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Do you think AAA studios should calm down with their pursuit of visual showcase and high production value?
- Thread starter Kaivan
- Start date
Yes, I felt that this generation's graphical increase was more of a plateau than a leap like it had been before (e.g. PS1 to PS2 to PS3). It's increasing budgets and time for very little, barely noticeable gains.
I have a hunch that most people saying yes are Nintendo fans. Personally speaking the answer is no, we need to move forward not get complacent if a game needs to be delayed so what? plenty other games to keep me occupied in the meantime.
No, I only play and look forward to the biggest games. I want devs to always push the limit of what is possible graphically.
Not really. The typical commentary on "fidelity" is pixel count, resolution, polycounts, etc.
What typically (again I'm making assumptions here) is referred to when people like myself and others mention art "style" is that things like Fire Emblem and Xenoblade 2 on Switch for example are objectively lower in fidelity but good in art direction in terms of the world and style it's going for (and yes I know some people would argue because of some of the character designs but that's not what we're talking about here.)
Something like Hollow Knight for example, as charming as it is, has some animations and such that look like older flash animations, and yet the art style is "cute" and different enough to give it more lasting hold to no doubt stand the test of time moving forward in the medium.
A game can have good art direction AND fidelity, yes, but they don't always go hand in hand and in fact some of my favorite games have what people would call shit fidelity and yet to me look like stunners. Things like the PS1 era with things like Vagrant story where the characters are "Shaky" and the environments "Small" still work for me because of the style they went with and the cinematography around it. Fidelity in that sense has little to do with that opinion.
they are called AAA devs for a reason, let them do their thing, there are plenty of other devs to provide other content.
edit: you might dislike it but its incredibly rewarding for devs to push the envelope and that is why they work at those studios.
edit: you might dislike it but its incredibly rewarding for devs to push the envelope and that is why they work at those studios.
Yea don't believe that artists should stop striving for more just because people feel its "good enough", there should be opportunities for games ect. that don't strive for a high level of visual quality and innovation, but I feel every department should be pushing for their best. It's up to the director to discern what is most important...
I get a lot of gamers don't value the strides a lot of artists have accomplished in the game visual realm, but there are a lot of people that value this medium of visual story telling and want to see it evolve.
Also good luck telling game artists to "calm down" and stop pushing it. ;)
I get a lot of gamers don't value the strides a lot of artists have accomplished in the game visual realm, but there are a lot of people that value this medium of visual story telling and want to see it evolve.
Also good luck telling game artists to "calm down" and stop pushing it. ;)
No.
Studios should continue to strive for whatever it is they want to do.
What they should be doing is trying to find a better way to achieve these goals.
Studios should continue to strive for whatever it is they want to do.
What they should be doing is trying to find a better way to achieve these goals.
"High quality production" isn't the sole reason behind Crunch culture.
So no, I disagree. What's the point of playing if nothing is getting better ?
So no, I disagree. What's the point of playing if nothing is getting better ?
Nope. Supergiant games are very high on artstyle and simple in graphical fidelity. Those games will look beautiful forever.
On the other hand COD games are high on graphical fidelity and simple on artstyle and they will look ugly within a decade.
And those horse testicles will have been programmed by someone who had been working 16 hours straight and hasn't been able to see their son in weeks.
Inhumane conditions: Working at an entertainment industry job in a first world country, getting paid well to do one of the most interesting, fun and rewarding jobs I can think of surrounded by one of the best kind of people I know. Man I have it so hard. I understand what you are going for but stop making it like we are all chained to a desk with bread and water and doing hard manual labor with a shotgun to our heads.
If you work 80 hours in a week for months, it is an inhumane condition, no matter what you are doing or where you are doing it. You are destroying your health.
Do you think indie developers are not crunching? :)
Go watch this doc then
Indie Game: The Movie - Wikipedia
Crunch is not about AAA. It exists everywhere.
Hmmm. This is kinda true ^.
It's a tough question, OP. The solution isn't simple or clear cut. I'm not sure what the definitive answer is. It depends on what the game is trying to be. Competition even existing in the first place also makes this hard.
