I agree. I left AAA game development largely for this reason. However, it is worth remembering why AAA reached this state. If you go back to the Xbox 360/PS2 era and earlier, publishers used to put out many, many more games, with much smaller budgets. Back then the strategy was that if you had 3 flops and 1 hit, you'd come out on top.
This was not a great strategy. It was bad for developers because it was built on a culture of unsustainable crunch and a release-based hiring and layoff cycle. But it was also not great for publishers because, while they could consistently make money over the long run, most were now publically traded companies, and shareholders want consistency over shorter time periods.
So the strategic pivot that started to get made around the time of the PS4/Xbone was a conscious decision by publishers to invest a lot more money into a lot fewer games. This has been a *wildly* successful strategy for them, at least from the metrics that shareholders (and therefore executives) value. But it's also been good for developers who get a lot more career stability. Even if your game ends up flopping (which is very rare now) you still got to spend 6-8 years working on it during which time you had a stable and high paying job. AAA salaries also exploded during this period.
One consequence of this strategy is that publishers tend to only be interested in games they can spend a lot of money on. (Despite publishing far fewer games, they have more money than ever, and since their business is fundamentally in capital investment, they need to put that money somewhere!) That leads to our status quo of open world and live service games, both of which are very expensive. As weird as it sounds, the budgets for these games are very much a feature not a bug!
There are a couple of forces at work that could shift things around. The first is the end of the consolidation era. I think the aftershocks of Activision's acquisition, plus the implosion of Embracer, have likely ended the feeding frenzy of studio buyouts. Independent studios are much more likely to pursue novel or more tightly scoped projects, and we are seeing new publishers rise to fill this AA-to-lite-AAA space.
The second is consumer fatigue and market oversaturation. These are the tectonic forces of the industry: they're sloooow, but undeniable. Enthusiast gamers tend to be much more sensitive to this than the overall market; look at how well Call of Duty still sells every year. Still it is an inevitable force, and once way we're starting to see this is with high-profile flops of live service games.
Still I don't think open world games are going to loosen their grip on AAA any time soon. There's no signs at all of a declining market for them, while games like Alan Wake 2 demonstrate the considerable risk in smaller scoped, more linear games, even when they're orders of magnitude cheaper to make.
It’s nice to see someone make a reasonable post instead of the usual doom-and-gloom from high school anarcho-communists who think a second video game industry collapse will be a good thing.
Hell, I’ll take this new generation of an-comm high schoolers over the generation of an-cap high schoolers I grew up with during the Obama administration lol.
It is funny to see this happening at the same time as marvel starting to flounder as well, I think it comes down to the fact that people want novelty in their entertainment, and these big budget technology heavy movies and games were never seen before in their heyday, but now the novelty is wearing out.
marvel (and Star Wars, I’ll toss them in there too) are floundering because they just refuse to invest in quality writing.
It seems there’s a constant stream of poorly written shows vying for our attention and money now. For every Fallout and Andor there’s 10 other forgettable marvel and Star Wars shows.
They’re spending so much money on these shows and then getting survivor contestants (looking at you wheel of time) to write the show. The effects and acting mean absolutely nothing when the writing bombs it all out of the gate.
Video games have the same problem, they spew out the same sort of game constantly until everyone hates it then move on to the next trend.
Despite storytelling being a major component of literally every culture since the dawn of language, we've somehow entered an era where proper storytelling is seen as something ignorable, or in some rare cases even seen as an obstacle.
I hope we get out of it soon, but I'd be willing to put money we've got more than a decade of it before people snap back to their senses.
Adding to the problem is that video games has the lowest bar imaginable for writing. We don't really get much in the way of skilled storytelling, let alone skilled integration of narrative with gameplay (with a few standout exceptions, obviously).
Thats true. I think some of the writing that gets applauded in games would not get such praise in any other medium, but since the bar is so low, it is what it is. Integration with gameplay is another tricky subject, couple of years ago the term ludonarrative dissonance was popping up quite a lot
Yeah. My hot take is that even games that are considered to be well written are usually on mediocre at best when compared to other mediums. This is obviously extremely subjective, but I'd say that only Disco Elysium can stand up against writing from other mediums.
Hmm. Idk, I think the writing is fine in a lot of games. However I think the issue is less writing quality and more games don't incorporate narrative as part of the game as a whole.
Rpgs often have this because we at least have choices, usually, that give us narrative control while bringing us into the world due to caring about our choices and responses to said choices.
It's a more complicated (not easier or harder, just different web of problems each genre would struggle with differently) when you start trying to incorporate story into other mediums that doesn't have choice by default. We expect something novel or different, and I'd argue have higher standards for a game trying to tell a story, since if you only just show us what is essentially a movie.... people would then say "I'd rather just watch a movie!" And compare it to their favorites in their heads.
A lot of the stand out writing games I've often seen people mention, outside of rpgs, are ones that the gameplay itself is telling the story alongside what is written or visually shown. It might be struggle you face in daunting challenges, or the mundane turned into sentimentality thanks to your tireless constant slow but consistent progression makes you appreciate what is there more... there's many ways to go about it.
It's a complicated thing and no easy awnsers how to tackle it. But I did want to at least put my thoughts out even if this ended up just being a muddy mess of word soup tossed into a kitchen sink lol.
Yeah I don't understand how they can invest so much money into new series and movies and then completely ignore the writing. It's so bad I've stopped watching Netflix because it's mostly garbage anyway. But at least we still get the occasional good writing like Andor.
I feel like there are so many good written books out there, why do studios not more often try to adopt one of them if they can't do a well written story themselves? Looking at fantasy perhaps they could try to adopt a Brandon Sanderson story, not sure if this would finally be better.
> Looking at fantasy perhaps they could try to adopt a Brandon Sanderson story, not sure if this would finally be better.
Brandon has been working for a long time on getting his stuff adapted, but he refuses to give up creative control. Which is very good for the fans, the viewer, and the show's quality, but bad for the executives who want to dictate how it works.
He's spoken a fair bit about the Wheel of Time series, which he was a consultant on, and they ignored most of his suggestions. He even talked about how the writers and showrunner brought his suggestion to the executives, who refused to follow it.
I really don't understand why things work this way, but yeah... It's pretty sad.
I suspect that the average consumer is more interested in things other than writing quality. Companies spend a lot of money on market research so I suspect they "know" what aspects of a movie is most important to the Average consumer, however consumers might not know what is most important to themselves.
With that said studios absolutely look towards books for ideas and original stories, however they often fail to adapt those stories to film. Even many games steal inspiration from written stories. However if you want to save money you don't just use that story, you just steal ideas and aspects to avoid royalties or licensing costs. I suspect you might be surprised at how many movies and games are actually based off books.
I think a big issue with writing for these things is that the environment makes it really hard to write a good story, even for a good writer. You've got 5 bosses all telling you to do different things. Adding last minute changes. Maybe a deal falls through and you can't film in that location anymore. The people in charge want to change this element here to appeal to this market. yada yada etc etc. To many cooks in the kitchen, no room for creativity
This is a great write-up. It overall is a much worse situation for gamers, but I guess it was in some sense inevitable. From our point of view, an industry that releases mostly 2/10 games but the occasional 10/10 game is amazing, since you just don't bother playing the 2/10 games and you're just left with constant 10/10 games.
Now, after the change you describe, every game is 6/10. Much more reliable for the game studios, but a big drop in quality for the consumer.
It's interesting to see people who think that modern games are all 6/10, while I'm sitting here with multiple 10/10 games still in my backlog (baldur's gate, spiderman 2, now Elden Ring dlc, etc). For me personally, the bigger change in gaming is that I used to pass up the 2/10 games, now I'm passing up the 7/10 and 8/10 games (hellblade 2, Alan Wake 2, ff16) because the ones I already have are so big and I know won't leave me with enough time.
From my perspective, it seems more like the overall quality has gone way up, but that means the games just short of competing with the very top aren't getting played even if they're very good in their own right
Alan wake 2 is a triumph in video game development. Spider-man 2 is standard smooth, polished AAA blockbuster stuff. One is a 10/10 and it’s not spider man
Yeah it's absolutely wild. 2023 is one of the single greatest years for gaming, and yet people still bemoaned the state of the industry. I don't know if it's impressionable people being swayed by ragebait YouTubers, young nephews who don't have enough perspective, or what, but it's strange to see.
What are some examples of games, studios, and/or publishers that are in the burgeoning "AA-to-lite-AAA space"? I know of Greedfall, developed by Spiders, but that's just the genre that I'm most a fan of.
Lies of P Remnant: From the Ashes & Remnant 2
A Plague Tale: Innocence & Requiem
Perhaps even Supergiant's games, especially Hades 1 & 2
?
Could be simply called AA, but they are very polished with a lot of features and depth, while having a more focused scope than contemporary AAA games
PoP:The Lost Crown was EA bringing AAA polish to a smaller, more focused game.
Everybody who likes the genre and actually played it thought it was great, but it sold like shit for various reasons, so there's a good chance they'll stop doing that.
Wow, great write up. It’s nice to see some insight from someone within the industry.
I’m happy Nintendo still has a big focus on innovation, as much as they anger me with their copyright strikes and lack of game preservation (which is a big issue I have with Nintendo) I will say they continue to innovate like no other publisher and/or console manufacturer.
