I know it's a thing generally these days because of how shit multiplayer especially has gotten but if I see something that's 'online' now I don't want anything to do with it. Every new release it's the same story, they can barely be called games anymore they're more like a live service with some minor gameplay elements tacked on in the most half-arsed way imaginable. That goes for a lot of supposedly singleplayer releases as well depending on the company.
I think I'd much rather pour my free hours into something like Microsoft Flight Simulator because then I'd at least gain a valuable skill from it and I've also found myself delving back into the good stuff that was the early 2000's releases. Even if you see something that looks vaguely promising it inevitably gets annihilated by the DEI contractors that plague this industry now.
It's extremely ironic that the games industry is trying to cater to anybody who isn't a gamer and they seem to be all mentally ill weirdos to one degree or another who have an addiction problem and fleece them for all their money before moving onto the next cringey fad. I'm sorry for coming across too black pilled, but if a game does well it seems like that developers will go out of their way to ruin it because yet again, they've shown that gamers do not matter and we're nothing more than a vehicle for hype to get their product into the normie sphere who just want to college digital items all day instead of play the fucking game.
I’m from Texas. It’s Mexicans here. It’s been Mexicans here for many years.
I do play some Forza. Horizon has been going down each entry since 3. 5 is at best a DLC for 4. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not one to suggest that every new entry of a game series has to be revolutionary. I’m all in on if something is fun, more of the same is fine. The problem is it’s “less” more of the same. They got so freaking lazy. Even their rally DLC in FH5, look it’s more dirt and cactus! You didn’t have enough of that already! Forza Horizon 6 would have to blow my mind for me to be in on it, I’ve lost interest and shunned Microsoft since the launch of 5.
Seriously though, almost everything I play (outside of Forza I suppose, although it doesn’t get much time anymore) is either Indie-to-AA level online stuff to screw around in a bit with friends, or old stuff I have mostly on GOG. I’ve been replaying Doom 3 recently. It doesn’t feel old after a handful of years. I’ll probably get my hands on Dead Space on PC soon, I haven’t played through it in several years. Still have the Xbox version, but eh I’m starting to abandon that platform, so we will see.
People have bitched at me for bringing up my programming and game dev background in posts constantly but I can go into very autistic detail into exactly why the devs take the steps they do. Yes exactly, the deserts and the cacti? It's because it's so damn easy to texture compared to a lush forest for example, the same goes for snow too really but these days it seems even the normies expect some degree of interaction with the snow so maybe they don't want to do the tesselation which can get a bit tricky sometimes.
The graphics of modern games quickly lose their appeal when you realised it's the exact same procedurally generated crap every time. With some devs even in the AAA side of things are now resorting to AI art in order to pump out their utter crap these days.
I am much more impressed by an indie artist who does low poly art now and it's usually a red flag for me if I see high graphical fidelity. Particularly in the customisation side of things, it tells me that they probably jammed in some third party character creation tool and did everything in the most half-arsed way possible while pretending they worked on it for years. I can tell you now that in a lot of cases even with the art they did not spend years on it and sometimes depending on the studio the models look like they've been painted in Quixel Mixer for about 5 minutes maximum.
It's all just so much worse than people realise and you understand the kind of shitty workflow that modern studios go for.
I’m a huge fan of let’s say 2005-era 3D graphics. Enough level of detail to put me in place, not so much it has to be as much work. Before the PS3 era came along and made everything sepia. I also liked how much more time was spent on environmental lighting. Not that it had to be realistic, that means nothing to me. It gave areas a feel. They also had to make the game fun because otherwise it wasn’t much to look at.
I mean you’re right, the reason I never manage to finish a game is always the graphics, I don’t like doing graphics. I actually have a few things I think I can finish in mind now, but life happens at times and I can’t dedicate much time to it for a bit. Nothing revolutionary but it would be cool to actually release a game.