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 dont know, a number of Indie studios could probably qualify.
Best video recently about this from Yahtzee: https://youtu.be/4LplgYMiLhM
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.
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.
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.
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 gone from the last Space Shuttle flight (July 8, 2011) to the first noon landing since Apollo (2025-2026) before ESVI is released. Crazy.
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.
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…
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.
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
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.
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.
Yeah I mean the trend has been obvious for years now, whether you look at GTA or Counterstrike. The times where you released a game, the game was now finished and you move to the next one are long over.
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.
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.
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,
I just assumed that AAA are going to be online-only and jammed with macro-transactions.
COUGH Fallout76 COUGH GTA-Online
Cheers -Henry
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.
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 mean I’m a fan of elder scrolls. What’s going to happen it its development cycle?
By the time TES6 comes out, Lemmy will have it’s own controversy and the alternative Redmee will be the new site.
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.
