MS just stealth-launched their own version of Steam Box (Off-Topic)

by uberfoop , Seattle-ish, Monday, June 13, 2016, 22:28 (3252 days ago) @ Kermit

It takes a lot of man hours to produce hyperrealistic content. (I think about the marketplace sequence in Uncharted 4 and it boggles my mind.) Maybe technology could advance in a way to make production easier.

That's basically everything in modern game development. Creating assets has ballooned into astronomical costs, and mitigating that with tools is critical. The popularity of Speedtree for aiding in the creation of foliage assets is a particular clear sign of this. Improving software delays when artists are testing content as they iterate is also a huge deal; remember how the internet sort of blew up when the rumor surfaced about Destiny's development environment taking forever to load a level.

There are more nuanced changes; most of the motivation behind physically-based rendering has to do with getting artists to create and tune their assets faster, by supplying a consistent and predictable framework for defining materials and lights.