Starfield was the biggest letdown ever for me
It was honestly the design choice to make it procedural generation and then leaving the universe as a new game plus. That killed it completely.
That and the horribly boring story. Emil Pagliarulo should have been fired over a decade ago.
Edit: Also the fact that the most fun parts of space travel are cutscenes. Probably because of the limitations of using the same damn engine they’ve been keeping on life support since 1997.
I feel like the death if the AAA industry has been dragging on for a while. Every time the “only indie studios can save gaming” feeling hits me a new God of War or Knack 2 or Doom comes out.
Baldur’s Gate 3 gave me one of the most appealing experiences I’ve ever had playing a video game. It literally felt like a breath of fresh air coming from the rest of the industry. I tried to get into Divinity, but hated the combat so much I stopped playing as much, and then dropped it. I still didn’t love the combat in BG3, but damn, the rest of it literally blew me out of the water. The cinematics of interactions with NPCs, the freedom to do what the developers didn’t intend for you to do, but still allowed it anyway, and so much more. An actual amazing game that seemed to push what SHOULD be the norm for games going forward (RPG wise), but that requires actual writers, actual planners, and actual people who care about video games. That’s not something the big “AAA” studios like to have on their teams, because that costs money.
DoS is an adjustment after BG3, but I’ve come to prefer the combat and character build mechanics. I bounced off it soon after BG3 and got really into it after trying again later. If you thought you might enjoy it, worth another try.
I hope their next game is DoS 3 (or a Shadowrun game if I dare to dream).
For more D&D combat and mechanics I also highly recommend Solasta, and Solasta 2 will be coming out this year.
I think Shadowrun would struggle to find an audience after Cyberpunk. But I’ve heard all the attempts at Shadowrun vidya since the SNES one in the 90s were a bag of wet ass, so I kind of hope it does get its due eventually.
The recent ones were good. But they’re basically a visual novel with some combat, so they’re small scale.
The more I read about BG3 the more I wonder if I fucked up somewhere that lead me to not liking the game…
It’s literally not as enjoyable as drawing a map, thinking about myths or just reading stories
I understand, but it could just not be the game for you. I almost exclusively play RPG games, and this is THE game newer RPGs will have to compete with for me to give them anything over a 5/10.
I should mention that I played it from release to completion before they even released patch 3-4, and still enjoyed the hell out of it. Now they’ve included a few more classes, fixed a ton of bugs (that I never ran into surprisingly!), and have official mod support now. I can’t wait for me and my SO to play together to make our own story, as mine was nothing but good guy vibes the whole time, while SO is a little more chaotic than I am, and I am wanting them to be the main character so I don’t just do the same stuff all over again like I would if I played it singleplayer.
If you don’t mind me asking, what game has made you feel the way I feel about BG3? I’d be interested in looking into it!
Not the person you were responding to but I think I just picked the wrong class. I need to start over but haven’t gotten around to it
I think it’s down to western studios being so investor driven. The devs estimate it will take five years, so the PM tells the C-suite it will take four years, so the c-suite tells investors it will take three, who then pressure the C-suite to make it two. Then everyone is shocked, shocked, when the end product is buggy, slap-dashed slop.
Former game studio guy who got out and into general software dev and doubled his pay back in like 2012 and haven’t looked back…
This is correct… that plus a couple other things :
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Western game studios have ZERO qualms burning through people because they believe an endless fresh crop of 20-somethings can be brought in to burn out by forcing 96-hr work weeks for garbage pay
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Even many of the “once-great-studios” got rid of / severely reduced the bonuses / profit-sharing you used to get when a game was successful and just lay people off or close studios right after the games ship (even when they’re “successful…”) which means if you ever want to be a home owner, or have time to set aside for a family, or just not be terrified you’re going to be financially ruined… you’re kinda screwed.
So what this means you’ve got a bunch of people who largely have ZERO experience on each project, and are in survival mode, learning from mistakes that otherwise experienced devs would help avoid as they grew, usually making sequels to popular games that are worse than their previous entries - at least as far as tech goes (see Far Cry series where they show the tech used in FC2 vs newer entries), and when it’s done, they are laid off or have their studio shut down and then have to struggle amongst a now even more competitive job market to find another position somewhere else… or they bounce… like I did.
