The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria Revealed

[AusWolf]

but it's not a AAA title then.

a AAA title uses the latest engine/graphics and have dozen of millions of dollars of development cost and huge dev teams, look at the games being developed with unreal engine 5.
So yes, you can judge a game by it's graphics if it's called "AAA".

this is not AAA, not even near, as everyone said before, graphics look extremely dated the lighting, animations and models are stiff, plasticky and not organic moving, it looks like a 10+ years old "AA" game and even then it's a "maybe", even COD WARZONE has better graphics and animation and it's a F2P MMFPS.

COD Warzone, aka. Generic Shooter 46978469? If that's AAA, then I'll stick to cat. B games, thanks.

 

[big_glasses]

No, it's an indie game made by a number of people that is presumably less than 87.

Admittedly, I had something of a similar reaction. It's kinda plasticky-looking, and doesn't manage a particularly distinct aesthetic. None of that means it won't be good, though. This ain't an original thought, but we could do with less emphasis on graphics in games. Eye candy's great and all, but if a developer needs to choose whether to de-prioritize graphics, gameplay, design or performance, I know which I'd prefer they pick.

Valheim manages to have a more unique (albeit low poly/graphic) style that doesn't look stiff/plastic, 5 person studio https://www.ign.com/articles/valheim-how-a-5-person-team-created-the-most-popular-game-on-steam
GTFO manages to look great (for what was a 9 person team until recently/ during their EA), can't find source since they've increased massively before release. They are 65 now https://www.apollo.io/companies/10-Chambers/56d964e6f3e5bb262c002109?chart=count
Riftbreaker (Exor Studio) is allegedly 14 people (11-50 person 'size', both according to their linkedIn) https://www.linkedin.com/company/exor-studios?original_referer=https://www.bing.com/
The Forest devs is (I believe) 8 people. https://opengovca.com/vancouver-business/20-118155
It Takes Two (I absolutly love this game. Great visuals and extremely fun gameplay) (Hazelight studio) is 65 people. https://www.hazelight.se/about/
Ultimate Epic Battle Simulator 2 (and 1) from Brilliant Game Studios, while not the most graphical beatuiful, it does run it's pathfinding-AI of the GPU and can have an immense amount of units on the map(I've run a couple of multi-million unit battles in it), this is with a 4 person studio


Of course, the amount of devs and graphics doesn't mean that the game will be bad (or good). It's not really an indictive of very much, except maybe higher release chance than single dev 'studio'....