Why do modern games have less dynamic/living worlds than 20 years ago?
>>730858331>mfw finding a STALKER I shot a friendly smile and wave at in The Bar dead in the zone later
>>730858331the people who make video games now don't have the same combination of money and passion the ones back then did. they either have money and make soulless money extractors, have no money and find a way to make a soulless money extractor, or they have passion but not enough money to make the game they really want.
>>730858331baitpost but i'll give you a real answer because sleep isn't coming to me tonightbecause people do not give a shit about dynamic or living worlds like you might find in Stalker or Oblivion, and happily settle for the thinly veiled illusion thereof generally via story stepping, instances, and scriptrouted events based on the player's choices that have hard, specific outcomesoftentimes, they prefer this because the game and their session of play is more stable and isn't interrupted by random bullshit that kills an important NPC or something and they have to load, or, in worse cases, crashes the gamenot to mention, you're often looking at older game living/dynamic worlds through the lens of maybe 5+ years of official patches, and are also probably grabbing community patches which tend to shore up the rest of it, most of these games on release would basically crash every 30 minutesand then there's just the technical debt of such a system on the development end, having a bunch of NPC agents running around doing random shit is hard to design anything coherent aroundholy fuck EDGE CASES there are so many edge cases where the NPC will probably try to do something that crashes the game, stalker was notorious for this and most updates and patches to the game were just fixing stupid NPC bullshitand then someone reports the crash, now you get to diagnose something that is not easily reproducible, not really predictable, you might need their save, and there's a good chance whatever crashed them, won't happen on your end so the report is completely mootand again, you're going through all this headache, writing all this NPC code, for a feature that the player will likely not even notice or have any reason to care about, and would be far easier to just script specific events and encounters in for that randomly happen as the player runs around, at best they'll remember random zany bullshit NPCs might do, but that's about itits just not worth it
>writing all this NPC code, for a feature that the player will likely not even noticehow low IQ do you have to be to NOT notice this stuff? within 30 seconds of being in Cyberpunks open world (post intro stuff) you can very easily tell the games world run almost entirely on scripted events for gang fights etc, with very little dynamic activity. You don't need to "try" and notice this stuff, its blindingly obvious and hurts immersion.
