It’s honestly kinda crazy how long some games spend in development. The Final Fantasy 7 Remake trilogy is a perfect example of something that should’ve been quick but ended up being so bloated and took forever to make.
FF7Remake was announced in 2015, got stuck in development hell for a bit, released 2020. The sequel released 2024. The third one still hasn’t been teased yet. How many people are attached to a franchise if it takes 10 years to get the full story? I loved the first remake but dropped the second one, I just didn’t care about the story as much as I did ~5 years ago.
The graphics and “the biggest game ever” races have led to this.
No, you do not need physically accurate bubbles flowing in the shaded beer bottle that you will at best appreciate for 3 seconds while looking to get on with the game.
Or realistic horse balls. Or 4K skin textures. Or ray tracing in every game. Or 40000 side quests on a map as big as Mars.
I used to care quite a lot about graphics, but as the years have passed, I find graphically beautiful games less pleasing than a lot of the older games. It all seems too rounded and smooth now. I’ve been playing a lot of Project Diablo 2 lately, but when the new character dropped for Diablo 2 Resurrected, I figured I should give that a shot. While the graphics are definately nice, and the gameplay is smooth, I prefer the older graphics, because the griddy, slightly pixelated world adds so much to the dark and gloomy theme.
I’ve also just absolutely had it with every single Unreal Engine game looking exactly the same. Did the devs just lose all individual artistry?
Sometimes less is just more.
But also, what’s wrong with having any of those things? I’d argue it’s better to have those things with less developer crunch. We don’t need children to form “attachments” to video game franchises. That just breeds loyalty to corporations. We need games that are developed with love and care by developers who treat their employees and customers humanely. Whatever that looks like, we want that.
Nothing. I’d take more good games instead of fewer hyperrealistic ones, if I had to choose, but those features themselves aren’t anything bad.
The compulsion that every game has to have them, that’s what’s annoying, particularly when it comes at the price of putting developers under pressure.
If we are to have them at all, yes, less crunch is better.
The loyalty to corporations is a bad thing, absolutely, but I can also see how forming attachments can be nice. I very much enjoy my attachments to various movie or game franchises.
The shitty part is that these franchises are linked to corporations. I like Star Wars, but fuck Disney.
Absolutely. Grand games should get the time and care they warrant. Commercial pressure is poisoning game development and has been for way too long already.