For those like me, who have been using a computer for 25-30 years, we have witnessed most things, like document editing, viewing, spreadsheets, file management etc. going from unbearably slow (although even in the mid 1990s that was debatable), to basically so fast that performance does not matter any more, which has been reached at some point in the past 15 years and all extra resources go towards inefficiency or pointless features. At this point, I'd argue games have also reached this threshold.
Often I look at modern games, and feel like I'd happily trade marginally worse graphics for a game that runs well on my mid-range PC. I tried the Dead Space remake, for example, and it ran so bad on my PC that I immediately uninstalled it and replayed the original, and the difference in quality wasn't huge, despite the fact the original ran better on a PC that has about 1/20th the computing resources.
The answer has been and continues to be clear in the indie scene. Many of the most memorable and beloved games have not been high fidelity, but rather unique and thematic. Consider Mario Kart, Portal, Braid, Slay the Spire, and Balatro. Even games that continue being played after decades like Counter Strike, World of Warcraft, and Skyrim. While some of these may appear to be very high fidelity, they aren't the massive open worlds with millions of polygons. Most are either 2D sprite based or use relatively simple 3D models with distinctive textures.
I see the graphical spectacle of many new games similar to 3D movies. They catch your attention initially, but it quickly fades into the background. What keeps you playing and makes for an enjoyable experience are the mechanics, characters, and story. Beautiful themes and appropriate sounds really help with immersion. None of this requires hundreds of thousands of hours from hundreds of artists. What it does require is creativity and artistry.
The reason these AAA games fail is because they are bland, repetitive, uninspired gruel. With such large budgets they are driven to make their games as low risk and widely palatable as possible, which paints them into a corner of median, average, well-trodden ground. The potential upside of a break out classic isn't orders of magnitude above the average, but the downside could be a total loss.
Odd that the Author thinks it's OK to write about games without ever playing them. You have to be really far removed to think that Meta Quest Pro and Vision Pro are popular gaming hardware.
> “It’s very clear that high-fidelity visuals are only moving the needle for a vocal class of gamers in their 40s and 50s,” said Jacob Navok, a former executive at Square Enix who left that studio, known for the Final Fantasy series, in 2016 to start his own media company. “But what does my 7-year-old son play? Minecraft. Roblox. Fortnite.”
I don't know the formal name, but this is an extremely common pattern of leadership failure and resource mis-allocation. It's just so easy to follow a sounds-good metric down an easy-at-first trail...which leads out into the desert.
Generation-oriented thinking is an element of the NYT's clickbait formula before we were clicking.
Nothing is "fit to print" for the NYT unless it is interesting to people over 50 which is one reason why the NYT bungles youth culture (they sure did for the Boomers)
The "Minecraft. Roblox. Fortnite." is interesting because:
1. The youngest of those games is just 7 years old, the same as his son
2. Story is absent in these games
3. Microtransactions
One big problem the game industry has is that video games have a very long playable life. For instance there are people who have 10,000 hours into Disgaea. I went to Gamestop and bought Rise of the Tomb Raider and Ryse: Son of Rome for $5 total. I'll skip the $60 new game because I know it will go on sale and someday I will get it for somewhere between $40 and $4. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas is perfectly playable today and I think it's tragic that they gave up on the VR remake. If I was going to buy a game at launch (say a Type/Moon game) it would because of fanaticism for the brand which motivates studios to pump out more Hyperdimension Neptunia games and other sequels.
One answer is the "service game" like League of Legends which wants to retain you as a player forever. It is no longer a project and it retains developers indefinitely and thus the studio cannot develop a series of new games (even counting sequels.) That list of games is a example of the sort of business models that he'd like to force onto people, and in fact, that mobile gaming has to the point where mobile gaming dwarfs PC and console in revenue.
javascript-walled
If you changed your browser defaults, that's more accurately 'no script' walled, or rather it's paywalled and no script doesn't work around it.
If it is pay-walled, you have to subscribe/pay to get the complete content, I guess.
Then if it is javascript-walled, same but you must have a javascript web engine to access the content. There are web engines without javascript (not just disabled, there is zero javascript engine), namely noscript/basic (x)html.
But it would make no sense to pay for a service if you don't intend to enable js to access it. :shrug:
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