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.

Wouldn't count on that. Those techniques will help indie developers a lot, but AAA gaming is a constant race of trying to deliver more and more. AAA games are always hopelessly over engineered and once you throw AI into the mix they just raise the bar that AAA games have to hit. Expect ChatGPT flavor-text on every empty beer can you can find in the world. Auto generated quest lines and a whole lot of more stuff.

Indie developer in contrast can focus much more on actually delivering a game, with story, characters and game play. But AAA games are just ginormous piles of meaningless content and AI will help them get even bigger.

There are decades worth of great games already out. People should be open to trying out older games, even if it means slight hurdles in downloading compatibility mods or patches.

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

You can just go get Unity or UE right now. With UE you can make a $1million before you need to pay a royalty and the tooling is substantially better than any of the tools I'd released back in the day. (And fwiw I think it's a crying shame id tech engines are no longer open sourced too!)

I think we are already seeing price increases on many games that are starting at $70 (USD) these days. I don’t think we’ll see another increase for quite a while.

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.

I prefer quality over quantity

Microsoft has GamePass. They want continuous new releases. They didn't release Redfall because they thought it was ready, they released it because they thought it was good enough to get with a GamePass subscription.

There are many areas that can be improved upon to make games more realistic, just probably not graphical. NPCs using smarter AI, better physics, a more dynamic environment (better destruction, better NPC interaction with objects), and who knows what else that I can't think of now. There's still a lot of progress to be made, I just don't know if we'll have enough horsepower to run all of that, we're already reaching physical limitations on chips.

I mean if it got to 9 years between games, that eould be a big improvement for TES. Skyrim came out in 2011.

After playing Battlefield 3 and feeling an indescribable emptyness for AAA games, I turned to indie developers. The desire for more profits can really suck the uniqueness and character from a game when it's designed for accessibility to as many people as possible.

Bonus points if the game supports modding. It's a great way to extend the life of a game as well. Some of my first online gaming memories are from Quake and it's modding scene. Even Sven Co-op is still developing their mod for Half-Life to this very year.

Games like that seem to have a bit more passion behind it which gives it a bit more charm. It's been a bit sad watching old titles milked dry throughout the years in the name of the mighty dollar. Unfortunately the struggle now is finding those gems in a sea of mediocrity as gaming became more mainstream.

Same. Be cool if there was some kind of "ethically made without worker exploitation" seal of approval for games.

Honestly as long as the quality remains as high as it is for the Rockstar titles I am okay with it.

They get larger, have more features, content and better graphics but they don't seem to be getting any more fun to actually play (to me anyway but that could be 'old' setting in)

I don't care as long as the pipeline has enough different good games that I get one per year. I can wait years between games in a franchise as long as there's something else to play in the interim.

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.