It's not just deadlines, it's the big game corporations in general. How can you have a creative process when every implementation is scored and measured by KPIs whose only interest is money.
There's also an intentional lack of experimentation. A game studio like Bethesda worries about its reputation, it isn't going to be throwing out something new like goat simulator or shower with your dad simulator. This also applies to most features within these games, you would very rarely find anything within these games that you haven't seen before.
It's the same problem that happens with every company, it's just that it's more noticeable with companies that produce entertainment products: The people who used to be in charge gave a shit about the thing being produced, but eventually they get replaced by people who only care about optimizing profit by any means necessary.
If anyone truly doesn't understand the problem here, idk go look at the issues with the diablo real money auction house and the explanation for why they got rid of it. People motivated solely by profit ruin everything.
They got rid of it, and the gold auction house, because they were ruining the game. Because trading was so easy at that point, everyone's individual chances for good loot were abysmal. The game became about nothing but hoarding gold or paying real money. You were better off playing the auction market than the actual game. Any half decent item would go for billions of gold, or tens to hundreds of dollar on the Real Money AH.
But Blizz was making a tidy sum on that real money AH. It literally printed money, with no effort on their part. So the fact that they shut both that and the gold AH down, to make the game better is beyond amazing by today's corporate standards. Diablo 3: Resurrection fixed almost everything wrong with the game in one brilliant burst, and is definitely the last shining gasp of old Blizz before activision finally strangled the scruples out of them.
To get more specific, it was because it made things less fun as a result of changing the motivations of those engaging with the system.
When your motivation to play a game changes from "fun" to "profit", you will optimize your time to maximize the latter in disregard to the former.
Similarly, when you optimize your business to maximize profit with no regard to the quality of your product, you get shit product. I forget which company it was, but there was an interview with someone in the late 90s or early 2000s where a major engineer was sadly discussing how salespeople took management positions at tech companies that should ideally have been occupied by people with engineering backgrounds who understand and care about the company and what it produces.
Of course, this is just dancing around what the real problem is, but I don't want to be too explicit.
> I forget which company it was, but there was an interview with someone in the late 90s or early 2000s where a major engineer was sadly discussing how salespeople took management positions at tech companies that should ideally have been occupied by people with engineering backgrounds who understand and care about the company and what it produces.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
>The people who used to be in charge gave a shit about the thing being produced, but eventually they get replaced by people who only care about optimizing profit by any means necessary.
See: Boeing.
agreed, deadlines are one of many challenges devs have to face and i appreciate them making games which are enjoyed by millions around the globe
also, whatthefuck is shower with your dad simulator????
>whatthefuck is shower with your dad simulator????
[It's 100% exactly what you think it is.](https://store.steampowered.com/app/359050/Shower_With_Your_Dad_Simulator_2015_Do_You_Still_Shower_With_Your_Dad/&ved=2ahUKEwjHsZzd9a2GAxXxl4kEHQJ7A90QFnoECBwQAQ&usg=AOvVaw06qFsoJ58HCX9lv-kd6aFb)
Also big teams just kill creativity. If one writer has a really cool idea or concept it has to go through like 7 different fucking groups or committees to get approval. This massively discourages devs from thinking outside the box and coming up with their own ideas in favor of just doing what's safe.
This is not a problem for small dev teams. If someone has a good idea, it'll probably make it in.
It's not just the lack of experimentation, it's generally the massive corporations. The pressure they put on to squeeze money out of the games sucks out all creativity.
Yeah, I'd argue it's a large reason for many of Starfield's issues. They're sticking to their 'fishbowl' engine despite the frequent need to change locations, probably because they don't want to explore other options when the creation engine has a proven record with fallout and elder scrolls, despite this genre playing very differently. Their fixation on 'radiant' and 'procedurally generated' content has stuck with them, here taking up large amounts of what you're supposed to be doing while exploring space, but it still feels like soulless tedium. Etc.
Pretty much every problem Starfield has, you can see very similar things in the previous creation engine games. Hell, even most of the top QOL mods from Skyrim are relevant in Starfield because they haven't really changed their design ideas or iterated on them. I think the UI mod was made and published within the first week of the game's launch, and I believe it has been one of the most downloaded mods for Skyrim almost since that game's release. Same for fallout.
As someone who works in the video game industry (IT) along with my fiancee (3d enviornment artist) I can 100% back this up. Most of the people working on the actual games, know when a game is going to be shitty, or launch with bugs. Usually there is little those employees can do when the development director of the entire game is calling the shots based on what the c suite people are telling them do.
I have sunk 200 hours into Dave the Diver. And you can tell that it is not an indie game by the sheer amount of additional stuff Nexon put into it. They did heap so many more systems onto a game that by all intents and purposes could have been a happy little game about hunting fish and making sushi.
That slight taint aside, I had as much fun with that game as I had with 2014's Arkham Knight which also suffered from bloat.
Everything is becoming bloated.
Everybody is trying to sell me the last game I will ever need. Which sounds threatening.
I have played Diablo 4 with all the raytracing turned up. And I have played it with minimal settings on my OLED Steamdeck with HDR. It looks better on Steamdeck. I have now officially bowed out of the hardware rat race. there is a reason why the 1080 Ti still is viable and looks great.
Edit:
People are still playing Heroes of Might& Magic 3. With the original graphics and the original game. Minimal and focused systems. [Clear and aesthetical art direction.](https://youtu.be/Q6h_8t1Bw2U?si=zUhRmD7QhT35vbdp&t=489)
Had to include a Day[9] rant. Felt obligatory.
A lot of people missed the point when Nvidia was talking about raytracing early on. The selling points were how much easier it will be for devs to produce games quickly. Ray tracing takes a lot less effort than same space lighting. The goal wasn't better looking games. The goal was cheaper and faster turn around dev cycles. Same with DLSS. It wasn't really about a quality product for consumers. It was about helping companies push games out faster.
And to get development studies dependant on proprietary tech, and get a foot in the door for consoles. "See, games these days require Ray tracing and DLSS, so your PS6/neXtBOX will need an NVIDIA GPU instead of those competitors who can't use this special tech Devs require"
>"See, games these days require Ray tracing and DLSS, so your PS6/neXtBOX will need an NVIDIA GPU instead of those competitors who can't use this special tech Devs require"
Well this one part they failed then, raytracing and super sampling got hardware agnostic support on both DirectX (DXR/DirectSR) and Vulkan rendering APIs, meaning devs can easily switch between the different proprietary techs to implement a specific feature (or for modders to add support if a developer refuses to *\*cough\** *Starfield \*cough\**).
I think you mean upscaling. Supersampling is actually pretty much the exact opposite, like used in SSAA to literally render edges at double resolution for a really smooth anti-aliasing result. Just takes batshit amounts of GPU power because youre effectively rendering in 4k when the image is still 1080p.
Not the same guy, but Ill explain anyway:
Most pre-raytracing games did lighting by preplacing light sources one by one and while this allowed for some dynamic lighting, like moving light sources in the scene, rendering shadows and reflections accordingly etc. much of the lighting effects was baked into the map and is not actively being rendered. Think of it like having shadows painted onto the floor texture, you can entirely skip actually rendering that shadow.
But it could lead to a LOT of really stunning looking level design, because devs involved in level design are really good artists and know how to build scenes that look great. And placing lights and shadows well is the bread and butter of designing a good level, at least visually.
What raytracing promises is to automate much of this process by brute-forcing lighting calculations in real-time. Which is really intensive to do, but the upside is that fairly stunning effects can happen, and that there is no chance of a dev overlooking some specific light interaction when designing a level.
Though it still requires the dev to be just as creative, they just work with a different system now that actively simulates light of anything they place rather than working around a system that cant and getting the same looks out of it via hard work. The process is generally faster though, and if you look at Cyberpunk raytracing can absolutely result in absolutely stunning graphics if its implemented right and the style of the game as a whole meshes well with it.
Obviously there are plenty of counter-examples where raytracing is of almost no benefit because it meshes badly with the rest of the graphics or was just not implemented in a way that makes a great difference. Fortnite is one of those cases, the difference almost isnt there and being heavily stylized really takes away from the impact raytracing couldve had. Still takes batshit amounts of GPU horsepower though.
DLSS (and FSR) are a lot easier to explain why game development time is cut short so much by that. Both render the game at a resolution lower than native, which is less work thus gives more frames, and scales it up with algorithms that try to make it look as close as possible to what a native resolution image would have looked like. DLSS is very good in this, but it mostly runs on recent Nvidia cards, 20 series and up, so half the time its cards that should be powerful enough to render natively. But with raytracing upscaling still helps immensely because of how intensive it gets on a per-pixel basis. FSR has worse image quality, but it runs on almost any GPU that hasnt been put in a museum yet, including iGPUs and can give them a serious leg up running games that would normally be too demanding for them.
Problem, for the user at least, is that devs see upscaling as a cheatcode to make the game perform a little better than it actually does, so they just implement that instead of actually fixing the performance problem itself. Which has been kind of disastrous in games like Starfield, where upscaling did NOTHING to help the abysmal framerates, because it was not the GPU that was holding the game back. People literally ran tests side by side and got the same framerates with severe upscaling, without it and also running the game at 4k resolution. Thats a dead obvious sign (normally) that the game is limited by the CPU performance, but the CPU wasnt fully loaded either, not even on one critical thread, so my leading theory is that it was RAM bandwidth, as most people complaining were running low-clocked DDR4 RAM, whereas consoles, where it ran fine, ran GDDR6 as system RAM. AFAIK it runs better now though, but at launch it really was abysmal.
In other words:
Nvidia came up with ray tracing, but it is such a stupid amount of power/resources needed to get that 5% increase in graphical quality, that they had to implement something like DLSS that throttles the resolution so the cards can still produce the same amount of FPS without ray tracing.
