Currently, and especially this year, an increasing number of games do not meet the technical requirements of players or performance requirements. Although most AAA projects of recent months boast of well-developed mechanics and plot lines, almost all of them suffer from childhood diseases in the form of an unstable frequency of personnel or periodic errors.

Tiago Klafke (Brazilian developer with experience in companies such as Ubisoft and Blizzard (for more than 10 years as an artist surrounded by games such as Overwatch or Starcraft 2: Legacy of the Void) and currently working in the studio 100 Thieves) admitted that, as an artist, he pays special attention to potential errors during iterations, since they can knock the player from the immersion process, so that the work spent on the development of location or mechanics may go unnoticed and unified. However, he himself says that it is impossible to eliminate all the side effects of the creative process, so sometimes the bugs have to somehow be hidden, for example, applying a new texture on a buggy.

When he was asked how he relates to the comments of the players about the technical condition of the projects, on which he worked as a designer, he replied that the difficulty of creating modern video games is beyond the scope of the consumer understanding. At the same time, he recalls the past times with a positive, describing them as somewhat kind and simpler for Gamdev:

My site project took 2 years, so yes, the development of games always takes a lot of time. Nowadays, gamers are difficult to understand the whole difficulty of developing games. Previously, having 10 developers, it was possible to create a masterpiece. Now, to work on AAA, hundreds of people, studios and programs are needed, and these programs are constantly updated, the equipment is updated, there are so many things that may go wrong.

So it used to be much easier. And easier. To create a texture, you only needed Photoshop. Now you can use various programs for creating textures – Zbrush, Substance Designer, Substance Painter, Photoshop, Quixel and so on.

The stage of production of AAA Taytlov is becoming more and more complicated, which also leads to the fact that the development of games takes more time. Tiago Klafke, however, sees the other side of the coin and gives hope that some projects, mostly medium and low-budgets, can extract obvious benefits from modern tools and laws of the market:

There is part of the industry that will continue to spend a lot of time on the largest AAA projects, but I also see that now all available tools will bring something new. I think that small teams will increase their influence in the market, and new tools will reduce the gap between them and large companies. When I worked on the project "Spanish city", I bought some assets, for example, trees. It’s easier to use a digital store to buy a sky model or certain sounds. You pay $ 20 and get high -quality, professional materials. Yes, at the same time everything becomes more complicated, but more accessible. I think people will be smarter to use existing resources. Some of the old companies are stuck in their old approaches and will continue to adhere to them – I do not think that this will change. All hope for a new generation.

So does this mean superiority "Indie" over large hits of the next few years, or it is rather false hopes? Or the problem of buying up other people’s assets in order to introduce them into their own developments, solving one problem, gives rise to another, for example, more noticeable secondaryness of independent games? This, of course, is the relationship that you should follow in the coming years. However, if a developer with 20 years of experience sees potential benefits for Gamdev and Gamers from this state of affairs, then this should be more than worse than worse.