Regarding State of Unreal:
Ive seen
that clip from Hellblade 2 lauded on Twitter but I think "sure it looks cool" – does it make the game better? I believe we reached a graphic fidelity a couple years ago that is just "enough" for me. Games like the first Hellblade or the first Horizon still look fantastic.
What is there really to be gained from all these details on Senuas face? It'll have a "wow" effect when you see it, sure, since Hellblade had various up close scenes, but in gameplay terms, what does it add? How much immersion do you really need?
And the graphical fidelity arms race prolongs dev cycles which leads to fewer titles, higher prices, more monetization, buggier launches, stutterfests, needing expensive hardware + DLSS/FSR to make games look and run halfway decent that are supposed to look lifelife...
Plus, I would really, really like it if this push towards "lets all use Unreal" would stop and we'd see more engine diversity again. Not just because I dislike Epic – if it was all Unity or whatever, it would also not be great.
Its a shame that id Software stopped licensing their engine out (thanks to Bethesda, if I recall correctly), and that engines like the Fox engine didnt get developed further (in case of the Fox engine because Konami ousted Kojima and then stopped bothering with games for a while).
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Regarding Atari and NightDive: huh thats a bit weird, but as others have said, they probably reached the endpoint of what IPs they can get. Also, other companies have jumped on the train of getting old games and re-releasing them, like Pixel Games UK, or Ziggurat. I wish bigger publishers would go and re-release more (or; all) of their older titles digitally. Activision has released a lot, EA some, Ubisoft very little. I'd love to have the original Lemmings, Ski or die, Prince of Persia, SimCity ....