In short:
- Increased graphical fidelity means that you need more people to create the same scene. By way of a source of his, he gives the example of a scene from Final Fantasy IV and how many people with specialized roles it would take to create the same scene in modern graphics compared to back in the 90s.
- Larger team sizes means communication takes longer. For everything. No longer just one studio but multiple studios in multiple locations and time zones working on the same game.
- Scopes are bigger. Players are expecting more, whether that’s more hours of content for your dollar or more reflective puddles. May become a vicious cycle as this means you now need to make your game appeal to more groups of people in order to justify your larger costs from this and other areas.
- Technical challenges; changing game engines or platforms over time. If you need to upgrade your engine so that it supports outputting to a console that came out while you were developing the current game, it affects more than just the version that ships on that new platform. Or any other way a game might need to upgrade to support some ambitious new thing the game is trying to do.
- Covid happened in the not-too-distant past, and everyone had to change how they work on a dime.
- Mismanagement, though a bit too umbrella of a term. He feels the number 1 reason is managers deciding every game needs to be a live service, not playing to the developers’ strengths. He also cites shifting timelines by 6 months at a time instead of actually evaluating how much time the game really needs; upper execs not being decisive about a direction for a studio while the studio is strung along for months before minds are changed; short-sighted layoffs between projects breaking up team chemistry; etc.
I want games with 6th and 7th gen graphics. That was the last time most games were creative and not corporate slop.
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.
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.
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.
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.