The monkey's paw curls. New AAA games now feature thousands of individual rock models, among other labor- and space-saving measures being forgone in favor of realism. The game is 400 GB and the devs have worked 110 hours per week for the last 3 months
There was a game that came out a few years ago that scanned in most of its rocks for photorealism. I can’t recall the name. EA was the publisher, I think?
Tons of games do that now. Usually they get scans and models from other companies, like Quixel Mega scans. It makes for a relatively fast workflow. Pretty much any photo-real game is doing something like this, it's just more affordable than paying people to digitally sculpt rocks by hand.
Setting aside that asset production is genuinely one of the most expensive parts of game dev, if they're smart they can use some clever GPU instancing to improve performance by reusing assets