Yeah, I don't really get why some people buy all this hype and even preorder stuff. Maybe I'm getting old, but I just don't care anymore for most of the new stuff, no matter how fancy the looks. I downgraded my PC and only play indie / decade old AAA nowadays, with only few exceptions which are mostly niche strategy games.
kiawe_fire|4 years ago
We have a thriving indie scene full of pixel art action platformers, RPGs, and rogue-likes, often built by a couple dozen developers at most. And we have the AAA scene that is expected to eke out every bit of performance and effects out of your RTX 3080, often developed by hundreds of people.
What about something in between?
Some of the newer strategy games have great, polished visuals with some modern sensibilities, but they aren't super high budget productions with infinitely detailed high res textures and countless objects filling every scene. But neither are they going for some C&C or Dune 2 inspired pixel retro look.
And the player base is just fine with that. As long as there is a certain sense of polish and creative direction to the art, then the most important part is "is the game fun?", "does it have solid gameplay systems", "is it balanced", those sorts of things.
This space doesn't really exist much for first person shooters or third person action games. There have been a couple of examples (Yooka-Laylie, A Hat in Time, Pumpkin Jack?) and certainly some rogue-likes like Strafe or Ziggurat that come close, but the market seems small and spotty. I'd argue in part because player expectations don't allow for this as much in the FPS space as they do in the strategy space.