Same. Be cool if there was some kind of "ethically made, fair hours and wages for workers" seal of approval for games.

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 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.

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.

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

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.

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 can assure you it's not the developers changing the scope...

Easier level design. I wouldn't be surprised if 99% of open world games just had their landscape generated and then slightly tweaked afterwards.

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.

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 I'd released back in the day. (And fwiw I think it's a crying shame id tech engines are no longer open sourced too!)

Style > Graphical fidelity If a game has good style and design, it's amazing how well it can hold up.

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