The only outliers (besides tiny indie devs hoping to make a hit) among the major game companies are based outside the U.S. along with only a handful of studios in the U.S. (whose games I guarantee you love) and - surprise surprise - when you look at their teams… they’re a bunch of guys in their 50s and up who’ve been making games since the 90s and aren’t being let go after each project ships or being asked to stay at the office and work over the weekend until Sunday at 3am for the entire 4th quarter of the year.
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Making smaller games isn’t a bad thing. Every game being a BG3 would be completely unsustainable. Sure, that game was a great accomplishment, but also imagine if they’d made the game that size and it was bad. It would’ve probably sunk the studio. I’m all about more A and AA games. Not everything needs to be a 300 person effort.
You appear to be agreeing with the meme; it didn’t say anything about the size of BG3, only the quality
The back and forth on twitter/bluesky over this topic was pretty wide ranging, and size/cost definitely was a topic discussed. And besides a lot of the “quality” of BG3 was the fact that it supported endless paths through the game, something which requires a lot of development effort.
Didn’t exactly one small developer say this in a tweet and even then everyone took it out of context?
Straw men don’t have security details
Huh?
starts digging the 10,000th dwarf fortress
I think it’s less that they intentionally under deliver, and more that how the actually run leads to bad products. The executives and consultants brought in try and run studios like they’re software companies. Which, yes, technically video games are software, but they’re more than that.
With a lot of software, a short turn around is important if you want to make sure your product isn’t outpaced by a competitor before it even launches. bugs can be patched out over time so shipping with a few bugs is fine so long as you’re getting to market as soon as possible. Breaking the project up in to lots of small items that can be independently worked on without interfering or relying on other items means you can expand the team easily to keep up with deadline.
On a video game, consumers care more about the experience of the released product and less about it being the most technically advanced. Huge bugs at release mutes any excitement, even if the issues are patched out later. Multiple teams working on a bunch of items in parallel will struggle to make a cohesive experience and the design guidelines put in place to make this possible will mute creativity. A handful of cohesive long quest lines makes for a better RPG than a 100 little independent quest scattered over the map.
Better to have smaller teams that work over longer time frames and release a product when it’s ready, 150 million dollars will make a much better product with a 100 person studio over 6 years than a 300 person studio in 2 years.
What about games that take 6 years and still suck? Like Halo?
Microsoft is just a small indie company, cut them some slack. More likely they just have no idea what they are doing and are just fumbling it all.
Halo: Combat Evolved sucks? That’s a hot take - been a few years, but I did enjoy playing it, massive controllers and all. Or did you have a specific one in mind?
No, the new Halos
They released a Halo 2?!
I hope they do a prequel!
I will not stand for this slander, Halo 2 is one of the greatest games of all time.
Atomic Heart, Metro, STALKER. It is american studios that underdeliver. And Ubisoft.
Or CD Project Red from Poland (The Witcher series, Cyberpunk, GOG.com). Or Larian Studios from Belgium (Divinity Series, Baldurs Gate 3). Or Platinum Games from Japan (Bayonetta Series, NieR:Automata, Vanquish, Astral Chain).
You’re correct, it’s the unhinged US turbocapitalistic corporatocracy that just produces more and more trash. Won’t change either, best is to just treat names like “Ubisoft”, “EA” or “Microsoft” printed on games like huge red flags and avoid them, no matter how good the manipulative marketing is. Saves money and nerves.
deleted by creator
Which dev is US based?
Elden Ring: Japan BG3: Belgian Atomic Heart: Cyprus (pretty much Russian though) Metro: Austria Stalker: Ukraine
My mistake yeah, thought Larian was US, was thinking of Obsidian
Obsidian is a great example that there are good US devs. I can’t think of a bad game they’ve made
The Outer Worlds was really not good. It had it’s moments for sure, but so do Skyrim, Oblivion, and Fallout 3. New Vegas was amazing though.
I keep hearing so much love for Outer Worlds but I found it just… Meh. I didn’t mind it, but the “picture + text” endings for character arcs seemed rushed and underwhelming, and the character development was minimal.
And I make one “wrong” dialogue choice and so my ship’s engineer will be alone forever, and never truly happy? WTF
Yeah, when comparing to New Vegas, Outer Worlds fell flat for me. I’m sure it’s a fun game to some, but I just don’t see it when there are plenty of games that do it better.
