JoshNautes

Just to cladify, most Digital Stores will only download the language Pack of your system. That's why when you change the game's language on Steam it needs to download a patch. It is download the language you selected and deleting the previous one.

Even through toy have to download them, doesn't mean you have to keep them. After download ING you can go to the install action path and the delete the other two games you don't want.

Yeah, I agree with everything you said. But what I was trying to say is that it is not all of the graphics push that are hurting production, I believe that on this generation alone we have many new graphics techniques that are aiming to improve image quality at the same time that it takes the load out of the devs. Just look at Remnant II that has the graphical fidelity of a AAA but the budget of a AA. Also, some of the production time is increasing due to feature creep that a lot of games have. Every new game has to have millions of fetch quests, a colossal open world map, skill trees, online mode, crafting, looting system etc. etc. Even if it makes no sense for the game to have it. Almost every single game mentioned on this thread suffers from this. With Batman being notorious for their Riddler trophies, The Witcher having more question marks on the map than an actual map, and Assassin's Creed... Well, do I even need to mention it? So the production time increase is not all the fault of the increase in graphical fidelity.

You picked the absolute best examples of their respective years while picking the absolute worst example of the current year, that makes the comparison a bit partial, doesn't it? Why not compare them to Final Fantasy XVI or one of the remakes like Dead Space or Resident Evil 4? Or pick the worst example of previous years, like Rambo: The Video Game (2014)? While good graphics don't make a good game, better hardware allows devs to spend less time doing better graphics. 2 of the 3 examples you gave have static lightning (ACU and BAK), while the bad example you gave have dynamic lightning. Baking static lightning into the map is a huge time consuming factor while making a game, I assure you that from my second hand experience that at least 1 of those 2 games you mentioned had to compromise gameplay because they couldn't change the map after the light-baking was done. And I'm just scratching the surface on the amount of things that are time consuming when making good graphics like the games you mentioned. As an example, you have the infamous "squeezing through the cap" cutscene that a lot of AAA of the last generation had, because it allowed the game to load the next area. That was time wasted on choosing the best times to do it, recording the scenes, scripting, testing etc. etc. All because the hardware was a limiting factor. Now that consumers have better hardware that isn't a problem anymore, but consumers had to upgrade to allow it. That was also true for a lot of other techniques like Tessellation, GPU Particles etc. The consumers had all to upgrade to allow devs to make the game prettier with less cost. And it will also be true with ray-tracing and Nanite, both cut a LOT of dev time while making the game prettier but requires the consumers to upgrade their hardware. Graphics are not all about looks, it is also about facilitating dev time which makes the worst looking graphics look better. If Rambo The Video Game (2014) was made with the tech of today, it would look much better while costing the devs the same amount of time. Please don't see make comment as a critique, I'm just trying to make you understand that not everything is black and white, especially on something that is as complex as AAA development.

EDIT: I guess the absolute worst example of the current year would be Gollum, not Forspoken.

What's better than going to the main inspiration of Spider games? Insomniac already said that a huge inspiration of their games is the Batman Arkham Series. They play very similarly but with Arkham being more focused on stealth and puzzles. The first one, Arkham Asylum is more of a metroidvania than an open world, so I think you could start with Arkham City (the second one). As for Zelda, you could try one of its copycats, Genshin is one of them, the other one would be Fenyx Rising, a Ubisoft game. I have never played, but from what Ive read, it's pretty good.

I have worked with a handful of online stores, all of them used different criteria for what was the most popular item. Some were pretty simple like "highest volume of sales in the past 7 or 30 days", some others were pretty complex and some were pretty much dishonest, putting expensive products next to slightly higher than average ones in order to make them feel cheaper. Like the other comment have said, there is no consensus and it mainly depends on the company's goals with that section.