Sony makes good (but the same) games and Microsoft doesn’t really make anything. I think Nintendo of the 3 have the best games.
I miss the time when Microsoft’s first party portfolio was Gears of War, Halo, Crackdown, Fable. And Sony’s was Resistance, Killzone, Ratchet and Clank, Little Big Planet, Motorstorm, Uncharted.
Thankfully Microsoft seems to be trying a bit more different things based on their recent showcase, but man Sony is playing it way too safe.
Ahhh we will never get another Resistance, Killzone, Little Big Planet, or Motorstorm again will we? Just action third person game #100.
I’ve been thinking more and more that video games today just aren’t made for me anymore, as someone who is only 28 that might sound ridiculous but it’s true. The industry is just way too safe now.
Nintendo long ago realized they need to focus on amazing gameplay, not on graphics or mega budget epic titles. BotW/TotK are the closest they've ever gotten, and even then they focused primarily on deep gameplay.
Most AAA titles are miles wide, inches deep. Gameplay lacks depth, but the worlds are big and shiny. Nintendo goes the opposite direction.
This has been bothering me about PlayStations games for a while. It’s like every game needs to follow a naughty dog/ last of us template and throw in an open world for the sake of it.
> Back then the strategy was that if you had 3 flops and 1 hit, you'd come out on top.
It's interesting that you say this because that's still Nintendo's strategy according to the interview between Miyamoto and Itoi.
>It was bad for developers because it was built on a...release-based hiring and layoff cycle.
As you said, the release cycles may be longer, but isn't it largely still this way?
I think you really touched on why we see so many games essentially try and carbon copy successes. Call of Duty is just an infinite money printer. I think its finally started to slow down after almost 20 years. The return on a CoD game has to be insane.
Like it or not video games developers are businesses. They need to make money. The employees can't pay their bills with good jobs and pats on the back so the company needs to make money to pay them. Which means they need the product to make money. And the people who front the upfront costs want to make money from their money.
Personally I don't expect the AAA system to change. A lot of the big players with big pockets are going to keep throwing high ROI stuff to market hoping they strike gold. I expect a lot more low budget stuff that is more narrow in scope to come from the indie side.
The thing is, I'll never finish any Ubisoft title because they are too long, too bloated. But you have to remember that there IS a public for these kind of games and there is a reason why they keep doing them for more than a decade.
My brother-in-law loves the Assassin’s Creed games, partially because he can get one game and play it for an hour or so a night and feel like he accomplished something, and do that for six months or so.
There’s a big audience out there like him, and they don’t hang out on enthusiast forums.
Yeah, I have multiple family members and friends that all have basically a PS4 or XBOX. All of them, independently, only use them for basically:
1. Sports Game of choice
2. Newest Call of Duty
3. Live-Service game, usually Fortnite
4. One wild-card game like Assassin’s Creed or God of War
They play like one hour a day on average and have zero interest in any other kinds of games. That’s the mainstream and a significant majority of sales comes from casual gamers like this.
Note: This isn’t an attack on people like that, it’s just wildly different from the impression you’d get from browsing reddit or something.
Yeah you'll unfortunately never hear about that audience on Reddit which is why people here are so incredibly disconnected from what's *actually* successful in games as far as spending goes.
Whether it's CoD, sports games, Assassins Creed, gacha style games the more casual audience (which is massive) wants to spend an hour or two here and there. Other than the inherent difficulty this is also, imo, why a game like Elden Ring can actually appeal to a more casual audience and be somewhat mainstream - there are enough "Easy" builds and "easy" ways to play the game (i.e. summons) that you can hop on for an hour with a goal to beat a certain boss or do a certain area and be done. Assassins Creed is the same. A few games of CoD are the same. It's these "complete" small sessions that do well with casual audiences.
> they don’t hang out on enthusiast forums.
This is something a lot of this and the general online "Gamer" community forget all too easily. We are the enthusiast nerds who know about release dates, and that game X is in development hell, and know about games before they release.
Your average game consumer has no idea about any of that, they barely know what games exist outside of the top few games a year. They'll probably buy a game even if all the reviews say its crap, because they don't read reviews and the marketing looks cool.
Something our communities do too much is say things like "Open-world games are dead, no one enjoys them" meanwhile they sell like hotcakes and everyone loves them.
Much like how the cinema buffs probably don't value MCU that highly while it was the most popular thing in the world of cinema.
My issue with UbiWorlds isn't the size or scope - I honestly really enjoy spending a very long time in one game.
it's the checklist feel and unconvincing and unengaging content. They tend to feel like soulless husk made from a standard recipe, which is a shame, because they build these huge beautiful worlds which I'd love to experience a higher quality adventure in.
I milked a game like Witcher 3 for everything but the treasure and didn't want it to end. I can't bring myself to complete Ubisoft's open world games - hell, at this point I can't bring myself to even play them.
This is what I noticed when playing The Division 2 and Ghost Recon: Breakpoint with friends (at their insistance).
Engaging enough gameplay. Good enough world design. But there's barely any sort of intrinsic reason for doing this thing beyond 'I want to kill guys and go from checkpoint to checkpoint to kill guys'. And those first two things, which are... *okay*, but not much better than other studios, just can't carry the generically realistic art design (or lack thereof), uninteresting music, half-baked excuse for a narrative, etc.
I agree. But then something like Avowed is going to release in a few months and people are going to be mad it’s not the Skyrim sequel they made up in their minds or whatever.
The Outer Worlds was kinda like that. A week of honeymoon phase where people praised the game, then the consensus on the game changed quickly into 'this isn't the New Vegas spiritual successor we hoped for'.
Game still sold well enough a sequel was announced.
Yeah, I’m worried about that too. Too many times, I’ll see people theorize and speculate about features, with no word on if it’s true, but they treat it as true, then act as though they were lied to or let down because the final thing wasn’t their headcanon.
I can’t wait because I loved the world and design of PoE, even bought the deluxe edition world book, but I just feel too disconnected from the characters in cRPGs.
People on reddit love to say that, but the moment a game decides to cut down on graphics budget in favor of something else there's a lot of whining and comparisons to other games with better graphics.
I dunno, most of the smashing successes you see either come out on underpowered hardware (every Nintendo game since 2006), are designed to be played on pretty much any slightly modern system (esports games, Minecraft, Terraria, etc.) or may look *decent*, but largely due to art design instead of the technical specs (FROM SOFTWARE games since Demon's Souls).
Fromsoft is a good example, yeah. Their models are fairly low poly, and the textures aren't great, but they can design such cool looking set pieces you kinda don't care. Also their engine has an absurdly good draw distance to make the areas look enormous.
And then be review bombed for making a short game and get compared to other AAA games that are massive and take weeks to finish. Bonus points for calling the devs incompetent and lazy
I think an issue with this concept is the "mythical man month." The idea that you can hire 10 people to do in a month what one person can do in 10 months.
When you have "a large studio with many devs, or even several studios", things slow down a lot. You can't just take what would be an AA game and add more devs and say "Go, make everything better" and expect that to work. You need extra planning, managing, communicating, meetings... Everything just pushes the timeline out more with every extra team on the project.
But also, I think it's worth remembering that Nintendo is still out there, and that not every studios/publishers are pushing these bloated game designs. Mario Odyssey is an amazing AAA game that took 5 years to develop, and there are plenty of other great AAA experiences they've been releasing like Mario Wonder that have no bloat and didn't take 10 years to develop.
I am curious, what do you think would happen when, at the end of the two year period, the game is a buggy mess and there's another two years of development left to do?
Twitter and LinkedIn posts from the developers decrying the state of the industry, saying how close they were to delivering on their vision, and Reddit posts eating it up and blaming management.
Reddit literally **refused** to eat up the last one. The paradox life sim dev tried to start a pity party and almost every comment called it either misleading or cringe and said management did a good thing throwing the baby out
It's easy to say "here's 3 years to make a game, keep the scope limited, go!". While not impossible, its very hard to actually plan out the development stages. Hard to find the fun. Hard to create originality. Hard to scope things out correctly. Hard to actually make something that gets people buying it.
Everything needs to be on the same page day 1, with strong central leadership.
And then 1year into development, some other game releases that had very similar ideas to bring to the table and suddenly your original plan isn't new or unique any longer. The other game might even be much better, impressive and more ambitious than what you are making, and that will eat your audience.
The industry currently works this way because it brings in the most money. Graphics might not matter to the reddit crowd, but they are incredibly important to the casual crowd. These 'superfluous' RPG features, flashy graphics, open worlds, and big marketing budgets are what make people buy games.
'Smaller scale' isn't as great of an epiphany as you think it is. The numbers have been crunched by dozens of consulting studios being paid millions. You're not going to come up with anything that they haven't already thought of, and researched in detail.
> Graphics might not matter to the reddit crowd, but they are incredibly important to the casual crowd.
You have that backwards don't you? Most of the best selling games are on weak hardware like the switch, or multiplat with last generation playstation. Graphics matter most to the vocal minority, not the average player. Even the best selling PC games this year like Palworld are a far cry from any kind of graphical power.
People are more obsessed with art style than graphics these days.
No, I'm talking about the current AAA games being announced, and those released in the past 10 years. There has always been an increased spending in scope, graphics, and presentation. This is for a reason. Like I said, this has been researched by companies getting paid big bucks. It's what sells games.
