it’s massively massively feasibler than ever before for one-person devs/tiny studios to rapidly iteratively make stuff, all kinds of stuff, from the fancy-graphic’d to the deliberately lo-fi, than it ever has been before, with fewer limitations, because of the same tech advancements that are mostly marketed via boring shit like a realistic building exploding or a couple of photorealistic guys punching each other.
the actual cost of making games is now almost completely decoupled from their graphical fidelity and that’s a good thing. every task in game dev takes less time than it ever took. everything is cheaper to do.
so when you see a big company grind their workers into paste forcing them to deliver more and more on tighter and tighter schedules, please be aware that it has nothing to do with graphics or hardware or gamers’ demands for anything, and everything to do with the capitalist thinking that says: oh, you can work twice as fast now? i will give you half the time
there’s been a shift from better hardware directly meaning “better graphics” to it meaning “devs can make a wider range of stuff more quickly using systems/workflows/techniques that weren’t previously feasible”, which to players (or even devs not using the stuff) looks the same as nothing changing.
so you’re like, “this looks like a game from 10 years ago! or near enough! why’s it need a 10 years newer computer!” because being able to target that higher spec meant we could waste less time, work more iteratively, experiment more and make better stuff. we can be more expressive because we’re less limited by process. that doesn’t even mean you’re going to like the output more, but it does mean it’s less compromised and closer to what the author wanted to make. unless the boss is a prick
games all want an SSD now, including games that don’t appear to be doing anything so very much wilder than was happening in 2009, but the SSD is letting us do that stuff in less time. like development time. the cleverer ways we were making it work back then took time, and forced premature commitments, and limited what we were able to do. invisible compromises nobody ever found out about were getting made constantly. remember how thief 3 had all its levels awkwardly split into chunks so it could run on the xbox? that’s just an unusually visible compromise. it’s surrounded by worse ones you’ll never hear about
tech people have been chasing “dynamic global illumination” for years, and now it’s here, and players don’t care, because we had many ways to make stuff be fine without it. but it’s expanding vastly the range of stuff you can feasibly do as a dev. think of the lighting in Mirror’s Edge that everyone loves: it took many hours to bake every time they wanted to see it, then you’d make a tweak and have to bake all over again, so you just didn’t iterate on your lighting all that much, it wasn’t practical. now we can get those same results 60 times a second, but you need better hardware. but you’re making better art because you don’t have to wait ages every time you want to try something.
this is the same issue we always have in trying to convey the value of good level design and narrative tools: players (or anyone but the author directly benefiting) don’t see the value. but the value is in everything: you make different, differently interesting stuff, because of the better tools.
every time i have the job of advocating for writers to have better tools (i make this my job everywhere i go) someone insists it’s pointless because there are words in the game already. some people just cannot be convinced there’s a benefit to a thing unless you can jump into a parallel universe to show them exactly what the result would have been without it
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