hughj

Sure, but there's maybe 100 million console gamers, so those AAA console games get all the funding they need. Star Citizen is a niche PC sim game with aspirations that necessitate a big budget and it simply isn't going to exist with a business model where everyone pays a small flat price.

At the end of the day, what's really the difference between Elite Dangerous and Star Citizen right now? I can fly around in both, do missions, buy ships. I'm sure a few years from now that both of those games will still be in development, just that Frontier funds that development via paid expansion packs, while SC sells ships. DCS has a similar model where they monetize by selling aircraft as modules. I'm not big into collecting figurines or building model railroads, but I'd imagine that niche hobbies like that can get ridiculously expensive. Are they all being duped, or are they maybe just a different market?

It really comes down to how the backers feel. It still feels like the majority of the ire directed toward Star Citizen is coming from people that haven't given money, and if they're being completely honest, they were never going to play it anyways. To call that a 'peanut gallery' would be an exaggeration as that implies they've at least paid something. Personally, I'd sooner have a company swing big and fail than to have the sum total output of all AAA development of the last decade or so. In that context $450 million is a drop in the bucket.

I'd speculate that the growing cost/time in development is the biggest factor. The more expensive something is, the less creative chances are going to be taken. Look at most network TV and big budget Hollywood movies -- it's generally junk. They're not made to be great for you, me, or anyone in particular, they're made to be merely good for everyone. There is no target demographic. When you're no longer making the game that you yourself wish you could play, and instead making something for a theoretical person with an age of 9-99, I see no reason to expect anything other than mediocrity.

Consider that back in the late 90s even "AAA" games had codebases small enough that a team of 1-3 programmers could write a new game engine from scratch in a matter of a year or two. Quake1's source code is ~10MB, Quake3 is ~20MB, Doom3 is ~30MB. UE4 today is something like 40GB. A game with a budget of $1-5 million can afford to focus on an audience of a few hundred thousand, but a game with a budget of $100+ million is going after tens of millions of customers.

To add to this, I'd also predict that things are only going to get worse in bigger budget titles. The move to multiplatform has the same effect as the desire to target broader demographics. You can't commit to design decisions dealing with input device, latency, expected screen size, hardware performance all because you have to account for your game being played on everything from a Switch, console, mouse/keyboard PC, and now streaming to a mobile device with a touch screen. Today AAA games made exclusively for mouse/keyboard on PC are mostly gone. If mobile+streaming ever manages to take off in a big way then I'd expect to see less focus on games that depend on low input latency and 6+ buttons.

Games perform poorly/inconsistently because games are developed for multi-platform now. Aside from some of the Sony 1st party titles, games are targeting a loose definition of a hardware spec, and then knobs are adjusted to make it work to some quality and performance threshold.

I don't see any reason to expect a mid-step console this time around. It made sense with PS4/XBoxOne specifically because they were APUs designed for a smaller budget, they had a fairly sizable node jump going from 28nm down to 16nm finfet, and AMD was doing poorly at the time and probably happy to give Sony and MS a great deal.

PS5/XBSX are on 7nm, and going down to 5nm just isn't going to facilitate a jump akin to what the PS4pro/XB1X brought. The improvement between last gen and this gen is precisely the sort of step you ought to expect from computer hardware these days. The days of huge generational leaps in hardware like we used to have are over.

We're coming up on... what.. 50 years since humans have ventured beyond LEO? It's a weird thought that the most distantly remote human beings during my lifetime would not be astronauts but rather someone on an island in the middle of the pacific or at a polar outpost.

Excited to see what JWST brings.

Seeing the Virtua Fighter cabinet for the first time in late 1993 was pretty remarkable to me. Probably the single most remarkable thing I recall seeing in video game graphics. A fully posable 3D camera, smoothly animated figures that appeared to move in a biomechanically correct way (presumably driven by a skeleton and motion capture reference.) Going from seconds-per-frame sprite animations to this where everything was moving at 30fps looked like something from a different planet. From watching the attract mode sequence I distinctly remember being confused how a regular arcade stick and a few buttons could possibly be adequate to manipulate a 3D character that was articulated right down to individual fingers and had the ability to grab and suplex another character in a way that looked physically simulated rather than animated.