I liked Outer Worlds. I think it was a decent game, especially considering the budget was tight since it was developed pre-MS acquisition.
I’m glad that you enjoyed it! It’s just that as someone who almost exclusively plays these types of games (RPGs) it just didn’t hit the mark for me. Bland characters, bland story, bland companions, bland worlds, bland dialogue options (besides the ones for being low INT, those are actually funny!). I love what the vision was, but I just personally feel like they fell very short. Just my opinion though, of course!
So Belgium isn’t a western Nation? Or who does Anon think made Baldur Gate 3?
Usually whan people make this argument with BG3 as evidence it comes with the implicit assumption that Larian is a AA developer, not a AAA one. I haven’t done enough research on what constitutes AAA vs AA and where Larian fits in that so I don’t know if that’s reasonable, but that’s the argument.
And Japanese AAAs don’t under deliver?
FromSoft had enough money to make 200 hours of content but apparently couldn’t figure out 60fps on a 4090. Delivering!
Elden Ring is pretty good, though, don’t let me crap on it. I just wish they’d hire the Bluepoint guys that did the Demon’s Souls remake to handle their systems and engine work and just build content on top of that because, man.
It’s almost like every game studio has their own strengths and weaknesses? Crazy.
Hey, I’m on board with that idea 100%, but then you can’t complain online about “Western AAA under-delivering”. That’s just “the studio’s own strengths and weaknesses”. Can’t eat your cake and have it, too.
Can’t eat your cake and have it, too.
I’m upvoting just for the proper version of the phrase
It’s an awkward phrase in either version, but when I first encountered the original it was an immediate “Oh, so that’s what it’s supposed to mean” moment, so now I default to that. If people were shamed into abandoning “couldn’t care less” we can make this happen.
My pendantry is either a sneaky precision strike or a carpet bombing, no half measures.
shamed into abandoning “couldn’t care less”
Um, isn’t that the correct form? If you couldn’t care less, then you care the absolute minimum amount.
you can’t complain online about “Western AAA under-delivering”.
I’ve played the campaign of Diablo 4 and watched the studio fumble a franchise that has historically printed money.
Definitely feels like underdelivering to me.
Can’t eat your cake and have it, too.
If you can’t see any material difference between DLC bloated franchise zombies like CoD or the latest FF flop, relative to a sprawling open world action/adventure like Elden Ring or a tightly scripted RPG like BG3, I’m not sure you know what “cake” is.
You should give Diablo 4 another look, it’s alright now. For the record, D4 seems to have sold pretty damn well. I’ll say that I personally like launch D4 less than endgame D3, but maybe a bit more than launch D3. But hey, we’re getting in the weeds there.
I can absolutely see the difference between good games and bad games, but I suspect you and I may disagree on what games we’re talking about here and where the examples in the OP slot in.
People keep doing this. They say “western AAA” to mean “these five games I don’t like” and, as pointed out above, Baldur’s Gate is suddenly not western AAA despite being a European game with a budget of hundreds of millions, while now apparently Final Fantasy XVI actually IS Western AAA despite being from a Japanese studio.
I get that this would be much easier to talk about if there was a neat label to fit all the bad games, or if they all were bad for the same reason. But… you know, maybe it’s just not easy to talk about in the space of a meme after all.
The thing that still amazes me about D4 is basically its optimization. In runs so damn smooth on my handheld it’s crazy. I can play helltide content on Torment with bazillion things going on at the same time and the FPS is rock solid at 60.
But we can complain about AAA studios under delivering.
Game studios aren’t individual people it’s hundreds of individuals working together to make a game. There’s no excuse for elden ring to be so laggy, there is most definitely some management decisions pushing back performance upgrades to the engine.
Game studios aren’t individual people it’s hundreds of individuals
*Some
Don’t forget that there’s many indie studios that are a handful of people. Seas of Stars only had 20-30 people on staff IIRC
Ehh, I take a bad performing PC version over a good performing PS5 version. Give me the Demons Souls remake on PC, so I can judge Bluepoint myself. I’m not gonna buy some weird console.
You can play Demon’s Souls for PS3 on the RPCS3 emulator if you want to play the original on PC
Consoles serve their purpose for hassle-free gaming at some cost and lower performance.
