more features, content and better graphics but they don’t seem to be getting any more fun to actually play
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.
I don’t care as long as the pipeline has enough different good games that I get one per year. I can wait years between games in a franchise as long as there’s something else to play in the interim.
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.
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 just assumed that AAA are going to be online-only and jammed with macro-transactions.
COUGH Fallout76 COUGH GTA-Online
Cheers -Henry
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.
There are decades worth of great games already out. People should be open to trying out older games, even if it means slight hurdles in downloading compatibility mods or patches.
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)
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.
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
There are many areas that can be improved upon to make games more realistic, just probably not graphical. NPCs using smarter AI, better physics, a more dynamic environment (better destruction, better NPC interaction with objects), and who knows what else that I can’t think of now. There’s still a lot of progress to be made, I just don’t know if we’ll have enough horsepower to run all of that, we’re already reaching physical limitations on chips.
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)
