I bought Red Dead Redemption 2 last weekend because it was reduced to $17, it’s supposed to be amazing, and I loved the first one.
I still have to finish Pragmata (loving it) and am really enjoying Forza Horizon 6, but I’m planning to play the heck out of Red Dead.
Seeing as how Red Dead is made by Rockstar Games, it also made me think of this recent post from Matt Webb, where they likened these big games that take 200 years and billions of dollars to make to the great pyramids. In other words, soon-to-be ancient history.
Grand Theft Auto 6 is maybe the last of them. As they put it:
Incidentally GTA6 is coming out in November and apparently it cost $1 billion to make.
Gonna play the heck out of it not just for the music but because of its status as a cultural artefact: the final big game built before LLMs.
No-one will ever invest that much in a game again, no software will ever encode this quantity of hands-on human labour again. The last of the great pyramids.
You think any studio will ever again spend years recording human-authored dialogue from human voice actors for NPCs in story branches that the player may encounter? No way. As much as I am looking forward to playing the first AAA title that does something unique and infinite with AI, we are at the end of an era.
They’ve got a point, certainly.
Comments welcome!