A lot of what defines AAA games these days is that, as much as possible, every moment has some kind of hand crafted element to it, often not constructed from th

A lot of what defines AAA games these days is that, as much as possible, every moment has some kind of hand crafted element to it, often not constructed from the core mechanics. In the days of half life and what not, distinct content was mostly in the form of level design and enemy placement and what not. In AAA games of today its from scripted sequences that are more movie esque. I think its a bad direction tbh. It's too expensive and, especially in an open world game, you end up with an uncanny valley of super deep and super uninteresting gaps of content. I think breath of the wild was the one game to make a more traditional approach work with open world content. There's NOT a lot scripted sequences. Most of the fun is emergent from a small but comprehensive physics system. You don't see a whole lot of new elements around each corner, but it works. But if your goal is hip cliche AAA game, yeah, you need the huge team. I don't know if its much of a diminishing marginal utility of devs/artists either, so much as a sprawling tree of parallel but unrelated pieces. The newer tomb raiders are the epitome of this to me. Every five minutes you're on a death defying leap with crumbling architecture or whatever. As close to the video game ideal of "every frame a painting".