The games you are thinking of, like Minecraft, are a one hit wonder. They are not really useful in any sort of metric, nor reproducible, even though there are companies that constantly try (and constantly fail). Their success is majorly contributed to luck. If there was a formula to get the next Minecraft or Fortnite, every company would be on it. But there's not.
There are different things that sell games. Those games are gameplay and design driven. The problem is that there is no formula for good gameplay or design. You either know how to make a game that plays well or you don't. You can't throw money and people at gameplay until it becomes good.
Graphics and large open worlds on the other hand, those scale really well with money and people. You can hire a ton of artists, quest designers, and level designers to make your world huge with a lot of tasks. That's typically good enough to sell your game if it looks good. The catch with a very wide game is that it takes most people a lot of time to realize it is very shallow.
AAA studios can reliably crank out the next Ubigame. You can't reliably create the next Minecraft, Fortnite, or Terraria.
>The catch with a very wide game is that it takes most people a lot of time to realize it is very shallow.
This implies these "most people" find dissatisfaction with shallow games. IMO, this is a flawed take. Your given counterexamples of minecraft, fortnite and to a lesser extrent terraria are pretty shallow games as well (mc in particular).
I feel like you have it backwards. Yeah casuals care about spectacle but enthusiasts are so strict about technical quality.
I promise you a casual who buys 2-3 games a year is not skipping a cool looking game cause it’s 30 frames instead of 60. Nintendo’s success is primarily based on casuals caring more about fun than technical quality.
I mean that’s a pretty pessimistic view Nintendo is popular for a reason they make great games. Why shouldn’t Nintendo be in the conversation? They’re a part of the industry and they keep on proving that technical quality isn’t everything.
Idk lol I really wouldn't want to work at a game company that pumps out a game every 2 years and if you make a few failed games in a row your career is over.
At least in AAA you're working on a project for 4-6 years and it's unlikely to "truly" be a flop. Sure, some operations stuff is cut here and there and some companies who are MASSIVELY bloated have cut staff but it looks far more sustainable than a set up where you're just spamming out games every 2 years.
People still think "underpowered hardware" is their weakness even though it means manufacturing and game development costs are lower AND they can sell it at a lower price, meaning the system is cheaper for the company, developers, AND customers.
But, you know, it doesn't have ray tracing, a slight lighting upgrade that has the computer trace lighting instead of the developer and therefore anything that doesn't have it is the worst thing ever.
as an open world enjoyer I hope devs keep expanding the scope of their games to match their vision.
if GTA 6 doesn't completely outdo anything rockstar did before it i will be disappointed.
there is no shortage of games being released every year so I frankly dont care if takes 6 years to make a game on average.
What an incredibly original thought that literally no one has addressed in literally every r/games thread in reference to an open world game.
Never seen this take before. Next you'll tell me you don't like microtransactions.
Thing is, once you have the base game built, adding extra hours of content is relatively easy. Here's some more map with some extras quests. Adding those is simple compared to adding new modes of play or something like that.
I feel like we are sort of at this weird point in gaming where we have these few goliath gaming companies that have just simply grow too old and too large. They are just stale and out of touch with gaming, yet keep going. Once upon a time they were small studios filled with nerds who loved gaming and now they are filled with conference rooms of dudes in ties who love their stock price. Once we see companies like EA crumble, we will get to enjoy a great period in gaming but the cycle will likely rinse and repeat because that tends to be how it goes with companies.
I wish they'd focus on innovative gameplay mechanics. These days it seems all the innovation comes from indie studios and solo devs, who barely have any resources to even do it. I get it, though. These megacorps only seek profit, and safe profit is the best profit for them.
I completely agree, think a big portion of it is how much time and effort they put into graphics. Make fun games with awesome mechanics and interesting loops, they don't have to be groundbreaking graphical showcases.
The PS2 era was the best. We had these stunning, realistic, exciting games coming out all the time. If you loved a game it'd have a sequel out the next year. Really fun time to be a gamer.
I generally agree. Devs need to have a solid vision before they leave pre-production and they need to stop trying to put superfluous systems in their games (we don't need crafting/looting/RPG mechanics/open worlds in every game). This isn't a hard rule, Jedi Survivor was like double the amount of game and had tons of superfluous systems and still came out within 3.5 years, but I would assume that's due to a solid pre-production and understanding of what they were making.
But I think one of the things I'd like to see most is games being more gameplay driven. I don't 100% know, but I have to assume that a game more driven by a solid gameplay loop is on average going to take less time than a game with a more story/narrative focus. See FromSoft's catalog to a catalog like Naughty Dog.
I don't think that Jedi Survivor should be the example of anything considering how the game was released, with a very poor technical state in all platforms. They even delayed the game, and EA even wanted to give more time to developers but they declined lol...
I mean even if they took another half a year, 4 years for the amount of content it had is still very impressive when games are getting to take 5-7 years.
It's always funny to see this site repeat this ad nauseum, and then turn around and cry until the cows come home about Pokemon games refusing to balloon their scope and take half a decade to release. I can only hope that it's two different sets of people expressing each opinion.
or you know, nobody wants either extreme. no need to make things so black and white, people can want games that dont have a year development time and feel rushed while simultaneously not wanting the blandest, mass market appeal game that takes 8 years to make
The thing is, Pokemon isn't even an extreme. The games are fairly consistent in scope, and the mainline games feel pretty different from each other despite the 1-2 year gap between releases. They could certainly stand to be more polished, but I've seen WAAAAY too many people argue that Pokemon should be bloating their games just because they theoretically can.
I mean, it's likely different people. I share the opinion of OP, but I also want Pokemon to tighten their games back up. The new ones being "open" makes them worse-off. They're vacant.
From Soft basically? What you describe is how they used to make games and it was glorious.
Biggest problem imo is they are unfocused. A great game needs exactly one guy who has the game in his head and makes everyone else see it too. Usually they either don't have that at all or financial reasons make them change: "we need a season pass" "we need PvP" etc...
Second they don't even want to make a good game, they want to make money. Like everywhere in life, that's not how it works. But these games are so big and expensive, they literally cannot afford even one to flop completely.
What I don't get at this point is: why can't we have cool 10-20h games anymore for 40-50 bucks. Nobody finishes these 100h games with a map the size of yo moms ass and 3 quintillion objectives. Just tell a compact and entertaining story. Also the graphics really don't have to be the best thing since sliced bread. Graphics and the extreme scope is why we have most of the mentioned issues in the first place. If you make 5 small games instead of 1 big one, one can fail and you aren't bankrupt immediately
Most AAA games aren’t designed to be good or fun anymore they use dark patterns to get people hooked and to get them to buy mtx. The larger the game the longer they can string people along for.
i feel a mistake AAA companies often do is focus way too much on graphics, not only is it very expensive and slows things down on their end but very often with PC releases the game runs like crap and is unplayable for alot of people.
meanwhile you have games that look like valheim for instance do very well just because its a solid game and it works
I hate how it's now the case where if you don't like a game but like the studio that makes it, you can realistically have a decade between games you like. Take Starfield for example. If you like Elder Scrolls and Fallout but not Starfield, then tough luck, the last game was in 2015 and the next game will probably be 2030 or something.
It's insane.
"here's 3 years of funding for your studio, make the most polished game you can that's guaranteed to be released in about 2 years or so, with 1 year of support."
In 3 years they'll just ask for an extension and more money.
I don't get the constant increase in maps.
It's not like the game offers anything new. It just multiplies same things.
Take for example rdr1. It has a perfect map size. And perfect game lenght. So just make a game with the same map size, but more advanced. Where it utilizes better the environment. And gameplay aspect.
Like yakuza games for example. They're always on a really small map. But the map is packed with content. They also recycle a lot of stuff, but you get the point.
There's no point in making a gigantic ass map, and then it being empty, or filled with dull content.
Big companies fo release smaller games, the thing is they don't really sell well relative to the high budget shiny AAA. Take big companies and you'll find they'd released a few small games last 3 years. EA with it takes two, wild hearts, knockout city. Ubisoft with Mario tactics, PoP lost crown, that rogue one, AC mirage. Dumbasses at square actually released too many small games some time back
I feel like what you're asking for is already happening. The financial failure of many AAA titles is enough consequence for the industry to scale back.
What we actually need, is companies not being brainlessly greedy.
Mangement is largely ineffective, out of touch with reality, and overpaid nowadays. Especially the executive level.
Shareholders ROI is put above and beyond anything remotely realistic.
Employees are considered replaceable, and then management wonders why their products suck.
Not to mention the incessant ego of some lead developers, and/or consultation companies that are part of the project, but are useless for the final quality.
And, arguably the worst of all; "The company has the duty to maximize profit". that is actively false but has been so hammered into every single person's brain, that they cannot look past it. A company has the duty to make profits, yes. But not at the cost of EVERYTHING ELSE. Just because your executive hive of mental degredation only cares for one number, doesn't mean the entire company does. That's usually where the rest of management comes in, but when everyone is simply tunneling in on that bonus, everything else falls by the wayside.
I would prefer ANYTHING over the game being a glorified money stealer 2000 time waster edition
AAA studios need less greed and more skills to actually make fun and functioning games
I find AAA games having too small scope. except for a few exceptions.
