I am worried about the development of next gen titles.

[Foffy]

I very much worry that longer development times means stronger investment in fewer brands going forward, as a financial failure comes with greater risk. It also means one misstep can kill a franchise. This not only puts risks that the occasional serviceable game is a game that sacrifices a whole IP. Additionally, this also means that there's greater risk to monetize the product, making it prone to being nickel and dimed for safe measure.

Imagine, for example, what would have happened with Devil May Cry if 5 underperformed. That might have been a signal that character action games that weren't being funded via first parties are not a viable space for anybody to be in, considering the legacy of the series and how that particular brand carries the genre as a whole.

 

[DanteLinkX]

I very much worry that longer development times means stronger investment in fewer brands going forward, as a financial failure comes with greater risk. It also means one misstep can kill a franchise. This not only puts risks that the occasional serviceable game is a game that sacrifices a whole IP. Additionally, this also means that there's greater risk to monetize the product, making it prone to being nickel and dimed for safe measure.

Imagine, for example, what would have happened with Devil May Cry if 5 underperformed. That might have been a signal that character action games that weren't being funded via first parties are not a viable space for anybody to be in, considering the legacy of the series and how that particular brand carries the genre as a whole.

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Couldnt have said it better myself, considering there was a dark time for character action games after several of them had bad quality or/and underperformed, as a result that left bayonetta 2 up for grabs since they didnt want to fund the game (and accoeding to some rumours that also contributed to mgs rising 2 nowhere to be found too) its actually a miracle that game came out since god knows why nintendo decided to fully back it up. Thanks god they did (and financed wonderful 101 too) and thanks god capcom decided to trust on itsuno's call of making dmc5 instead of dragons dogma 2 when he had the choice, it reignited character action games.

Nintendo also helped "revive" ng3 (by securing a limited exclusivity deal) and helping financing razord's edge. Hopefully they help reinvigorating the genre with some other ninja gaiden game (and will all the rumours of hayabusa being in smash that gives me a lil bit of hope). And i am also very glad they decided to finance bayonetta 3's production too. This all comes as a relief after the sad fate that Scalebound suffered in its development that ultimately ended it being cancelled. Hopefully that can be returned from the ashes someday.

 

[Hieroph]

This has been one of the best generations ever. I've got literally zero reason to be worried about next-gen, people complaining about stuff like "no new Wipeout" when we got the excellent Wipeout Omega Collection (and 2048 stand-alone) is just ridiculous.

 

[ZaddyMattty]

Games are getting more complex and difficult to make. It takes more time, simple as that.

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but at what point does quantity of quality games become more important than better graphics/physics? Nintendo has this figured out which is why they're not pushing the limits in terms of hardware.

 

[Wispmetas]

These last years have been crazy with games. Way to many games coming out close to each other. I would not get worried. My backlog is already big.

 

[aevanhoe]

but at what point does quantity of quality games become more important than better graphics/physics? Nintendo has this figured out which is why they're not pushing the limits in terms of hardware.

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Well, in a way, it's about the market and demand - I mean, I have no idea, but I'm guessing this is a trend because it's bringing in money.

Personally, I like all kinds of games, from big to small - but for the biggest titles, like Sony first party games, I like them epic and insanely polished, even if it takes, like, 7 years to make them. It's not like there aren't many other great, smaller games out there to fill the void. But for my Gods of War and Horizons and Spider-Men - I would actually rather get one mega-insane-production-value game per generation than two that are less, well, insane. I don't feel we're missing out, because there are all types of games. Great games not pushing the limits in terms of hardware? We have them from Nintendo, as you say. Great games pushing the limits in terms of hardware? We have those, too. So, I guess, all is good.

 

[Vitamin_B_Complex]

Since you wanted a dev to put your mind at ease, I'm going to try concisely detailing what's easier going into the PS5/Scarlett transition.

