How interesting. Always better with a finished game coming late then an unfinished dumpster fire that makes people give up on you (still remember battlefield 4 when it came out).
This one has been cooking for so long that they missed an entire console generation, GTA5 originally launched on the PS3 and Xbox 360. Naughty Dog is a similar story, the PS5 has been on shelves for nearly five years and their first original title for it doesn't even have a projected release year. Rumors are pointing to 2027 at the earliest.
What I don't get is why don't they milk their engines a bit more.
I would expect it to make sense to pump out a few more games after GTA 5 based on the same engine. New maps, new stories, same mechanics. I know GTA Online exists but that's something else entirely.
The same goes for Bethesda. The last Elder Scrolls game we've had was Skyrim. Why haven't they taken that game and re-released it in a few years on a new map and with a new story? It seems wasteful to not do so.
Once you've played a version of it heavily modded, you realize that if they were to do this, they'd need to improve it up to the level the modding community has already. The mod community has added a ton of free content to the game and added a lot of graphical and quality of life improvements. They need to compete with that as well. Instead they chose not to compete and have paid mods which didn't go over too well.
I've played heavily modded versions of both of those games, but let's not kid ourselves that the available mods are anything like another first party game would be. (I'm alluding to the scale and richness of the world, story playtime, cast and such.)
Please god no. Bethesdas engine has been trash by modern standards for like 15 years. It should have been sent to the recycle bin after Skyrim. Their games are almost as crippled as Nintendo’s have been by the ~~switch~~ potato. Even the Skyrim remaster they just released feels like PS2 tech.
This is why Dan Houser left Rockstar in 2020 and left Sam in charge. Dan went on to start a new game company with the aim of returning to sane development cycles. He's 51 now and just wants to make games.
Yes. I think eventually the AAA game industry is going to crash and we will go back to smaller teams and less ambitious games, because it does seem unsustainable.
Unless you're very wealthy, chasing the AAA game peak performance on PC is becoming unattainable. You can easily get an Intel Arc B580 card for ~300 to play at 1440p regular settings, but to take advantage of the highest quality at NVIDIA 4090 or 5090 you're looking at $4000 just for the GPU. AAA games just broke their price ceiling too with Nintendo going for $80/90 regular game prices for their headliners, and Microsoft following.
There are so many wonderful independent games studios that aren't competing for the top performance, or twitchy shooters that require such high hardware that it becomes serious competition for AAA.
A few recent favorites that don't require anything top end hardware wise are Psychonauts 2, Balatro, Wanderstop, Kitsune Tails, Shovel Knight, Cuisineer.
Since Doom: The Dark Ages requires a raytracing card, it's out of reach for me.
Peak performance has always been pricy. Chasing the 4k dragon is not worth it for most people, but inflation adjusted a 2,000$ gaming PC from 1998 would be $3,900 today.
I’ve got a 4k monitor, but only use that resolution on old games as it’s not like 1080p suddenly sucks.
GTA Online in GTA V changed the game entirely for Rockstar and they realized they could make oodles of money off it. I'd say we would have seen GTA VI come out in ~2018 had it not been for online, and we would have seen a couple of single player DLC's too.
I don't think GTA V was originally intended to have such an expansive online component and they just had to keep duct taping shit to make it all work because it was a cash cow. Now I think the reason GTA VI is taking so long is they are trying to get the online "framework" right so they can push content for the next decade.