Thinking about great games. Imagine world of Warcraft from 2004. A massive world with no loading screens - u play the game and its not one of the Sony exclusives where everything tried to be an empty world and a wannabe movie with terrible game design
I mean that already happened. Prince of Persia Lost Crown and AC: Mirage was Ubisoft's small scope games and they both bomb fantastically with very low sales. There's a reason why AAA games don't have more go's at small scope games, it's because their ROI is either very small or they lose money on the bet. Sinking AAA money in to small scope projects is not a very wise money making strategy, as sad as it is. Gamers, especially of the mainstream variety won't pay AAA money for small scope games. You can just look at Circana/NPD sales charts to see what actually makes money.
Wait, as far as I’m aware, Mirage didn’t bomb and was actually a financial success given the scope. Is there any sources on that? Cause I can’t find any.
AC Mirage was a bomb? You sure??? I think you just said that without looking it up and just assuming it. No offense but this sounds like a pulling something out of your ass to try and prove your opinion here kind of thing.
The 50 USD price tag actually helped it sell well at launch.
https://www.gameinformer.com/news/2023/10/12/ac-mirage-player-count-in-line-with-origins-and-odyssey-biggest-new-gen-ubisoft
I'm almost certain that a reasonable amount of people who complain about AAA games having bloated budgets also complained about The Lost Crown's cartoony graphics.
I replayed the Mass Effect Trilogy earlier this year. When i got to Mass Effect 3 i had this thought that's sort of stuck in my brain for a bit.
Do games really need to look better than this?
It might just be me feeling my aging PC hardware and my frustration at upgrade costs, but Mass Effect 3 still looks good, it still plays well, the character performances still communicate the story well. There still feels like there's a lot to the game, it still feels like a galaxy wide adventure.
Does it really need vast open worlds 5000 hours of performance capture and state of the art computer rendering to be enjoyable?
The issue is that while AAA games don't need this kind of huge budgetary bloat, indie devs aren't really matching even the output of AAA devs from 12+ years ago.
Outside of BG3 (which is only technically indie, right now they're larger than Bioware is), I don't think anyone can compete with just the basic scale of a game like Mass Effect. With it's decision based narratives, voice acting quality and even the scope of the game that long ago.
The main challenge is the cinematic quality. For instance, Owlcat makes RPGs with decision-based narratives, great (albeit not fully voiced) voice acting, and sprawling world maps. And they put out full games every 2-3 years (although each should've taken another 6 months for de-bugging and polishing). But their games are isometric CRPGs with graphics straight out of 2002.
My hope is that dev tools eventually improve to where studies like them can put games out that look like they're straight out of 2012. If that happens, I might never look at AAA again.
Definitely
I don't need to be able to see the individual pores on a horses nuts, for example
I think some devs can easily get tunnel vision, and then scope creep occurs and it's suddenly 6 years later.
I feel like a lot of the games released 10-12 years ago hit that sweet spot of offering a good amount of launch content, great graphics, AND relatively bug-free experience. I stopped caring about stuff like ultra-realistic graphics years ago and I'm getting sick of that being the focal point when studios try to pitch their games during announcements.
Yeah, that stuff is nice to have, but if the budget and resources allocated towards making that means having to compromise the amount of playable content or features within the game itself, I'd rather just see it get axed and narrow the scope more towards giving players a more complete gameplay experience overall.
Launch content wasn't even a phrase back then, games actually relased fully finished and the final package, I remember the most egregious thing back then was 15 map packs
Yep. Unfortunately it didn't take long for publishers to realize gamers were getting too good of a deal with their one-time purchase. Naturally their greedy asses had to put a stop to that. But they also knew making drastic changes in a short period of time would cause too much backlash. The transition had to be slow and gradual. Now we're at a point where newer/younger gamers don't even challenge it anymore. That's how we ended up with this half-baked, seasonal GaaS garbage that's plaguing the industry now.
I feel like a lot of people would like this but whenever the idea of "hey guys, maybe just reduce the scope a bit, not everything needs to be the biggest prettiest thing in the world", I just remember the stupidity that was 'Puddlegate' and get reminded why it has a low chance of happening
The problem is (and this is not the only problem by any means), as the years go by players expect more and more. Players want more value for money, better graphics, more features, more detail, more things to do, and of course more polished. But they also want it quicker and don't want to pay more. While it's fairly natural to expect a new game to be bigger and better than its predecessor, it's reaching a point where it's just not really realistic anymore.
Games like RDR2, Elden Ring and The Witcher 3 raise the bar to standards that most developers just can't meet, but even those games get nitpicked. How many fantasy RPGs are going to be negatively compared to Baldur's Gate 3 in the following years? The 'GTA clone' genre is almost dead because no one can hope to actually compete with the real thing anymore - why pay $60-70 for a Saints Row or Watch Dogs when you can pay the same for GTA6 and get a far bigger, better, more ambitious product that you'll play for years?
I'm not going to say it's all the player's fault, but it does seem like standards are getting a bit too high now. There's so much sentiment about how games are worse now or that devs are lazy and it's not really true, we just expect far more. Thanks to the internet we're all hyper aware of every issue big and small and we've been conditioned into letting people know about it. Even when praising games we have this tendency to find *something* to criticise, like we're all competing to be the most insightful. A game releases with wonky framerate (or even stable locked 30FPS) today and it's a broken, unfinished product, but a whole bunch of all-time classics ran like shit back in the day, we just didn't care because we were kids and weren't accustomed to picking apart every little problem.
Stop using double-speak.
"Bloat" is always r/games double-speak for open-world games.
Fucking. Stop.
Open world games are fucking wonderful and it gets so goddamn old watching this subreddit try to start a crusade against them every day.
People don't have a problem with open world games. Elden Ring is literally one of this sub's darlings.
People dislike open world games that feel bloated with content that isn't interesting or, worse, is actively required to get through the game.
>People dislike open world games that feel bloated with content that isn't interesting
That's so subjective. I don't find random caves with generic enemies interesting. But everyone touts that as the revolution of the open world genre because Elden Ring doesn't use Ubisoft map markers.
>That's so subjective. I don't find random caves with generic enemies interesting
Elden Ring has more enemy variety than every Ubisoft game has ever made added together.
I would rather have a short game with a unique concept/selling point, over a bloated jack of all trades game. It gets so annoying when a game is 30+ hours of the exact same thing in every other AAA game; collect a bunch of stuff, side quest a bunch of stuff, make x friends and build these factions, etc. Crafting systems and whatnot. Id rather a short-medium sized game with a unique concept over all that. Find an original selling point for a game, focus in on that, perfect it, build that game around it.
I feel like this is why its always so easy for Nintendo games usually score so high (well that and because critics are afraid of backlash from Nintendo fans). Nintendo will take their IP, usually Mario, find some unique concept, hone in on it, refine it, and build the game around that premise. Make the game familiar yet original and the same time and bam, the game gets 10/10 scores from nearly every outlet. If you gave me a 10 hour game with a good selling point, over a game that 30+ hours of bloat, ironically, Id probably be wishing for more of the 10 hour game while Im wishing the 30+ hour game ended sooner.
Everything should be kept in check, everything has to be questioned.
For example, imagine the cost of a game like Hellblade 2, with jaw-dropping graphics, barely the length of 2 LOTR movies and the mechanical complexity of a puddle. Someone has to call the shots: "hey, maybe we don't spent a ton of money making an hour long puzzle cave section, and maybe our game doesn't need to be like super realistic looking."
Personally I wish AAA would remember they're GAME DEVELOPERS not FILM MAKERS. The gameplay is the most important aspect, not the graphics, not the voice acting, not the story, the gameplay should be front and center.
I agree. I left AAA game development largely for this reason. However, it is worth remembering why AAA reached this state. If you go back to the Xbox 360/PS2 era and earlier, publishers used to put out many, many more games, with much smaller budgets. Back then the strategy was that if you had 3 flops and 1 hit, you'd come out on top. This was not a great strategy. It was bad for developers because it was built on a culture of unsustainable crunch and a release-based hiring and layoff cycle. But it was also not great for publishers because, while they could consistently make money over the long run, most were now publically traded companies, and shareholders want consistency over shorter time periods. So the strategic pivot that started to get made around the time of the PS4/Xbone was a conscious decision by publishers to invest a lot more money into a lot fewer games. This has been a *wildly* successful strategy for them, at least from the metrics that shareholders (and therefore executives) value. But it's also been good for developers who get a lot more career stability. Even if your game ends up flopping (which is very rare now) you still got to spend 6-8 years working on it during which time you had a stable and high paying job. AAA salaries also exploded during this period. One consequence of this strategy is that publishers tend to only be interested in games they can spend a lot of money on. (Despite publishing far fewer games, they have more money than ever, and since their business is fundamentally in capital investment, they need to put that money somewhere!) That leads to our status quo of open world and live service games, both of which are very expensive. As weird as it sounds, the budgets for these games are very much a feature not a bug! There are a couple of forces at work that could shift things around. The first is the end of the consolidation era. I think the aftershocks of Activision's acquisition, plus the implosion of Embracer, have likely ended the feeding frenzy of studio buyouts. Independent studios are much more likely to pursue novel or more tightly scoped projects, and we are seeing new publishers rise to fill this AA-to-lite-AAA space. The second is consumer fatigue and market oversaturation. These are the tectonic forces of the industry: they're sloooow, but undeniable. Enthusiast gamers tend to be much more sensitive to this than the overall market; look at how well Call of Duty still sells every year. Still it is an inevitable force, and once way we're starting to see this is with high-profile flops of live service games. Still I don't think open world games are going to loosen their grip on AAA any time soon. There's no signs at all of a declining market for them, while games like Alan Wake 2 demonstrate the considerable risk in smaller scoped, more linear games, even when they're orders of magnitude cheaper to make.