First of all, the asset creation side of things is nearly identical. We're still using PBR because, well, you can't do better than physics. We have better refractive materials, subsurface scattering, and other things which are difficult to do well without hybrid ray-tracing, but those are all just as easy to author as they are now. This is in stark contrast to PS3>PS4 where we shifted from diffuse/specular/gloss to PBR materials and many of us had to learn how to do materials 'from scratch' with new tools. But now we can hone those skills with much better balance on the rendering side of things.

Speaking of rendering, it's no longer required to manually set up light probes, and better global illumination means that the film-inspired lighting setups we've been using this generation will now have their full effect. In that sense, aside from the fairly straightforward work of transitioning to hybrid ray-tracing, it will actually be easier than ever to light a photorealistic scene. On the engineer side, many renderers already support voxel-based GI and will only need to implement rays for materials above a certain smoothness threshold, while this also gives access to improved shadows and ambient occlusion. It's important to note here that many rendering improvements you'll see have been researched heavily in recent years and were just out of the reach of current-gen consoles; full-fat ray-tracing isn't the be-all and end-all here.

Of course, there is a demand for higher fidelity artwork, but most games with high-end visuals already use detailed sculpts where a straightforward subdivision + displacement would get most of the detail people are hoping for. With respect to environments, the new CPUs give us tremendous flexibility with draw calls. RDNA also allows for much more graceful and performant tessellation which makes way for more automated LOD systems. Current tile-based approaches will work fine, of course, but this is one way of making development of open worlds simpler for both artists and engineers. More dynamic environments will be a big challenge, but it will also be much more achievable with such well-balanced hardware.

In terms of character artwork, more detailed hair and cloth with proper animation (especially for wrinkling) is a major challenge, but we can use more sophisticated tools already available for film. That's another major advantage going into this new generation- recently updated 3D creation tools are easing many aspects of asset development. It's never been easier to create a complex character and make iterative tweaks as you go along. It's also important to remember that most current-gen characters are based on either photogrammetric or CG-quality source files. Many artists transitioned to high-fidelity artwork along with their transition to PBR, whereas the audience was more forgiving of substandard visuals on the PS3/360. So for those of us who improved, next-gen is a welcome opportunity to flex our skills and show off the full glory of our source artwork.

This post is getting a bit long in the tooth, so I'll wrap it up by tempering your expectations. I may have made next-gen sound like a cakewalk, but developers' deep familiarity with the workflow going into it means expectations will skyrocket. That's not just from the audience, but our expectations of ourselves. Now that photorealism is actually achievable, there are many opportunities to get carried away and waste time, but that will be born out of the flexibility and ease of development going forward. High quality visuals are now accessible to all developers, not just technical powerhouses like Capcom and Naughty Dog. We have yet to see whether developers take this opportunity to speed up development and target reasonable budgets, or to chase the end of the rainbow.

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Thanks for your level headed response. It's not all doom and gloom like everyone here makes it out to be. Many things will get easier and the difficulty will stem more from the passion people want to put into their artwork rather than the difficulty of optimization.

 

[DanteLinkX]

Since you wanted a dev to put your mind at ease, I'm going to try concisely detailing what's easier going into the PS5/Scarlett transition.

First of all, the asset creation side of things is nearly identical. We're still using PBR because, well, you can't do better than physics. We have better refractive materials, subsurface scattering, and other things which are difficult to do well without hybrid ray-tracing, but those are all just as easy to author as they are now. This is in stark contrast to PS3>PS4 where we shifted from diffuse/specular/gloss to PBR materials and many of us had to learn how to do materials 'from scratch' with new tools. But now we can hone those skills with much better balance on the rendering side of things.

