If it includes marketing then yeah, it's mostly that. $700M is an absolutely absurd astronomical amount for what CoD is, on a purely development basis.
Sledgehammer Games. They never really kept the cycle, they kept fucking up and others had to come in to help etc. There's got to be disatrous management at the studios.
You cannot convince me it cost $700M to make any of the recent CoD games. They are rehashes of each other. That has to include literally every dollar spent during the games development lifecycle across all studios and the publisher, right? Otherwise they are just pissing money away.
But Larian themselves released a buggy mess even with early access for 3 years? Why did they rush it out?
Fuck EA and AAA in general, but like practice what you preach Swen. You aren't the small studio you think you are anymore, you have nearly 500 employees.
You cant toggle it, or you get loads of shimmering, you cant use it because you get loads of blur. There's ghosting even without AA. This is the exact problem, there's no good implementation if you are relying on TAA and/or DLSS as anti-aliasing. Squad suffers it, the same as any UE5 game.
I really dont mind solutions like upscaling, but it should be for people with older hardware, so they can run newer games better.
Instead it is used as a crutch by developers to gain some "performance" out of their poorly made game (Not blaming devs individually here, they are all probably overworked on titles like this and they wont have much of a say in what tools or timeframe they have). You are right, it's a capitalism issue too.
TAA just looks like I have grease smeared over my monitor... the only acceptable AA for deferred rendering is SMAA honestly, but I still think it's a misused technique in most cases, I have only seen a few games look good with it. Games with it usually have lots of visual flaws, that they hope TAA smears over. But then you just get a blurry game.
Yes, the engine could be used well, but it's used for it's out of the box "good" graphics, lighting and such. Which then yes, devs slap on shitty DLSS, frame generation or whatever at the end to reach a somewhat playable framerate (or "framerate number" should I say with the way things are going. Fuck you Nvidia).
No developers are going to spend ages tweaking the engine to get good performance when people will just buy the game regardless. I've yet to see a good performing UE5 game with good fidelity and I probably never will because it's entirely reliant on TAA as it's deferred rendering as standard. I hate seeing developers abandoning their own in-house engines just to swap to shitty UE5. I know, I know, it's all about the money...
The engine is a plague, as every developer is seemingly moving to it. Chasing "upgraded" graphics that no one asked for. All games consolidating onto one engine is very bad.
It's good for movies, bad for games. Give us good raster performance back, no TAA, no upscaling, no frame gen.
You can play Unciv I guess, I don't see why you would want a strategic view only though? Nothing stopping you just using that mode exclusively yourself.
Steam (and PC in general) just lends itself to indie games more, which is good. It could do better, but overall there's a lot of great games that get the recognition they deserve. Triple A finds most of it's success on consoles, where they can easily market it on the front page of the console, rather than just on the store.
But PC is (unfortunately?) really getting mainstream now, so we are starting to see a lot morals thrown out the window by consumers just to play the latest AAA slop too.