Comment on Anon is worried about AAA sales
Sunsofold@lemmings.world 1 week agoCool. Welcome to the world of options that exist outside of designed by committee, mass market, crowd pleaser, middle of the road, mechanically stagnant gaming.
It’s telling that your prime examples of AAA are games that choke on their own development but ultimately only offer bigness as their value. Big maps… big, mostly empty maps. Big crowds of NPCs… that do the same three idle animations, duck and cover like a choreographed team at a gun shot and then go back about their day 30 seconds later. Big, powerful engines… with big piles of bugs that take a year of dev time after release to fix. Big texture files… that you probably don’t notice because you’re playing on less than top of the line hardware or just ignore if you aren’t. Big ‘storylines’… that ultimately end up being ‘choose path A or B and then shoot/stab a giant pile of mostly similar enemies,’ and 95% of your game time is the distraction of sidequests you wander into with no effect on the main story. Big collections of voice acted lines… saying generic things and repeating them so often they hit you like an arrow to the knee. Big teams… that get so big they have to have meetings about their meetings with the meetings team before scheduling a meeting with someone from art, marketing, sound, code, and three other people to decide whether its reasonable to have a meeting about adding a hair to the dog in side quest 37.
So, yeah, welcome to the part if gaming where you experience the small, but meaningful. ‘To the Moon’ is never going to have an impressive trailer, but it might make you weep, if you have the heart for it. Disco Elysium doesn’t have square lightyears of map to wander, but its creators paid attention to everything you can see. Pacific Drive was made by a team of less than a dozen people, but was put together with incredible skill and artistry. Bullets Per Minute took an idea many have had and made it real, and even did a great job of it. Quality over quantity, every time.
REDACTED@infosec.pub 1 week ago
I honestly don’t understand your point. Just because the games are larger, they’re worse? The things you describe are commonly not even in many indie games (Ie. Animations).
So your logic is that if the product is not 11/10, it’s shit? I’m sorry that you’ve had such a terrible experience, but personally some of the best games I’ve ever played in my life were AAA games and I’m glad companies made/make them.
Also, your “quality over quantity” at the end is so out of touch due to everyone complaining about how long it takes nowadays to make AAA games. New entries used to be made in a year or two-three, now we’re entering “wait a decade or two till we make the second game”
Sunsofold@lemmings.world 1 week ago
Don’t misrepresent me and then pretend to have defeated my positions by defeating your own misrepresentations.
I didn’t say they suck. I said they are designed by committee, mass market, crowd pleaser, middle of the road, and mechanically stagnant. They are the corn of gaming. They aren’t poison, or shit, but they are decidedly mediocre in their makeup, and there are so many options that are better on one metric or another, basically any metric other than scale, if the players weren’t locked in or tricked in, the AAAs aren’t going to get the kind of support they have. Saying ‘some of my happiest memories are eating my way through a big trough of corn,’ isn’t a demonstration that corn is better, or even good, but that you, specifically, anecdotally, really like your corn.
And yes, there is something about them that bugs me on a deeper level, specifically their manipulative place in the industry/culture, but that doesn’t mean I’m wrong to call them mediocre. Are all opinions invalidated by emotional entanglement? Then why should we trust your word as an avowed supporter of AAA game companies? You have an emotional reason to support them. Why should anyone listen to you about them if your views are emotionally tainted and your own standard requires detached judgement?
REDACTED@infosec.pub 1 week ago
“Your opinion is not valid because you like, not dislike what I dislike” is what this sounds like.
Alright then, tell me which open world driving+action game is better than GTA or Cyberpunk? Which RPGs are better than Buldur’s gate, Elder scrolls and Kingdom Come? What other online shooters besides Battlefield, COD, Arma (besides those hero/competitive) are that popular and generally great? What about flight simulator? I’m sure there are indie studios beating Microsoft at that.
You cannot and will not convince me that AAA games are “middle of the road, mechanically stagnant”. AAA studios are literally the ones inventing new stuff and pushing the bar higher up, hence the increasing time between releases. From valve’s material rendering to real time lighting and ending with all kinds of misc things like TAA, texture tech, thousands of little mechanisms everyone now copies (especially from titles like Far Cry 3 that innovated alot). It has become incredibly hard to actually make a great AAA game, and logically that’s respectable for anyone who accomplishes this.
Sunsofold@lemmings.world 1 week ago
That… Yeah, it does seem you are having trouble understanding.
That line you quoted is not to say your opinion is invalid. It is to say that it is hypocritical to complain that I do not approach it from a disinterested perspective when you don’t either. If we were disinterested, we wouldn’t be here. We’d be into something other than games and wouldn’t think about these things, so it’s a bit absurd to expect disinterest.
This also shows you aren’t understanding the point. The one thing these games have to offer is scale, bigness, lumpen sum size, so either you’re just trolling me at this point or you’re not getting that size isn’t the goal. There aren’t other games with that big open world because there can’t be. It’s the defining trait of AAA games because they are the only ones with $100000000 to burn hiring giant teams, so nothing else has it. The whole point, though, is big does not mean good. It doesn’t matter if your dinner is 3 ears of corn or 300. It’s still just corn. Not poison. Not shit. Might taste a bit better with some mods like salt and butter on it, but it’s still just bulk. There are far better options available, customized to your palate, what you find to define quality. Whatever you think of as ‘good’ in games is probably better served by something outside the AAA space by something specializing in that thing (Unless you really just like big more than anything. I suppose you could just be the ‘size queen’ of gamers.) and might even be elevated by the investement of some of the money that is currently being sucked in by the gravity well of the big companies, but because those big companies suck up so much of the light, air, and resources, lots of indie projects just wither.