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The Two Genders
(beehaw.org)
[alt text: Text which says, "The 2 genders according to chuds". Below the text is two images. On the left is an image of Geralt from The Witcher 3, and he is labeled, "Male, parentheses (white)". On the right is an image of Ciri from The Witcher 4 trailer, and she is labeled, "Political".]
Ofcause it does. What part of a game that gets attention is a choice.
From visuals to gameplay to sound design and so on. Everything has a priority.
And with priority comes allocation of resources.
A AAA game will have these kinds of details today, because it's expected by customers. AAA(A) games that don't (looking at you, Ubisoft, with your shoddy animations) get relentlessly mocked unless they excel in every other area. First party Sony titles in particular are expected to push technical boundaries (at least of their hardware) in some way or another. That's part of the reason why people are buying these games and the systems they are running on. This isn't an optional thing, it's not a choice, it's the baseline.
You also have to consider that even if this wasn't the case, you can't just radically change the way studios are being organized. Large studios are art-heavy in terms of their manpower, in large part because it's very easy to produce tons of game assets in parallel. It's not easy to hire or retrain people after a switch in priorities and it's much more difficult to apply the same kind of manpower to game design tasks. The old saying that nine women can't birth a baby in one month applies here as well.
Taking a rough look at the credits, Horizon Zero Dawn had 30 designers working on it (world, quest, writing, etc.). Compare this to 57 coders coding things and 148 artists creating audio and visual assets. There are other departments like production, marketing, HR, etc. that I'm not counting, but I think you get the picture.
Yes, but it's by choice. Big companies aren't trying to impress nerds. Their demographic is everyone that is easily fascinated by "shiny" things.
The hardware it was made for also prioritized resolution over frames per second. So hyper realism became a focal point of many of the AAA games created. And hyper realism is a one-way street (aesthetically speaking).
It culminates in Hellblade. With ridiculously stunning visuals, but little else going for it.
At what point would you say that a game isn't a game anymore, but closer to an interactive movie?