Speaking of rendering, it's no longer required to manually set up light probes, and better global illumination means that the film-inspired lighting setups we've been using this generation will now have their full effect. In that sense, aside from the fairly straightforward work of transitioning to hybrid ray-tracing, it will actually be easier than ever to light a photorealistic scene. On the engineer side, many renderers already support voxel-based GI and will only need to implement rays for materials above a certain smoothness threshold, while this also gives access to improved shadows and ambient occlusion. It's important to note here that many rendering improvements you'll see have been researched heavily in recent years and were just out of the reach of current-gen consoles; full-fat ray-tracing isn't the be-all and end-all here.

Of course, there is a demand for higher fidelity artwork, but most games with high-end visuals already use detailed sculpts where a straightforward subdivision + displacement would get most of the detail people are hoping for. With respect to environments, the new CPUs give us tremendous flexibility with draw calls. RDNA also allows for much more graceful and performant tessellation which makes way for more automated LOD systems. Current tile-based approaches will work fine, of course, but this is one way of making development of open worlds simpler for both artists and engineers. More dynamic environments will be a big challenge, but it will also be much more achievable with such well-balanced hardware.

In terms of character artwork, more detailed hair and cloth with proper animation (especially for wrinkling) is a major challenge, but we can use more sophisticated tools already available for film. That's another major advantage going into this new generation- recently updated 3D creation tools are easing many aspects of asset development. It's never been easier to create a complex character and make iterative tweaks as you go along. It's also important to remember that most current-gen characters are based on either photogrammetric or CG-quality source files. Many artists transitioned to high-fidelity artwork along with their transition to PBR, whereas the audience was more forgiving of substandard visuals on the PS3/360. So for those of us who improved, next-gen is a welcome opportunity to flex our skills and show off the full glory of our source artwork.

This post is getting a bit long in the tooth, so I'll wrap it up by tempering your expectations. I may have made next-gen sound like a cakewalk, but developers' deep familiarity with the workflow going into it means expectations will skyrocket. That's not just from the audience, but our expectations of ourselves. Now that photorealism is actually achievable, there are many opportunities to get carried away and waste time, but that will be born out of the flexibility and ease of development going forward. High quality visuals are now accessible to all developers, not just technical powerhouses like Capcom and Naughty Dog. We have yet to see whether developers take this opportunity to speed up development and target reasonable budgets, or to chase the end of the rainbow.

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Wow awesome post, thanks a lot, that insight from an actual developer eases all my worries, here is to a games-filled next gen :).

 

[DanteLinkX]

I mean, you're right in that triple-A blockbuster titles are getting harder to develop... I'm not sure where else the big two console manufacturers can go at this point, they seem dead set on this endless arms race for bigger specs and better visuals in lieu of any significant innovations. Naturally this will continue to hit devs of bigger marquee titles the hardest, heaping way more expectation on teams and demanding more advanced development hardware, bigger headcounts, more specialisation to cope with the endless ramping up of graphical complexity that gamers have come to expect.

I don't doubt that there's some market research knocking around somewhere that tells us our biggest audiences want more realism, higher resolution, denser poly counts etc... But this is an unsustainable trend. The improvements get more and more incremental, more subtle, to the point where the vast majority of players won't even notice the difference (how they'll manage to make stuff like Raytracing marketable I have no idea). But most importantly this eats into dev time that could be better spent on iterating gameplay, refining core design, writing more competent AI, story, time for creating actual meaningful content to justify that $60 price tag.

Personally I feel that most players are much smarter than publishers like to let on, and are in fact yearning for more games that just feel straight-up good to play, that aren't a gigantic ripoff, that don't demand constant further monetary investment and don't preoccupy themselves with aesthetics beyond all else. This is why indies can be such a breath of fresh air; yes, in some ways the advancement of tech hits them too, but they're far less beholden to industry trends, audience expectations, publishing strategies, marketing gimmicks, etc. This approach to games obviously does come with its own caveats that push dev times up as well (IE less overall structure to the development cycle, smaller teams with less specialisation, etc)... But the freedom to innovate in that space is so valuable to the industry as a whole.

