If Rambo The Video Game (2014) was made with the tech of today, it would look much better while costing the devs the same amount of time.
I don’t think this is quite correct. A while back devs were talking about a AAApocalypse. Basically as budgets keep on growing, having a game make its money back is exceedingly hard. This is why today’s games need all sorts of monetisation, are always sequels, have low-risk game mechanics, and ship in half broken states. Regardless of the industry basically abandoning novel game engines to focus on Unreal (which is also a bad thing for other reasons), game production times are increasing, and the reason is that while some of the time is amortised, the greater graphical fidelity makes the lower fidelity work stand out. I believe an “indie” or even AA game could look better today for the same amount of effort than 10 years ago, but not a AAA game.
For example, you could not build Baldur’s Gate 3 in Unreal. This is an unhealthy state for the industry to be in.
Yeah, I agree with everything you said. But what I was trying to say is that it is not all of the graphics push that are hurting production, I believe that on this generation alone we have many new graphics techniques that are aiming to improve image quality at the same time that it takes the load out of the devs. Just look at Remnant II that has the graphical fidelity of a AAA but the budget of a AA.
Also, some of the production time is increasing due to feature creep that a lot of games have. Every new game has to have millions of fetch quests, a colossal open world map, skill trees, online mode, crafting, looting system etc. etc. Even if it makes no sense for the game to have it. Almost every single game mentioned on this thread suffers from this. With Batman being notorious for their Riddler trophies, The Witcher having more question marks on the map than an actual map, and Assassin’s Creed… Well, do I even need to mention it?
So the production time increase is not all the fault of the increase in graphical fidelity.
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I don’t think this is quite correct. A while back devs were talking about a AAApocalypse. Basically as budgets keep on growing, having a game make its money back is exceedingly hard. This is why today’s games need all sorts of monetisation, are always sequels, have low-risk game mechanics, and ship in half broken states. Regardless of the industry basically abandoning novel game engines to focus on Unreal (which is also a bad thing for other reasons), game production times are increasing, and the reason is that while some of the time is amortised, the greater graphical fidelity makes the lower fidelity work stand out. I believe an “indie” or even AA game could look better today for the same amount of effort than 10 years ago, but not a AAA game.
For example, you could not build Baldur’s Gate 3 in Unreal. This is an unhealthy state for the industry to be in.
Yeah, I agree with everything you said. But what I was trying to say is that it is not all of the graphics push that are hurting production, I believe that on this generation alone we have many new graphics techniques that are aiming to improve image quality at the same time that it takes the load out of the devs. Just look at Remnant II that has the graphical fidelity of a AAA but the budget of a AA. Also, some of the production time is increasing due to feature creep that a lot of games have. Every new game has to have millions of fetch quests, a colossal open world map, skill trees, online mode, crafting, looting system etc. etc. Even if it makes no sense for the game to have it. Almost every single game mentioned on this thread suffers from this. With Batman being notorious for their Riddler trophies, The Witcher having more question marks on the map than an actual map, and Assassin’s Creed… Well, do I even need to mention it? So the production time increase is not all the fault of the increase in graphical fidelity.