packrat so I won't get into why Hershey's is barely chocolate

There's a video for that:

    Chocolate is overrated, although highly addictive. All the worship it gets is just rationalization of sugar+cocoa addiction. If you go cold turkey for a couple of months and then put one of those things in your mouth again, they all taste like sugared-up vomit or bitter cardboard. Even the fancy European ones. Being from Europe, I can only imagine the horrors of Hershey's taste for an unconditioned palate.

      Yes, Witcher 3 marks the time when AAA games started becoming too realistic, and I never even noticed the hair and beard growth. It still looked good, but later games became so realistic they actually looked bad, and they spend billions of dollars on artwork (is it even 'art' when it's all mocap, photo textures, and 3D scans?) while neglecting gameplay.

      However, I make RPGs so I have to strike a balance; I can't simply say "no realism". Most RPGs have fuel and ammo. Anything that adds an interesting challenge is good realism, but excessive simulation adds nothing to gameplay or worse, leads to hair-splitting decisions or overly-precise aiming. If it's an open world RPG without fast travel, players will denigrate it as a "walking simulator". It also needs to look good by RPG afficionado standards, which are pretty forgiving compared to the latest normie AAA standards.

        synthnostate (is it even 'art' when it's all mocap, photo textures, and 3D scans?)

        Yes, because art is about composition and meaning. In other words, it matters more how it's all brought together rather than how it's produced in the first place.

        synthnostate If it's an open world RPG without fast travel, players will denigrate it as a "walking simulator".

        Not necessarily. So long as you have meaningful challenges and interactions show up regularly along the way.

            The Stone Soup developers had some really good rules about what makes a good game and what should be thrown out. If there's a "best" option, let alone a "required" one, it doesn't belong in the game. If any activity doesn't directly reflect a strategy, it doesn't belong. If something can be done by a simple algorithm, it doesn't belong (or should be automated).

            Of course, by their standards, MMOs should have all died out a long time ago. (I have a hard time disagreeing with that.)

              "Realism" is a very broad concept. Saying "realism=bad" is so generalized a statement that it almost makes no sense.

              Engaging gameplay is the defining characteristic of games, that sets them apart from other forms of art and media. So everything that supports the gameplay is good for a game. "Realism" can do a lot in that respect. Every "bad" thing listed in the OP can be cleverly woven into game rules, instead of being just realistic for the sake of being realistic.

              Even when used as mere gimmicks, realistic aspects can add to one other important dimension - the atmosphere. It's secondary to gameplay but still essential for satisfying gaming experience in many of genres.

                xyz ooh my precious belgian chocolate

                  DJM True.

                  This is what annoys me about Sony, most of their big sellers, other than COD, are "walking sim" or "narrative driven" adventure games like TLOU (The Last of Us).

                  Don't get me wrong I'm an adventure game fan from way back, but most of the good ones are PS exclusive, and I'm an Xbox guy.

                    xyz Maybe you've never had quality dark chocolate. I'd describe it as "fruity" or "exotic" way before I'd say "cardboard". But it's also true I'm weird. Maybe even a freak. I love earthy/medicinal flavors so much, I'm the kind of guy that seeks out protein bars for the flavor.
                    I understand where you're coming from if you're talking about milk chocolate, the average mars chocolate bar. 60% sugar, 10% dried milk, 20% cocoa butter and only 10% cocoa mass, concocted as punishment for man's gravest sins on earth.
                    Or maybe you're talking about fake "chocolate", the kind that has no real chocolate at all. No cocoa mass, no cocoa butter, but a brick of hydrogenated vegetable oil flavored with chemicals some dudes in a lab thought tasted kinda like chocolate, with a pinch of cocoa powder.

                      duane

                      If there's a "best" option, let alone a "required" one, it doesn't belong in the game.

                      that's way easier said than done. the life cycle of any online game is someone finding a dominant strategy that the developers attempt to fix, and if they manage it then someone else finds a new one, and it just repeats ad infinitum. and single player games are only better in the sense that there's not nearly as many people try-harding them into oblivion... normally.

                      xyz I understand what you're saying, but I struggle to figure out how something like "horse balls shrink in cold areas" (an actual example from RDR2, that took a surprising amount of resources to accomplish) could ever do any of that. if there is a line to cross, that game leaped over it with acrobatic prowess.

                            samuraidan Some dudes wanna play with their movies. Other dudes like their alternate realities to be a close cousin to ours. Others just want a puzzle to play with that has a pretty coat of paint. Ultimately if the machine can take it, someone gets paid for the work and someone enjoys it, I never saw the harm.
                            Besides that, shrinking horse balls was an awesome PR move. Do you know how many sites were talking about that?

                                The thing is, the huge $500 million dollar AAA games are a small portion of the games released. The vast majority are smaller indie stylized games.