There's a ton more stuff to factor into this whole issue that I don't know if I'm properly equipped to talk about, particularly the advent of games as a service which approach the issue in a very different way... Ultimately though, you're right to be concerned, and I think that it's something we need to prepare for, or find new solutions to. Because we absolutely do try to evolve our workflows, and we do build better, more user-friendly engines with streamlined featuresets and automation... There's just only so much you can do when you're constantly preparing for the next big thing to come along, which will inevitably make your job harder.

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Awesome insight, just read this, thanks a lot for this post. I agree with you in that sometimes players might prefer gameplay over graphics, and maybe devs realize that instead of spending x hours into polishing something only for it to look "better" maybe they can spend that time in making it play better.

 

[SpaceCrystal]

People that are expecting a ton of AAA games & a lot of 1st party & 3rd party games exclusive to PS5 & Xbox 4 are in for a rude awakening.

There's going to be a ton of cross-gen games out the ass between PS4/PS5 & Xbox One/Xbox 4 for about 2 & a half to 3 years, tops. Development costs/advertising costs will go through the roof, & it's already expensive & time consuming to make AAA games nowadays.

 

[Doom_Bringer]

In the wake of a recent Rockstar thread that talked about how we only got 1 Rockstar game this whole generation (not counting GTAV remaster), and most people citing that "long development process of titles this gen" as being the main cause of this drought of rockstar titles. I remember that I used to talk about this with my gaming friends, how historically we have been getting less and less games from developers as we go up in generations. And this one is no different I mean, look at these examples:

Naughty Dog:

Ps3 gen we got:
-3 Uncharted games (which was also a new ip)
-Last of us (again new ip)

Lenghty, full of content games that were even heavy in the multiplayer font, so no corner cutting here.

Of those 4 games at least 3 are considered to be really awesome games, with 2 of them being usually considered as 2 of the best games of that generation (u2 and tlou).

Ps4 gen we get:

-1.5 uncharted games. (Uc4 and lost legacy)
-The last of us 2.

I think that while uc4 was a really good game, it didnt really set the world on fire, due to it even being a "slower" game, most accuse of being a walking simulator and it even had less "setpieces" something uc series were known for, makes one wonder if this was due to corner cutting. Tlou2 is yet to be seen, but its looking like it will be a great game. Still only 2.5 titles, compared to 4 full titles last gen. And also taking into consideration that ps3 was hard as fuck to develop for, this speaks lenghts about current dev scenario.

And while we got an uncharted game for ps vita I didnt count it because it wasnt developed by ND.

Sony Santa Monica:

Ps3 we got:

-2 God of war games.

Gow3 was probably one of the most spectacle sony games ever, it never holds its punches (presses O non stop on you, pun intented) and while GOW Ascension wasnt that good, it still tried.

Ps4 we got:

-God of war.

While its an awesome game, it, like uc4 before, is a more "grounded" game, makes one wonder if all this is devs "maturing" in their game design and choosing not to go "balls to the wall" in the setpieces or if all this is on purpose trying to evade the heavy lifting of more complex setpieces, cuz say what you will, but nothing on gow comes close to the gow3 intro, scope and setpiece wise, due to all it maybe costing more money and time in this gen development process.

Rocksteady:

Ps3 we got:
-2 batman arkham games.

Fucking incredible titles, nothing else can be said about these, they are just incredibly awesome games. We did get a 3rd one (and another portable one at that too) but it wasnt developed by them.

Ps4 we got:

-arkham knight.

While its my favorite arkham game, I know its not the best one. I so wish we got another one made by rocksteady or maybe another super hero, but here we are, we got nothing so far and this far on this generation I doubt we will.

Square Enix:

Ps3 we got:
-3 ffxiii games (amonst other titles, but I will only count main titles)

Controversial games for sure, but still it were 3 "full" ff games.

Ps4 we got:
-ffxv. (And 4 dlc chapters)

Again, like with rocksteady case, ffxv is my favorite, superior to every other ffxiii game, but then again I know its not the best in the series.

