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Norion on 12 July 2023
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PAOerfulone said:
Norion said:

Well yeah I said game development takes longer now. Taking into account it's from 2021 I think it looks clearly better than everything pre-2022. UE5 will help devs a lot with making high fidelity games though the real fun will be when true photorealism becomes easy enough for even indie teams to tap into. Another example is the recent path tracing update for Cyberpunk, path tracing becoming standard will be huge for improving visuals.

How much longer are we talking here? Even during Gen 8, you were seeing games that had long dev times. Halo Infinite came out 6 years after Halo 5. Even if you account for COVID and say it would've come out sooner if there was no pandemic. That's still between 5-6 years. Last of Us 2 came 7 years after Last of Us 1 and 4 years after Uncharted 4. Ragnarok is 4 and half years after GOW 2018, and Spider-Man 2 is slated to be 5 years after Spider-Man 1. Tears of the Kingdom came 6 years after Breath of the Wild, which came 5 and half years after Skyward Sword... which came 5 years after Twilight Princess.

Red Dead Redemption 2 came 8 years after Red Dead Redemption 1. It's already been 5 years since that game came out and we still have no sign of a Red Dead Redemption 3. These dev times just keep getting longer and longer. At this point, I don't think we're going to see GTA VI or Elder Scrolls VI until the PS6 and next Xbox start making the rounds. 

As this games get more demanding in resources and development alongside consoles, in order to have these games out within a certain amount of time, it's going to cost THAT much more money and resources to make sure they do. Now some of the bigger studios and publishers can afford that, but not everyone can. And the ones who can, they need the games to sell THAT much more in order to cover the rapidly rising development costs, otherwise they run into a wall where they can't afford to spend any more unless they want to start losing money on some of these games. And what that happens, the devs, publishers, and event he console makers will be faced with the question: "Is it really worth it?"

Elder Scrolls VI won't be till then but GTA VI should be next year or 2025. Development times won't be far from their peak length currently since things like ray tracing are gonna help reduce it overtime and companies will want to avoid taking much longer than 4-5 years. Things will be far better when doing photorealism is fast and easy.