Dragon Age: The Veilguard consultant and former Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah has published a Youtube video addressing the question: "why do AAA games take so long?" It's a tidy 25 minutes or so, and gets a fair way into the weeds of a variety of topics, from the current enthusiasm for live service "forever games" over 'finite', narrative-led affairs, to the "misleading" announcement of highly-demanded sequels years before they enter full production, in order to pump up a publisher's brand during a dry spell.
One thing I wanted to fish out and drop on your plate is Darrah's discussion of what he terms "the fidelity death cult" - that is, the desire for ever greater levels of lifelike visual detail and "intricacy". "We are also in a period of something I've called the fidelity death cult," Darrah explains in the vid, around the eight minute mark. "where a lot of games are trying for hyper-realistic art styles, hyper-high fidelity, hyper-customisation, hyper-intricacy.
These things, while they don't contribute to a larger size, while they don't help you make a forever game, they still take a lot more time.
When you are concerned about the way people's hair moves on their back, that's going to take time that you in the past wouldn't have done.
You would have just spray-painted their hairdo on, or given them a hair cap, or something pretty static. Now, you're introducing new avenues of complexity." He extends the point to encompass player dislike of things in games they consider to have been "recycled", from chunks of recurring environment to animation systems. "Similarly, we currently see from players quite a bit of pushback on the reuse of systems and assets, so even though I might be making a sequel to a game that came out just a couple of years ago, I might feel within the dev team that we can't reuse any of our assets, because we're going to get pushback from the players.