Comment on Anon is worried about AAA sales
Sunsofold@lemmings.world 1 week agoDon’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.
REDACTED@infosec.pub 6 days ago
I never claimed big = good, this was the thing I argued against initially when I implied at the fact that size doesn’t matter, but you said I misinterpret you. What a weird convo we’re having. Starfield is most definitely not a more enjoyable game that Factorio.
And yet, when I ask you for examples, you refuse, because I’ve played thousands of games, most being indie, and I’m still trying to understand what is it that you’re seeing that I don’t. Indie games are great, but they will never be GTA 5, they will never have such attention to detail, innovation, wow-factor, ecetera ecetera, they’re commonly just good at gameplay, but that’s it. Even the Factorio I mentioned. It was more addictive than the AAA looking Satisfactory, but I actually return to Satisfactory far more often than Factorio, and that’s my subconsciousness wanting it. There is just something very satisfactory about seeing your factory in such an impressive rendering, rather than just text-based (Ie. Idle games) or top-bottom 2D games.
So, again, unless you’re actually capable of answering my previous question about you proving examples of which games are better than the ones I named in that category, I’ll just assume you’re being emotional.
Sunsofold@lemmings.world 4 days ago
(Aside: I also prefer Satisfactory to Factorio but it’s because it’s 1st person. I hate top-down view because alignment and legibility are almost always awful on top-down.)
I won’t give examples because you are asking for examples that are contrary to the limitations of reality. You asked for an open world example when the only way to get something of that scale is to have big teams to crank out all those assets. You asked essentially for an example of a non-AAA AAA game. It’s self negation.
But, at this point, I’m walking away from this. If you are still simultaneously demanding examples of a thing that cannot exist, to peg a scale that cannot exist, in pursuit of objectivity that cannot exist, you are clearly too deeply buried to reach without lots of shovel time. I don’t know you enough to care enough to fight past your hypocritical ideology.
Happy gaming.