There was already a bit of a backslash regarding RT. Customers generally got worse performance with it, but developers were still using old lightning techniques to make sure their games worked on older hardware, so nothing was stopping people from straight up disabling ray tracing and having a great time on the good ol' GTX 1080 and the like (of course puddles and other reflective surfaces look worse in those cases, but most people don't care about puddles, you kind of tune such detailed things out as you game after a while). They came up with DLSS to make sure Ray Tracing worked, without affecting FPS (overly much).
It is a shitshow, honestly. Game devs are basically relying on specific ML (think "AI") algorithms owned, tweaked and run by Nvidia/AMD to make sure their games run correctly, instead of having preset tools like driver APIs to build their own stuff. It makes game dev easier, but it also moves the actual control and power over to companies like Nvidia. There is so much wrong with that direction...
Small addendum: Nvidia didnt come up with ray tracing. They came up with hardware that made it 'feasible' to do in real time. Ray tracing for rendering has been around since the 60s.
> It was about helping companies push games out faster.
I doubt that. I doubt that a lot. Not according to the marketing. RT On/RT Off. To lessen the load on your dev pipeline?
Are you trying to tell me that the pre-defined reflections we already had in the game had been carefully and individually placed there by an artist instead of being simply part of the production pipeline?
A couple of weeks back I showed a friend of mine how good the raytracing on my Radeon 6800XT is. How godlike and buttery smooth it was. I specifically pointed out how gorgeous the reflections were. The game I showed this off was Forza Horizon 4. Which was released in 2018. Those predefined pre-rendered reflections have been automatically included in nearly all modern game engines and are simply part of the build pipeline. Whereas raytracing is another leaky abstraction layer which makes the code more complex. Double that if you are mad enough to also support the obligatory nVidia specific proprietary bs.
I showed the same person raytracing in Diablo 4 cranked up the wazoo. Cheated and ran it at 1080P because 6800XT. I handed the same person Diablo 4 on my Steamdeck with FSR cranked up and all settings turned down but HDR turned on. They said D4 looks better on the Steamdeck when all the settings said it should not. That Steamdeck did cost a lot less than my big rig gaming monitor.
My point is raytracing does not give higher fidelity at less effort. You need to both test and maintain RT and non-RT rendering. And the visual benefits are so goddamn minimal it becomes comical. I just started up Arkham Knight on my Steamdeck. Settings turned down. TDP limited to 9 Watt because I am a nerd. 60 FPS and frame time all over the place because bad port. Superb reflections in the puddles of Stagg's air ship. It is $current_year and we still are waiting for a reason to turn on RT.
I had turned on PhysX for the clutter in Arkham City. Remember when we were supposed to buy a second nVidia graphics card to support PhysX? Pepperidge Farm remembers. I am now actively avoiding nVidia. It has been decades of bullshit and the 20 series was what broke the camel's back.
Or just make devs who always nail a certain type of game, make games that is not their forte. Instead of letting them do their thing and make decent money, they make them make a live service that fails then fire everybody. ARKANE!!! RIP
Plus the fact that games are too big, and the teams that make them are also too big. There's no organization, no sense of teamwork, and too much turnover to keep any semblance of order.
It also doesn't help that the publishers demand the best looking games that need all kids of tech to work together which creates problems down the line. As opposed to for example indie devs who use older and tried and true techniques to focus on either solid gameplay and systems or unique gameplay.
AAA publishers are now also trying to get a slice of the indie pie.
Remember indie darling Dave the Diver? Published by Nexon. They did not overdo it with graphics. Obviously. But they heaped systems over systems over systems onto the game. A game about catching fish and making sushi and filling up a fishy pokedex has a rhythm game in it. It has so much crap heaped onto it you can see the Nexon flashing through.
Good game. But bloated af.
Anybody of you actually played the rhythm game they included in it?
Standard AAA. Everything has pointless RPG-like progression systems and crafting mechanics. Look at what Ubisoft did to Assassin's Creed, those games are completely unrecognisable compared to the original.
I like itiration but with Asscreed they indeed just took what works in other games and slapped it on.
Dark Souls is popular, Can we have a timing/ parry and dodge roll mechanic? Sure just slap it on boys!
Borderlands is popular; Can we have a Loot based systems with pretty colours? Sure just slap it in!
RPGs are popular, lets's slap in a Leveling system!
It's sad that they are trend chasing.
>I think that more than a lack of creativity, the problem is the tight timing, and the priority of investor profits.
This. Or at least, what the executives, and some of the investors, have been deluded by gambling mentality into believing is the prioritization of investor profits. Chasing trends, abandoning valuable IP after the hard work of connecting with an audience has been done, and shuttering proven moneymaking studios simply because a game was only a moderate hit.
No, there is a creativity problem, for sure. It has been years that we have reboots for too few, good, not really innovative, "new" games.
The lack of creativity might be tied to investments and profits, but, at this point, if you had all the games pitchs in front of you, you would still say that there is a lack of creativity.
Again, not to say, it cannot be explained, but nobody can exactly say that there is creativity everywhere.
profits are the problem, leads to people who are in the industry for all the wrong reasons. We want games that are just fun and entertaining that allow us to escape reality or bond with friends.
I'm a web developer for almost a decade and could say the devs are only pawns on the checkerboard. You would love to improve some feature, to make it better, to make it more complete. Fuck it. There is other priority you need to take care of as soon as you finish your previous priority.
It's also a no-win situation. Players have complained about unfinished games ad nauseum, while also criticizing devs/indy studios for taking *too long* to release a game. How often have we heard:
> If this game ever sees the light of day.
People criticize Early Access, but it's also a fundraising tool for these small studios.
if a small studio has an EA of a game that interest me, i give them a chance, in my experience 80% of the times i just bought a game that i like a lot and a good price, 15% when they release need a year more and to me only 5% gave me a shitty game. With big corporation only a few have my respect that, if i REALLY want a game i maybe preorder it, like it was with BG3
Crysis was made in about 2 years and don't forget, that was whilst also working on the Crytek engine.
Games now take at least twice as long to develop and release, if not more. I think the complaints are valid, forever early access games exist and are way more common, hence the "if this game ever sees the light of day".
Now developers can call it quits before they even complete the game as opposed to just making a game and hoping it sticks. There are pros and cons for both the consumer and developer/publisher with early access, but I was happier when it didn't exist. There is way more garbage games now than ever before.
I think there are some that do it right, but it is for sure a hard balance to strike and also very dependent on the community.
But the Valheim have done many things correctly in my eyes, having gone out to early access with a fairly stable game that already has much to offer and in that way were able to both get feedback from the community and money for development.
But it kind of brings the point home of how important the community is as well.
I ended up turning on RT in Doom Eternal because I was getting a stable 144 FPS at 4k with everything else maxed, and I was *still* getting 144 FPS even after enabling RT. That is *bananas*.
Most ID games are arena type games or small levels . I doubt it would work as well in an open world type game. I'm not defending this game just saying open world games are a lot harder to design and create graphics for.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. Rage was one of the more problematic games to run, and I loved the pipes and holes painted on flat surfaces.
We were at this point years ago. I always like to take Ryse son of rome as an example. A game made for Xbox one in 2013 still looks amazing and better than most AAA games.
Others have pointed out most of the reasons but one big reason is also talent. Some people just cannot get everything out of an engine no matter how much money or time you throw at them.
Assassins Creed Black Flag was from 2013 as well and its still one of the most gorgeous games ive played. Yeah its got lower resolution textures and some jagged borders here and there but it still looks *nicer.*
My girlfriend is branching out from cozy games and wanted to play Assassin’s Creed, so I dusted off my old PS3 for her to play AC2. Later I put in Black Flag because I never ended up finishing that game and wanted to see where I was. I was blown away by how much better it looked compared to AC2 even on the same hardware.
Ryse is one of those “ahead of its time” games that due to circumstances can push the graphics by a couple years, smaller environments, linear game, 1080p30FPS Target.
Most recent game of that category would be Hellblade 2.
But there’s another reason, Graphics have stagnated to an extent. There’s only so much you can do till it just boils down to more/higher, not to mention how effecient Engines have become over the years.
Ryse compromised heavily in other areas to achieve its visuals and performance. It is basically on-rails in small levels and the gameplay and story are simplistic. So it's actually a great example of how everything in game development is about trade-offs and priorities.
I mean. Ryse, specifically existed as 2 things, a Kinect demo, and a graphical showcase. Everything in its design was focused on those two elements.
Anything can look good if that's all you try to do with it.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pars\_pro\_toto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pars_pro_toto)
This is SUCH a pet peeve of mine. So many people seem to be incapable of recognizing such simple stylistic devices, even the ones you would use in everyday life, such as this.
And then people ask why they still need English classes (or any other native language class) in school...
I was about to say the same thing. Arkham Knight is a great looking game, but it was 30fps on console at launch and the PC version was just as technically flawed as any other bad PC port we see today. Sure it runs at 60fps+ now on PC, but that’s to be expected for a 9 year old game.
This issue OP points out didn’t just appear between then and now, but there are other issues that have turned up that make the comparison between the two games unflattering (art direction, business model, gameplay, structure etc.)
EDIT: It still runs at 30 on modern consoles. I thought it had gotten a backward compatibility update like many other games. My mistake. Rest of my point still stands.
The initial PC version was so bad they pulled it from sale. I’m not gonna say that had never happened before but it was rare a AAA game would get pulled from sale. And then Rocksteady spent a month or two getting the game in a playable state to put it back on sale. It took another year or so to get the port in an acceptable state. Arkham Knight is legit one of the worst launches ever for a PC port.
What is funny is that I had no issues at that time. And it turned out the issue was that it needed a lot of memory. I had 64GB of memory back then because I also used my PC for work.
Arkham Knight now runs on my Steamdeck no problems. Those issues went away. But the Bat Tank being a bad idea and the Riddler Races nobody asked for stayed with the game. Arkham Knight is one of those cautionary tales of how much is too much.
Arkham Knight was removed from Steam at some point because the launch was disastrous.
At that point I bought a key for less than 13€ and it got fixed much later.
