The coding and environments take so much more effort to optimize and get running. Not to mention the writing has to be longer and deeper the more they expand it.
aphelion135
Better technology sadly means better and higher standards consumers and even developers have on themselves.
Therefore longer development times.
For companies like rockstar, its excusable understandable since whatever comes from that company its always industry zenith.
And if u mention the trilogy that failed. Rockstar had nothing to do with that since their money hungry publisher and parent company “take two” was responsible for green lighting that.
But I came to the point of wishing companies would back off of real realism and make it more stylistic.
Obviously many people in here disagree since graphical evolution is the whole point of next gen.
But i remember a time were the uncharted series for example had 3 games released on the same console .
Every game had two years in between. A fan had just to wait TWO YEARS max for a new game they were anticipating.
If its stylistic enough it wont even age that much in hindsight. Because the more realistic a game wants to be, by the time the new gen comes out that game looks awful in comparison.
Thats why i think nintendo games age “gracefully”.
Atleast most of em. Sure they embraced HD since 2012 but never went overboard to the point that they still could release a game atleast once a year that many people are anticipating.
Maybe its just nostalgia but this gen has the power but at what cost……
If there arent enough games.
Salarian_American
Does anyone else wonder if maybe part of the problem is that too many studios announce things way too soon?
We’re so used to waiting years for something that when a company waits until close to release to make an announcement, people assume they just started work on it. LIke when the first Jedi Fallen Order trailer came out six months out from the release date, people freaked out that it was going to be a rushed mess because they only worked on it for six months, when in reality they’d been working on it for about five years, just quietly.
Avenger1324
In the case of Bethesda it is their choice to work on one game at a time, but this just ends up annoying everyone because every sequel takes so damn long. With both TES and Fallout series big enough to support full teams in full time development they really should split and do that. Then they could really go crazy and crank out more than one title per series per decade.
NotTheTrixter
And even if I’m 65 and a new game comes out I’ll be happy to play it and wait for the next one.
Stamperdoodle1
“Fidelity death cult” is 1000000% the biggest reason.
The amount of time it takes to fill out an environment these days can be pretty staggering. You’re not working with ~100 poly limits on props and ~1000 poly limits on characters, You’re not talking about some shitty photostock textures run through crazybump or whatever to make a cheap normal, desaturating the diffuse and calling it a “spec” map and calling it a day.
You’re talking every. fucking. tiny. thing. being a full blown hero piece. thousands, hundreds of thousands – fucking millions of polys. Everything with microdetail, everything with height maps, multi-layered-RGBAchannel-based vertex blending, Substance painter/designer generated masks and smart materials (while yes, reusable as fuck, Also can still take a lot of time for other artists to reverse engineer as many do it different ways)
Where does this come from? Competition and player demand – That’s about it.
Ever see a gameplay trailer of something and think “Looks a bit dated/Why does it look old/Ps2 game”? Yeah, that’s where this shit comes from, You’re not competing against your LAST released product, you’re competing against EVERYTHING available in the market.
And yeah, this doesn’t mean your game NEEDS those things, but if you’re going for mass market – then yes it does. and any game with hundreds of millions in budget is 100% mass market.
This is just a tiny portion of the art side – Some peoples WHOLE fucking job is just to create materials. What used to take 1 fucking guy to fill out an entire environment in 2005, Now can easily take over 100 people for the same size environment – And then you see fans clamouring for “more unique biomes” and “bigger maps”
Then you have Sound, Lighting, gameplay, networking – The whole fucking thing is a big inflated mess industry-wide. and we’ve hit diminishing returns.
Lando1Win
With the quality bethesda puts into their games, there’s no reason they should take longer than 1 year to produce…
Meeqs
I mean losing 5+ years on chasing live service games that crash and burn has been pretty frequent. BioWare just happened to be one of the first
I think one of the biggest mistakes that gaming has made was obsessing over resolution and realism instead of art direction
8 Comments
The coding and environments take so much more effort to optimize and get running. Not to mention the writing has to be longer and deeper the more they expand it.
Better technology sadly means better and higher standards consumers and even developers have on themselves.
Therefore longer development times.
For companies like rockstar, its excusable understandable since whatever comes from that company its always industry zenith.
And if u mention the trilogy that failed. Rockstar had nothing to do with that since their money hungry publisher and parent company “take two” was responsible for green lighting that.
But I came to the point of wishing companies would back off of real realism and make it more stylistic.
Obviously many people in here disagree since graphical evolution is the whole point of next gen.
But i remember a time were the uncharted series for example had 3 games released on the same console .
Every game had two years in between. A fan had just to wait TWO YEARS max for a new game they were anticipating.
If its stylistic enough it wont even age that much in hindsight. Because the more realistic a game wants to be, by the time the new gen comes out that game looks awful in comparison.
Thats why i think nintendo games age “gracefully”.
Atleast most of em. Sure they embraced HD since 2012 but never went overboard to the point that they still could release a game atleast once a year that many people are anticipating.
Maybe its just nostalgia but this gen has the power but at what cost……
If there arent enough games.
Does anyone else wonder if maybe part of the problem is that too many studios announce things way too soon?
We’re so used to waiting years for something that when a company waits until close to release to make an announcement, people assume they just started work on it. LIke when the first Jedi Fallen Order trailer came out six months out from the release date, people freaked out that it was going to be a rushed mess because they only worked on it for six months, when in reality they’d been working on it for about five years, just quietly.
In the case of Bethesda it is their choice to work on one game at a time, but this just ends up annoying everyone because every sequel takes so damn long. With both TES and Fallout series big enough to support full teams in full time development they really should split and do that. Then they could really go crazy and crank out more than one title per series per decade.
And even if I’m 65 and a new game comes out I’ll be happy to play it and wait for the next one.
“Fidelity death cult” is 1000000% the biggest reason.
The amount of time it takes to fill out an environment these days can be pretty staggering. You’re not working with ~100 poly limits on props and ~1000 poly limits on characters, You’re not talking about some shitty photostock textures run through crazybump or whatever to make a cheap normal, desaturating the diffuse and calling it a “spec” map and calling it a day.
You’re talking every. fucking. tiny. thing. being a full blown hero piece. thousands, hundreds of thousands – fucking millions of polys. Everything with microdetail, everything with height maps, multi-layered-RGBAchannel-based vertex blending, Substance painter/designer generated masks and smart materials (while yes, reusable as fuck, Also can still take a lot of time for other artists to reverse engineer as many do it different ways)
Where does this come from? Competition and player demand – That’s about it.
Ever see a gameplay trailer of something and think “Looks a bit dated/Why does it look old/Ps2 game”? Yeah, that’s where this shit comes from, You’re not competing against your LAST released product, you’re competing against EVERYTHING available in the market.
And yeah, this doesn’t mean your game NEEDS those things, but if you’re going for mass market – then yes it does. and any game with hundreds of millions in budget is 100% mass market.
This is just a tiny portion of the art side – Some peoples WHOLE fucking job is just to create materials. What used to take 1 fucking guy to fill out an entire environment in 2005, Now can easily take over 100 people for the same size environment – And then you see fans clamouring for “more unique biomes” and “bigger maps”
Then you have Sound, Lighting, gameplay, networking – The whole fucking thing is a big inflated mess industry-wide. and we’ve hit diminishing returns.
With the quality bethesda puts into their games, there’s no reason they should take longer than 1 year to produce…
I mean losing 5+ years on chasing live service games that crash and burn has been pretty frequent. BioWare just happened to be one of the first
I think one of the biggest mistakes that gaming has made was obsessing over resolution and realism instead of art direction