Finding ways to reduce and eliminate crunch is what's necessary for sure, but some games will likely always push visuals if it suits the style and aim of the game.
This.
The amount of people who have attacked Microsoft for the so called lack of high budget AAA single player games is proof of that.
Usually they just go for bland grey realistic graphics so sure, maybe they should focus more on unique art styles and engaging gameplay.
As with all these kinds of problems, the solution is easy: Legislation.
If gamers are upset that games are no longer as "ambitious" as before, they will get used to it. You cannot expect private companies to watch over the health of their workers if it is not with the government monitoring them.
If gamers are upset that games are no longer as "ambitious" as before, they will get used to it. You cannot expect private companies to watch over the health of their workers if it is not with the government monitoring them.
I would rather see more focus on game mechanics, physics etc. Hope the increased CPU horsepower allows for this in next gen games.
At the moment we are already at a level where artists need to work hard to achieve the level of detail in current games. Just throwing more polygons and shaders at it isn't going to do much. Good art direction is key.
At the moment we are already at a level where artists need to work hard to achieve the level of detail in current games. Just throwing more polygons and shaders at it isn't going to do much. Good art direction is key.
The market decides this not the studios they only reason they do this is because the market demands more and better GFX.
I don't think fidelity or production value is the issue, it's scope. You have photogrammetry setting the high-bar, so you can have games like Resident Evil 2 and DMC5 setting the bar for visuals without insane budgets.
What you have are 40 and 100 hour games that maybe have 12 hours worth of ideas. They're just bigger than they have any reason to be. It's going for bigger instead of better or even different, and without the 3 hour point at which people will walk out of the movie, or the page count where printing the book becomes impossible, there isn't a natural limit on the size a game can be.
What you have are 40 and 100 hour games that maybe have 12 hours worth of ideas. They're just bigger than they have any reason to be. It's going for bigger instead of better or even different, and without the 3 hour point at which people will walk out of the movie, or the page count where printing the book becomes impossible, there isn't a natural limit on the size a game can be.
Yes. I'd much rather they focus all of that attention on denser, more vibrant and lived in worlds. But that's never going to happen.
Problem is most people want more realistic looking games, Nintendo keeps getting called "for children" for not following on that trend and Valorant had a lot of people complain it did not look good enough even as they said performance and gameplay was their focus.
Untrue, we have been pushing for better looking games since the beginning because we the devs want to strive to push the limits.
What makes you say that? You definitely have way more experience than I do, I'm genuinely curious about it!
I feel like there's a false dichotomy going on here.
If you, game studio director, want to make the super duper cutting edge video game that's gonna sell to every soul on the planet and display the biggest measure of production value the medium and the technological state of the art is gonna allow you to, by all means, go ahead, secure your sources and the timeframe so that said vision can be achieved in reasonable terms taking into account the amount of man hours each one of its components will take to develop.
But if your virtual extravaganza can't be achieved without having to badly hurt the physical, mental, personal and emotional health of your employees, especially due to arbitrarily set date commitments and resource allocations, then though luck. You're product (or art work, in the rarest of cases) is not worth devaluating other people lives.
"But RDR2 can't be done without 1000 people having cranch (?) for ten years", you say, well, first of all, it should have taken 20 years then. But now that it didn't, it doesn't mean you have to get up there too. It's not about you., or your product, or the shareholders, or whatever.
Note that there's a difference between a few weeks of voluntary and paid overtime to achieve certain high quality conditions in project deadlines, and having your employees on lockdown for 3 years in 10 hours shifts, 7 days a week.
Hopefully dev tools improve significantly in the next few years and videogames can achieve visual quality over easiest conditions.
If you, game studio director, want to make the super duper cutting edge video game that's gonna sell to every soul on the planet and display the biggest measure of production value the medium and the technological state of the art is gonna allow you to, by all means, go ahead, secure your sources and the timeframe so that said vision can be achieved in reasonable terms taking into account the amount of man hours each one of its components will take to develop.