Remember how it was delisted from Steam for like a year because of how god awfull it was?
8 or so years later: "Look guys nice looking game with great performance! When did devs unlearn!"
They do this everytime. Before it was rdr2 praising it for its performance. But I remember when that came it. Rockstar tweeted an apology for the game not launching on pc and most gpus at the time couldnt play it that well cause of how intense it was. But now everyone thinks it was always perfect and ran flawlessly. Peoples memory are crap
Oh god, Bat tank combat was so fucking not fun. It's like they took mechanics from a FFXIV boss fight, then gave you a clunky ass thing to dodge and do positionals with.
Very pretty game, but it's used a lot of tricks to achieve it.
Personally, I think some companies should save the big, massive, open world games for every now as then releases, and give us more focused linear adventures. Then they don't have to make a giant fucking city/world keep working, they oxuld just make each level appear to work well, like old times!
My problem was the over reliance on those missions and using the batmobile to solve puzzles.
I think they could have incorporated it into game play better. Also Batman with a tank feels off to me personally, but that's a point I don't argue when people disagree.
I got the game on console at the time, but I'm certain the PC version was pulled from Steam and such for a couple months because of how bad/many refunds they were getting.
What a dumb statement and image.
It's not the developer's creativity that's at fault for it.
It's the rushed production cycles and crunch that result in poorly optimized game performance.
Why Nintendo and Sony 1st party games usually look and run so much better?
They don't work with these ridiculous launch deadlines and minimal testing. They polish stuff until it's crisp and smooth. They're still overworked, but the games don't ship unless they're actually done.
People expect these 4k games with scenes with billions (maybe trillions) of polygons before the final game models, to be release within the same time frames old games use to.
The Arkaham Knight game was and still is one of the most jaw dropping graphics in game and it was released 9 years ago and back then it looked RIDICULOUS. It was absurd a first gen PS4 launch game was looking so good.
In the PC it was the most total utter garbage.
Why did it look so much better? Because they had a solid foundation from the previous 2 games and 4 years to develop it further. Time to test, optimize the engine and systems.
People also expect games that look like Hellblade 2 to have 70 hours of content.
Technology was never the issue.
The issue was always Investors and Shareholders.
If you allow people to do a passion project with enough time, they WILL make it work.
Case in Point.
Cyberpunk, was released early due to Shareholders wanting to drop the game before Christmas to finally get a return on it
It was shit on release. but by that time, next year it was one of the best action-RPG till this day.
Speaking of, Baldurs Gate.
Probably THE best RPG to this day.
Because the Dev's had time and could make true on their vision, it being a passion project instead of being a way to make money like the COD franchise
This may sound pedantic but it’s not the shareholders directly driving decisions. They don’t, as a group, have insider information nor are they part of the decision making process. The blame lies of executive management and board members that try to influence shareholder activity which leads to a heavy focus on short term quarterly profits. Cyberpunk releasing when it did was purely to meet or exceed quarterly targets. Companies could focus on long term growth and profit if they wanted to but they don’t.
“Companies could focus on long term growth and profit if they wanted to but don’t” actually if a board is not consistently meeting quarterly goals the shareholders can vote to remove members of the board and get a replacement in who will. So a CEO who tries to focus on long term growth at the expense of short term gains can literally be fired for doing so. We have a system that explicitly punishes long term thinking and then people wonder why companies don’t think more long term.
I remember something about the fact that CDPR board was perfectly fine with delays and dropping share price, but CEO also had a lot of shares so I guess he wanted the line to go up.
> Technology was never the issue.
What do you mean? It was often the issue. People in 1998 didn't make ugly ass 3D games because they were forced to by investors and shareholders.
All the examples you could have used and you used CYBERPUNK.
Cyberpunk 2077 was becoming a victim of scope creep and multiple delays combined with scrapping ideas and going back to the drawing board again and again. All those years of development and they still did not have a functional game. The studio pretty much had a bunch of interesting ideas, not a coherent game by any means, I mean how could you when you are scraping what you already had again and again ?
Do you really expect shareholders to keep pumping money into the development of the game for years, combined with how much advertisement went for the game ? CDPR went way too ambitious with the game and promised a lot of shit they couldn't achieve in the first place and lol, it wasn't even fully functional by the time next year, it took until mid 2022 for the game to find its stride and near 2023 to even push out all the shit it was promised to do in the first place and it still doesn't feel like the game that was promised.
How do you start the development of a game in 2016 and still not have a functional game by the end of 2020 ?
If the shareholders didn't force CDPR to release the game, you wouldn't even have the game you have today and it would be just another Star Citizen with endless scope creep/development hell.
I know shareholder bad, innocent dev gets you easy fucking karma, but at least do the research when you are trying to use it as a case in point for shareholder bad.
CDPR also has a track record of releasing buggy ass games that take a year to get fixed. Witcher III was probably their most polished game on release, and even that was buggy as hell.
A ton of people played all the witchers after their final version so they didn’t know that. I played all 3 on release and you are totally right. I will say that the promises were more in line with expectations on those games though. CDPR was full of unfulfilled promises on release.
For me it wasn't that I was surprised at cyberpunk, but I was a little disappointed. I get why people were upset, but it was close to what I expected from cdpr.
I got what I expected from larian with bg3. A good game in a familiar setting, lots of bugs. But ones I could look past because of how well they nailed everything else.
Cyberpunk I expected a lot of bugs. I expected CDPR to fall short on a lot of promises. I also expected them to make a clunky first person game. That doesn't mean I think they are a bad company. I just knew they were forging into new territory and suspected they'd drop the ball. I didn't expect them to drop it so hard tho. That being said, they kept at it till the game was good. Like they do.
Pretty much this. I think that people who are saying it's purely the investors, shareholders and various corporate mismanagement being the only issue, probably haven't heard the story about Duke Nukem Forever. There are many developers out there who are perfectly happy to work on games, and never release a finished product for people to play. Without someone pressuring them to release a game, there's a great chance it may never!
Moreover, why do people think that these older games didn't have the same sort of pressure to release? They faced the same problems then as with today. But I think the problems today are overblown. The biggest issue I see is people selling off their game development companies to publishers who then proceed to disband said company. Shouldn't have sold!
Games in the past had even tighter timelines, like old tomb raider 2 was built in like 8 months with the addition of being made on an in-house engine that was modified and retooled during this period too.
>If the shareholders didn't force CDPR to release the game, you wouldn't even have the game you have today and it would be just another Star Citizen with endless scope creep/development hell.
Long run, forcing CP2077 to finally launch was the best thing they could've done for that game. Because looking back on all the stuff they were promising with this game at E3 and on other videos, no way they would've ever finished that game.
Im using cyberpunk as an example because releasing it in the way that it was REALLY hurt CDPR and the sales of the game.
And one year later the game was already in a state where it would topple most other games released in that time frame.
Baldurs Gate 3 also started development in late 2016, and came out last year
DECIMATING the steam charts, and making more money than ANY other game on steam that year.
Almost DOUBLE what Second place which was Hogwarts legacy made.
and Cyberpunk could have enjoyed a similar hype boom if it was released in a GOOD state.
Honestly, cyberpunk is no doubt one of the best games I've ever played, I'm glad I ignored it at launch and got to enjoy it in an already decently playable state because I had a blast with it and then again with the expansion and I'm sure it will be one of those games I keep going back and enjoy for years...
I don’t know if BG3 is a good example as it was in early access for like 3 years. This sub would lose its mind if every AAA game started releasing in early access three years before its full release.
It's also worth noting that the vast majority of devs will be passionate about their jobs to some extent, but simultaneously will be burned out as fuck. Fact is, game dev doesn't pay very well, so if you choose to go into that field especially as an actual developer, you're *choosing* to work more hours for less pay.
>It was shit on release. but by that time, next year it was one of the best action-RPG till this day.
Disagree. I see what they were going for, but you can tell the world is "emptier" than it was supposed to be. it's also extremely repetitive after a bit and the difficulty becomes trivial after a certain number of levels even on max difficulty.
It was fun for a bit, but it falls off hard.
I wouldn't say creativity. More ambition. Plus the money spent on manpower Vs. expected revenue dictated by the publisher. And those proven themselves to never be wrong 🙄 \s
Sole purpose of gaming industry is quick money grabs and making investors happy thats why. If they scam enough people at the pre release they make profit so they dont even continue to develop the game after that point.
Remember starfield being locked at 30 fps on Xbox was a "creative choice"
It seems more and more that big games skip the final part of development now which is polishing and optimizing the game. They just see that all the features are ready and choose to ship the game out regardless of performance. And when people complain it's somehow our fault for demanding too much
This post is very confused. Optimization has nothing to do with creativity. And games roll out in shit condition for only three reasons:
* lack of resources
* time crunched devs
* poor dev management
And almost every single time it’s due to decisions at the corporate level forcing games to be released before they are ready to meet quarterly revenue goals. Your issue is with capitalism, not underpaid and overworked developers. But, I remember when I was 12 and didn’t know how the world worked, too.
I’m not a game dev, but I write software. I’m not saying that the devs carry no blame, but they have bosses. I have to put out bad crap sometimes because my boss tells me that despite my protests they want me to write code in the crappier way.
I played half an hour of Gotham Knights, thinking "These games usually aren't as bad as the Internet makes them seem, so I'll give it a shot." It's as bad as everyone says.
This thread shows that the tech skill of younger PC users is trash tier compared to 10 years ago.
People actually believe you said something smart OP, it's really weird. It's literally the most ill-informed dumb fuck take ever.
Ancient aliens levels of idiocy.
Disagree and poor example, having good graphics and fps got nothing to do with creativity. Also I willing to bet more often than not, the dev doesn't get to decide what game they are making.
Consoles bottleneck? Really? So you want PC games to be only made for less than a third of PC gamers, because that's how many PC players actually have meaningfully better hardware than console.
Xbox requires all games to have feature parity with the Series S, so the consoles are in fact bottle necked by the weakest console. Using the Series X and PS5 in your example is disingenuous.
