Dragon Age vet says the "fidelity death cult" and a "fear of backlash" over reused assets is making AAA games take way longer, but that creates room for Dark Souls-style surprise hits
Dragon Age vet says the "fidelity death cult" and a "fear of backlash" over reused assets is making AAA games take way longer, but that creates room for Dark Souls-style surprise hits
The focus on hyper-realistic visuals is making AAA games take even longer to make, Mark Darrah says
Those are almost completely self-imposed. Style is important, not hyperrealism, and almost nobody would complain about lack of realism if the result has good artistic direction.
Those who do complain may be vocal, but they're a tiny, tiny minority. Realism is a coat of paint that may impress for a couple minutes before you start caring about what the game is really worth.
I love that this comes out of Dragon age's dev team, as if they weren't part of the reason why people started being so aware of reuse and just general laziness.
Also, nobody cares about reuse, we care about reuse that makes the game worse.
The fact that dragon age 2 had 6 dungeon tilesets they reused super lazily with a very mediocre random generation algorithm and they got shat on for it doesn't mean all reuse is bad, it means the ratio of content to playtime has to be higher than whatever that fucking was.
But most of all, going from a completely bespoke, no repetitive side quests, all killer no filler CRPG to whatever the fuck DA2 thought it was going to be? Step down, no matter how much of it would have been original assets, it was just worse design and a lower overall level of craftsmanship. I could throw that gameplay loop together in a day of work, it's just not interesting.
In DA2's defence, the game went from concept to release in 16 months. With a development cycle that fast, it's a miracle it was even playable; I wouldn't call its rampant copy-pasting "lazy". I'd call it many bad things, because that game had tons of problems, but that's what happens when the beancounters have an unexpected success and want to capitalize on it yesterday.
he states that the industry is seeing "quite a bit of pushback" from players when it comes to devs reusing systems and assets, which may pressure developers to make certain things from scratch for a sequel when there might not really be a need to.
Who knew that people don't want a small number of different mob types that are reskinned to be the same enemy in a different color? Why do gamers have to be so picky with their need for "variety"?