It can be brutal. Hard hours, stressful deadlines, cooperate greed, no job security in a lot of the AAA companies. But... I have never seen or heard of an industry filled with such passion. Most people in this industry love what they do and it shows.
Kite Demo is fantastic and artistically amazing. It definitely is a huge step forward for real-time rendering. I agree that the game industry, or at least the game industry outside of AAA, has moved past realism and is more stylistically diverse.
One of the most anticipated AAA title for me, and I'm a big fan of Quantic Dream's games. Already looks, feels and sounds so tempting. As a character artist myself, this game has the proper eye candy in that matter. ;D
GDC - Animating Dauntless. Worth checking out! He goes into how they use mocap for their stylized game, as well as using mocap on their creatures. Great talk. http://gdcvault.com/play/1024081/Animating-Dauntless-Slaying-AAA-Animation
Seriously best game ever. They went one further with this, making a ball have more character than most AAA films. Then they went even further and made the bloody walls have amazing character! I give up.
Thanks Tvidotto! About couriers, I'm leaving them to some AAA 3D artists friends of mine :P Anyways, If you want to do a courier let me know and I'll see what we can do ;)
Another successful collaboration! I love the opportunity to work on high fidelity VR assets. If you or your team are interested in AAA quality asset, textures, or environments, DM or email me at cptalbatross@gmail.com and let's get to working!
wow, something new! :D Was just disappointed that they only showed all this sequels. Would have loved to see something new. Maybe nintendo will show some real new AAA games, where they launch a new console.
I went from self-taught for a year to first-party AAA-development. If you work hard enough on your art, befriend the right people ie networking. People will notice you and will want to help you get in.
I can't be too specific unfortunately but at this point, pretty much every AAA studio has either a bunch of SD/SP licenses or at least a will to evaluate. Publisher wise, the biggest Substance users are Sony, Activision, Ubisoft and Capcom.