Kind of. The problem is that it’s not a good long term thing for the industry. It’s like indie films. You’ll have one director make some highly acclaimed thing. Sometimes they might make a few but most just have one thing and drop off the map.
You need AAA for the funding to push the tech. To push what’s capable and have the big budgets. I don’t want to play games without AAAs out there.
There's basically nowhere to go in terms of graphical fidelity. Games from the PS4 still look pretty modern. It's nowhere near the jump between the SNES and N64 or the PS1 and the PS2 and we'll never see a jump like that again. Throwing more money at graphics doesn't meaningfully further games anymore.
A lot of expenses go towards better graphics, but we are at the point where better graphics have less impact since capabilities are already so high that the improvements are minimal and hard to notice.
Plus the better you make the graphics, the more powerful hardware is required to run it, which means fewer people can buy/run your game, meaning less sales and thus the return on investment is lower.
Zero Company, Blood of the Dawnwalker, Endacopia, Mr Sleepy Man, Moldrise, Denshattack, Poco, Öoo, Resident Evil Requiem, Esoteric Ebb, Midnight Walk, Carimara: Beneath there Forlorn Limbs, Silent Hill F, Discopup
All games I thoroughly enjoyed in the past year or so for story, game mechanics, or unique art style. There are so many great games coming out all the time.
Eh...right now the tech push is to defer basic optimizations to AI especially since real optimizations are kept like trade secrets.
Like I would say the only thing they have going is they forget to go lean so they make more jobs than indie due to funding, though that's a shrinking window.
Otherwise AAA living or dying is kinda irrelevant, though at least Eastern studios mostly understand how to make a game for their audience rather than a game for everyone.
Which is why the complaints are bullshit and the real reason is greed, incompetence, and mismanagement.
Mihoyo has like a dozen games in development atm, and none of them sound massively delayed or mired in problems. And all of their output has been of high quality and effort, even if people don't care for gacha as a revenue method.
For the most part I concur. They know when to turn back. They have done greedy traps a lot like with Genshin and Lunar Reactions be locked behind gacha units without non spending ways to access and making a meta out of it. Mihoyo did backpedal that for now.
What happened with HSR lately? I liked the game, but haven't had time for it since Penacony ended. I did hear the dmg inflated massively in Amphoreus, but there is also a ton of content to do every week between weeklies, monthlies, and time-limited stuff.
Voracity which is a massive DPS check mechanic where after defeating an enemy, they revive and you have to knock out their max HP by dealing damage (and it's not 100% of the damage, if it isn't elation, only half the damage dealt reduces max HP). If they die again but their max HP is still above 60%, they revive again.
Also this isn't just an endgame mechanic, if you progress through the story you WILL encounter it and have to deal with it.
Rigid team comps for endgame, drop in quality for story moments, and well rampant powercreep.
Edit: also if you are daily grinding you will also run into them so uh...wanna build elation?
Yeah, I did notice how they went from varied group comps to each new planet being "Path of the Week" now, which I'm not too fond of. eg: Your entire team is Remembrance in Amphoreus.
Push the tech = give more money to Epic for adding things to Slop Engine 5 according to what they think is the right direction to take, along with NVIDIA's vested interest in influencing what direction is taken.
Getting good graphics engineers in this market is hard; bean counters decide that keeping them is redundant, so we get situations like id Software where they fire all their tech team; and the higher-ups decide that game developers have functionally the same role to play as video or graphics editors have in an advertisement company.
And the role of Adobe products in that industry is the equivalent to the role of Epic and Unreal Engine in this industry.
AAA used to push the tech with reasonably scoped games. Now instead of making a game in 2-3 years for someofthemoney. They only want billion dollar moonshots that make allthemoney and take 8 years to create.
That length also tends to drain creatives and you get way more turnover. It also means franchises bleed fans over time, because there is way too much time between games.
eg: Squeenix has said the younger generation isn't attached to Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest anymore because only 1 or 2 games come out across their entire childhood.
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u/Pleasant_Expert7329 15h ago
Honestly I feel like that’s just the gaming industry in a nutshell