But me personally? Yeah, I default to PC as well in most cases. I’d definitely take that Demon’s Souls PC port, right alongside Bloodborne, and I’m not even into Soulslikes that much.
Benefits of having shitty eyeballs I suppose is that I can’t tell what fps my games are running at anyway.
Hey, that’s all good. Then you don’t need a current-gen GPU that costs over a grand, you’re all set with a cheaper PC or a console. That’s a perfectly valid use case.
People do care, though, and it certainly matters when you’re giving people crap for “underdelivering”.
They probably bought into the propaganda that all of Europe is overrun by Muslims.
Europe is what? How does one even come up with that? Who says it?
Racists.
Meanwhile, stats show a total of 6% Muslims in Europe (mainly because of Turkey), and 3.2% in the EU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Europe#Abrahamic_religions
Fear mongering from the RN/AfD/PVV/PP/FdI/PiS/Fidesz and other Nazis like them
Hmmm, I’m a bit out of touch with politics, but I think FdI are much more vocal against migrants (in general, regardless of religion) and queers, I’d say Muslims are among their “least attacked” minorities. But I get the point
The anti-Muslim rhetoric comes out more in foreign policy discussions, and the degree to which more liberal-leaning politicians and talking heads let it slide unchallenged makes people not pay as much attention.
I guess that’s not totally wrong but I think being Muslim is definitely one of the things that is scary about the migrants
I thought that was only France? Or have they expanded their intolerance now?
Aren’t the “Western AAA developers” the ones complaining? Not the ones that made the mentioned games?
Then my question becomes what Larian Studios is, if not a AAA game dev.
An indie studio that had luck and got big. Let’s hope they stay independent and can keep doing what they want.
AA in the parlance
Absolutely not. I know plenty of so-called “AAA” studios that would murder for whatever deal with Raphael Larian had with Hasbro to fund a 200 million dollar early access six-year-long development cycle.
Larian is “independent”, sure, in that they’re a private company. They are AAA+, though, both in size and, depending on their licensing deal, on available resources as well. At least since halfway through the BG3 EA process.
Oh well they used to be thought of as AA, it at least III (lol these shorthands, man…).
They don’t really have a AAA aesthetic imho, as much as such a statement makes sense. Do you know what I mean? Like their game feels ambitious, yes, but it hasn’t been polished into a featureless sphere.
Yeah, but that’s my problem with the entire conversation in the first place. If you define “AAA” fully tautologically as “soulless game that feels corporate and is kinda shitty” then sure, AAA has a major issue, in that it seems to be consistently soulless and kinda shitty.
But if the definition is somewhat reasonable, either as a major production in terms of budget and scope, or even as a production from a major studio then all of a sudden AAA games are way more diverse and way more interesting than these types of posts give them credit for.
Not a Western AAA studio, lol.
The meme is saying that Western AAA game makers are too lazy to make good games and are upset at other, NON-Western game devs for producing good games and making themselves (the westerners) look bad.
Larian isn’t in the group of complainers. The meme isn’t putting them in any category.
Not just admitting they under-deliver.
They’re admitting to market collusion and lashing out at the companies that betray class solidarity.
The release of BG3 makes absolutely cackle to think about how the Elder Scrolls series can’t get away with recycling their old tricks anymore.
Kinda a weird take, because BG3 is just Larian recycling their old tricks, and Elden Ring is just FromSoftware recycling their old tricks. Seems gamers don’t have too much of an issue with companies making similar games in a niche.
Think the issue is more that Bethesda has never had a clear vision for Elder Scrolls as a series and changes the formula up for each game, as opposed to iterating. Elder Scrolls has lost more mechanics than its added over the years. I think Elder Scrolls 6 would be a lot more interesting if old tricks like spellmaking and levitation were brought back.
Hell, even Divinity Original Sin 1 would put the storytelling and roleplaying aspects of Elder Scrolls on the floor.
Then again, Bethesda learned nothing from FO76, which resulted in Starfield being what it is (devoid of meaning, story or anything other than space dungeons). I doubt they learned anything from it, either.
BG3 might not be a healthy reference for videogame development for different reasons, but it’s definitely remarkable how nothing has made me less excited for ES6 than Starfield.
I can’t predict how long it’ll take until it releases, but I’m doubtful it could be enough to fix whatever mess is already making its way through production—if they even planned to fix it, that is.
