The studios who do this mostly aren’t looking for an actual artistic vision. Play any of the recent Ubisoft open world games and you see at best moments of it during distinct, isolated sections (usually trips caused by substance use) that were clearly tackled by smaller teams within the large group of developers. The rest were busy making 15 different types of trees.
They do exist and in greater numbers and variety than ever before. Play Undertale, Baba is You, BeamNG.drive, FTL, Disco Elysium, Emily is Away, Islanders, NEO Scavenger, Rodina, Whispers of a Machine, Proteus, etc.
Totally random examples, but I could name dozens more. We are spoiled with great games that are pure expressions of their developers’ visions. There are more of them than anyone can realistically ever play.
That’s not how this works. You can comparatively easily scale up art departments, but you can not do the same with engineering and design. It’s also much less difficult to find competent artists in their respective niches than programmers and designers. Art skills can be far more easily taught and to a wider variety of people regardless of their inherent talent than software engineering and game design at the required level. Especially in the area of software engineering, game studios also have to compete with other fields with inherently better work/life balance, which is far less so the case with e.g. texture artists, modelers and animators.
Art can also be produced sequentially in large numbers and making more of it at a certain high enough level of quality makes a game appear more valuable to consumers. It’s practically guaranteed: Spend more on art, have more stuff you can impress people with, a more enticing value proposition. You can spend a fortune on game design and programming, but that’s invisible and there is far less of a guarantee that it’ll work out in the end (see: the phenomenon referred to as development hell), let alone attract customers.
Try marketing a game on mechanics and design instead of graphics. Most people pay maybe 15 to 30 seconds of attention to promotional material at best before making a purchasing decision. The vast majority of gamers do not read reviews, let alone whining essays about how some journalist doesn’t care about graphics (which have been written since the 1980s - there’s nothing new under the Sun). You can wow customers with fancy trailers and gorgeous screenshots, but you can not explain why your game that you spent 100 million on game design alone on has better game design than that blockbuster with individually modeled and animated facial hair.
Does it still contain remnants of Quake 3 or have they finally gotten rid of them?
This studio is not just known for an even by Japanese standards exploitative work culture, but it also reuses assets of all kinds far more liberally than other developers. Art is by far the biggest cost factor in games development and they are taking significant shortcuts wherever they can.
Have you tried Flight Simulator 2020?
There were also TV shows that would have a little flickering box in the top right corner. You would attach a diode to the screen and by the end of the show, you had a working program recorded to cassette.
Programs were not just distributed on cassettes and via radio and TV broadcasts. There was software distributed on vinyl records as well. The very first programs distributed on CD were stored on CDs as audio.
All of this was done, because floppy disks and especially floppy drives were hideously expensive - and hard drives even more so. It wasn’t unusual for a floppy drive to cost more than the machine it was attached to. Everyone had a cassette recorder at home though and knew how to operate it.
If this seems cumbersome, consider that one of the most important software distribution methods for home computers in the '70s and '80s was through so-called listings: Magazines would print the program code and you manually typed it in, line by line. We are talking cryptic assembler code, not something an ordinary human being could actually understand:
https://i.imgur.com/NW4Mhp6.jpg
If you were very lucky, there were checksums. If not, have fun going through every single one of the hundreds to thousands of lines of code, trying to find that one mistake you made. In case you were a kid on a tight budget, it wasn’t uncommon that you didn’t actually have any storage media to save this code to, so if you wanted to play a game, you had to type it in anew every time.
Even if you stored it on cassette tape, loading times on for example the C64 were typically between 15 and 30 minutes, if it loaded correctly.
Early home computing was wild.
It sold reasonably well in Germany, just like other titles from this studio. It was never as popular as any of the Gothic or even Risen games though, but a small community still formed around it.
I had no issues with it when it launched, on fairly modest hardware. Quite an enjoyable open world game with great world design and somewhat clunky, if highly skill-based combat and movement, as to be expected from this studio. The way the jet pack is a core part of the game design is remarkable, if you actually make use of it as intended.
Mixing used and new hardware is the cheat code. A used RTX 2080 beats Xbox Series X and PS5, yet it can be found for only about 200 bucks. The rest of the hardware can be new. That’s how I did it.
Before online DRM, we used to buy games once among friends, dividing the cost, and then share them. At first, everyone got the disc for a few days each, but then we figured out how to remove the copy protection…
No, not almost every other mod. Only small ones. Total conversions like Enderal are not possible:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/976620/Enderal_Forgotten_Stories_Special_Edition/
This mod is essentially a massive (50 hours just for the main story) free AAA RPG with its own world, story and mechanics. It even comes with professional voice acting in German and English.
I first streamed from PC to a portable device with my PSP way back when. It did not work very well, but it was a neat proof of concept.
That said, Playstation consoles have had this ability since the PS3 as well.
The hardware, yes. You can build a console-equivalent system for only a little bit more. It is far cheaper in the long run though. Games cost less, after all.
Get one of those gamepad cradles with USB-C (but don’t cheap out on it).