Cool. 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.
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, and I’m still looking forward to games like TESV6 or new Fallout.
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”. To me it appears you argue from emotions, something about this industry makes you mad, and you’re lashing out at the product itself.
There are many genuine thingst to be angry about, but generally saying AAA games suck? Yeah, no, on Reddit I’d say “redditors being out of touch with the world again”
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?
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?
“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.
Granted, sometimes the companies behind those games are very questionable, but do you really care what happens at Samsung factory?
Let them die. AAA games are games built to be marketed, not played.
Damn, I guess I’ll just delete GTA games, cyberpunk, Witcher, Skyrim and others because it was just marketing
Cool. 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.
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, and I’m still looking forward to games like TESV6 or new Fallout.
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”. To me it appears you argue from emotions, something about this industry makes you mad, and you’re lashing out at the product itself.
There are many genuine thingst to be angry about, but generally saying AAA games suck? Yeah, no, on Reddit I’d say “redditors being out of touch with the world again”
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?
“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.
Granted, sometimes the companies behind those games are very questionable, but do you really care what happens at Samsung factory?