I'd rather have a new good game every 2-3 years than one excellent game every 10-12 years. Not everything has to be AAAA quality. It just has to be fun and memorable.
Unless you are cool with graphics, engines, and limitations from 15-20 years ago, the current games do take that long to develop because games have become exponentially more complex.
And yet game engines have also become much more advanced and capable. Single devs or small teams are able to create astonishing games in reasonable time. Much of the time bloat for recent games isn't their complexity, but poor leadership. Owlcat games have been able to provide constant support for a game released 3 years ago while also developing 2 games that are due to release within the next year.
Except those advances haven’t kept up at all with the complexity of games. Blaming it on something like leadership is extremely silly. I am not saying that leadership is great, I am just saying it wasn’t any better 15-20 years ago.
What limitations? Modern games (and gamers) are far too focused on stupidly good graphics and hyperrealism instead of, you know... gameplay? The actual game? The state of the gaming industry is due in large part to consumers drooling over and demanding ever-better FPS and resolution and ignoring that they're playing bad games. You want expensive and shiny slop? Boy, do they have a deal for you!
Buddy, you’re barking up the wrong tree. I am in my 40s and play games mostly games from early 2000s and early 2010s more than I do anything modern. The last modern game I bought was BG3 when it came out and Total War Warhammer 3 before that.
But the market, like you said, wants hyper realistic open world games. Believe or not, those take a ton of work making anything in the environment interact with everything under the latest graphics.
It’s not for me, and you and I can consider it slop all we want, but it doesn’t change the fact that those graphics, physics, and environments require a lot, several factors worth more in fact, work than even the best games of early 2000s.
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u/Rancid_Lunchmeat 8h ago
"early development" on Mass Effect? No wonder all these studies keep getting shut down.
That game should be ready to be released within the next two years, not still be in early development.