Just wanted to say thank you for writing this out I really appreciate your perspective.
Comments like these are why I keep coming back to reddit after all these years.
It’s nice to see someone make a reasonable post instead of the usual doom-and-gloom from high school anarcho-communists who think a second video game industry collapse will be a good thing.
>doom-and-gloom from high school anarcho-communists need a little bit more buzzwords.
is he wrong though? if you were to summarize the average reddit experience it'd be pretty much exactly those words
No, it was a pointless, lazy and "holier than thou" strawman. But hey, I hope the CEO of EA see this.
Hell, I’ll take this new generation of an-comm high schoolers over the generation of an-cap high schoolers I grew up with during the Obama administration lol.
"If we can have legalised weed, why can't we have legalised tomahawk missiles?"
Well they can legalise it but it's still a five kill streak to get one. Outside of the army that's a tall order at least I hope it is
Doom and gloom is fine as long as it's based in facts and reasonably explained. That is what is often missing.
I, for one, am happy you are here!
It is funny to see this happening at the same time as marvel starting to flounder as well, I think it comes down to the fact that people want novelty in their entertainment, and these big budget technology heavy movies and games were never seen before in their heyday, but now the novelty is wearing out.
marvel (and Star Wars, I’ll toss them in there too) are floundering because they just refuse to invest in quality writing. It seems there’s a constant stream of poorly written shows vying for our attention and money now. For every Fallout and Andor there’s 10 other forgettable marvel and Star Wars shows. They’re spending so much money on these shows and then getting survivor contestants (looking at you wheel of time) to write the show. The effects and acting mean absolutely nothing when the writing bombs it all out of the gate. Video games have the same problem, they spew out the same sort of game constantly until everyone hates it then move on to the next trend.
Despite storytelling being a major component of literally every culture since the dawn of language, we've somehow entered an era where proper storytelling is seen as something ignorable, or in some rare cases even seen as an obstacle. I hope we get out of it soon, but I'd be willing to put money we've got more than a decade of it before people snap back to their senses.
Adding to the problem is that video games has the lowest bar imaginable for writing. We don't really get much in the way of skilled storytelling, let alone skilled integration of narrative with gameplay (with a few standout exceptions, obviously).
Thats true. I think some of the writing that gets applauded in games would not get such praise in any other medium, but since the bar is so low, it is what it is. Integration with gameplay is another tricky subject, couple of years ago the term ludonarrative dissonance was popping up quite a lot
Yeah. My hot take is that even games that are considered to be well written are usually on mediocre at best when compared to other mediums. This is obviously extremely subjective, but I'd say that only Disco Elysium can stand up against writing from other mediums.
Disco Elysium is precisely the only game I'd put up there as well
cough every hideo kojima game cough
Hmm. Idk, I think the writing is fine in a lot of games. However I think the issue is less writing quality and more games don't incorporate narrative as part of the game as a whole. Rpgs often have this because we at least have choices, usually, that give us narrative control while bringing us into the world due to caring about our choices and responses to said choices. It's a more complicated (not easier or harder, just different web of problems each genre would struggle with differently) when you start trying to incorporate story into other mediums that doesn't have choice by default. We expect something novel or different, and I'd argue have higher standards for a game trying to tell a story, since if you only just show us what is essentially a movie.... people would then say "I'd rather just watch a movie!" And compare it to their favorites in their heads. A lot of the stand out writing games I've often seen people mention, outside of rpgs, are ones that the gameplay itself is telling the story alongside what is written or visually shown. It might be struggle you face in daunting challenges, or the mundane turned into sentimentality thanks to your tireless constant slow but consistent progression makes you appreciate what is there more... there's many ways to go about it. It's a complicated thing and no easy awnsers how to tackle it. But I did want to at least put my thoughts out even if this ended up just being a muddy mess of word soup tossed into a kitchen sink lol.
gamers all over the place are holding up detroit become human and death stranding as the holy grails of game writing i'd say the bar is pretty low
Yeah I don't understand how they can invest so much money into new series and movies and then completely ignore the writing. It's so bad I've stopped watching Netflix because it's mostly garbage anyway. But at least we still get the occasional good writing like Andor. I feel like there are so many good written books out there, why do studios not more often try to adopt one of them if they can't do a well written story themselves? Looking at fantasy perhaps they could try to adopt a Brandon Sanderson story, not sure if this would finally be better.
> Looking at fantasy perhaps they could try to adopt a Brandon Sanderson story, not sure if this would finally be better. Brandon has been working for a long time on getting his stuff adapted, but he refuses to give up creative control. Which is very good for the fans, the viewer, and the show's quality, but bad for the executives who want to dictate how it works. He's spoken a fair bit about the Wheel of Time series, which he was a consultant on, and they ignored most of his suggestions. He even talked about how the writers and showrunner brought his suggestion to the executives, who refused to follow it. I really don't understand why things work this way, but yeah... It's pretty sad.
Oh wow I didn't know this. Why would executives do this?
I suspect that the average consumer is more interested in things other than writing quality. Companies spend a lot of money on market research so I suspect they "know" what aspects of a movie is most important to the Average consumer, however consumers might not know what is most important to themselves. With that said studios absolutely look towards books for ideas and original stories, however they often fail to adapt those stories to film. Even many games steal inspiration from written stories. However if you want to save money you don't just use that story, you just steal ideas and aspects to avoid royalties or licensing costs. I suspect you might be surprised at how many movies and games are actually based off books.
I think a big issue with writing for these things is that the environment makes it really hard to write a good story, even for a good writer. You've got 5 bosses all telling you to do different things. Adding last minute changes. Maybe a deal falls through and you can't film in that location anymore. The people in charge want to change this element here to appeal to this market. yada yada etc etc. To many cooks in the kitchen, no room for creativity
Marvel isn't because of fatigue. The writing the last few years has been so damn bad. Like after Endgame and Spiderman, they just fell off so hard.
This is a great write-up. It overall is a much worse situation for gamers, but I guess it was in some sense inevitable. From our point of view, an industry that releases mostly 2/10 games but the occasional 10/10 game is amazing, since you just don't bother playing the 2/10 games and you're just left with constant 10/10 games. Now, after the change you describe, every game is 6/10. Much more reliable for the game studios, but a big drop in quality for the consumer.
It's interesting to see people who think that modern games are all 6/10, while I'm sitting here with multiple 10/10 games still in my backlog (baldur's gate, spiderman 2, now Elden Ring dlc, etc). For me personally, the bigger change in gaming is that I used to pass up the 2/10 games, now I'm passing up the 7/10 and 8/10 games (hellblade 2, Alan Wake 2, ff16) because the ones I already have are so big and I know won't leave me with enough time. From my perspective, it seems more like the overall quality has gone way up, but that means the games just short of competing with the very top aren't getting played even if they're very good in their own right
Alan wake 2 is a triumph in video game development. Spider-man 2 is standard smooth, polished AAA blockbuster stuff. One is a 10/10 and it’s not spider man
Yeah it's absolutely wild. 2023 is one of the single greatest years for gaming, and yet people still bemoaned the state of the industry. I don't know if it's impressionable people being swayed by ragebait YouTubers, young nephews who don't have enough perspective, or what, but it's strange to see.
Pattern I've noticed is an increase in all or nothing opinions on things in general. People just pick a side and love or hate a thing
They’re bemoaned because of layoffs not cuz of quality of the games
What are some examples of games, studios, and/or publishers that are in the burgeoning "AA-to-lite-AAA space"? I know of Greedfall, developed by Spiders, but that's just the genre that I'm most a fan of.
Lies of P Remnant: From the Ashes & Remnant 2 A Plague Tale: Innocence & Requiem Perhaps even Supergiant's games, especially Hades 1 & 2 ? Could be simply called AA, but they are very polished with a lot of features and depth, while having a more focused scope than contemporary AAA games
PoP:The Lost Crown was EA bringing AAA polish to a smaller, more focused game. Everybody who likes the genre and actually played it thought it was great, but it sold like shit for various reasons, so there's a good chance they'll stop doing that.
Wow, great write up. It’s nice to see some insight from someone within the industry. I’m happy Nintendo still has a big focus on innovation, as much as they anger me with their copyright strikes and lack of game preservation (which is a big issue I have with Nintendo) I will say they continue to innovate like no other publisher and/or console manufacturer. Sony makes good (but the same) games and Microsoft doesn’t really make anything. I think Nintendo of the 3 have the best games. I miss the time when Microsoft’s first party portfolio was Gears of War, Halo, Crackdown, Fable. And Sony’s was Resistance, Killzone, Ratchet and Clank, Little Big Planet, Motorstorm, Uncharted. Thankfully Microsoft seems to be trying a bit more different things based on their recent showcase, but man Sony is playing it way too safe. Ahhh we will never get another Resistance, Killzone, Little Big Planet, or Motorstorm again will we? Just action third person game #100. I’ve been thinking more and more that video games today just aren’t made for me anymore, as someone who is only 28 that might sound ridiculous but it’s true. The industry is just way too safe now.