But if your virtual extravaganza can't be achieved without having to badly hurt the physical, mental, personal and emotional health of your employees, especially due to arbitrarily set date commitments and resource allocations, then though luck. You're product (or art work, in the rarest of cases) is not worth devaluating other people lives.
"But RDR2 can't be done without 1000 people having cranch (?) for ten years", you say, well, first of all, it should have taken 20 years then. But now that it didn't, it doesn't mean you have to get up there too. It's not about you., or your product, or the shareholders, or whatever.
Note that there's a difference between a few weeks of voluntary and paid overtime to achieve certain high quality conditions in project deadlines, and having your employees on lockdown for 3 years in 10 hours shifts, 7 days a week.
Hopefully dev tools improve significantly in the next few years and videogames can achieve visual quality over easiest conditions.
It depends, I'm hardly ever impressed by tech. The prettiest games around I couldn't care less about if the design just isn't there and no matter how you cut it, most AAA games are gonna be catered to the masses and they just want the pretty graphics and simple gameplay. For a lot of these people the graphics are a huge selling point and getting great graphics means investing a lot of money. It's a double-edged sword is what I'm saying; have great gameplay and basic graphics and you'll likely only attract the core gamers and as a result your budget is likely pretty low. Have great graphics and basic gameplay however, and you'll attract the masses, but your budget soars, but it's justified because you're likely to sell lots more copies.
I'd love to see less of a focus on graphics and more on level-design, performance and interesting mechanics, but on the other hand I see AAA games as the blockbusters of gaming. Theres nothing wrong with watching a dumb, vapid Marvel or Star Wars film every now and then, it can be fun to turn off your brain and just watch the pretty colors. It's not something I'd want exclusively though, but it's good to have the option.
I'd love to see less of a focus on graphics and more on level-design, performance and interesting mechanics, but on the other hand I see AAA games as the blockbusters of gaming. Theres nothing wrong with watching a dumb, vapid Marvel or Star Wars film every now and then, it can be fun to turn off your brain and just watch the pretty colors. It's not something I'd want exclusively though, but it's good to have the option.
I think they could do that for a while. Most folks will keep playing GaaS that are not that graphic intensive. And we could really use a revival of Arcade Racers, Car Combat, Wacky sports games and most of all Proper Survival Horror (90's - early 00's style)
Crunch exists because of poor management decisions, the encouraged culture and consumer expectations. In that order.
First, upper management has to make sure leads are monitoring their staff. They need to make informed decisions (hopefully also with empathy) that preserve the mental and physical health of their employees, who are critical assets.
Second, everyone has to be highly skeptical of crunch culture. There is a wealth of medical journals and studies showing the dangers of overworking. Just because you can push yourself that hard, doesn't mean you should. I see some developers posting here, and while I trust their hands-on experience with this topic... I don't feel it is out of line to suggest that their acceptance of crunch culture doesn't have ramifications they aren't considering. In a workplace environment, widespread acceptance of an overworking culture can lead to others not mentally or physically equipped being swept up into it by proxy. We have seen in the last year or two of reporting on this topic, a company says you don't have to crunch... but individuals feel obligated to. They don't want to be ostracized by their coworkers or given sideways glances by management.
Oh, and even if you work at a large company with benefits, don't forget your ambitions might be something that has to be realized with the help of outside contractors. We all know there are eastern Asian developers who are essentially asset farms, and it isn't a stretch to assume their working conditions are comparably poor.
Thirdly, consumers need to bring their expectations in line with reality. We also need to stop with toxic waste dumps of rabid user reviews, social media threads and support forum spam. In this day and age, the average consumer has a bounty of resources to make informed decisions. You shouldn't pre-order games unless there are physical supply issues you want to avoid. You shouldn't purchase a game on launch before reading press reviews and or researching technical evaluations posted by the likes of Digital Foundry. On PC at least, most platforms now let you refund games in a quick and convenient fashion.