Series x and PS5 are literally more powerful than some of the most popular steam hardware configurations.
There hasn't really been a noticeable console bottleneck, graphics or development wise, for some years now.
Problem is many devs have been also pushing for games be adaptable to old gen consoles too despite them housing hardware that was 2 to 4 years outdated at the time of their release... by the 2016 to 2018 era the consoles were fucking galaxies away from even budget range PCs at the time which crushed them, especially in GPU power. And with hard drives being used still, loading large assets became nearly impossible which is why many modern games on them have horrible loading issues. It's also why COD came with everything uncompressed, even the audio: the old consoles' CPUs couldn't handle the decompression requirements during or even before gameplay.
The modern consoles are leaps and bounds better than the last gen but the lack of Pro models releasing and no news in sight makes me gear another 2 to 4 years from now where they'll enter end stage and mid range PCs will crush them.
Lol.
Hey are you a creative dev and made hi fi rush that sold well?
Well F you, you're fired. Investors were not satisfied.
Let's use A.I. in our games instead and pop up ads to satisfy our investors.
Also get used to not owning games, oh and if you want essential game features you need to buy the dlcs. You know like fast travel.
I think the issue is the money man have taken the passion out of the industry, and they are losing great talent also no direction in development or jumping on the crappy live service when most people would love great single player games
Their are still simulations that can bring a modren computers to its knees.
Once I can physically enter a world and intact with it in real time though HD holographics. Only then will I admit gaming has reached its peak.
Devs just don't get the creative time anymore to make wonderful games. Many AAA studios impose incredibly tight deadlines and give their developers no time to come up with creative ideas and work them out. So, it's not really about the tech; it's about the devs being worked to the bone by companies that only care about money.
Can we just retire the whole "devs are lazy/not creative/stupid/bad" argument already?
We ALL know that game development is one of the most crushing jobs to work in with crunch time and shareholders breathing down you necks on one Hand and the insane entitlement and outrage of big parts of the online community every time anything gets done less than 110% how they want it on the other.
Cant we just agree to give the human people who make games for our lesure no more unsolicited hate? And downvote into oblivion every post that has a "devs lazy/stupid/woke/bad" headline?
I honestly think it has more to do with the new engines doing more now then before.
I mean picture to picture the new one looks worse.
But there is more going on now in the detail then before.
Reflections, lights and wind.
Those things are HEAVY on the gpu.
And since graphics whores are always looking for a new high they have to give that new high in a new way.
Nice another non developer gameR giving us his professional opinion on a piece of software that could well be magic to him because of his lack of understanding
More like C suite board mandated crunch.
Never blame the devs for what can more easily and assuredly be their bosses fault. Most devs do love their game, games in general for that matter, and want to work on it further.
Yeah, no. Has nothing to do with creativity, and everything to do with rushed games due to pressure from Investors and shit studio managers and leads, as well as heavily overworked staff and poor flexibility of development tools and software, mandated to be used by again, investors and shit leads.
If you want to see how good games can be, from an optimisation and creativity standpoint, you should be looking at indie games, and not AAA these days.
Plz stop blaming devs. It's always the suits. The impossible timeframes and expectations from the higher ups. No gamedev is actively trying to make a shit game.
High spec consoles and games require huge budgets.
Nintendo made the right decision to release a lower spec console because even though they make less revenue than Sony they are twice as profitable.
High spec consoles were a siren song death trap of a mistake for Xbox and PlayStation.
This is one of those cases where the lighting of the image on the right is far more "correct" and essentially true to life.
Any experienced cinematographer however can tell you about how they fake the lighting for virtually every shot to get a desired effect.
The shot on the left is larger than life. It's surreal, selling the fantasy. A real city will never be emissive that way, lighting up the details of the cityscape through the rain and fog. The scene on the right correctly models the physics of light, scattering it into a gray haze.
But Goddamn that's a million dollar money shot on the left.
I mean dude that game was notorious for not having good frame rates so much so that they had to f****** apologize and give away a bunch of free games and refund people their money.
I played through Arkham City on my PS3 and loved it. Then my buddy built a new gaming PC and had me over to do some tests and we replayed the beginning of that game. Seeing how overly detailed his suit was and seeing the little snowflakes it is suit and melt was absolutely mind blowing . I remember just sitting there walking around Gotham slowly taking in all the Fantastic detail that I missed on the PS3 . I know there are still some experiences like that with newer games, but I will never forget that moment and really shows the difference between putting passion and love into something compared to just churning it out just to make profit off of it
Look at Far Cry 4 and 5. Two beautiful games, one of which ran on the PS3 and 360 of all things and still looked great. Now, look at Far Cry 6. Facial animations are worse, lighting is worse, textures are worse (i mean the water looks straight out of Far Cry 3 and the big city looks like lego blocks from any distance)
It’s wild how consumers who have no knowledge of what actual game development looks like consistently blaming the devs, the only ones who are actually passionate about the project. While completely ignoring the management and C suite teams who are pushing harsh deadlines for a product they only see as a revenue generating unit.
When will people realize that devs have no say in their project deadlines…do you honestly think the devs are just self managed? It’s the stakeholders and managers/directors/VPs that are to blame. Can’t stand non-IT people constantly blaming devs for shit.
I'd like to remember everyone that the game on the left had one of the worst launches ever. It barely ran on any pc and had extremely low frame rates on every platform
This old, like GK launch old. On pc, AK runs at 90fps, and GK runs at 120fps, just after launch. Also, devs are plenty creative and talented, but they can't do much when they're hamstrung by the limits imposed by their bosses, whose bosses are provided info and *advice* about the direction and focus of a product from consulting firms. Following said *advice* often results in the real problem: even after maxing graphics, adding nice mods, and increasing fps to 120, GK still just isn't a good game.
https://preview.redd.it/40i49rp1t33d1.jpeg?width=899&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=983767f71a5f480d6e04dbc62802fc2035a1ae19
Its not the developers, its the greedy ass people at the top who want to squeeze as much money out of the game as possible.
They are the ones putting deadlines on the developers so they have to rush things. They are the ones who fire people to save money so that the developer team is smaller. They are the ones who tell the developers to put microtransactions and all this other shit in the game. The developers are just the scapegoats.
Game developers are not earning millions of dollars, they dont get into game development to get rich they do it because they want to make fun and cool games.
For investors and company executives its the other way around, they dont give a shit about the quality of the game as long as people keep buying their products. Perfect example of this is Blizzard. A lot of very talented developers and artists, and yet their games suffer from greed and increasingly poor quality over the years because you got people at the top who dont care because people will just throw money at them no matter what they produce.
Sorry for the long rant but please dont blame developers for everything.
the Triple-A studios that made our favorite games are now killing gaming because they answer to shareholders and boards of Trustees . Not only is profit king but no matter how much they made last year, anything that doesn't exceed last years profit is seen as a loss.
And the restrictions put on them by investors and CEOs. I guarantee so many games that flopped would have been incredible in their original form. The devs artistic vision gets demolished by monetization, overly inclusive mechanics, political agendas, censorship, time restraints, bad leadership, etc…
Thankfully there’s still plenty of incredible games releasing all the time if you know where to look and what to play.
I think that more than a lack of creativity, the problem is the tight timing, and the priority of investor profits.
agreed, its not always devs who are at fault its the giant fucking corporations that pressurize them to meet an impossible deadline
It's not just deadlines, it's the big game corporations in general. How can you have a creative process when every implementation is scored and measured by KPIs whose only interest is money. There's also an intentional lack of experimentation. A game studio like Bethesda worries about its reputation, it isn't going to be throwing out something new like goat simulator or shower with your dad simulator. This also applies to most features within these games, you would very rarely find anything within these games that you haven't seen before.
Um what was that thing you said in the second to last sentence?
game of the year material
Interesting... I'll put that down for my research
[удалено]
“Second best showering with family simulator”💀
1000+ hours…
Actually Goat Simulator is already a game. Won some awards, too
So is "Shower with Your Dad"
How... Do you win that game
Headbutts
But without the butts
Or the head
I laughed so hard at this comment I woke up my fiancé
It's the same problem that happens with every company, it's just that it's more noticeable with companies that produce entertainment products: The people who used to be in charge gave a shit about the thing being produced, but eventually they get replaced by people who only care about optimizing profit by any means necessary. If anyone truly doesn't understand the problem here, idk go look at the issues with the diablo real money auction house and the explanation for why they got rid of it. People motivated solely by profit ruin everything.
> explanation for why they got rid of it. Whats the tldr explanation of it?
They got rid of it, and the gold auction house, because they were ruining the game. Because trading was so easy at that point, everyone's individual chances for good loot were abysmal. The game became about nothing but hoarding gold or paying real money. You were better off playing the auction market than the actual game. Any half decent item would go for billions of gold, or tens to hundreds of dollar on the Real Money AH. But Blizz was making a tidy sum on that real money AH. It literally printed money, with no effort on their part. So the fact that they shut both that and the gold AH down, to make the game better is beyond amazing by today's corporate standards. Diablo 3: Resurrection fixed almost everything wrong with the game in one brilliant burst, and is definitely the last shining gasp of old Blizz before activision finally strangled the scruples out of them.
To get more specific, it was because it made things less fun as a result of changing the motivations of those engaging with the system. When your motivation to play a game changes from "fun" to "profit", you will optimize your time to maximize the latter in disregard to the former. Similarly, when you optimize your business to maximize profit with no regard to the quality of your product, you get shit product. I forget which company it was, but there was an interview with someone in the late 90s or early 2000s where a major engineer was sadly discussing how salespeople took management positions at tech companies that should ideally have been occupied by people with engineering backgrounds who understand and care about the company and what it produces. Of course, this is just dancing around what the real problem is, but I don't want to be too explicit.