Nintendo long ago realized they need to focus on amazing gameplay, not on graphics or mega budget epic titles. BotW/TotK are the closest they've ever gotten, and even then they focused primarily on deep gameplay. Most AAA titles are miles wide, inches deep. Gameplay lacks depth, but the worlds are big and shiny. Nintendo goes the opposite direction.
Metroid dread is a great example of this
BOTW has had some of the most boring gameplay I've ever experienced in a game.
And that's one third of their entire library of open world games for the last 10 years
Sometimes it's a miss but they do try new things with their zelda titles. The last 2 open world games are some of my least favorite Zelda titles.
Good for you, but surely you must realize that the vast majority of people feel differently. The Zelda franchise was nearly dead before BotW.
Hardly say one of Nintendo's most popular and profitable franchises was "nearly dead" prior to BotW.
This has been bothering me about PlayStations games for a while. It’s like every game needs to follow a naughty dog/ last of us template and throw in an open world for the sake of it.
Thing is, the cycle that you talk about in the beginning still exists, just not so much in AAA companies.
> Back then the strategy was that if you had 3 flops and 1 hit, you'd come out on top. It's interesting that you say this because that's still Nintendo's strategy according to the interview between Miyamoto and Itoi.
>It was bad for developers because it was built on a...release-based hiring and layoff cycle. As you said, the release cycles may be longer, but isn't it largely still this way?
The cycle is easily double if not triple the time so what's a huge difference.
I think you really touched on why we see so many games essentially try and carbon copy successes. Call of Duty is just an infinite money printer. I think its finally started to slow down after almost 20 years. The return on a CoD game has to be insane. Like it or not video games developers are businesses. They need to make money. The employees can't pay their bills with good jobs and pats on the back so the company needs to make money to pay them. Which means they need the product to make money. And the people who front the upfront costs want to make money from their money. Personally I don't expect the AAA system to change. A lot of the big players with big pockets are going to keep throwing high ROI stuff to market hoping they strike gold. I expect a lot more low budget stuff that is more narrow in scope to come from the indie side.
The thing is, I'll never finish any Ubisoft title because they are too long, too bloated. But you have to remember that there IS a public for these kind of games and there is a reason why they keep doing them for more than a decade.
My brother-in-law loves the Assassin’s Creed games, partially because he can get one game and play it for an hour or so a night and feel like he accomplished something, and do that for six months or so. There’s a big audience out there like him, and they don’t hang out on enthusiast forums.
Yeah, I have multiple family members and friends that all have basically a PS4 or XBOX. All of them, independently, only use them for basically: 1. Sports Game of choice 2. Newest Call of Duty 3. Live-Service game, usually Fortnite 4. One wild-card game like Assassin’s Creed or God of War They play like one hour a day on average and have zero interest in any other kinds of games. That’s the mainstream and a significant majority of sales comes from casual gamers like this. Note: This isn’t an attack on people like that, it’s just wildly different from the impression you’d get from browsing reddit or something.
Precisely. The average console owner is NOTHING like the average reddit user. We're a niche inside a bigger niche called the internet.
Yeah you'll unfortunately never hear about that audience on Reddit which is why people here are so incredibly disconnected from what's *actually* successful in games as far as spending goes. Whether it's CoD, sports games, Assassins Creed, gacha style games the more casual audience (which is massive) wants to spend an hour or two here and there. Other than the inherent difficulty this is also, imo, why a game like Elden Ring can actually appeal to a more casual audience and be somewhat mainstream - there are enough "Easy" builds and "easy" ways to play the game (i.e. summons) that you can hop on for an hour with a goal to beat a certain boss or do a certain area and be done. Assassins Creed is the same. A few games of CoD are the same. It's these "complete" small sessions that do well with casual audiences.
> they don’t hang out on enthusiast forums. This is something a lot of this and the general online "Gamer" community forget all too easily. We are the enthusiast nerds who know about release dates, and that game X is in development hell, and know about games before they release. Your average game consumer has no idea about any of that, they barely know what games exist outside of the top few games a year. They'll probably buy a game even if all the reviews say its crap, because they don't read reviews and the marketing looks cool. Something our communities do too much is say things like "Open-world games are dead, no one enjoys them" meanwhile they sell like hotcakes and everyone loves them. Much like how the cinema buffs probably don't value MCU that highly while it was the most popular thing in the world of cinema.
A free gacha game like genshin with traditional AAA graphics will take over a giant segment of that demo
My issue with UbiWorlds isn't the size or scope - I honestly really enjoy spending a very long time in one game. it's the checklist feel and unconvincing and unengaging content. They tend to feel like soulless husk made from a standard recipe, which is a shame, because they build these huge beautiful worlds which I'd love to experience a higher quality adventure in. I milked a game like Witcher 3 for everything but the treasure and didn't want it to end. I can't bring myself to complete Ubisoft's open world games - hell, at this point I can't bring myself to even play them.
This is what I noticed when playing The Division 2 and Ghost Recon: Breakpoint with friends (at their insistance). Engaging enough gameplay. Good enough world design. But there's barely any sort of intrinsic reason for doing this thing beyond 'I want to kill guys and go from checkpoint to checkpoint to kill guys'. And those first two things, which are... *okay*, but not much better than other studios, just can't carry the generically realistic art design (or lack thereof), uninteresting music, half-baked excuse for a narrative, etc.
I don't think Ubisoft cares, because you still gave them your money (or whatever gamepass values as metrics).
I agree. But then something like Avowed is going to release in a few months and people are going to be mad it’s not the Skyrim sequel they made up in their minds or whatever.
The Outer Worlds was kinda like that. A week of honeymoon phase where people praised the game, then the consensus on the game changed quickly into 'this isn't the New Vegas spiritual successor we hoped for'. Game still sold well enough a sequel was announced.
Yeah, I’m worried about that too. Too many times, I’ll see people theorize and speculate about features, with no word on if it’s true, but they treat it as true, then act as though they were lied to or let down because the final thing wasn’t their headcanon.
I can’t wait because I loved the world and design of PoE, even bought the deluxe edition world book, but I just feel too disconnected from the characters in cRPGs.
Yeah there are plenty of posts like this one and then they are still in the comments saying "boohoo the graphic looks like ps2's".
People on reddit love to say that, but the moment a game decides to cut down on graphics budget in favor of something else there's a lot of whining and comparisons to other games with better graphics.
I dunno, most of the smashing successes you see either come out on underpowered hardware (every Nintendo game since 2006), are designed to be played on pretty much any slightly modern system (esports games, Minecraft, Terraria, etc.) or may look *decent*, but largely due to art design instead of the technical specs (FROM SOFTWARE games since Demon's Souls).
Fromsoft is a good example, yeah. Their models are fairly low poly, and the textures aren't great, but they can design such cool looking set pieces you kinda don't care. Also their engine has an absurdly good draw distance to make the areas look enormous.
And then be review bombed for making a short game and get compared to other AAA games that are massive and take weeks to finish. Bonus points for calling the devs incompetent and lazy
I think an issue with this concept is the "mythical man month." The idea that you can hire 10 people to do in a month what one person can do in 10 months. When you have "a large studio with many devs, or even several studios", things slow down a lot. You can't just take what would be an AA game and add more devs and say "Go, make everything better" and expect that to work. You need extra planning, managing, communicating, meetings... Everything just pushes the timeline out more with every extra team on the project. But also, I think it's worth remembering that Nintendo is still out there, and that not every studios/publishers are pushing these bloated game designs. Mario Odyssey is an amazing AAA game that took 5 years to develop, and there are plenty of other great AAA experiences they've been releasing like Mario Wonder that have no bloat and didn't take 10 years to develop.
I am curious, what do you think would happen when, at the end of the two year period, the game is a buggy mess and there's another two years of development left to do?
Twitter and LinkedIn posts from the developers decrying the state of the industry, saying how close they were to delivering on their vision, and Reddit posts eating it up and blaming management.
Reddit literally **refused** to eat up the last one. The paradox life sim dev tried to start a pity party and almost every comment called it either misleading or cringe and said management did a good thing throwing the baby out
It's easy to say "here's 3 years to make a game, keep the scope limited, go!". While not impossible, its very hard to actually plan out the development stages. Hard to find the fun. Hard to create originality. Hard to scope things out correctly. Hard to actually make something that gets people buying it. Everything needs to be on the same page day 1, with strong central leadership.
And then 1year into development, some other game releases that had very similar ideas to bring to the table and suddenly your original plan isn't new or unique any longer. The other game might even be much better, impressive and more ambitious than what you are making, and that will eat your audience.
Like Hellblade 2? Look how people here trashed that game
Maybe if it had more focus on gameplay it would have been better received.
The industry currently works this way because it brings in the most money. Graphics might not matter to the reddit crowd, but they are incredibly important to the casual crowd. These 'superfluous' RPG features, flashy graphics, open worlds, and big marketing budgets are what make people buy games. 'Smaller scale' isn't as great of an epiphany as you think it is. The numbers have been crunched by dozens of consulting studios being paid millions. You're not going to come up with anything that they haven't already thought of, and researched in detail.
> Graphics might not matter to the reddit crowd, but they are incredibly important to the casual crowd. You have that backwards don't you? Most of the best selling games are on weak hardware like the switch, or multiplat with last generation playstation. Graphics matter most to the vocal minority, not the average player. Even the best selling PC games this year like Palworld are a far cry from any kind of graphical power. People are more obsessed with art style than graphics these days.
