Thread 1011815

how the fuck does a studio of 30 people total (including programmers, managers) create such a massive game with unique environments and character models?

I struggle to create any environment in less than a month that is going to be rendered in a still frame. what kind of magic do these people do?

>>1011815 (OP)
by outsorcing and ending up with 400+ people in the credits. the "made by 30 people" is literally a lie and a marketing stunt

>>1011820
fpbp

>>1011815 (OP)
Not familiar with the work in question but one artist can make assets that on the surface looks like it'd be an impossible workload requiring large teams if you recycle content cleverly.

'stacked modularity' such that you can dramatically alter and customize the look of existing assets of combine them in novel ways that they in context looks different depending on their adjacency.

Tile pieces that snap together. trimsheet texture swaps such that same geometry can have dramatically different look for low cost effort on part of the artist.

The upfront cost is the R&D and time you spend assembling a deep enough bag of tricks to be able to do something like that. Like you can do something in 1 year that looks like it'd take you 10 years to do. But only because you probably already spent some years practicing developing the skills that goes into being able to do that.

Like take GTAO as an example, there are vehicles you can customize swapping body kits and liveries around such that same vehicle can have numberous builds that all look dramatically different.
You can do that same level of deep customization for architecture and generic looking but highly intentional terrain features etc.

>>1011831
reusing assets is standard practice, but if you played the game, you realize the environments are wildly different from each other it's almost impossible they created this world just with asset reuse

>>1011815 (OP)
buying pajeets for 2 cents on the dollar doing work for you

>>1011844
I watched a longplay of it and clicked around, well done for sure but there are tell tale signs of how they stretch what they have as thin as they can get away with with the characters often running thru narrow passage ways lined by heavily repeating static mesh. It's the kind of environments you can rapidly make a lot of once you have your base assets compiled.

What I said in that post very much applies to what I'm looking at, sit down and take your time to see what is the same element repeating with altered scale/orientation etc and you prob start to realize how it's feasible for a small team to create it for a much more reasonable effort than it first seems.

NieR is another good example where you easily see the heavy reuse of stringed together assets employed in similar fashion. That asian Final Fantasyesque 'anything goes' art style also lends itself to be able to use any and all assets you can acquire without anything looking out of place since incoherence is part of the aesthetic.

>>1011860
Blow out rooms with half the walls missing and pieces suspended in air by float magic is a classic time saver you keep seeing in these titles. "let's have a divine sky level where we run around on a bunch of random shit suspended midair in sumkind of northern lights bukkake space with fireflies and piano music"

Didn't see one of those specifically but I get the vibe they could have one of those somewhere in there.

>>1011815 (OP)
>>1011844
Jesus, Fromsoftware's success really sucked out the creativity out of gaming industry

>>1011815 (OP)
they used store assets for things like rocks, foliage, textures etc. of standard environmental features. still, this game has so many unique assets in it, that it becomes almost impossible to believe they did it all in 5 years.

>>1011820
if you had actually looked through the credits, you would know that they did in fact outsource, but in regards to actual in game assets, the only outsourcing they have done was to 8 koreans for gameplay and animation. I think you people don't understand just how many people end up in credits even if a core team is small. for example, if there are voice or music recording sessions, even just the person who confirmed the booking of the room will end up in the credits. this game has things like voice acting in 2 different languages, performance captures, that alone accounts for over 100 credits. the game has also been localized into several languages, and that alone also accounts for another 50 credits. now we have things like porting, QA, marketing, publishing. Very easy to get another 100 names on there through that.

at its core, the actual game creation was still handled by a relatively small team, but they had access to all the collaborators an AAA studio would have for porting, qa, publishing and marketing.

>>1011871
Reward someone for lowering the bar and the bars starts coming down. Had to happen at some point tho.

But it's pretty amusing how overtly algorithmic in nature human driven art is in this era when we all like to take a dump on AI.

>Machine can only combine not create! Soulless sl0p g3ner4t0r!
>manually *CTRL-C* souls-like slop *CTRL-V* 'ImadeThis.jpg'

>>1011957
Are you a professional? If I said this I would told to shut the fuck up and get out. I have to go along with what's made, even though I always wanted to be original. I guess I wasn't really asking the right questions with wanting to be original though. Since everything is based off something

>>1011957
>human driven art
>as opposed to dog or alien driven art

>>1011959
Does it matter if I am or what people would say? Either there's truth to it or not.

I think what we're witnessing in videogames follows a pattern of increasingly derivative work based on already very derivative work.
Audiences and creators alike have enough common references as to know what something represents when it appears so any story and framing
no longer serves any purpose; people are very willing to consume these disjointed tropes of stylistic archetypes ripped from
a cultural database of already established popular traits.

People into it no longer care if it has any coherence or substance, they only care what feeling this and that character evoke in them.

Fromsoft itself is deliberately designing like this; having stories so vague and cryptic that it becomes this canvas
onto which you can project whatever you want onto it. It's a pattern of 'post-meaning' art that is only concerned with surface aesthetics.

