Naughty Dog in 1996
(media.scored.co)
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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.