>>724216019
>Why is good art direction a lost art?
It's not. The problem is that big studios don't give a fuck about good art direction. They want as many people making as much shit as realistic as possible. You don't have good art direction without GOOD DIRECTION, and there's no way to fully direct 100+ people— half of them being outsourced contractors who don't even see you 90% of the time— all working to make shit "realistic" unless you're a fucking once in a generation king of vidya.
There's a reason why "design by committee" is an insult for art that has no vision. There's a reason "too many cooks in the kitchen" is a saying. Don't get it twisted; I'd wager that roughly 40-60% of the artists who worked on this shit are legitimately talented people, but that all means NOTHING if there's so much noise that no clear vision comes through. Then, on top of that, you have two added barriers: a remake cannot have a vision of its own. You are always going to be handicapped by the original's intentions, and unless the remake team is at least 70% the original staff or at least turboautists who've obsessed over the game their whole lives it's always going to result in direction becoming muddied (and even then, it still might). Then you add AIslop on top of that, which Micro$oft is pushing its employees to use nonstop. LLMs are LITERALLY a design by committee machine, a mechanical focus group designed to produce the "most average" result from a prompt using an uncountably large dataset. There can be no vision in a machine designed to produce grey sludge.
Games have gotten too big, studios have gotten too afraid of risk. It's going to keep getting worse until smaller-scale studios build up enough capital to fund AAA games without getting acquired, which will never happen if they go public because every shitfuck retard investor will just push them into a buyout from Micro$oft or EA or whatever other dogshit megalithic corporation without a soul.