>Welcome to 'Vibes Dungeoun XII' where you get to consume more of your favorite flavor mental comfort food.

>>1011966
As opposed to machine driven art. You know, like that one ~everybody is quite concerned about.

>>1011970
But is having that opinion going to change anything

>>1011975
The lens thru which you view things informs you what to partake in and what to contribute towards.

Are having realizations like this gonna alter the trajectory of our culture? Not anytime soon.
But the more people gain such insights it stands the possibility to nudge the trajectory of specific individuals
that resonate with the message. Because it's not people entrenched in the current paradigm that will end up evolving us
past where we're already at, it somewhere amongst those who strays the path forward will be claimed.

You don't have to despise something to harshly criticize it. From a mature psychology you'll critique primarily
those things that have aspects you love because those are the things you wish to bring to a higher standard.

>>1011815 (OP)
For the past few decades, the French have been cultivating artists. Their art schools are really good, and so they produce a lot of highly talented people.

>>1011877
>the only outsourcing they have done was to 8 koreans for gameplay and animation.
Lol top kek. They had to outsource programming and animation to koreans, the rest of 492 + 27 people were literal blue haired females and art trannys, out of the remaining 3 one was sound engineer, one story/dialog writer and the team manager.
The game itself is pozzed beyond belief and the simps and coomers fell for it.

>>1011976
>i-itll change eventually
Yeah no. The practice of repeating what works will happen regardless whether you like it or not. Even the idea of being purely new/original doesn't exist. Either learn it and shut the fuck up or pretend to be those bullshitter hustler zoomers that are a dime a dozen. I know I will be honest and know what I have to know.

>>1011815 (OP)
get millions of daddy money to fund the game for 3+ years, outsource part of the game, "it was made by 33 people!' profit

what they did is super impressive, but "it was made by 30 people" is just wrong. If anything, it just shows that if a company can use money smartly can make great games, any game company that get shit on like EA, blizzard and so on are capable of making a game this good and even better because they have more money. When you have to bend over to stakeholder, pay the 15 blue hair HR people and the one chinese and indian guy that is part of the company but does fuck all but actually make the company pay them money instead of paying their core artist more, you get shit games

>>1012128
Also considering the salary in France (im a frog) wouldn't surprise me one bit if there were some fuck around with the money being funnelled somewhere else (in someone/family pocket) cause trust me, the devs are not seeing a salary of almost 3 millions (for 30 people... or so) being put in their monthly income

>>1012128
>underdog success story
>look inside
>nepobaby/trust fund kid
I should stop getting surprised

>>1012130
true but games like this is why they want to take away your inheritance, your family and separate your people, because some trust fund baby with a good idea and the willpower to execute it is a threat to their monopolies
i've never played the game and probably never will, but i'm sure big game companies hate the fact that it got made

>>1011815 (OP)
Simple answer really, they use blender, blender speed up your workflow 1000% faster than Maya, your average mayatard took 1 month to create a single props, meanwhile Chad blender user could produce 10 times much more in the same amount of time

>>1011815 (OP)
Games, in theory, should be faster than ever to produce especially since a lot of the baking processes like lightmaps are gone which lets artists put together worlds extremely quickly. Expedition 33 has the luxury of not having bureaucracy get in the way. Other companies like Acitivision and Bethesda have too many employees, politics, and metrics to make an efficient product.

>>1011815 (OP)
>>1012190
>>HOUDINI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VpXC5VhXxTA&t=4448s

>>1012594
>uaa je uaaa je uaa voluemetrique jeea voluemetrique quiii uaa ouu

UE5 stock terrain generation
+ stock photogrammetry packs these include tons of photoscanned rocks, and mountains
UE5 is basically designed around making huge rocky, forest, outdoor areas easy as fuck
tutourial
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJXw8oQcjTU
probably what their process looked like
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urTYEBBQbY4

UE5 Meta humans for all human characters they used i can tell by the hair this character creator makes making human characters a breeze no riging just a little sculpting if at all. plus it has hair already figured out for you too.
you can also just scan your face and viola new character that looks like you
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy2GpNHObv0

Ue5 does so much solo dudes can even make stuff like this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=edVPug0ehE4
that entire thing was made by a single dude

People who are impressed by what few devs do with UE5 don't understand, how much ue5 already does for you, how many photoreal asset packs etc. are available.
you hardly have to make anything from scratch like the old days.
Just download UE5 and see for yourselves.
Hell you don't even have to be a big boy and code to use UE5 you can just use node graphs.

>>1012786
part 2
And i mean it makes sense if you're making something generic af, tons of people have already made systems for that so why remake the wheel and not use whats already been made.
just look at a couple of tutourial videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1XjgLKrb4_M

>>1012787
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ju7wyvZGBI&list=PLKPWwh_viQMGQkQfKKD5lF96efA3_RWt-&index=3
more videos showing how easy dis shit is

>>1012788
If it's that easy then why aren't all other devs doing it?

>>1012789
They aren't?