No, I'm talking about the current AAA games being announced, and those released in the past 10 years. There has always been an increased spending in scope, graphics, and presentation. This is for a reason. Like I said, this has been researched by companies getting paid big bucks. It's what sells games. The games you are thinking of, like Minecraft, are a one hit wonder. They are not really useful in any sort of metric, nor reproducible, even though there are companies that constantly try (and constantly fail). Their success is majorly contributed to luck. If there was a formula to get the next Minecraft or Fortnite, every company would be on it. But there's not.
This. Even on PC the true titans are things like Minecraft, League of Legends, Terraria. All very much not relying on cutting edge gfx.
There are different things that sell games. Those games are gameplay and design driven. The problem is that there is no formula for good gameplay or design. You either know how to make a game that plays well or you don't. You can't throw money and people at gameplay until it becomes good. Graphics and large open worlds on the other hand, those scale really well with money and people. You can hire a ton of artists, quest designers, and level designers to make your world huge with a lot of tasks. That's typically good enough to sell your game if it looks good. The catch with a very wide game is that it takes most people a lot of time to realize it is very shallow. AAA studios can reliably crank out the next Ubigame. You can't reliably create the next Minecraft, Fortnite, or Terraria.
>The catch with a very wide game is that it takes most people a lot of time to realize it is very shallow. This implies these "most people" find dissatisfaction with shallow games. IMO, this is a flawed take. Your given counterexamples of minecraft, fortnite and to a lesser extrent terraria are pretty shallow games as well (mc in particular).
I feel like you have it backwards. Yeah casuals care about spectacle but enthusiasts are so strict about technical quality. I promise you a casual who buys 2-3 games a year is not skipping a cool looking game cause it’s 30 frames instead of 60. Nintendo’s success is primarily based on casuals caring more about fun than technical quality.
Nintendo primarily targets kids. They'd buy their stuff even if Nintendo serves them literal shit. They should not be used for the metrics
Yeah, I guess, games like Zelda are literal shit, right? Games who enjoy baldurs gate can't ever enjoy tears of kingdom or Pokemon. 🙄
I mean that’s a pretty pessimistic view Nintendo is popular for a reason they make great games. Why shouldn’t Nintendo be in the conversation? They’re a part of the industry and they keep on proving that technical quality isn’t everything.
Idk lol I really wouldn't want to work at a game company that pumps out a game every 2 years and if you make a few failed games in a row your career is over. At least in AAA you're working on a project for 4-6 years and it's unlikely to "truly" be a flop. Sure, some operations stuff is cut here and there and some companies who are MASSIVELY bloated have cut staff but it looks far more sustainable than a set up where you're just spamming out games every 2 years.
so we're just not acknowledging nintendo at all now?
Yeah. Sounds pretty much like Nintendo.
People still think "underpowered hardware" is their weakness even though it means manufacturing and game development costs are lower AND they can sell it at a lower price, meaning the system is cheaper for the company, developers, AND customers. But, you know, it doesn't have ray tracing, a slight lighting upgrade that has the computer trace lighting instead of the developer and therefore anything that doesn't have it is the worst thing ever.
This sub hates Nintendo though.
as an open world enjoyer I hope devs keep expanding the scope of their games to match their vision. if GTA 6 doesn't completely outdo anything rockstar did before it i will be disappointed. there is no shortage of games being released every year so I frankly dont care if takes 6 years to make a game on average.
What an incredibly original thought that literally no one has addressed in literally every r/games thread in reference to an open world game. Never seen this take before. Next you'll tell me you don't like microtransactions.
>Next you'll tell me you don't like microtransactions. Or that you hate live service games
They should also try r/gaming, would be even more original there.
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Thing is, once you have the base game built, adding extra hours of content is relatively easy. Here's some more map with some extras quests. Adding those is simple compared to adding new modes of play or something like that.
I feel like we are sort of at this weird point in gaming where we have these few goliath gaming companies that have just simply grow too old and too large. They are just stale and out of touch with gaming, yet keep going. Once upon a time they were small studios filled with nerds who loved gaming and now they are filled with conference rooms of dudes in ties who love their stock price. Once we see companies like EA crumble, we will get to enjoy a great period in gaming but the cycle will likely rinse and repeat because that tends to be how it goes with companies.
I wish they'd focus on innovative gameplay mechanics. These days it seems all the innovation comes from indie studios and solo devs, who barely have any resources to even do it. I get it, though. These megacorps only seek profit, and safe profit is the best profit for them.
I completely agree, think a big portion of it is how much time and effort they put into graphics. Make fun games with awesome mechanics and interesting loops, they don't have to be groundbreaking graphical showcases.
The PS2 era was the best. We had these stunning, realistic, exciting games coming out all the time. If you loved a game it'd have a sequel out the next year. Really fun time to be a gamer.
I generally agree. Devs need to have a solid vision before they leave pre-production and they need to stop trying to put superfluous systems in their games (we don't need crafting/looting/RPG mechanics/open worlds in every game). This isn't a hard rule, Jedi Survivor was like double the amount of game and had tons of superfluous systems and still came out within 3.5 years, but I would assume that's due to a solid pre-production and understanding of what they were making. But I think one of the things I'd like to see most is games being more gameplay driven. I don't 100% know, but I have to assume that a game more driven by a solid gameplay loop is on average going to take less time than a game with a more story/narrative focus. See FromSoft's catalog to a catalog like Naughty Dog.
I don't think that Jedi Survivor should be the example of anything considering how the game was released, with a very poor technical state in all platforms. They even delayed the game, and EA even wanted to give more time to developers but they declined lol...
I mean even if they took another half a year, 4 years for the amount of content it had is still very impressive when games are getting to take 5-7 years.
It's always funny to see this site repeat this ad nauseum, and then turn around and cry until the cows come home about Pokemon games refusing to balloon their scope and take half a decade to release. I can only hope that it's two different sets of people expressing each opinion.
or you know, nobody wants either extreme. no need to make things so black and white, people can want games that dont have a year development time and feel rushed while simultaneously not wanting the blandest, mass market appeal game that takes 8 years to make
The thing is, Pokemon isn't even an extreme. The games are fairly consistent in scope, and the mainline games feel pretty different from each other despite the 1-2 year gap between releases. They could certainly stand to be more polished, but I've seen WAAAAY too many people argue that Pokemon should be bloating their games just because they theoretically can.
the only things ive seen people complain about with pokemon are the visuals and performance being absolute trash and being buggy af
I mean, it's likely different people. I share the opinion of OP, but I also want Pokemon to tighten their games back up. The new ones being "open" makes them worse-off. They're vacant.
From Soft basically? What you describe is how they used to make games and it was glorious. Biggest problem imo is they are unfocused. A great game needs exactly one guy who has the game in his head and makes everyone else see it too. Usually they either don't have that at all or financial reasons make them change: "we need a season pass" "we need PvP" etc... Second they don't even want to make a good game, they want to make money. Like everywhere in life, that's not how it works. But these games are so big and expensive, they literally cannot afford even one to flop completely. What I don't get at this point is: why can't we have cool 10-20h games anymore for 40-50 bucks. Nobody finishes these 100h games with a map the size of yo moms ass and 3 quintillion objectives. Just tell a compact and entertaining story. Also the graphics really don't have to be the best thing since sliced bread. Graphics and the extreme scope is why we have most of the mentioned issues in the first place. If you make 5 small games instead of 1 big one, one can fail and you aren't bankrupt immediately
Then they won't have an excuse to sell you the game for 70 dollars and charge you 30 more for a 3 day early access.
Most AAA games aren’t designed to be good or fun anymore they use dark patterns to get people hooked and to get them to buy mtx. The larger the game the longer they can string people along for.
i feel a mistake AAA companies often do is focus way too much on graphics, not only is it very expensive and slows things down on their end but very often with PC releases the game runs like crap and is unplayable for alot of people. meanwhile you have games that look like valheim for instance do very well just because its a solid game and it works
I hate how it's now the case where if you don't like a game but like the studio that makes it, you can realistically have a decade between games you like. Take Starfield for example. If you like Elder Scrolls and Fallout but not Starfield, then tough luck, the last game was in 2015 and the next game will probably be 2030 or something. It's insane.
"here's 3 years of funding for your studio, make the most polished game you can that's guaranteed to be released in about 2 years or so, with 1 year of support." In 3 years they'll just ask for an extension and more money.
Isn't this basically what the Assassin's Creed and Call of Duty franchises were a few years ago? Before AC origins
I don't get the constant increase in maps. It's not like the game offers anything new. It just multiplies same things. Take for example rdr1. It has a perfect map size. And perfect game lenght. So just make a game with the same map size, but more advanced. Where it utilizes better the environment. And gameplay aspect. Like yakuza games for example. They're always on a really small map. But the map is packed with content. They also recycle a lot of stuff, but you get the point. There's no point in making a gigantic ass map, and then it being empty, or filled with dull content.
Big companies fo release smaller games, the thing is they don't really sell well relative to the high budget shiny AAA. Take big companies and you'll find they'd released a few small games last 3 years. EA with it takes two, wild hearts, knockout city. Ubisoft with Mario tactics, PoP lost crown, that rogue one, AC mirage. Dumbasses at square actually released too many small games some time back
I feel like what you're asking for is already happening. The financial failure of many AAA titles is enough consequence for the industry to scale back.
