I see people referencing ESG more and more these days and there seems to be a blatant and undeniable link now between shit, poorly disguised unreal asset flips which even the big studios are doing and them running off a check list of cringey woke talking points or characters that almost always look the same.
If we think about it all titles now seem to follow this type of pattern:
. Blatant Unreal world environment assets that they don't even try to hide or edit properly anymore
. Speed tree ( Possibly the most favourite overused tool of a big studio I love to frequently reference for doubters )
. Usually the most basic third person character controller you've ever seen
. Black woman with afro or dreadlocks heavily featured, usually with a white female in tow and several male background characters
. Possibly characters lifted straight out of metahumans? Difficult to tell, can't confirm properly as of yet but they all look suspiciously similar in terms of fidelity and the setup - see video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXuVqfasT90
This isn't what I'm interested in despite the lengthy post, all of these moves by big studios have one thing in common. That's to reduce production time, reliance on a large art team which would have been necessary back in the day and general running costs of maintaining a big studio.
No, what's activating the old weaponised autism on this issue we're facing as gamers is what is truly driving this? Are we looking at a situation where we're going to have something akin to big studios turning into zombie companies that maintain a skeleton crew of do nothing diversity hire employees while you have one or two real designers doing all the work in the background? It seems that if the ESG subsidies are as massive as people seem to think it could well be worthwhile for CEOs to operate their companies as minimally as possible and simply pocket this government money as long as they like and because it's allegedly Blackrock. Much like how hotels are being paid ridiculous amounts of money to house migrants rather than operate themselves as a legitimate business with infinite government money the business owners aren't going to give a shit about what happens as long as they get to keep pocketing their half a million in the bank every year and leave the community to rot.
This means that they can and will keep producing infinite amounts of shit at very little cost and even if gamers all get mad and jump ship it's not going to matter and they will still keep churning this out every year as long as they maintain their diversity quotas and keep getting money.
Yes everybody, I am going down a major conspiracy rabbit hole with this and my brain has been ticking away. I want to know if there are any kind of financial numbers or reports buried deep in the way that potentially supports all of this cringe mediocrity.
Can someone explain a speed tree to me?
Ah, sorry, speed tree is an asset for creating lots of generated high fidelity trees that big game studios love to use and something I often explain to either non-gamers or gamers that aren't as informed about the internal third party assets that these studios prefer to use.
Nothing wrong with this by itself, but most studios now are very lazy and you often see them abuse the fuck out of these assets for the sake of making their games look like have more content than is actually there. This is why I often immediately snub games with 'gud graphics' because I know how they've made it.
https://store.speedtree.com/
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CDfNDFK297o
Also, you know that splash screen that pops up at the beginning of almost every 'AAA' titled game? That's them giving credit to the paid assets they use. You quickly realise how little content they put in their games are theirs beyond maybe some fancy character designing and audio work.
OK, that's insane. So after they drop $1mil of a game budget on this where does the other $149 mill go??
Ohohohooo now that's the real conspiracy theory :P
It really is, these technologies should be streamlining game budgets, not bloating them. The budgets for cutscenes have gone up with mocap almost becoming industry standard and occasional celebrity voice actors, but not anywhere near enough to justify this.
what are the other markers of a speed tree game?
It's not necessarily speed tree by itself that's the problem it's just that's a favourite of mine to point to and I always stress. Paid assets by themselves me and others really don't have a problem with, it's when you have these big studios acting like they spent years and years on a game and then they come out with absolute crap and if you've always wondered why, this is why. It's the lazy overuse of assets while trying to pretend they did a ton of work that's the problem.