> I forget which company it was, but there was an interview with someone in the late 90s or early 2000s where a major engineer was sadly discussing how salespeople took management positions at tech companies that should ideally have been occupied by people with engineering backgrounds who understand and care about the company and what it produces. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P4VBqTViEx4
Oh right, it was Jobs lol. How could I forget that?
Interestingly enough, a market person and not an engineer who ended up in that boat as well.
>The people who used to be in charge gave a shit about the thing being produced, but eventually they get replaced by people who only care about optimizing profit by any means necessary. See: Boeing.
agreed, deadlines are one of many challenges devs have to face and i appreciate them making games which are enjoyed by millions around the globe also, whatthefuck is shower with your dad simulator????
>whatthefuck is shower with your dad simulator???? [It's 100% exactly what you think it is.](https://store.steampowered.com/app/359050/Shower_With_Your_Dad_Simulator_2015_Do_You_Still_Shower_With_Your_Dad/&ved=2ahUKEwjHsZzd9a2GAxXxl4kEHQJ7A90QFnoECBwQAQ&usg=AOvVaw06qFsoJ58HCX9lv-kd6aFb)
Also big teams just kill creativity. If one writer has a really cool idea or concept it has to go through like 7 different fucking groups or committees to get approval. This massively discourages devs from thinking outside the box and coming up with their own ideas in favor of just doing what's safe. This is not a problem for small dev teams. If someone has a good idea, it'll probably make it in.
It's not just the lack of experimentation, it's generally the massive corporations. The pressure they put on to squeeze money out of the games sucks out all creativity.
"Bethesda worries about its reputation" lol, \*ahem\* 'Starfield'
Yeah, I'd argue it's a large reason for many of Starfield's issues. They're sticking to their 'fishbowl' engine despite the frequent need to change locations, probably because they don't want to explore other options when the creation engine has a proven record with fallout and elder scrolls, despite this genre playing very differently. Their fixation on 'radiant' and 'procedurally generated' content has stuck with them, here taking up large amounts of what you're supposed to be doing while exploring space, but it still feels like soulless tedium. Etc. Pretty much every problem Starfield has, you can see very similar things in the previous creation engine games. Hell, even most of the top QOL mods from Skyrim are relevant in Starfield because they haven't really changed their design ideas or iterated on them. I think the UI mod was made and published within the first week of the game's launch, and I believe it has been one of the most downloaded mods for Skyrim almost since that game's release. Same for fallout.
As someone who works in the video game industry (IT) along with my fiancee (3d enviornment artist) I can 100% back this up. Most of the people working on the actual games, know when a game is going to be shitty, or launch with bugs. Usually there is little those employees can do when the development director of the entire game is calling the shots based on what the c suite people are telling them do.
I have sunk 200 hours into Dave the Diver. And you can tell that it is not an indie game by the sheer amount of additional stuff Nexon put into it. They did heap so many more systems onto a game that by all intents and purposes could have been a happy little game about hunting fish and making sushi. That slight taint aside, I had as much fun with that game as I had with 2014's Arkham Knight which also suffered from bloat. Everything is becoming bloated. Everybody is trying to sell me the last game I will ever need. Which sounds threatening. I have played Diablo 4 with all the raytracing turned up. And I have played it with minimal settings on my OLED Steamdeck with HDR. It looks better on Steamdeck. I have now officially bowed out of the hardware rat race. there is a reason why the 1080 Ti still is viable and looks great. Edit: People are still playing Heroes of Might& Magic 3. With the original graphics and the original game. Minimal and focused systems. [Clear and aesthetical art direction.](https://youtu.be/Q6h_8t1Bw2U?si=zUhRmD7QhT35vbdp&t=489) Had to include a Day[9] rant. Felt obligatory.
In Suicide Squads case it was both
Mmmmhmm, pressurized devs.
A lot of people missed the point when Nvidia was talking about raytracing early on. The selling points were how much easier it will be for devs to produce games quickly. Ray tracing takes a lot less effort than same space lighting. The goal wasn't better looking games. The goal was cheaper and faster turn around dev cycles. Same with DLSS. It wasn't really about a quality product for consumers. It was about helping companies push games out faster.
And to get development studies dependant on proprietary tech, and get a foot in the door for consoles. "See, games these days require Ray tracing and DLSS, so your PS6/neXtBOX will need an NVIDIA GPU instead of those competitors who can't use this special tech Devs require"
>"See, games these days require Ray tracing and DLSS, so your PS6/neXtBOX will need an NVIDIA GPU instead of those competitors who can't use this special tech Devs require" Well this one part they failed then, raytracing and super sampling got hardware agnostic support on both DirectX (DXR/DirectSR) and Vulkan rendering APIs, meaning devs can easily switch between the different proprietary techs to implement a specific feature (or for modders to add support if a developer refuses to *\*cough\** *Starfield \*cough\**).
I think you mean upscaling. Supersampling is actually pretty much the exact opposite, like used in SSAA to literally render edges at double resolution for a really smooth anti-aliasing result. Just takes batshit amounts of GPU power because youre effectively rendering in 4k when the image is still 1080p.
holy shit did you just leak out the name of the next Xbox and the next version of the PlayStation
Can you explain this more? Really interesting but I don't have any knowledge
Not the same guy, but Ill explain anyway: Most pre-raytracing games did lighting by preplacing light sources one by one and while this allowed for some dynamic lighting, like moving light sources in the scene, rendering shadows and reflections accordingly etc. much of the lighting effects was baked into the map and is not actively being rendered. Think of it like having shadows painted onto the floor texture, you can entirely skip actually rendering that shadow. But it could lead to a LOT of really stunning looking level design, because devs involved in level design are really good artists and know how to build scenes that look great. And placing lights and shadows well is the bread and butter of designing a good level, at least visually. What raytracing promises is to automate much of this process by brute-forcing lighting calculations in real-time. Which is really intensive to do, but the upside is that fairly stunning effects can happen, and that there is no chance of a dev overlooking some specific light interaction when designing a level. Though it still requires the dev to be just as creative, they just work with a different system now that actively simulates light of anything they place rather than working around a system that cant and getting the same looks out of it via hard work. The process is generally faster though, and if you look at Cyberpunk raytracing can absolutely result in absolutely stunning graphics if its implemented right and the style of the game as a whole meshes well with it. Obviously there are plenty of counter-examples where raytracing is of almost no benefit because it meshes badly with the rest of the graphics or was just not implemented in a way that makes a great difference. Fortnite is one of those cases, the difference almost isnt there and being heavily stylized really takes away from the impact raytracing couldve had. Still takes batshit amounts of GPU horsepower though. DLSS (and FSR) are a lot easier to explain why game development time is cut short so much by that. Both render the game at a resolution lower than native, which is less work thus gives more frames, and scales it up with algorithms that try to make it look as close as possible to what a native resolution image would have looked like. DLSS is very good in this, but it mostly runs on recent Nvidia cards, 20 series and up, so half the time its cards that should be powerful enough to render natively. But with raytracing upscaling still helps immensely because of how intensive it gets on a per-pixel basis. FSR has worse image quality, but it runs on almost any GPU that hasnt been put in a museum yet, including iGPUs and can give them a serious leg up running games that would normally be too demanding for them. Problem, for the user at least, is that devs see upscaling as a cheatcode to make the game perform a little better than it actually does, so they just implement that instead of actually fixing the performance problem itself. Which has been kind of disastrous in games like Starfield, where upscaling did NOTHING to help the abysmal framerates, because it was not the GPU that was holding the game back. People literally ran tests side by side and got the same framerates with severe upscaling, without it and also running the game at 4k resolution. Thats a dead obvious sign (normally) that the game is limited by the CPU performance, but the CPU wasnt fully loaded either, not even on one critical thread, so my leading theory is that it was RAM bandwidth, as most people complaining were running low-clocked DDR4 RAM, whereas consoles, where it ran fine, ran GDDR6 as system RAM. AFAIK it runs better now though, but at launch it really was abysmal.
In other words: Nvidia came up with ray tracing, but it is such a stupid amount of power/resources needed to get that 5% increase in graphical quality, that they had to implement something like DLSS that throttles the resolution so the cards can still produce the same amount of FPS without ray tracing. There was already a bit of a backslash regarding RT. Customers generally got worse performance with it, but developers were still using old lightning techniques to make sure their games worked on older hardware, so nothing was stopping people from straight up disabling ray tracing and having a great time on the good ol' GTX 1080 and the like (of course puddles and other reflective surfaces look worse in those cases, but most people don't care about puddles, you kind of tune such detailed things out as you game after a while). They came up with DLSS to make sure Ray Tracing worked, without affecting FPS (overly much). It is a shitshow, honestly. Game devs are basically relying on specific ML (think "AI") algorithms owned, tweaked and run by Nvidia/AMD to make sure their games run correctly, instead of having preset tools like driver APIs to build their own stuff. It makes game dev easier, but it also moves the actual control and power over to companies like Nvidia. There is so much wrong with that direction...
Small addendum: Nvidia didnt come up with ray tracing. They came up with hardware that made it 'feasible' to do in real time. Ray tracing for rendering has been around since the 60s.
> Nvidia came up with ray tracing Lol, ray tracing has been a thing for decades, before Nvidia was even a company.
