i get that it's optional and shouldn't affect anything by being there, but...
doesn't it seem pretty dumb to anyone else to make a game, and throw in a button to skip the game part?
But I think the whole idea of what a video game
is deserves re-examination. The vast majority of games inevitably boil down to you using often lethal force to overcome an enemy who intends to use similar force on you. There's nothing wrong with that per se, we're all on a forum devoted to a game that at its heart is about blowing spaceships to pieces. But somehow around 1992 it was decided that video games
must be about killing or some sanitized version thereof. The whole concept of video gaming needs to be re-evaluated, but a large sector of the target audience ("gamers") are openly against any sort of re-evaluation because the entire medium is hopelessly rotten and incestuous (see video game "journalism") and controlled by insiders both among the producers and consumers who loathe and distrust any sort of outsider (including demographic outsiders like women).
And in the end these idiots will probably buy the next BioWare game anyway. They will go on their forums and complain about how BioWare has betrayed them (again), and bull-rush the stores on the release day of the next BioWare game (again).
So **** them.
The indie studios are our only hope for any kind of innovation. Fortunately for us, thanks to increasing computing power and automation, and the sort of graphics "ceiling" (where effort to improve the visuals has diminishing returns), I think we'll start to see more indie titles that can give these AAA blowhards a run for their money visually while still being awesome. And, of course, we'll always have the types of games where the visuals don't matter as much as the content. Minecraft, anyone?
Not going to happen. Even if the target of AAA graphics stops moving, to get better asset fidelity you need to pour more resources and man-hours into making those assets. A typical game in 1980 was developed by some nerd in his house. A typical game in 1990 was developed by a handful of people in a tiny development studio on a budget of thousands. A typical game now is made by hundreds of people working in a massive corporate enterprise on a budget of tens of millions. Think of the absolute best of the FSU assets, the stuff that really makes jaws drop. Imagine having to make an entire game with that (or higher) as the
minimum standard, not just models and textures but music, interface art, level design (FS benefits immensely from not having to build physical levels at the same detail as all the other models, since everything is set in space) voice acting, writing, absolutely everything, on a two-year deadline. Hundreds of talented people, working
full-time and you have to pay them (do you want to work 60 hours a week for free?). You have to write your own engine too, or license one for hundreds of thousands and then still need a small army of coders to customize it for your purposes. Then add publishing, marketing, production, overhead...
Without a huge development studio backed by a publisher that can throw $10 million or more into a project, you're not going to get that.
And then you have to QA the resulting product. Hundreds more people, hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars...
Trying to match AAA games' asset fidelity is not a realistic or desirable goal for indie developers.