Or are games like Cyberpunk or Red Dead just made with early-mid 2010’s tech?
Edit: to clarify, development didn’t actually start 8 years ago, but rather the game was announced 8 years ago. Thanks to the commenters for letting me know!
In: Technology
At this point, technology doesn’t actually change very much. The industry has seen enormous changes, but currently nothing like that is happening.
Take for instance that in the times of NES consoles and such everything was sprite based. Everything had to be made from little 2D blocks of a fixed size. When 3D was introduced all of that had to be completely thrown out — the way you do the graphics is different, the way the world works is different, the way controls work are different. So definitely, at times like that, it was hard to keep up. If you spent years polishing up your old school 2D game, you might have found that by release day 3D had exploded and your stuff now looked old, and redoing everything for 3D would be impossible without starting from scratch.
But we seem to be mostly done with this kind of thing. The most similar thing to that going on today is VR, which while not that different from 3D games does have its own peculiarities and requirements that can be challenging to adapt to. But it’s still much less jarring than the shift to 3D was. Also, console hardware is far less “special” — modern consoles are pretty much standard PCs, rather than the extremely specialized devices they used to be with various weird and very manufacturer specific hardware.
Other than VR, which as far as I know Cyberpunk doesn’t use, we’re mostly adding incremental improvements: faster CPUs, faster video cards, faster storage, plus optional features like raytracing. Those are easy to adapt to. Make bigger textures, more complex assets, fill the world with more people, etc.
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