Before you bite the bullet and buy a game, take some responsibility for knowing what state it is in. If you do buy it and have problems that aren't extraordinary, give the human laborers who have limited resources to test for the countless issues any one user could have time to fix it. Also, report your issues to the developer through whatever official channels they've set up (if you're willing). A detailed analysis and constructive criticism go a long way towards your desired goal of better services and products than hammering expletives and insults into the brains of folks working in tandem with dozens/hundreds/thousands of other specialists to make your luxury product function to your liking.
Also, right as I wrote all this out Crowbcat posted a new video about Ghost Recon. I know a lot of folk had issues with Ghost Recon Breakpoint. Making a reductive mockery meme compilation isn't helping. We sit here and laugh at the expense of developers just doing their jobs, which at worst blunts their morale or at worst causes them psychological distress. It also makes executives and investors sit up and take notice when their marketing and relations people bring in charts of social media impressions that look like the stock market crash of 1929. That attention doesn't always end up working out in the consumer or developers favor, either.
Oh, and don't mistake this as letting developers off the hook for launching broken products. I don't. I also tend not to buy broken products because it's really easy to avoid. Plus, even if I did buy something and get through it and have issues, shouting into the void about it isn't useful. Not everything can land on the positive side of the law of averages, including our entertainment.
First, upper management has to make sure leads are monitoring their staff. They need to make informed decisions (hopefully also with empathy) that preserve the mental and physical health of their employees, who are critical assets.
Second, everyone has to be highly skeptical of crunch culture. There is a wealth of medical journals and studies showing the dangers of overworking. Just because you can push yourself that hard, doesn't mean you should. I see some developers posting here, and while I trust their hands-on experience with this topic... I don't feel it is out of line to suggest that their acceptance of crunch culture doesn't have ramifications they aren't considering. In a workplace environment, widespread acceptance of an overworking culture can lead to others not mentally or physically equipped being swept up into it by proxy. We have seen in the last year or two of reporting on this topic, a company says you don't have to crunch... but individuals feel obligated to. They don't want to be ostracized by their coworkers or given sideways glances by management.
Oh, and even if you work at a large company with benefits, don't forget your ambitions might be something that has to be realized with the help of outside contractors. We all know there are eastern Asian developers who are essentially asset farms, and it isn't a stretch to assume their working conditions are comparably poor.
Thirdly, consumers need to bring their expectations in line with reality. We also need to stop with toxic waste dumps of rabid user reviews, social media threads and support forum spam. In this day and age, the average consumer has a bounty of resources to make informed decisions. You shouldn't pre-order games unless there are physical supply issues you want to avoid. You shouldn't purchase a game on launch before reading press reviews and or researching technical evaluations posted by the likes of Digital Foundry. On PC at least, most platforms now let you refund games in a quick and convenient fashion.
Before you bite the bullet and buy a game, take some responsibility for knowing what state it is in. If you do buy it and have problems that aren't extraordinary, give the human laborers who have limited resources to test for the countless issues any one user could have time to fix it. Also, report your issues to the developer through whatever official channels they've set up (if you're willing). A detailed analysis and constructive criticism go a long way towards your desired goal of better services and products than hammering expletives and insults into the brains of folks working in tandem with dozens/hundreds/thousands of other specialists to make your luxury product function to your liking.
Also, right as I wrote all this out Crowbcat posted a new video about Ghost Recon. I know a lot of folk had issues with Ghost Recon Breakpoint. Making a reductive mockery meme compilation isn't helping. We sit here and laugh at the expense of developers just doing their jobs, which at worst blunts their morale or at worst causes them psychological distress. It also makes executives and investors sit up and take notice when their marketing and relations people bring in charts of social media impressions that look like the stock market crash of 1929. That attention doesn't always end up working out in the consumer or developers favor, either.
Oh, and don't mistake this as letting developers off the hook for launching broken products. I don't. I also tend not to buy broken products because it's really easy to avoid. Plus, even if I did buy something and get through it and have issues, shouting into the void about it isn't useful. Not everything can land on the positive side of the law of averages, including our entertainment.
I'd say yes, the graphics arm race just doesn't matter as much to me anymore when few of the games are really playing in any new or interesting ways.