As far as characters & engagement goes, I think it’s fair to now want more from the Elder Scrolls than their typical surface-level cutouts they’ve given players so far.
I play games for the characters and environments. Sure, good ol’ Bethesda doesn’t have to copy BG3 as a template, but I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t raise my expectations for them now, after seeing what other games have shown what can be achieved. Y’know?
Shareholders, it all comes down to public companies
The best culture will always come from cooperatives, when artists are fully invested in what they do and not just salary men building stuff based on soulless profit metrics.
These “Western AAA studios”… Are they in the room with us right now?
It’s less “purposely underdeliver” and more “You mean I need to raise 300 million dollars to even try?”
But hey, Anon can gamble nine figures of their own money next time. I’m sure they’d do great.
FF7 cost about $90M when adjusted for inflation and was one of the most expensive games to developed in it’s time, but yh, yOu CaN’t MaKe A gOoD gAmE fOr LeSs ThAn $300M!!!
I’ll go even lower and say Grand Theft Auto: Vice City and it’s one of the more remarkable entries of the series.
It took $5 Million to develop.
$5m to develop + $13.2m to market
Equivalent to about $32m in 2024. Not disagreeing, putting the value into perspective. Also consider the scale of vice city compared to your average AAA, even AA game. Games have significantly higher expectations nowadays.
Who’s expectations?
Not the people playing, that’s for sure.
The expectations from gamers is pretty cooked nowadays man, pay attention to the louder and larger voices on game forums, x (formerly known as Twitter), Facebook, steam etc.
Hah. This thread is literally coming from some guy finding that every game should be like Elden Ring and BG3.
That’s not GTA VC size, so I’m gonna say Anon’s expectations, to your question.
Would most people be happy with a 2025 AAA game with the graphical fidelity of GTA:VC, though?
Personally I would love it if those massive budgets were spent where it matters, but I suspect “this game looks like it came out 20 years ago” would be a common complaint, as if only indie devs get to sacrifice photorealism for style.
I have a couple of coworkers that hate Minecraft because it’s a voxel game. Whenever I tell them it’s alright to not like it but there’s nothing wrong with Minecraft’s art choice, their response is: “No it’s fucking stupid”. What’s weirder is that one of these guys plays a lot of retro games
You can absolutely make a fantastic game for way less than 300 million.
You can’t make Baldur’s Gate 3 or Elden Ring, though.
Didn’t BG3 literally cost 1/3 of that to make?
Best guesses are somewhere between 100 and 200 million, if you allow me the slight hyperbole. It’s unclear if marketing is included in that.
I’m going to say if you are in nine digits territory the point in my post stands very well on its own. I come from a gaming industry where we were all clutching our pearls when games first broke past 50 million budgets and felt things were unsustainable then. These days people have the gall to mention a game at least twice as expensive as “not AAA”.
Calmly explaining why you can’t have a good Rogue-like anymore because Balatro’s budget was too high.
Casually dismissing Bloodborne and Divinity: OS as bad games, because they weren’t what came after.
You mean I need to raise 300 million dollars to even try?
And that’s the brain rot in the industry.
They can make lower budget games. Not every game needs to be some sprawling open world game with multiplayer features. You don’t need a crafting system, complex RPG mechanics, and unique animations for every possible interaction in your action adventure game. I don’t need to see every pore, have accurate hair physics, and a full featured face designer in a looter arpg.
Yeah, pretty graphics are nice, but honestly, I only need a handful of those total. My favorite games have fun, focused gameplay and/or really good story-telling, and that doesn’t cost money, it simply requires talent. Balatro was incredibly cheap to make and really fun, in fact, I could probably create it myself given a year or two, but I probably couldn’t come up with the idea in the first place.
Instead of making one or two big games to impress journalists, how about making aw few fun games with 1/10 the budget (still overkill IMO) each year to impress players?
Well, yeah, I don’t have a problem with that observation. I fully agree.
Just as long as we all also agree that you’re not getting Baldur’s Gate 3 ever again, then. You’re getting Divinity Original Sin, maybe OS2 if you’re lucky.
Because BG3 WAS a 200 million dollar game where every single interaction is animated and voice acted and the amount of user branching paths is insane and all party NPCs can be used as PCs as well and they all have specific dialogue for all the options and all the other insanity that’s in that game. And it took six years to make with a team of hundreds.