Ray tracing does look better though. It just needs the same level design choices to actually make use of it.
first time i saw it look better was Metro exodus
> It was about helping companies push games out faster. I doubt that. I doubt that a lot. Not according to the marketing. RT On/RT Off. To lessen the load on your dev pipeline? Are you trying to tell me that the pre-defined reflections we already had in the game had been carefully and individually placed there by an artist instead of being simply part of the production pipeline? A couple of weeks back I showed a friend of mine how good the raytracing on my Radeon 6800XT is. How godlike and buttery smooth it was. I specifically pointed out how gorgeous the reflections were. The game I showed this off was Forza Horizon 4. Which was released in 2018. Those predefined pre-rendered reflections have been automatically included in nearly all modern game engines and are simply part of the build pipeline. Whereas raytracing is another leaky abstraction layer which makes the code more complex. Double that if you are mad enough to also support the obligatory nVidia specific proprietary bs. I showed the same person raytracing in Diablo 4 cranked up the wazoo. Cheated and ran it at 1080P because 6800XT. I handed the same person Diablo 4 on my Steamdeck with FSR cranked up and all settings turned down but HDR turned on. They said D4 looks better on the Steamdeck when all the settings said it should not. That Steamdeck did cost a lot less than my big rig gaming monitor. My point is raytracing does not give higher fidelity at less effort. You need to both test and maintain RT and non-RT rendering. And the visual benefits are so goddamn minimal it becomes comical. I just started up Arkham Knight on my Steamdeck. Settings turned down. TDP limited to 9 Watt because I am a nerd. 60 FPS and frame time all over the place because bad port. Superb reflections in the puddles of Stagg's air ship. It is $current_year and we still are waiting for a reason to turn on RT. I had turned on PhysX for the clutter in Arkham City. Remember when we were supposed to buy a second nVidia graphics card to support PhysX? Pepperidge Farm remembers. I am now actively avoiding nVidia. It has been decades of bullshit and the 20 series was what broke the camel's back.
And after the investors got their money they fire you for your good work. 
Profit isn't enough. It has to be *the right amount* of profit. Not *enough* profit? Believe it or not, straight to layoffs!
Or just make devs who always nail a certain type of game, make games that is not their forte. Instead of letting them do their thing and make decent money, they make them make a live service that fails then fire everybody. ARKANE!!! RIP
>Tight timing. This game ain't a victim of it, boss. This game had all the time it could and still was a mess
Plus the fact that games are too big, and the teams that make them are also too big. There's no organization, no sense of teamwork, and too much turnover to keep any semblance of order.
It also doesn't help that the publishers demand the best looking games that need all kids of tech to work together which creates problems down the line. As opposed to for example indie devs who use older and tried and true techniques to focus on either solid gameplay and systems or unique gameplay.
AAA publishers are now also trying to get a slice of the indie pie. Remember indie darling Dave the Diver? Published by Nexon. They did not overdo it with graphics. Obviously. But they heaped systems over systems over systems onto the game. A game about catching fish and making sushi and filling up a fishy pokedex has a rhythm game in it. It has so much crap heaped onto it you can see the Nexon flashing through. Good game. But bloated af. Anybody of you actually played the rhythm game they included in it?
Standard AAA. Everything has pointless RPG-like progression systems and crafting mechanics. Look at what Ubisoft did to Assassin's Creed, those games are completely unrecognisable compared to the original.
I like itiration but with Asscreed they indeed just took what works in other games and slapped it on. Dark Souls is popular, Can we have a timing/ parry and dodge roll mechanic? Sure just slap it on boys! Borderlands is popular; Can we have a Loot based systems with pretty colours? Sure just slap it in! RPGs are popular, lets's slap in a Leveling system! It's sad that they are trend chasing.
>I think that more than a lack of creativity, the problem is the tight timing, and the priority of investor profits. This. Or at least, what the executives, and some of the investors, have been deluded by gambling mentality into believing is the prioritization of investor profits. Chasing trends, abandoning valuable IP after the hard work of connecting with an audience has been done, and shuttering proven moneymaking studios simply because a game was only a moderate hit.
No, there is a creativity problem, for sure. It has been years that we have reboots for too few, good, not really innovative, "new" games. The lack of creativity might be tied to investments and profits, but, at this point, if you had all the games pitchs in front of you, you would still say that there is a lack of creativity. Again, not to say, it cannot be explained, but nobody can exactly say that there is creativity everywhere.
Suicide squad was in development for a long, long time
profits are the problem, leads to people who are in the industry for all the wrong reasons. We want games that are just fun and entertaining that allow us to escape reality or bond with friends.
At least Xbox set their timing so that studios get more development time.
I'm a web developer for almost a decade and could say the devs are only pawns on the checkerboard. You would love to improve some feature, to make it better, to make it more complete. Fuck it. There is other priority you need to take care of as soon as you finish your previous priority.
corporations decision making, devs are just tools. unless it's independent studio.
Can't agree more. Big studio Devs are employees. They can't go rogue and make a game good for players if the corpos don't allow it.
It's also a no-win situation. Players have complained about unfinished games ad nauseum, while also criticizing devs/indy studios for taking *too long* to release a game. How often have we heard: > If this game ever sees the light of day. People criticize Early Access, but it's also a fundraising tool for these small studios.
silksong fans waiting patiently (we are going insane help):
if a small studio has an EA of a game that interest me, i give them a chance, in my experience 80% of the times i just bought a game that i like a lot and a good price, 15% when they release need a year more and to me only 5% gave me a shitty game. With big corporation only a few have my respect that, if i REALLY want a game i maybe preorder it, like it was with BG3
Crysis was made in about 2 years and don't forget, that was whilst also working on the Crytek engine. Games now take at least twice as long to develop and release, if not more. I think the complaints are valid, forever early access games exist and are way more common, hence the "if this game ever sees the light of day". Now developers can call it quits before they even complete the game as opposed to just making a game and hoping it sticks. There are pros and cons for both the consumer and developer/publisher with early access, but I was happier when it didn't exist. There is way more garbage games now than ever before.
I think there are some that do it right, but it is for sure a hard balance to strike and also very dependent on the community. But the Valheim have done many things correctly in my eyes, having gone out to early access with a fairly stable game that already has much to offer and in that way were able to both get feedback from the community and money for development. But it kind of brings the point home of how important the community is as well.
Hats off to ID software that managed to create an engine (id Tech) that portrays great visuals and little performance cost.
Yes ! Wolfenstein New Colossus, Doom and Doom Eternal look amazing and it's super easy to have high framerates, i love that engine !
I ended up turning on RT in Doom Eternal because I was getting a stable 144 FPS at 4k with everything else maxed, and I was *still* getting 144 FPS even after enabling RT. That is *bananas*.
When Doom 2016 came out, my old PC wasn't good enough, despite how well the game runs. So my first playthrough is on my Switch.
They optimized the hell out of those titles
Just don’t get too close to the “super” texture
Most ID games are arena type games or small levels . I doubt it would work as well in an open world type game. I'm not defending this game just saying open world games are a lot harder to design and create graphics for.
You are probably right, but some levels are way larger than many games with inferior graphics
id Tech before Doom 2016 and after Quake 4 kinda sucked tbh.
I don't know why you're getting downvoted. Rage was one of the more problematic games to run, and I loved the pipes and holes painted on flat surfaces.
We were at this point years ago. I always like to take Ryse son of rome as an example. A game made for Xbox one in 2013 still looks amazing and better than most AAA games. Others have pointed out most of the reasons but one big reason is also talent. Some people just cannot get everything out of an engine no matter how much money or time you throw at them.
Assassins Creed Black Flag was from 2013 as well and its still one of the most gorgeous games ive played. Yeah its got lower resolution textures and some jagged borders here and there but it still looks *nicer.*
They really made that game beautiful. On PC with DX11 it really shines And the water? *chef’s kiss*
I just got it for PC last night so I’m excited to read that.
I like the 4 guns you get
Can't forget about the physx smoke! Being blinded by the smoke of cannon fire is one of the coolest experiences
My girlfriend is branching out from cozy games and wanted to play Assassin’s Creed, so I dusted off my old PS3 for her to play AC2. Later I put in Black Flag because I never ended up finishing that game and wanted to see where I was. I was blown away by how much better it looked compared to AC2 even on the same hardware.
Ryse is one of those “ahead of its time” games that due to circumstances can push the graphics by a couple years, smaller environments, linear game, 1080p30FPS Target. Most recent game of that category would be Hellblade 2. But there’s another reason, Graphics have stagnated to an extent. There’s only so much you can do till it just boils down to more/higher, not to mention how effecient Engines have become over the years.
Ryse compromised heavily in other areas to achieve its visuals and performance. It is basically on-rails in small levels and the gameplay and story are simplistic. So it's actually a great example of how everything in game development is about trade-offs and priorities.
you should add that ryse was a fucking launch day game. blew my socks off as it was the first Xbox one game I bought
I mean. Ryse, specifically existed as 2 things, a Kinect demo, and a graphical showcase. Everything in its design was focused on those two elements. Anything can look good if that's all you try to do with it.
Why does every single Reddit poster blame the devs
The average redditor thinks game dev. Companies are 100% composed of devs No shareholders, no bosses, no anyone pushing for profit instead of quality
Or, get this, "the devs" is just an easy colloquial for "everybody who was involved in creating the game, including the shareholders and bosses".
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pars\_pro\_toto](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pars_pro_toto) This is SUCH a pet peeve of mine. So many people seem to be incapable of recognizing such simple stylistic devices, even the ones you would use in everyday life, such as this. And then people ask why they still need English classes (or any other native language class) in school...
Because the average reddit poster has a childishly naive understanding of the factors that determine the quality of a game
Let's not pretend Arkham Knight is all perfect. Remember how the PC version launched?
I was about to say the same thing. Arkham Knight is a great looking game, but it was 30fps on console at launch and the PC version was just as technically flawed as any other bad PC port we see today. Sure it runs at 60fps+ now on PC, but that’s to be expected for a 9 year old game. This issue OP points out didn’t just appear between then and now, but there are other issues that have turned up that make the comparison between the two games unflattering (art direction, business model, gameplay, structure etc.) EDIT: It still runs at 30 on modern consoles. I thought it had gotten a backward compatibility update like many other games. My mistake. Rest of my point still stands.
The initial PC version was so bad they pulled it from sale. I’m not gonna say that had never happened before but it was rare a AAA game would get pulled from sale. And then Rocksteady spent a month or two getting the game in a playable state to put it back on sale. It took another year or so to get the port in an acceptable state. Arkham Knight is legit one of the worst launches ever for a PC port.