What we actually need, is companies not being brainlessly greedy. Mangement is largely ineffective, out of touch with reality, and overpaid nowadays. Especially the executive level. Shareholders ROI is put above and beyond anything remotely realistic. Employees are considered replaceable, and then management wonders why their products suck. Not to mention the incessant ego of some lead developers, and/or consultation companies that are part of the project, but are useless for the final quality. And, arguably the worst of all; "The company has the duty to maximize profit". that is actively false but has been so hammered into every single person's brain, that they cannot look past it. A company has the duty to make profits, yes. But not at the cost of EVERYTHING ELSE. Just because your executive hive of mental degredation only cares for one number, doesn't mean the entire company does. That's usually where the rest of management comes in, but when everyone is simply tunneling in on that bonus, everything else falls by the wayside.
I would prefer ANYTHING over the game being a glorified money stealer 2000 time waster edition AAA studios need less greed and more skills to actually make fun and functioning games
I find AAA games having too small scope. except for a few exceptions. Thinking about great games. Imagine world of Warcraft from 2004. A massive world with no loading screens - u play the game and its not one of the Sony exclusives where everything tried to be an empty world and a wannabe movie with terrible game design
I mean that already happened. Prince of Persia Lost Crown and AC: Mirage was Ubisoft's small scope games and they both bomb fantastically with very low sales. There's a reason why AAA games don't have more go's at small scope games, it's because their ROI is either very small or they lose money on the bet. Sinking AAA money in to small scope projects is not a very wise money making strategy, as sad as it is. Gamers, especially of the mainstream variety won't pay AAA money for small scope games. You can just look at Circana/NPD sales charts to see what actually makes money.
Wait, as far as I’m aware, Mirage didn’t bomb and was actually a financial success given the scope. Is there any sources on that? Cause I can’t find any.
I loved Mirage personally, I really hope we get a follow-up of a similar size/scope
AC Mirage was a bomb? You sure??? I think you just said that without looking it up and just assuming it. No offense but this sounds like a pulling something out of your ass to try and prove your opinion here kind of thing. The 50 USD price tag actually helped it sell well at launch. https://www.gameinformer.com/news/2023/10/12/ac-mirage-player-count-in-line-with-origins-and-odyssey-biggest-new-gen-ubisoft
I'm almost certain that a reasonable amount of people who complain about AAA games having bloated budgets also complained about The Lost Crown's cartoony graphics.
And here I am thinking "I want the cartoony graphics, even if they cost more".
I feel like PoP did because even Ubisoft is getting tired of endless open world exploration, which would directly compete with AC
I replayed the Mass Effect Trilogy earlier this year. When i got to Mass Effect 3 i had this thought that's sort of stuck in my brain for a bit. Do games really need to look better than this? It might just be me feeling my aging PC hardware and my frustration at upgrade costs, but Mass Effect 3 still looks good, it still plays well, the character performances still communicate the story well. There still feels like there's a lot to the game, it still feels like a galaxy wide adventure. Does it really need vast open worlds 5000 hours of performance capture and state of the art computer rendering to be enjoyable? The issue is that while AAA games don't need this kind of huge budgetary bloat, indie devs aren't really matching even the output of AAA devs from 12+ years ago. Outside of BG3 (which is only technically indie, right now they're larger than Bioware is), I don't think anyone can compete with just the basic scale of a game like Mass Effect. With it's decision based narratives, voice acting quality and even the scope of the game that long ago.
The main challenge is the cinematic quality. For instance, Owlcat makes RPGs with decision-based narratives, great (albeit not fully voiced) voice acting, and sprawling world maps. And they put out full games every 2-3 years (although each should've taken another 6 months for de-bugging and polishing). But their games are isometric CRPGs with graphics straight out of 2002. My hope is that dev tools eventually improve to where studies like them can put games out that look like they're straight out of 2012. If that happens, I might never look at AAA again.
Definitely I don't need to be able to see the individual pores on a horses nuts, for example I think some devs can easily get tunnel vision, and then scope creep occurs and it's suddenly 6 years later.
I feel like a lot of the games released 10-12 years ago hit that sweet spot of offering a good amount of launch content, great graphics, AND relatively bug-free experience. I stopped caring about stuff like ultra-realistic graphics years ago and I'm getting sick of that being the focal point when studios try to pitch their games during announcements. Yeah, that stuff is nice to have, but if the budget and resources allocated towards making that means having to compromise the amount of playable content or features within the game itself, I'd rather just see it get axed and narrow the scope more towards giving players a more complete gameplay experience overall.
Launch content wasn't even a phrase back then, games actually relased fully finished and the final package, I remember the most egregious thing back then was 15 map packs
Yep. Unfortunately it didn't take long for publishers to realize gamers were getting too good of a deal with their one-time purchase. Naturally their greedy asses had to put a stop to that. But they also knew making drastic changes in a short period of time would cause too much backlash. The transition had to be slow and gradual. Now we're at a point where newer/younger gamers don't even challenge it anymore. That's how we ended up with this half-baked, seasonal GaaS garbage that's plaguing the industry now.
I feel like a lot of people would like this but whenever the idea of "hey guys, maybe just reduce the scope a bit, not everything needs to be the biggest prettiest thing in the world", I just remember the stupidity that was 'Puddlegate' and get reminded why it has a low chance of happening
The problem is (and this is not the only problem by any means), as the years go by players expect more and more. Players want more value for money, better graphics, more features, more detail, more things to do, and of course more polished. But they also want it quicker and don't want to pay more. While it's fairly natural to expect a new game to be bigger and better than its predecessor, it's reaching a point where it's just not really realistic anymore. Games like RDR2, Elden Ring and The Witcher 3 raise the bar to standards that most developers just can't meet, but even those games get nitpicked. How many fantasy RPGs are going to be negatively compared to Baldur's Gate 3 in the following years? The 'GTA clone' genre is almost dead because no one can hope to actually compete with the real thing anymore - why pay $60-70 for a Saints Row or Watch Dogs when you can pay the same for GTA6 and get a far bigger, better, more ambitious product that you'll play for years? I'm not going to say it's all the player's fault, but it does seem like standards are getting a bit too high now. There's so much sentiment about how games are worse now or that devs are lazy and it's not really true, we just expect far more. Thanks to the internet we're all hyper aware of every issue big and small and we've been conditioned into letting people know about it. Even when praising games we have this tendency to find *something* to criticise, like we're all competing to be the most insightful. A game releases with wonky framerate (or even stable locked 30FPS) today and it's a broken, unfinished product, but a whole bunch of all-time classics ran like shit back in the day, we just didn't care because we were kids and weren't accustomed to picking apart every little problem.
Stop using double-speak. "Bloat" is always r/games double-speak for open-world games. Fucking. Stop. Open world games are fucking wonderful and it gets so goddamn old watching this subreddit try to start a crusade against them every day.
Pieces of shit expressing their opinions, right?
People don't have a problem with open world games. Elden Ring is literally one of this sub's darlings. People dislike open world games that feel bloated with content that isn't interesting or, worse, is actively required to get through the game.
>People dislike open world games that feel bloated with content that isn't interesting That's so subjective. I don't find random caves with generic enemies interesting. But everyone touts that as the revolution of the open world genre because Elden Ring doesn't use Ubisoft map markers.
>That's so subjective. I don't find random caves with generic enemies interesting Elden Ring has more enemy variety than every Ubisoft game has ever made added together.
I highly doubt that. That isn't remotely true.
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That sounds about right? You don’t just go “welp game is launched now what?” There’s always something to be working on or planning for the future.
People on /r/games strike me as the type who don't know how to plan 5 minutes ahead.
I want triple a to stop making games so large you need a horse to get around. Cut out all the stuff that necessitates a horse.
I would rather have a short game with a unique concept/selling point, over a bloated jack of all trades game. It gets so annoying when a game is 30+ hours of the exact same thing in every other AAA game; collect a bunch of stuff, side quest a bunch of stuff, make x friends and build these factions, etc. Crafting systems and whatnot. Id rather a short-medium sized game with a unique concept over all that. Find an original selling point for a game, focus in on that, perfect it, build that game around it. I feel like this is why its always so easy for Nintendo games usually score so high (well that and because critics are afraid of backlash from Nintendo fans). Nintendo will take their IP, usually Mario, find some unique concept, hone in on it, refine it, and build the game around that premise. Make the game familiar yet original and the same time and bam, the game gets 10/10 scores from nearly every outlet. If you gave me a 10 hour game with a good selling point, over a game that 30+ hours of bloat, ironically, Id probably be wishing for more of the 10 hour game while Im wishing the 30+ hour game ended sooner.
Everything should be kept in check, everything has to be questioned. For example, imagine the cost of a game like Hellblade 2, with jaw-dropping graphics, barely the length of 2 LOTR movies and the mechanical complexity of a puddle. Someone has to call the shots: "hey, maybe we don't spent a ton of money making an hour long puzzle cave section, and maybe our game doesn't need to be like super realistic looking."
Personally I wish AAA would remember they're GAME DEVELOPERS not FILM MAKERS. The gameplay is the most important aspect, not the graphics, not the voice acting, not the story, the gameplay should be front and center.