Gaming

Same. Be cool if there was some kind of "ethically made, fair hours and wages for workers" seal of approval for games.

I think so too. The process of content creation will become more efficient. I hope it will allow companies to try new and weird things with less risk.

I think this has always been the case, though. Engines haven't just suddenly got better, they've been getting better and better for decades now. Some of those improvements give you features "out of the box" that you used to have to implement yourself. One of the reasons Unity became so popular with smaller developers is because it lets you focus on building your game - most of the tech is there, you've got an asset store for additional models, plugins, etc. so save you time but ultimately making a (good) game still takes time. Making a game is a very iterative process and a lot of the quality of a game these days is less to do with developing the engine and more to develop the mechanics of the game itself - the way your characters move, the responsiveness of the controls, the UI layout and so on. All of that stuff is hard to be given to you by an Engine, because it's specific to your game.

this, i despise the focus on polygon and texture counts so goddamn much

games from a decade ago are still popular and still look good, can we please just focus on performance and actual mechanics

I want more games like valheim. Could care less about the graphic HD quality. Just give me a good game that looks good enough I can forget about my actual life for a while.

I know, Tears of the Kingdom the most graphically intensive game of all time took 6 years to make. I bet they could have cranked out that bad boy out in like 3 years if they had just used the same graphics as Breath of the Wild

I can assure you it's not the developers changing the scope...

Easier level design. I wouldn't be surprised if 99% of open world games just had their landscape generated and then slightly tweaked afterwards.

I'd rather have a long development cycle but deeper, more substantive games.

This isn't anything new - the "Megagames" were famous for having crazily long development times for the era. And some of those went on to be very well received like Ultima VII, Ultima Underworld, Daggerfall, Baldur's Gate, etc. - I remember Baldur's Gate advertising the "90 man-years" required to create it and same for Daggerfall for the (procedurally-filled) map "the size of Great Britain".

There are plenty of companies with short turn-around times, but they make mediocre games.

Style > Graphical fidelity If a game has good style and design, it's amazing how well it can hold up.

GTA5 and TES5 were the two most popular games of the PS3/360 generation.

Despite that, there were no new Elder Scrolls or Grand Theft Auto games released for the entire 7 years that the PS4/XB1 generation lasted.

By the time Elder Scrolls 6 is out, baby Dovahkiin will probably be old enough to vote and die for his country.