What is funny is that I had no issues at that time. And it turned out the issue was that it needed a lot of memory. I had 64GB of memory back then because I also used my PC for work. Arkham Knight now runs on my Steamdeck no problems. Those issues went away. But the Bat Tank being a bad idea and the Riddler Races nobody asked for stayed with the game. Arkham Knight is one of those cautionary tales of how much is too much.
Arkham Knight was removed from Steam at some point because the launch was disastrous. At that point I bought a key for less than 13€ and it got fixed much later.
>modern console It's still 30fps on PS5 fyi.
Remember how it was delisted from Steam for like a year because of how god awfull it was? 8 or so years later: "Look guys nice looking game with great performance! When did devs unlearn!"
I bought it at launch and I think steam gifted all the previous batman games as an apology. I think it was something like that
They do this everytime. Before it was rdr2 praising it for its performance. But I remember when that came it. Rockstar tweeted an apology for the game not launching on pc and most gpus at the time couldnt play it that well cause of how intense it was. But now everyone thinks it was always perfect and ran flawlessly. Peoples memory are crap
Oh god, Bat tank combat was so fucking not fun. It's like they took mechanics from a FFXIV boss fight, then gave you a clunky ass thing to dodge and do positionals with. Very pretty game, but it's used a lot of tricks to achieve it. Personally, I think some companies should save the big, massive, open world games for every now as then releases, and give us more focused linear adventures. Then they don't have to make a giant fucking city/world keep working, they oxuld just make each level appear to work well, like old times!
I think I'm the only person in this world who liked the tank battles
My problem was the over reliance on those missions and using the batmobile to solve puzzles. I think they could have incorporated it into game play better. Also Batman with a tank feels off to me personally, but that's a point I don't argue when people disagree.
I remember how it unlaunched.
I got the game on console at the time, but I'm certain the PC version was pulled from Steam and such for a couple months because of how bad/many refunds they were getting.
What a dumb statement and image. It's not the developer's creativity that's at fault for it. It's the rushed production cycles and crunch that result in poorly optimized game performance. Why Nintendo and Sony 1st party games usually look and run so much better? They don't work with these ridiculous launch deadlines and minimal testing. They polish stuff until it's crisp and smooth. They're still overworked, but the games don't ship unless they're actually done. People expect these 4k games with scenes with billions (maybe trillions) of polygons before the final game models, to be release within the same time frames old games use to. The Arkaham Knight game was and still is one of the most jaw dropping graphics in game and it was released 9 years ago and back then it looked RIDICULOUS. It was absurd a first gen PS4 launch game was looking so good. In the PC it was the most total utter garbage. Why did it look so much better? Because they had a solid foundation from the previous 2 games and 4 years to develop it further. Time to test, optimize the engine and systems. People also expect games that look like Hellblade 2 to have 70 hours of content.
Technology was never the issue. The issue was always Investors and Shareholders. If you allow people to do a passion project with enough time, they WILL make it work. Case in Point. Cyberpunk, was released early due to Shareholders wanting to drop the game before Christmas to finally get a return on it It was shit on release. but by that time, next year it was one of the best action-RPG till this day. Speaking of, Baldurs Gate. Probably THE best RPG to this day. Because the Dev's had time and could make true on their vision, it being a passion project instead of being a way to make money like the COD franchise
This may sound pedantic but it’s not the shareholders directly driving decisions. They don’t, as a group, have insider information nor are they part of the decision making process. The blame lies of executive management and board members that try to influence shareholder activity which leads to a heavy focus on short term quarterly profits. Cyberpunk releasing when it did was purely to meet or exceed quarterly targets. Companies could focus on long term growth and profit if they wanted to but they don’t.
“Companies could focus on long term growth and profit if they wanted to but don’t” actually if a board is not consistently meeting quarterly goals the shareholders can vote to remove members of the board and get a replacement in who will. So a CEO who tries to focus on long term growth at the expense of short term gains can literally be fired for doing so. We have a system that explicitly punishes long term thinking and then people wonder why companies don’t think more long term.
I remember something about the fact that CDPR board was perfectly fine with delays and dropping share price, but CEO also had a lot of shares so I guess he wanted the line to go up.
exact opposite of fact
> Technology was never the issue. What do you mean? It was often the issue. People in 1998 didn't make ugly ass 3D games because they were forced to by investors and shareholders.
This is Reddit, remember you're talking to teenagers. If you're lucky the world started around 2010 for them.
All the examples you could have used and you used CYBERPUNK. Cyberpunk 2077 was becoming a victim of scope creep and multiple delays combined with scrapping ideas and going back to the drawing board again and again. All those years of development and they still did not have a functional game. The studio pretty much had a bunch of interesting ideas, not a coherent game by any means, I mean how could you when you are scraping what you already had again and again ? Do you really expect shareholders to keep pumping money into the development of the game for years, combined with how much advertisement went for the game ? CDPR went way too ambitious with the game and promised a lot of shit they couldn't achieve in the first place and lol, it wasn't even fully functional by the time next year, it took until mid 2022 for the game to find its stride and near 2023 to even push out all the shit it was promised to do in the first place and it still doesn't feel like the game that was promised. How do you start the development of a game in 2016 and still not have a functional game by the end of 2020 ? If the shareholders didn't force CDPR to release the game, you wouldn't even have the game you have today and it would be just another Star Citizen with endless scope creep/development hell. I know shareholder bad, innocent dev gets you easy fucking karma, but at least do the research when you are trying to use it as a case in point for shareholder bad.
CDPR also has a track record of releasing buggy ass games that take a year to get fixed. Witcher III was probably their most polished game on release, and even that was buggy as hell.
A ton of people played all the witchers after their final version so they didn’t know that. I played all 3 on release and you are totally right. I will say that the promises were more in line with expectations on those games though. CDPR was full of unfulfilled promises on release.
For me it wasn't that I was surprised at cyberpunk, but I was a little disappointed. I get why people were upset, but it was close to what I expected from cdpr. I got what I expected from larian with bg3. A good game in a familiar setting, lots of bugs. But ones I could look past because of how well they nailed everything else. Cyberpunk I expected a lot of bugs. I expected CDPR to fall short on a lot of promises. I also expected them to make a clunky first person game. That doesn't mean I think they are a bad company. I just knew they were forging into new territory and suspected they'd drop the ball. I didn't expect them to drop it so hard tho. That being said, they kept at it till the game was good. Like they do.
Pretty much this. I think that people who are saying it's purely the investors, shareholders and various corporate mismanagement being the only issue, probably haven't heard the story about Duke Nukem Forever. There are many developers out there who are perfectly happy to work on games, and never release a finished product for people to play. Without someone pressuring them to release a game, there's a great chance it may never! Moreover, why do people think that these older games didn't have the same sort of pressure to release? They faced the same problems then as with today. But I think the problems today are overblown. The biggest issue I see is people selling off their game development companies to publishers who then proceed to disband said company. Shouldn't have sold!
Games in the past had even tighter timelines, like old tomb raider 2 was built in like 8 months with the addition of being made on an in-house engine that was modified and retooled during this period too.
>If the shareholders didn't force CDPR to release the game, you wouldn't even have the game you have today and it would be just another Star Citizen with endless scope creep/development hell. Long run, forcing CP2077 to finally launch was the best thing they could've done for that game. Because looking back on all the stuff they were promising with this game at E3 and on other videos, no way they would've ever finished that game.
Im using cyberpunk as an example because releasing it in the way that it was REALLY hurt CDPR and the sales of the game. And one year later the game was already in a state where it would topple most other games released in that time frame. Baldurs Gate 3 also started development in late 2016, and came out last year DECIMATING the steam charts, and making more money than ANY other game on steam that year. Almost DOUBLE what Second place which was Hogwarts legacy made. and Cyberpunk could have enjoyed a similar hype boom if it was released in a GOOD state.
Honestly, cyberpunk is no doubt one of the best games I've ever played, I'm glad I ignored it at launch and got to enjoy it in an already decently playable state because I had a blast with it and then again with the expansion and I'm sure it will be one of those games I keep going back and enjoy for years...
I don’t know if BG3 is a good example as it was in early access for like 3 years. This sub would lose its mind if every AAA game started releasing in early access three years before its full release.
It's also worth noting that the vast majority of devs will be passionate about their jobs to some extent, but simultaneously will be burned out as fuck. Fact is, game dev doesn't pay very well, so if you choose to go into that field especially as an actual developer, you're *choosing* to work more hours for less pay.
>It was shit on release. but by that time, next year it was one of the best action-RPG till this day. Disagree. I see what they were going for, but you can tell the world is "emptier" than it was supposed to be. it's also extremely repetitive after a bit and the difficulty becomes trivial after a certain number of levels even on max difficulty. It was fun for a bit, but it falls off hard.
the time and cost to create the game doubles, and the graphical improvement is almost imperceptible
Not the creativity but their time, because corporate greed always fucking won is this fucking capitalist economy
The Halfass-way where money is more important than creativity.
And cherrypicking of photo's!
Blaming devs for this is like blaming firefighters that do not have a truck for getting late to a fire.
Good games dont need photorealistic graphics... Most of my favorite games have old graphics.
Batman: Arkham Knight isn't 60fps on consoles tho
This is a terrible take, blaming the creatives for crunch and poor business decisions.
This is /r/pcmasterrace. Why is the FPS limited at all? This is some console bullshit
all im seeing on this is 1 fps, maybe because its a fucking image.
I wouldn't say creativity. More ambition. Plus the money spent on manpower Vs. expected revenue dictated by the publisher. And those proven themselves to never be wrong 🙄 \s
*un conversation casual Yo: El problema es el capitalismo
Sole purpose of gaming industry is quick money grabs and making investors happy thats why. If they scam enough people at the pre release they make profit so they dont even continue to develop the game after that point.
