I'd argue smart AI is not always a goal worth striving for, and in fact it frequently may not be. If Indiana Jones is occasionally stealthy and they're engineering a game where you only have the tools that he'd typically have, the rules need to be clear on what works and does not work to stay in stealth. Since he doesn't have Dishonored powers, I think it's okay that you're basically invisible if you're almost 5 feet above ground level, and it's okay that they take 3 full seconds to recognize that you're in front of them, because the feedback on what you've done wrong is good.
ampersandrew
joined 9 months ago
Is this a modern/old dichotomy? Playing through Metaphor right now, I agree that they go with the old-school dungeon crawler approach, but Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VII are definitely not modern, and I don't think they'd fall into the same bucket.
Consoles dwarfed PC gaming back then, so your experience is pretty atypical.
Perhaps he didn't like it. I sure didn't.
But it doesn't have cutting edge graphics now that it's 7 years older just because it technically runs on the newer version of the engine under the hood. It runs on phones, after all.
The flagship Unreal 5 game released on Unreal 4 in 2017 has outdated graphics, yes.
I'd make that trade, easily. More often I find games these days are too long to their own detriment than that they felt like they ought to be that long. Your mileage may vary on a game by game basis, but in general, that's how it's been lately.
It's true, and I'd certainly like to see some of these studios try to target making many games at that budget than a single game at ten times that every 7 or 8 years, but even these "cheaper" games you listed still take a long time to make, and I think that's the problem to be solved. Games came out at a really rapid clip 20-25 years ago, where you'd often get 3 games in a series 3 years in a row. We can argue about the relative quality of those games compared to what people make now and how much crunch was involved, but if the typical game is taking more than 3 years to make, that still says to me that maybe their ambitions got out of hand. The time involved in making a game is what balloons a lot of these budgets, and whereas you could sell 3 full-priced games 3 years in a row back in the day, now you're selling 1 every 6 years, and you need to sell way, way more of them to make the math work out.
This article wasn't about indie games.
Alright, not like for like exactly, and at 34M, we're stretching the definition of shoestring. I'll bet KC:D's sequel spent far more, for one. I'm with you that more of these studios ought to be aiming for reasonable fidelity in a game that can be made cheaply, but when each of those studios took more than 5 years to build their sequels, that becomes more and more unlikely.
What are the good looking games with shoestring budgets?
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Final season of Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League content, offline mode coming
(www.suicidesquadgame.com)
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Phil Spencer Confirms Xbox is Planning an Xbox Handheld, But It's a Few Years Away
(insider-gaming.com)
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I'd be happy if they pandered more to controller players without removing the decision making in base building, like Halo Wars did. I always look to Cannon Brawl as an indication of what RTS can still be (by which I mean, not exactly like Cannon Brawl).