Hammeroj said:
some factors:
- It takes roughly an entire cycle, as the devs have stated, to master a system's capabilities and nuances in order to utilize them to the full potential. Then that knowledge gets tossed out of the door for the new system, so that they have to learn it all over again. The knowledge goes largely wasted. You would think it would carry over, but then, somehow, somebody screwed up the Silent Hill collection. Hmmmm.
(yes, i realize that there are a number of factors involved with the mess up, but even if they had to build that thing FROM SCRATCH you would think, hey, maybe it would be relatively simple to rebuild a game where you already know how everything happened, right? i mean, just going by that logic...)
- During this period of learning, the new system is underutilized, mismanaged, or in many cases involving the PS3, outright inferior to an older system in some ways simply due to certain hardware changes/decisions that cause more complications than they're worth. In addition, with each scaling up of complexity, the cost of developing the same amount of content, while matching the higher level of graphical (and in some cases, audio) fidelity, increases dramatically for the developer, which leads to games like Skyrim, which feels more empty than Oblivion, since sacrifices have to be made in other areas to accommodate for theses costs and resource development time. In the worst case scenarios for triple A games, as the stakes grow higher and the development scales ever much larger, there is more room for error, less room for innovation, and more pressure to deliver, which then leads to companies resorting to more devious pay schemes in order to feed them, for an experience that may not necessarily be better, or even worse off than before. Then everybody ends up angry or unhappy and wonders where the fun went or why we have to keep paying more for stuff we don't want or need.
- Consoles, due to having to stick to a price point, are ALREADY behind when they're new, so pushing for a new console hasn't significantly improved the gameplay to the point where the "pc master race" hasn't already been there, doing it better. A console's strength is not the sheer graphical power or how many hardware specs you can rattle off a sheet, but the accessibility, and the common platform which allows devs to aim for a specific set of parameters freeing them up to play in the safety of this sandbox. This is weakened by a smaller cycle. Smaller cycles mean that consumers must pay more often, companies have to pay for more new systems (as they foot a large part of the bill to produce and distribute them!), and these systems have to establish themselves as a legitimate platform before market development sets in place long enough to make money, during which time everybody hemorrhages lots of money for development and low initial sales compounded by easily possible launch hiccups. In the meanwhile, devs are pressured to come up with quality content that fits the platform's capabilities within a time span that people don't consider "too late", which given all of our previous experience, never happens and those titles get pushed back. Early launch games consist of either tech demos or things that were ported over or otherwise easy to make with pre-existing assets. The exceptions are games that Nintendo purposely develops alongside the hardware deep in their fortress of solitude, and since they pushed up their development cycle to cut off the other two at the pass, even those games ended up later in the release, or as they were before that happened, exactly where they were going to be to begin with.
- In the past, while games were limited by their hardware, it did not actually stop them from being great, or fun. In particular, during the 32-bit era, the games market just exploded in creativity and charm. Japanese games are especially famous for making insane games possible on these systems that seem primitive compared to the capabilities we have now, but there has not been significant progress since that time which has matched that amount of work to game experience (if we include the time spent on the PS1/2 where they simply expanded on that work, while not necessarily utilizing much more of the added features). The plaintiff calls to the court one Square Enix (which during this time was not merged), which since turning over their development towards the graphical side of things, has not produced a Final Fantasy game quite like the sixth one, which is so long and epic and does so many different things that work together that you have to wonder what the hell happened to them after that.
now, it wasn't always like this, i believe two primary factors contributing to this is that a lot of pc developers moved to consoles to chase money and ended up trying to make the consoles conform to pc standards with...mixed results, and as the environment grew increasingly corporate, the corporate influences tainted the development cycle and pushed towards profits instead of quality