Now, I loved Original Sin 1 and 2. I’d play that size of game again, probably indefinitely. But those weren’t the ones that exploded and sold tons, and they’re not the example used in the OP to show why everybody else “underdelivers”.
Disco Elysium had about the same amount of voice acted dialogue as BG3.
Granted, it gets away with that because it’s a point and click adventure game, but you don’t necessarily have to have a sky high budget to have tons of dialogue and a highly branching storyline. If you don’t have voice acting it’s even cheaper. Fallen London has roughly 4x the amount of dialogue as those games, though it’s basically a live service text adventure.
It absolutely does not. I haven’t played nearly as much Disco Elysium as BG3, but it has way fewer characters and way less content. DE is a 20/40 hour game, BG is a 80/200 hour game. And BG3 again includes full voice acting for eight PCs as well as a ton of side characters and branching paths.
Disco Elysium gets a ton of mileage of its inventive event system and branching situations, but it’s an order of magnitude less content than BG, easy. Baldur’s Gate cast was effectively on call for six years straight. They were studio employees for the duration. And that’s not even getting into the fact that every dialogue bit in BG3 is not just voiced but animated. Procedurally, most of the time, but there’s still a ton of tweaking and debugging and manual scripting being done that needs to match the audio in a way the portraits and text in DE does not.
I get how the end result may seem comparable, Pareto principle and all that, but one of those things is not like the others.
The question is whether the extra effort is part of the reason why BG3 is an all-time best seller and DE is a smallish indie hit. I don’t need all my games to be just as big as BG3, but I also own thousands of games, including both BG3 and Disco Elysium. Would the normies that heard of BG3 through the grapevine, maybe watched some Critcal Role once, have been just as willing to part with sixty bucks with a tenth of the voice acting, a fifth of the visual polish and a third of the content?
And I’m not saying I definitely know that answer, but it’s the answer your average publisher exec with greenlight decisionmaking powers has to make when they budget and finance whatever game they’re publishing next.
Baldur’s Gate 3 supposedly has 1,365,000 words of dialogue while Disco Elysium supposedly has “a little more than a million”.
I’m not talking about how the game feels, this is just raw stats.
EDIT: the Final Cut version of Disco Elysium is supposed to be completely voice acted, but for lines where the narration is mixed into the middle of a character’s line, it’s not. For example: “Yes,” Kim adjusts his glasses “I think that would be prudent”. The “Kim adjusts his glasses” part isn’t voice acted, so that might cut down on the amount of voice acting a bit more.
I’d have to go check the Final Cut version. I certainly remember a lot of unvoiced prose in there, but it’s hard to know what is included as “script” of that, or what percentage of each game’s reported script is voiced.
For what it’s worth, the number I see out there for Baldur’s Gate 3 is two million words, not one point three. That’s still twice as long, and the points about cast size, length and animation definitely stand, as does the overall point.
BG3 can happen periodically, it doesn’t need to be every game though.
Starfield is a perfect example of this. They wanted it to sell like Skyrim, but they didn’t commit to delivering what’s needed to make that happen. They should have limited the scope and delivered a really good game where you fast travel between planets without any of the space stuff and cut most of the procedural generation. That would’ve been a great game and probably would’ve gotten a lot of praise, especially if they put some of that saved budget into better animations. They could have later released the space stuff and procedural generation as a DLC or sequel, with all the polish needed to make that good.
GTA V would’ve been just as good or better with a smaller map, and I’m sure GTA VI will as well. The same goes for most big budget games. Make tighter experiences with incredible QA, good writing, and fun gameplay and it’ll sell. The indie scene proves that, and a lot of times the main ingredient missing is marketing. Give an indie studio a AAA budget and they’ll make a dozen good games, whereas the AAA studio will be late on one mediocre game, but it’ll look super pretty.
And that’s why I rarely buy AAA games. Yeah, it’ll probably be a decent experience, but for the same money, I could get a few great indie or AA games. The main issue is discoverability, which is something AAAs are great at solving.
But BG3 is at least as large in scope as Starfield. Likely bigger.
Why is scope the problem?
I mean, for one thing, BG3 isn’t every game. This year people can’t shut up about Balatro (which I like but not love, incidentally). Or about Metaphor Re:Fantazio (which I love and took a long time to make, but is decidedly mid-sized).