All in all, I know shit about game development, but can someone in the inside ease my doubts? I mean, will the process of development gaming for next gen be more "streamlined"? (as in easier/less time consuming/etc,) because if not, what good does it make that those consoles have them terraflops and not having enough games to enjoy said terraflops, or even less games output than this gen due to it being harder to develop for those next gen consoles.

I know the economic barrier will probably still be there, and maybe high as ever, I just wish they find a way to make game dev easier so we can see all developers ideas turn into lots of awesome games.

So era, what do you think? Are you happy with this current gen output? Or do you wish next gen we get more games and more new ips compared to this gen? Or do you think we are pretty much fucked and will inevitably get less games due to next gen being harder to dev for?

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Great op I agree with you 100%

This is all because of tech and graphics. Nintendo was right all along imo

 

[ElNerdo]

Last generation was long as fuck though

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This generation is just as long as last gen, no?

 

[Goldenroad]

I feel like the next gen launch will be the greatest launch line up that any console(s) have ever had. Fall 2020 - Fall 2021 is going to be nuts. Yeah, there will be a lull again at some point, but it's going to be a ways off.

 

[Anustart]

We don't want quick Dev cycles! We want to end crunch!

 

[Poimandres]

I feel like the next gen launch will be the greatest launch line up that any console(s) have ever had. Fall 2020 - Fall 2021 is going to be nuts. Yeah, there will be a lull again at some point, but it's going to be a ways off.

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Do you know something we don't, or just speculation? As far as I'm aware no one has announced launch titles for next gen yet.

 

[Goldenroad]

Do you know something we don't, or just speculation? As far as I'm aware no one has announced launch titles for next gen yet.

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Obviously speculation. I feel like games like Halo Infinite, Ghosts of Tsushima, Assassins Creed Vikings, Rocksteady's next game, Elden Ring, Starfield, Spiderman 2, and arguably GTA VI will all show up by Fall 2021. Remember what a barren wasteland Fall 2013 - Fall 2014 was? Maybe I'm wrong and some of these games will come out before next Fall or after the following Fall, but I don't think any of those will be rushed out in the next 9 months with new hardware on the horizon. I think it will be a great launch, and then, like I say, we'll see what happens.

 

[Phantom]

Indies is where it's at

 

[Poimandres]

Obviously speculation. I feel like games like Halo Infinite, Ghosts of Tsushima, Assassins Creed Vikings, Rocksteady's next game, Elden Ring, Starfield, Spiderman 2, and arguably GTA VI will all show up by Fall 2021. Remember what a barren wasteland Fall 2013 - Fall 2014 was? Maybe I'm wrong and some of these games will come out before next Fall or after the following Fall, but I don't think any of those will be rushed out in the next 9 months with new hardware on the horizon. I think it will be a great launch, and then, like I say, we'll see what happens.

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Ah yeah nice list! I forgot about Halo for a second which is an actual announced next gen launch title. The others are reasonable predictions for the first year odd (although we'll see about GTA6!).

 

[Conal]

Hot Take: AAA game development will start getting quicker.

Big developers will be scanning in characters / objects, picking textures from massive, photo realistic libraries and generating wide open vistas with the click of a button.

Lighting, weather and sky boxes? Tweaking a few dials.

Animation blending? Done with AI.

 

[DanteLinkX]

Great op I agree with you 100%

This is all because of tech and graphics. Nintendo was right all along imo

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Nintendo and its switch family of systems could prove to be a safe haven for some devs that might not have the budget/manpower to go all out on next gen and stay on comfort zone in the tried and true 720p/1080p hd development. Most people are expecting next gen games to be 4k/60fps and that might mean more workload/investment.

 

[Xeontech]

I feel like we're going to be surprised by both the quality and the quantity of next gen offerings.

GTAVI and Cyberpunk is all I'll probably need tho lol