                                If you go on Steam and just look at what's advertised on the front page, you see what big companies like Ubisoft and EA have paid for. But if you search out stuff you can find anything you want. Itch also has smaller more boutique games.

                                  I know my previous post sounded like I'm chocolate ignorant. But I'm a former fellow addict. In my time, I did everything. From hyper quality to canola oil sludges. But, as typically is the case with reformed addicts, I guess I now turned into an anti chocolate zealot.

                                  Long ago I was working on a gig far far in the aforementioned chocolate kingdom of Belgium. We went to visit the historical city of Brugge. It's dr. Evil's birth town but also a very picturesque place. During 6 hours I spent there, I ingested at least half of the lifetime allowance of premium chocolate mass. At the time I thought I was in heaven, but, as I came to realize years later, that were just sugar induced ephemeral endorphins doing the "thinking".

                                  It's worth mentioning here that the density of chocolate and pastry shoppes in Belgium is borderline insane. Every small town and village is oversupplied with chocolate. Pastry baubles fall out of windows. I remember wondering how the hell they're all staying so, ehm... relatively, thin.

                                  Many winters have passed and I went on the top of the mountain to meditate on chocolate incarnates. During one of the exhausting white chocolate fixated sessions, the divine providence settled upon me, thus I was granted the full fathom of the chocolate spectrum, and a realization that there's no true fulfillment to be found inside it.

                                  There are two orthogonal axes that constitute the spectrum. The cocoa axis and the sugar axis. If you go far down the cocoa axis, into the high flavor zone most "quality" chocolates claim to be occupying, you end up in the bitter area, because, duh - bean butter is bitter. And bitterness is one of my least favorite things. So you need to compensate on the sugar axis. But then you enter the diabetes quadrants. If you minimize on both axes, a third axis of fat and flavoring needs to be introduced, expanding the spectrum into the vast vegetable oil goo dimension. And in that dimension, as @packrat already concluded, a truly happy place is nowhere to be found either.

                                               Sugar
               ^
               |
               |
    Yucky      |      Yummy 
   Diabetes    |     Diabetes
               |
               |
---------------+----------------> Cocoa
               |
    Meh?       |
  Need to add  |      Yuck!
     3rd       |      Bitter
  artificial   |
     axis      |
               |

                                    xyz
                                    I have nothing. You're clearly more sagely than I.
                                    Though, I still disagree. Bitter is yummy. As I speak, I am drinking a mocha. How much sugar is in it?
                                    2/3 a gram, and yes, I measured. It's a left over habit from my baking days.

                                      I went to Hershey Park as a kid (it's the Disney Land of chocolate). They sell Hershey bars at the gift shop, except they make them there, and it's like 10x better the quality than the ones you get at the supermarket. So good.

                                      packrat I also saw a bunch of articles complaining about how much they had to crunch to get everything done. in the context of those articles, the previous ones about how much work they put into features that don't add or change anything gameplay or even visual wise (who's actually gonna look at them during gameplay?) feels really slimy. not to mention most articles about AAA games have been paid off for years now, so it probably wasn't even natural PR.

                                      cybereality I will agree with the caveat that it can be very, very hard to find stuff that's not good at advertising itself. steam tags are unreliable at best, a lot of good games don't sell well for a myriad of reasons so they never end up on lists, steam curators are a meme at this point I'm not sure why they still exist, and itch is mostly demos. ...a lot of which are for games that never got released. I'm someone who tries really hard to find hidden gems and games people forgot about that are still worth playing and it is not easy. on any platform. discoverability's a pain in the rear end!

                                            I hate how most AAA games go for hyper-realism in their graphics, that's for sure. It just makes the games more exclusionary to people with less-powerful hardware.

                                            But when it comes to gameplay aspects that's just personal preference tbh. Some genres are built specifically to be realistic as possible (simulator games) or at least realistic as playable (Escape from Tarkov, Arma 3, etc.). Others sometimes implement a small number of these "realistic features" into something called an immersive sim.

                                              HavenHuski I hate how most AAA games go for hyper-realism in their graphics, that's for sure. It just makes the games more exclusionary to people with less-powerful hardware.

                                              Conversely this is a huge boon for indie developers who aren't artists but are very capable coders, since they can rely more on premade asset packs of particularly the photogrammetric type assets. Since they will be decently consistent and not clash with each other. At least for static environmental art assets this can bring huge time and financial budget savings.

                                                  samuraidan steam tags are unreliable at best
                                                  samuraidan itch is mostly demos

                                                  And if you think steam's tags are bad you should see itch's. Shovelware devs purposely miscategorize their 'games' and there's zero enforcement.

                                                  samuraidan discoverability's a pain in the rear end!

                                                  Absolutely. Making a commercially viable (indie) game is only half the battle. Attractive graphics (i.e. "sufficient realism") go a long way though!