By the time Quake rolled around ~3 years later that newness of poly-raster 3D had mostly worn off to me. Every console had done some of it by that point, and on PC there were plenty of examples of halfway steps, whether it be raycasted "2.5D" FPS or games with voxel/heightmap-based landscapes. By 1994-95 on PC I had Mechwarrior2, FX Fighter, Magic Carpet, NFS, Duke3D, Dark Forces, and some others I'm probably forgetting, and I honestly didn't even bother trying Quake immediately at launch because it didn't seem that special from screenshots. In terms of pure visuals I think the biggest thing Quake delivered was the combination of precalculated and dynamic lightmaps. It gave the sense of the world and objects inside it occupying the same space. Before Quake you made a room look dark by uniformly tinting the brush textures and maybe apply some brightness fall-off based on distance. After Quake you'd precalculate radiosity maps for the environment which would give you a pretty good approximation of all the indirect bounce lighting.

I think where Quake delivered a revelatory experience was with the shift to 3D acceleration and the addition of QuakeWorld's netcode. That's what facilitated a paradigm shift in how we played games. Everything changes when you're running at >60fps and playing against dozens of other people. Frankly, I'd still choose QW Team Fortress over any modern derivation of it (TeamFortress2, Overwatch, etc).

Another anecdote of the change to 3D: Making a map in the Build engine always felt like you were working against it, and whatever you made could only be a barely recognizable representation of what you wanted. I recall it being common to want to recreate your high school or house and be able to show your friends, but chances are you gave up after a few hours when you realized how much smoke and mirrors were involved to reproduce even the simplest floorplans. After Quake those fundamental technical constraints were basically gone.

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1023469/Classic-Game-Postmortem

Looks like there's been C&C post-mortem talks from GDC as well:

https://www.gdcvault.com/play/1025777/Classic-Game-Postmortem-Command-Conquer

There's very few examples of decisions made in Destiny that feel coherent from year to year, whether it's having to do with game design or its business model, so at this point there's literally nothing that Bungie could do that would surprise me or upset me. If Bungie said they were permanently shutting it down tomorrow I don't think I would mind, and that's coming from someone that's played it more than any other game in the last few years.

It's become the digital equivalent of a theme park. An eclectic variety of rides that seasonally get cycled in and out. As rides get added or retrofitted they introduce new membership paywall tiers in the hopes of generating more revenue from their diehard fans. There's no story to speak of, no meaningful RPG char building or level progression, no sense of a shared persistent world like an mmorpg has. You buy a season pass, get a colored wrist band that entitles you to most of their facilities (while they're still available), and you try not to spend additional money on the equivalent of overpriced popcorn and mouse ears.

If Bungie could wind the clock back and do Destiny over again, I seriously doubt they would willfully make it into what it has become. It feels like a never ending series of ad hoc design decisions prompted by unforeseen business changes and technical hurdles.

Yep. This was pretty clear to see even in the earliest days with the success of QWTF over traditional Quake TDM. Support roles allow for players to feel productive and receive positive reinforcement from their teammates even if they're not amazing at aiming. 2042 feels like it's chosen a F2P/Fortnite as its target model, and that kind of solo oriented gameplay strikes me as the wrong fit for BF.

That's a normal beginner thing, but it's probably related to the bad habit of flinching or tensing your body in anticipation of something (making a jump in a platformer, shooting a gun, etc.) Some of that will go away as you get more used to it, but I think it's a very good idea to be cognizant of what your body is doing, take a breath, and re-center yourself. If you find you're unnecessarily flexing muscles in your body before/during doing a certain move, then I'd try doing that move over and over again and being mindful that your breathing and body are relaxed while it's happening.

I also strongly suspect (at least in my own case) that there's contributing factors involved with how steady my hands are (some combination of blood sugar, adrenaline, hydration, caffeine, sleep, etc.) There are certain activities that I simply don't bother attempting (playing guitar, drawing, competitive FPS, drinking soup in public, etc) when my hands don't feel up to it.