Naughty Dog in 1996
(media.scored.co)
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Apart from the obvious (everyone is a normal looking white dude), notice also the tiny team size. A modern bloatmaxxed triple-A company has hundreds, if not thousands, of people yet who can't produce a single classic game and require Blackrock investment money to stay afloat.
while AAA projects obviously mismanage the hell out of their budgets and make despicable propaganda from hell more than they make games, those huge teams aren't there for no reason. to get even the left asscheek of the pair of pants the main character wears for the first level of a 10 hour campaign looking good, not clipping, not looking weirdly lit near torchlight, etc, can take one man a week. you add together all the asscheeks and levels and torches in the game, and the manhours spent to make an AAA game quickly skyrocket. at that point, to keep up standards in graphics, animation, design and so on, you need the hundreds-strong teams.
i don't think that alone is non-conductive to good game design, because now and then you do get games like RDR2 that are fun, not (entirely) demonic propaganda, and still keep up all the AAA standards with the thousands of developers putting in work. it's more likely that it's just coincidental that just as fidelity started rising, enemy actors found out just what a good tool games are to push brainwashing on the general populace, and started buying up all the studios and enshittifying them.
you can still see White excellence wanting to poke through, TLOU2 has prime mechanics and graphics. but then some brazillian comes along and demands all of the devs use their skills to depict the most retarded shit ever, otherwise their 500k-a-year salary gets handed to Laquintisha Boutiqyiuful and they have to start begging on the streets of san fran, which is a fate worse than death.
EDIT: just to clarify, this is coming from first-hand experience with organized game-dev, i'm in the middle of a funded project right now with a skeleton crew. we are absolutely feeling the effects of not having those hundred guys to throw around - sure, everything we make comes from the soul and the game will probably be better off for it, but taking a week just to make sure some random subsystem of a subsystem is working, or 2 weeks to develop a workflow tool which will only then let your content creator create content, really starts eating up your available time when you don't have a whole huge company of juniors and mid levels to throw the small things at.
To me this basically just reads as an indictment on modern game devs prioritizing graphics above all else. If you need 300 people working on one individual polygon each, your graphics have outstripped reasonable capacity. The correct course of action is to make what you're able to without an entire city of employees working 80 hours weeks. One day, computers and tools will be advanced enough to allow a small team to make realistic graphics. Until then, stop trying to force it.
Then again, AAA slop is still making bank, so what do I know. I'm just some lunatic who cares more about games being fun than pretty.
it's not just polygon count and texture resolution. you ever played MGSV and felt that the movement was immaculate, responsive, and still felt weighty and real? yeah, that took metric tons of animation work. the little animation you do when barely not running off a cliff in Death Stranding? 3 days to implement and 4 weeks to make sure it plays correctly on all ledges in the game and you never run off like a moron without a good reason.
hell, there's an hour or so long presentation of all the trouble they went through just to make sure the NPCs in Death Stranding could follow you around and attack you. it undoubtedly took basically the entire length of the game's development to maintain and finalize, otherwise the basic idea of the combat would break down as the enemies couldn't reliably reach you.
there's a lot of AAA stuff we take for granted. if you want a high fidelity game with lots of things, lots of mechanics, i.e. lots of fun, you need a lot of time spent on it. the alternative is that every game is a 2 week project like megabonk and balatro and i think that would be a fucking tragedy.
I'm of the age where I remember seeing Link stand on a staircase with his feet at two different levels in Wind Waker and going "holy shit, it doesn't get any more realistic than this" so I don't think I'll ever understand the obsession with ultra super realism.
Good animation and AI are important, but those things don't bloat a game up to 100 gigabytes. Demanding a unique 8k texture on every blade of grass does, and an insane amount of time gets spent on making sure each rock is unique. As a result, budgets are inflated to the point where they basically have no choice but to do two things: sell their soul to a lucifer-adjacent publisher like Ubisoft, and implement tons of scummy micro transactions and predatory business practices.