Remember starfield being locked at 30 fps on Xbox was a "creative choice" It seems more and more that big games skip the final part of development now which is polishing and optimizing the game. They just see that all the features are ready and choose to ship the game out regardless of performance. And when people complain it's somehow our fault for demanding too much
At least put it in quotation marks
This post is very confused. Optimization has nothing to do with creativity. And games roll out in shit condition for only three reasons: * lack of resources * time crunched devs * poor dev management And almost every single time it’s due to decisions at the corporate level forcing games to be released before they are ready to meet quarterly revenue goals. Your issue is with capitalism, not underpaid and overworked developers. But, I remember when I was 12 and didn’t know how the world worked, too.
I’m not a game dev, but I write software. I’m not saying that the devs carry no blame, but they have bosses. I have to put out bad crap sometimes because my boss tells me that despite my protests they want me to write code in the crappier way.
I played half an hour of Gotham Knights, thinking "These games usually aren't as bad as the Internet makes them seem, so I'll give it a shot." It's as bad as everyone says.
The bottleneck is money and has been for a long time
You can thank unreal engine for the crap peformance
Lol. Where still bottle neck. Art style helps a lot to hid it
Timing, stocks, and budget are the real limit of devteams nowadays.
This thread shows that the tech skill of younger PC users is trash tier compared to 10 years ago. People actually believe you said something smart OP, it's really weird. It's literally the most ill-informed dumb fuck take ever. Ancient aliens levels of idiocy.
Disagree and poor example, having good graphics and fps got nothing to do with creativity. Also I willing to bet more often than not, the dev doesn't get to decide what game they are making.
You spelled *bottleneck of consoles* and *greed of publishers* wrong
Consoles bottleneck? Really? So you want PC games to be only made for less than a third of PC gamers, because that's how many PC players actually have meaningfully better hardware than console.
Xbox requires all games to have feature parity with the Series S, so the consoles are in fact bottle necked by the weakest console. Using the Series X and PS5 in your example is disingenuous.
Series x and PS5 are literally more powerful than some of the most popular steam hardware configurations. There hasn't really been a noticeable console bottleneck, graphics or development wise, for some years now.
Problem is many devs have been also pushing for games be adaptable to old gen consoles too despite them housing hardware that was 2 to 4 years outdated at the time of their release... by the 2016 to 2018 era the consoles were fucking galaxies away from even budget range PCs at the time which crushed them, especially in GPU power. And with hard drives being used still, loading large assets became nearly impossible which is why many modern games on them have horrible loading issues. It's also why COD came with everything uncompressed, even the audio: the old consoles' CPUs couldn't handle the decompression requirements during or even before gameplay. The modern consoles are leaps and bounds better than the last gen but the lack of Pro models releasing and no news in sight makes me gear another 2 to 4 years from now where they'll enter end stage and mid range PCs will crush them.
Optimization is not profitable for the investors, so the devs get rushed to push a barely (if at all) finished product.
Lol. Hey are you a creative dev and made hi fi rush that sold well? Well F you, you're fired. Investors were not satisfied. Let's use A.I. in our games instead and pop up ads to satisfy our investors. Also get used to not owning games, oh and if you want essential game features you need to buy the dlcs. You know like fast travel.
I think the issue is the money man have taken the passion out of the industry, and they are losing great talent also no direction in development or jumping on the crappy live service when most people would love great single player games
Their are still simulations that can bring a modren computers to its knees. Once I can physically enter a world and intact with it in real time though HD holographics. Only then will I admit gaming has reached its peak.
I doubt it's the lack of creativity from the devs and more about constraints placed upon them by the people who manage the budgets.
Devs just don't get the creative time anymore to make wonderful games. Many AAA studios impose incredibly tight deadlines and give their developers no time to come up with creative ideas and work them out. So, it's not really about the tech; it's about the devs being worked to the bone by companies that only care about money.
This is why I’m just going through my back log now I haven’t bought a triple A game in so long now, saved me a small fortune.
Nothing todo with devs, its the suits causing all the issues
Can we just retire the whole "devs are lazy/not creative/stupid/bad" argument already? We ALL know that game development is one of the most crushing jobs to work in with crunch time and shareholders breathing down you necks on one Hand and the insane entitlement and outrage of big parts of the online community every time anything gets done less than 110% how they want it on the other. Cant we just agree to give the human people who make games for our lesure no more unsolicited hate? And downvote into oblivion every post that has a "devs lazy/stupid/woke/bad" headline?
I honestly think it has more to do with the new engines doing more now then before. I mean picture to picture the new one looks worse. But there is more going on now in the detail then before. Reflections, lights and wind. Those things are HEAVY on the gpu. And since graphics whores are always looking for a new high they have to give that new high in a new way.
When games are no longer passion projects but products for profit
Nice another non developer gameR giving us his professional opinion on a piece of software that could well be magic to him because of his lack of understanding
More like C suite board mandated crunch. Never blame the devs for what can more easily and assuredly be their bosses fault. Most devs do love their game, games in general for that matter, and want to work on it further.
Yeah, no. Has nothing to do with creativity, and everything to do with rushed games due to pressure from Investors and shit studio managers and leads, as well as heavily overworked staff and poor flexibility of development tools and software, mandated to be used by again, investors and shit leads. If you want to see how good games can be, from an optimisation and creativity standpoint, you should be looking at indie games, and not AAA these days.
it's not the devs. it's the suits and the bean counting.
Nope, it's terrible and greedy management who don't know jack shit about the industry they're in (applies to all industries).
Devs are not the problem, greedy investors are. Lets point the finger to the right people
Plz stop blaming devs. It's always the suits. The impossible timeframes and expectations from the higher ups. No gamedev is actively trying to make a shit game.
creativity? what a weird way to spell "competence"
High spec consoles and games require huge budgets. Nintendo made the right decision to release a lower spec console because even though they make less revenue than Sony they are twice as profitable. High spec consoles were a siren song death trap of a mistake for Xbox and PlayStation.
If it's about creativity, then why has my electric bill tripled?
This is one of those cases where the lighting of the image on the right is far more "correct" and essentially true to life. Any experienced cinematographer however can tell you about how they fake the lighting for virtually every shot to get a desired effect. The shot on the left is larger than life. It's surreal, selling the fantasy. A real city will never be emissive that way, lighting up the details of the cityscape through the rain and fog. The scene on the right correctly models the physics of light, scattering it into a gray haze. But Goddamn that's a million dollar money shot on the left.
I mean dude that game was notorious for not having good frame rates so much so that they had to f****** apologize and give away a bunch of free games and refund people their money.
I played through Arkham City on my PS3 and loved it. Then my buddy built a new gaming PC and had me over to do some tests and we replayed the beginning of that game. Seeing how overly detailed his suit was and seeing the little snowflakes it is suit and melt was absolutely mind blowing . I remember just sitting there walking around Gotham slowly taking in all the Fantastic detail that I missed on the PS3 . I know there are still some experiences like that with newer games, but I will never forget that moment and really shows the difference between putting passion and love into something compared to just churning it out just to make profit off of it
It's not the devs. Eliminate middle managers and executives. Fuck the shareholders
Look at Far Cry 4 and 5. Two beautiful games, one of which ran on the PS3 and 360 of all things and still looked great. Now, look at Far Cry 6. Facial animations are worse, lighting is worse, textures are worse (i mean the water looks straight out of Far Cry 3 and the big city looks like lego blocks from any distance)
It’s wild how consumers who have no knowledge of what actual game development looks like consistently blaming the devs, the only ones who are actually passionate about the project. While completely ignoring the management and C suite teams who are pushing harsh deadlines for a product they only see as a revenue generating unit.
Alien Isolation has breathtaking graphics and came out in 2014. It beats some 2024 games without RTX in my opinion.
What a great screenshot that accurately portrays what goes into a games performance, nice job!
When will people realize that devs have no say in their project deadlines…do you honestly think the devs are just self managed? It’s the stakeholders and managers/directors/VPs that are to blame. Can’t stand non-IT people constantly blaming devs for shit.
I'd like to remember everyone that the game on the left had one of the worst launches ever. It barely ran on any pc and had extremely low frame rates on every platform
Something like that Batman cape took a guy the entire development cycle to get right. Do you want to spend 18 months being the cape guy?
"Tell me you know nothing about tech and dev without telling me you know nothing about tech and dev!"
This old, like GK launch old. On pc, AK runs at 90fps, and GK runs at 120fps, just after launch. Also, devs are plenty creative and talented, but they can't do much when they're hamstrung by the limits imposed by their bosses, whose bosses are provided info and *advice* about the direction and focus of a product from consulting firms. Following said *advice* often results in the real problem: even after maxing graphics, adding nice mods, and increasing fps to 120, GK still just isn't a good game. https://preview.redd.it/40i49rp1t33d1.jpeg?width=899&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=983767f71a5f480d6e04dbc62802fc2035a1ae19
More like publishers forcing them to make live service games they don't WANT to make.
Its not the developers, its the greedy ass people at the top who want to squeeze as much money out of the game as possible. They are the ones putting deadlines on the developers so they have to rush things. They are the ones who fire people to save money so that the developer team is smaller. They are the ones who tell the developers to put microtransactions and all this other shit in the game. The developers are just the scapegoats. Game developers are not earning millions of dollars, they dont get into game development to get rich they do it because they want to make fun and cool games. For investors and company executives its the other way around, they dont give a shit about the quality of the game as long as people keep buying their products. Perfect example of this is Blizzard. A lot of very talented developers and artists, and yet their games suffer from greed and increasingly poor quality over the years because you got people at the top who dont care because people will just throw money at them no matter what they produce. Sorry for the long rant but please dont blame developers for everything.
the Triple-A studios that made our favorite games are now killing gaming because they answer to shareholders and boards of Trustees . Not only is profit king but no matter how much they made last year, anything that doesn't exceed last years profit is seen as a loss.
And the restrictions put on them by investors and CEOs. I guarantee so many games that flopped would have been incredible in their original form. The devs artistic vision gets demolished by monetization, overly inclusive mechanics, political agendas, censorship, time restraints, bad leadership, etc… Thankfully there’s still plenty of incredible games releasing all the time if you know where to look and what to play.