>>1012786
they certainly used this and then "tricked" the players into thinking they were in different regions by changing the colours, drastically, there's a reason why the gestral forest is red, fallen leaves is yellow and so on. but that's not the whole story.

they also used a shit ton of houdini and procedurally generated assets and scattering tools. with Houdini you can do a lot of shit quite cheaply this way. look at the lead technical artists artstation

>>1012128
also explains all the freemason imagery in the game.

>>1014167
Bro, it's got 33 in the title...

>>1011988
It always surprises me that people like you exist on a board dedicated to craft and productivity. I have to assume you're just a tourist from vpol and don't actually do anything.

>>1012128
Of course it had to be a rich kid. Fuck I'm so jelly. Ngmi but that was known already

>>1012128
Billionaire fatigue is real

Contracted hundreds

>>1011815 (OP)
>what kind of magic do these people do?
lidar, 3d scanning and AI

>>1012128
2.7 million is button money outside the turd world

>>1012128
2.7 million is literally pocket change compared to any AAA game. Doubly so if you include advertising budget.

>>1011815 (OP)
>expedition33.
fuck this shitty fucking game with its shitty fucking off centered camera
looks and feels like dogshit

>>1011815 (OP)
>>1011815 (OP)
>I struggle to create any environment in less than a month that is going to be rendered in a still frame. what kind of magic do these people do?

Bruh...
>go to Unreal Engine asset store (now known as FAB)
>search for [whatever]
>buy
>import in your scene
DONE

You want caracters?
>get CC4 or Daz Studio or MetaHuman
>search around in their asset store
>buy
>import in your scene
DONE

This is why Clair Obscur has no coherent artistic style. It's a smorgasbord of "cool shit" they found online. Ever wondered why there are so many realistic military shooters? Ever wondered why in a sci-fi game like Death Stranding you have this whole WW2/ModernWarfare sections? It's because there's a shit ton of top quality war assets out there that you can just drag and drop in your scene for pennies.

Of course you have to create custom assets like the clothes on the main characters but that's easy to do. It's easier to start with a AAA rig like MetaHuman than from zero.

Btw, AAA studios do the same exact thing. Their development team consists of also around 30 people yet they have so much money given to them by the publishers that instead of buying FAB assets they choose to hire FAB artists on commission.

When they say "only 30 people" they only count the coders, and the subtext is "if you don't like certain aspects of the game please be kind cause only so little people worked on it".

When AAA studios say "over 400 people worked on the game", the subtext is "our game is expensive because we have a lot of mouths to feed".

The visual assets in a game are the least important part in the development but also the most expensive. Visual assets are there to mask boring basic shit like "if (button_press) then (character_walk)". Look at a game like TLoU 1&2. There's hardly any gameplay but the visuals are so amazing that players don't even notice that all you do is just walk and and point your cursor from time to time. BioShock: Infinite is a literal rail-shooter.

>>1017695
https://x.com/MR3Dev/status/1917019772253884667
proof

>>1011815 (OP)
I'm honestly not and never have been impressed by messy post apocalyptic jumbles of props like this. I mean, congrats, it looks cool enough, but it's not that amazing and requires far less work than nature and habitations that look like they could actually exist.

>>1012594
If you want to punch above your weight as a dev, having a good technical director, who knows software like Houdini, is essential. This is also how another small team made an impressive looking game, The Ascent.

>>1011815 (OP)
By not actually being massive? Its a JRPG in the style of plder JRPGs where you have vast backgrounds but the actual walkable space is pretty small

>>1011815 (OP)
Do employees come with no resources tied to them? Like, a portfolio doubles as an asset library. A company is very likely to hire someone who has a massive asset library that belongs to that 1 person.

Getting hired can boil down to already completing years worth of work.

>>1017790
That's not how copyright works

>>1017793
irrelevant

>>1017795
How is it irrelevant

>>1017790
Yeah it's usually a given that portfolios will be made from stuff you made at a previous employer so it can't be used. Plus it won't be to spec anyway

>>1017797
>>1017802

When are we blocking access to the internet for minors?

>>1017790
You clearly never worked a job in your entire life.

>>1017809
You are a sped

>>1017790
What you are talking about is called asset libraries and has nothing to do with employees

Saar I am in the credits, this is very outrageous. Do the needful and remember there would be no game assets without me, saar.

I've seen gameplay and it looks like an asset flip, dont see the hype, avg gamer will eat up anything their favorite streamer tells them

Gonna get GOTY for sure, demonstrating the power of Blender

>>1021224
It wasn’t made in Blender, they didn’t create anything. Everything you see in the game was brought in Unreal Store asset or in some other website. The “made in Blender” was nothing but lies in DA.

>>1021230
The power of blender is so overwhelming you have to imagine it was the resilt of a dozen different tools. As an autodesk user it would make sense, since their tools are so limited

>>1021300
No, they really just brought stuff from UE store: youtube.com/watch?v=mEYKF1fCL24

They never used Blender.

>>1021302
Denial is the first step to acceptance, you'll understand the power of blender like you should, eventually

>>1021302
You should tell the lead artist cause he lists blender as used in making the character models on artstation