You're being downvoted but I feel the same exact way. I've been playing video games since pong, and through the years the 3D effects have really been used to bring the story to life. These days, the story is used to drive the 3D effects, and I'm just not here for it. I could already start to feel it in the Final Fantasy 7 days - like, yeah, it's really neat that the characters are 3D now for the first time, but why am I sitting through this 10 minute "Knights of the Round" casting animation every single battle? Let me get back to the things I found fun about the Final Fantasy series, which was fine in 2D pixel art.

And yet, for some reason, the industry ran with those cutscenes. They got worse in FF8, and then today we see the end result. I mean, they really gave it away when they made Final Fantasy: The Sprits Within and they made such a big deal about how they did the hair. The whole movie was just to showcase their hair model.

So now here we are in 2023, and we are playing the same games over and over again, but with better graphics every year. I'm sure this face capture tech or similar will make its way into all the next AAA games including the next Final Fantasy, which will have amazing hair and clothes and eyes and facial movements, but it will be the same game that's been made for 30 years.

Thankfully, not all is lost.

The best game released in decades is hands down in my opinion Dwarf Fortress, which took the graphics budget and put it toward innovative gameplay. Then there's Factorio which similarly isn't using AAA graphics, and could be called "retro". Of course Minecraft was a huge hit, and it had FFF graphics, only proving that really the graphics are next to meaningless if the gameplay is fun enough.

Today there's a whole retro-gaming movement that's dedicated to breathing new life into consoles like the NES, but embracing the graphical limitations of the platform to focus on innovative gameplay and rich storytelling. The indy game scene is pretty strong to the point of being oversaturated really. I doubt it will cool down though with all these new AI technologies; now more than ever it's possible to take a game idea all the way to fruition with an AI helper generating assets for you.

If it's slow, costly, and hard to animate characters, only cutscenes—where the animated characters are the focus—will have well-animated characters. But if it's fast, cheap, and easy, then even the incidental “scenery” NPCs can have nice animations, making the game world seem more alive.

I disagree. I'm completely tired of mannequin NPCs. Anything that will make it easier for NPCs to behave like living things is a win in my book.

I'm also not a fan of the interactive movie genre. It's a weird niche, and I don't really know who it serves.

Two decades ago, I would have generalized it to "console gamers", but I'm not so sure after the God of War / Elden Ring GOTY vote.