You’re assigning execution problems to scope as if the games that serve as a reference for being great were small. But they aren’t. They come in all sizes, including mind-bogglingly huge. Execution and scope aren’t the same thing.
This year people can’t shut up about Balatro (which I like but not love, incidentally)
Same. That said, the value for the overall budget was incredibly high. I’m not saying Balatro should’ve been done by a AAA studio, just saying I think many people would prefer more games like that than more Assassin’s Creed games with large, empty worlds. How many cool indie games could a typical AC game budget fund and market?
Why is scope the problem?
Big budget games have their place, and it’s awesome to have a few games with incredible eye-candy each gen, but the balance seems to be way off here.
Execution and scope aren’t the same thing.
They’re not, but it’s a lot easier to execute well when scope is limited.
For example, look at Tears of the Kingdom, it’s basically Breath of the Wild with a fresh coat of paint, yet both BOTW and TOTK sold like hotcakes. The scope of TOTK was merely a handful of changes from its predecessor, plus an all new story. The difference between TOTK and most AAA games is that TOTK put gameplay first and reused whatever it could from previous games. I’m guessing Echoes of Wisdom reused the Link’s Awakening engine as well, with some extra polish to make the gimmick in that game work.
I want AAA studios to act more like Nintendo than Ubisoft or Activision Blizzard. Nintendo tends to focus on gameplay first, QA second, followed closely by art style, and graphics aren’t really a consideration.
Give me a few big games with deep scope and execute really well on those, but fill it in with a bunch of high quality, lower budget games with great gameplay, writing, etc. Sometimes I’m in the mood for a mind-blowing, cinematic experience, but usually I just want to veg and have fun. I’ve largely written off the AAA industry for gaming because their cinematic experiences tend to be poorly executed (poor QA, mediocre writing, etc), yet they charge a premium.
Hey, the best game published by Ubisoft this year was a mid-sized Prince of Persia game. The second best was a small Prince of Persia roguelike. Neither did particularly well with audiences, both are great.
We’re still not agreeing in our definitions, though, because man, how can anybody put a first party Nintendo game, let alone their Zelda open world tentpole, anywhere outside AAA? TOTK is AAA as fuck. TOTK defines AAA. Six years in the making, insane polish, a seeming blank check to mess with design to blend Zelda and Minecraft and built by some mix of Nintendo’s top tier talent and massive, industrial outsourcing over to Monolith Soft, which itself has hundreds of employees.
The realization that even sensible, savvy people just don’t grasp cost, scope or size in game development is… not new, but still disappointing. I still think this entire conversation is entirely tautological. People are defining size and “AAA-ness” based on whatever vibes and superficial traits they’ve assigned to “AAA”, not any sort of measure of size, budget or scope.
how can anybody put a first party Nintendo game, let alone their Zelda open world tentpole, anywhere outside AAA?
I’m saying it is AAA, and that’s how other AAA games should be. BOTW graphics are good but not life changing, bugs were rare on launch, the game is fun, and it brings something new to the series. TOTK is the same way, but it gets to reuse a lot of the engine work from BOTW while feeling like a new game. BOTW was audacious in scope, and Nintendo rarely takes those kinds of risks, so they feel special when they happen.
Nintendo is perhaps the best example of what I’d like other AAA studios to be, as least from a game design standpoint. Take big risks occasionally, and ship fun, lower-budget games between them. If we look at Zelda games on Switch, we have:
- BOTW - flagship for the console to show what it can do
- TOTK - sequel to BOTW, which is a lot less risky given how popular BOTW was
- Link’s Awakening - top down, relatively straight-forward Zelda game, remake from older game
- Skyward Sword - remake from Wii
- Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom - reuse engine from Link’s Awakening, but still takes a big gameplay risk
Only BOTW was truly risky here, and I imagine it cost way more than everything else.
If we look at Ubisoft, for example, they churn out massive AC games almost every year, and those cost hundreds of millions each time. Yeah, they have other games too (so does Nintendo), I’m talking more about the frequency of these massive world games they release, which is honestly absurd. I can’t speak for everyone, but I imagine many gamers would prefer to reduce the frequency of AC releases, improve the story progression (and eventually end it), and invest that budget into new IPs or smaller games.
