Technology

[…], particularly when end users tend to despise particularly greedy live service business models.

Have you considered making your business models … not particularly greedy?

There have been massive diminishing returns on graphical quality vs. hardware and developer requirements since the PS3 era.

I will always put an emphasis on art style and gameplay over trend-chasing and what takes the most computing power.

Imho, graphics don't make the game. There are people here still playing doom and portal. Even games like Terraria aren't too demanding. You don't need amazing graphics.

I'm also going to add my stone to the pile here and point out that this hyperfixation on more and more "graphics" usually results in it ultimately being impossible to actually see what the fuck is happening on the screen.

You are a realistic barbarian dude who is brown, and wearing brown. standing in a realistic landscape which is brown, against a realistic highly textured and bump mapped bunch of trees which are brown, with leaves that are waving around in all directions realistically and are brown, trying to dodge arrows (which are brown) raining on you from the half dozen hairy orcs in the distance, who are also brown. And about nine pixels tall, and hidden in the bushes. Which are brown. And if this isn't happening verbatim (or even if it is), 2/3 of the screen is also covered by a zillion glowy particle effects, motion blur, and bloom, which are the only colorful parts of the image but still add up to you not being able to actually see jack shit out of what's important.

Bonus points if this also requires near frame-perfect inputs to handle, and you have half a second of input lag in between all the shit your console is trying to render plus the two or three frames eaten by postprocessing to make it "look pretty."

Yeah, fuck all that.

A major part of game deign that everyone seems to forget a lot these days in the name of making everything realistic and/or extra graphicy is clearly communicating to the player just what the hell is going on. Older games, I find, often did a significantly better job of this.

bruh Im out here still playing Beyond Oasis. Just make a good fucking game and I'll play it for 30 years. I dont think people making games actually listen to people playing games.

Mufasa wouldn't have been a bad movie if they just sprang for animation, and voice actors who even attempt to sound like the characters they're playing.

I’d rather play a pixelated platformer…