Why Games Now Take 6+ Years To Make

I want games with 6th and 7th gen graphics. That was the last time most games were creative and not corporate slop.

Xbox 360/PS3 had enough graphical power. We never needed more.

Obviously better is better and more is more, but I dont want that increase at the expense of anything. If the tech happens to be good enough that we can just magically have better graphics and its all fine then great, but i dont want to wait many years, or have massive teams of miserable code-monkeys chained to a production line, or have less overall games desperate to make a safe return so they dont dare try anything new or original.

Im tired of playing the same game over and over again for sure. Since getting gamepass I basically only play the little indie games on it.

I'll download every big AAA day one release to see the hype, but after 5 minutes of "wow its very pretty isnt it?" I realise that ive already basically played it before and dont need to do the rest.

A game like Halo 3 still looks great today besides some of the human faces. Most games from the mid 00s to the early 2010s hold up graphically for the most part, but actually have interesting and fun gameplay on top of it.

Ill take less graphics and better gameplay please

We never needed more.

I might be wrong, but I think that's too early for me - I'd like 120fps at 1440p in a game like Portal 2 as a regular mid-to-high end experience, and I'd like to have room for funky stuff (portals will already have some funky cost).

The issue to me is that it's a nonsensical competition for better graphics, without considering the actual experience, and instead of solving the root causes people are treating performance as the issue to attack by reducing fidelity, framerate and resolution, and filling in the gaps.

It's funny, thinking about it. Back when hardware was weak game developers figured out they can keep textures at low resolution and layer them with differently scaled textures, or straight up noise, to make them look more detailed up close. Now we're basically doing the equivalent of that on the whole screen, cutting down on the image and filling in the gaps, and it's become a competition of who can do it better.

I do not. This rethoric makes it sound like gamers share the fault for the industry being shit, when the fault lies solely with the publishers and sometimes devs. I do agree with "no crunch and decent wages" bit - if it takes a decade to make it and costs a lot fine, so be it, take your time, but I want and I like options: shorter games, longer games, pretty ones, 8-bit one, realistic graphics, story or not is of no concern, I want them all. What I don't want is this late stage capitalism infinite growth bullshit which stifles studios from innovating, keeps franchises going forever on mediocre entries and closes studios for short term gains.

If we assume the faith of most games gets decided by a board of directors based on a short 10-slides pitch, it's easy to see that videos and screenshots, made up numbers and popular hashtags (openworld, moba, ai) are what lets them be greenlit. Pertnering up with AMD/NVIDIA so they patch drivers for your project alone, so your game at least launches, is pro and not a con.

EA doesn't have fly wrinkles and we do, with the help of AI, in Betamax 9k MetaHD.

The only way to get under surface for a tripple A game publishers is test groups, but I don't think this can touch the question of gfx/performance/effort because everything is presented on capable hardware, scenes handcrafted to impress, and it's hard to point out anything about visuals unless they are hella ugly.

What does 6th and 7th gen mean?

I want games with 90s to mid 2000s graphics. FMV was the height of graphics hahaha

6th gen = Dreamcast, PS2, Gamecube, Xbox

7th gen = Xbox 360, PS3; optionally Wii, but this is the spot where Nintendo systems sort of stop aligning with other console generations

Thank you! Xbox and PS3 games hold up, sometimes… sometimes not, for me. Most GC/DC/PS2 games hold up great for me. Most stuff before that looks excellent still (sometimes requiring a CRT.)

Yeah, any earlier than that and I'm hunting down scanline filters for RetroArch to dial in the look. Having a proper CRT and old consoles is too much for me, but CRT scanlines very much affect the look of those old games.

the first*, eight and tenth most purchased games of all time are 2d games with pixel art graphics

There's an MS-free version of it called "Indie Pass". It's not remarkable right now, but I'll admit I'd like to see it built up into something worthy of more attention.

If it was a button you pushed once instead of something you need to download and set up do you think they still wouldn’t use it?