Its strange to me that there are so many high budget open world games that fall within the assassin’s creed / far cry / GTA triangle and yet it seems like nobody tried to copy the Bethesda open world formula given the enormous popularity of Skyrim.

I actively get annoyed when games don’t give me some quiet time to not play the game, and I really appreciate the beauty of games beyind the gameplay.

This gave me conniptions when playing Control. I couldn’t just stop and look at the environments, which clearly had a lot of work put into them, for more than a minute without the getting a loud “BRRRR” alarm in my ear and having a full screen text popup that says “BOARD ALERT: HISS COMMANDOS IN WASTE PROCESSING”.

This was compounded by the whole ‘randomly spawn in some random group of enemies at a random point every time you enter a room’ design of the game. That’s bad enough for other reasons, but those two things together gave the impression that the game designers were terrified of the player having 10 seconds to sit there and have a thought enter their brain.

If anything gaming culture has regressed, at least in this aspect.

Remember when the $2.50 Oblivion horse armor DLC was considered to be ridiculous?

When people say that I think they mean they want games to look like this:

Or like this.

So, still atmospheric and beautiful, but low poly enough that artists don’t have to spend so much time creating detail. Sort of like an impressionistic painting.

To be honest though for most AAA games I think its animations and highly choreographed gameplay sequences that are bottlenecking development more than the art is. Look at games like cyberpunk and fallout 76: they largely didn’t have unfinished art assets (in fact the art assets in both those games, particularly the environments, look quite good). Instead they had broken animations and gameplay systems. I guess art style does play a roll in that though, as a more realistic model kinda demands more realistic animations to avoid looking weird.

At to end of the day it comes down to this:

Is it cheaper to store steel stock in a warehouse or terrawatt-hours of electricity in a battery farm?

Is it cheaper to perform maintainance on 2 or 3x the number of smelters or is it cheaper to maintain millions of battery or pumped hydro facilities?

I’m sure production companies would love it if governments or electrical companies bore the costs of evening out fluctuations in production, just like I’m sure farmers would love it if money got teleported into their bank account for free and they never had to worry about growing seasons. But I’m not sure that’s the best situation for society as a whole.

EDIT: I guess there’s a third factor which is transmission. We could build transmission cables between the northern and southern hemispheres. So, is it cheaper to build and maintain enormous HVDC (or even superconducting) cables than it is to do either of the two things above? And how do governments feel about being made so dependent on each other?

We can do a combination of all three of course, picking and choosing the optimal strategy for each situation, but like I said above I tend to think that one of those strategies will be disproportionately favorable over the others.

Huh?

https://xkcd.com/963/

Fortunately I haven’t had to open it in a very long time.

Pretty good track record with videogames too.

The SSN system is one of the more moronic things the US does, which is really saying something.