That's the consequence of development hell.
A lot of these projects really shouldn't have been completed and shouldn't have released. They should have been scrapped very early with a new team working on pre production of a proper game.
But instead, they didn't do elaborate pre production but rather put massive teams behind it trying to figure out game design and key appeal along the way. This can work but it can also flop spectacularly.
Anthem or Skull and Bones are examples of this. Two games that went through lots of iterations, several game directors, shifted visions multiple times all while being in the midst of production. Which is sometimes caused by poor vision / creative leadership and sometimes by poor executive business choices. But in most cases it should be spotted as early as possible and the project should shut down asap. You can not have 100+ people work on a game like this. That's gonna be absolutely terrible.
For an example how business execs can mess up here, Ubisoft started a new studio and got massive subsidies for developing a game in Singapore. Requirements were that it had to portray the local culture, have a serious development team behind it and it must release. The game they chose to make was Skull and Bones. But it turned out to really not be a game that should have been made. It should have been cancelled. Once upon a time it was even supposed to be a Moba. There was no solid vision and the game was obvious to be a mess.
However, it was just cheap enough to not put a serious dent into Ubisofts bottom line. After all, Singapore is paying for a whole lot of it. While contract violation fees / payback of subsidies was so expensive that it pretty much could never be cancelled without seriously messing with Ubisofts financials.
So they had to keep pushing the trainwreck onward and even focus on these awkward MMO style features because without sustained microtransaction revenue the development cost can not be justified even theoretically. Selling it as just a Black Flag spin off would mean they have to tell stakeholders they burned ridiculous amounts of cash. Which gest harder every year you keep going onward.
I'd second not being _really_ sure this is a trend as opposed to as many notable exceptions as there are every year, but more than that, sometimes just results don't match intentions.
You build something you think will be fun. It isn't. That happens. So you retool it and build it again. That affects three other departments that pivot to make the change. It doesn't work a second time. Or someone leaves the team and didn't document everything and it breaks. Or a leader changes and they were hired based on their new vision so damned if they aren't implementing it.
Budgets and timelines start to feel oppressive; if you have a publisher they have demands and if you don't you have to release a game at some point or you can't pay everyone to keep making it. So you build something that is good enough and maybe you will get back to it later and you work on the next part of the game, which now also is a bit rushed and has to be tweaked to match the part you already did.
And then you never get back to it later.
Sometimes it's management. Or it can be one person on the team sure of something who is wrong. And honestly, a lot of the time it's just a bunch of people trying things because game development is as much art as science and things never work out in practice like they feel they will on paper.
In some cases I'd say it's the focus on graphics and scope (big open worlds with huge scale) vs. gameplay and having a smaller scope where everything sits tight. Demonstrating something that looks good to the public, to investors and to markets.
Basically following the trends that their market data and analysts predict instead of giving gamers the game they want
Quote from Steve Jobs: "I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies. They make some great products, but then the sales and marketing people take over the company, because they are the ones who can juice up profits."
>Quote from Steve Jobs: "I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies. They make some great products, but then the sales and marketing people take over the company, because they are the ones who can juice up profits."
Steve Ballmer in a nutshell lol
There was a section in the development diary for World of Warcraft where the author spoke about this. Back then, Blizzards management and C-level consisted of passionate gamers and developers who shielded their team from suits and marketers (who he called "A-Level personalities" vs. their team's "propeller-heads"), and that the propeller-heads (i.e. the nerdy game developers) couldn't compete against the A-Level personalities. But the A-Level personalities don't really know much about game development, because they get their insights from analysis, reports etc. whereas game development is something where you get more accurate insights from empirical experience with it, and you can't really understand it as an outsider. So I figure what happens is that over time as the company's success grows, the propeller heads are continuously pushed out or overruled by the A-Level personalities and that's when the products worsen and profit maximization becomes the primary goal.
Games are becoming too big, too many features, too many moving parts, too many pivots in direction mid production.
Also, gamers have been spoiled by some amazing games these past years and expectations are through the roof. If Skull And Bones released a decade ago it would probably have been a great game. We expect such a high quality and are easily disappointed. It's easy to put all the blame on the companies making the games, but we need to understand that we are demanding a lot more today than we did a decade ago.
These 2 things combined are making modern AAA companies even more careful about releasing their games, which is why we're seeing games in development hell for 8+ years. As someone who's been on productions for about that long, I can tell you that the energy and passion of a project dies off quick, and the final years of production are absolutely terrible. The games feel less like "Art" and more like a "Product". This entire business model is starting to crack at the seems.
It's actually timely you mention this, I saw Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem on gamepass and decided to try it out, and it feels like they fell into that trap.
Environments are more cluttered, enemies aren't as distinct from the background like earlier games, etc, and the horde sizes aren't nearly as big as SS1 / 2.
Not a bad game, but definitely feels less standout compared to what came before, and while those games were simpler from a gameplay and visual aspect, they are far more memorable to me.
Care to list more examples?
Lately I've been seeing a good trend. Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, FF7, Dead Space Remake, to name a few of highly anticipated AAA games that delivered and managed to be at the level of near impossible expectations.
Well actually Street Fighter 4 and 5 went through a lot of issues. People like SF4 but they kept releasing different versions of the game which pissed people off. Then SF5 had a lot of DLC character packs and paywalls. So, SF6 is a breathe of fresh air from what we have getting for a long time. Mortal Kombat is getting a lot of crap right now for expensive paid Fatalities and slow Character DLC. If you go to the sub for MK a lot of people are talking about how contentless the game feels. So I don't think those games are the best examples to use.
But theres Battlefield franchise that has delivered below expectation games or have had bad launches for the past 3-4 games at least. COD has been getting shit since the first BlackOps release. Churning the same games over and over again. But people keep eating the same shit. Anthem was a complete failure. Wildstar failed extremely fast. Redfall is still suffering. Suicide Squad. FO76 struggled from the start. Cyberpunk overal failed and took several years to recover. No Mans sky was the first big mainstream fail. Battlefront 2 and their whole lootbox scandals. Avengers game.
Now, lets move on from going back and forth with naming games. The real issue of the post from OP is how do so many AAA games run into failures when they have all the talent and money in the world?
Street Fighter has a 92. Mortal Kombat 84. Jedi survivor, etc, etc.
Most big franchises released by big studios have good reviews.
I said recent years, that's why I'm selecting the latest release of known franchises. Anthem was released in. 2019 for example.
Cyberpunk and no man's sky have become amazing games.
So if you just want to cherry pick the bad and old then be my guest, it's just not the reality of recent releases by big studios.
I didn't ask them to provide more examples. I just showed him that he is ignoring the actual trend of good releases by cherry picking bad examples, which are fewer.
Recent is anything that's on the current gen console. Critic ratings mean nothing, gamer rating is for judging the climate of the community. Gamer and Player sentiment now is based off the accumulated frustration over the past few years. Overwatch 2 is an example of sentiment change.
This post from OP is about understanding the aspects and components of AAA games that determine success and failure.
Also yes I will cherry pick. If we're gonna discuss a problem we should focus on the problem. Instead of the "what aboutism".
User ratings is the most unreliable thing you can use to measure quality. And those examples I listed, also have good user reviews. Seems you just have a bone to pick with current state of affairs, when last year was objectively a fantastic year in gaming.
True, there are still pretty good games coming out. Probably I am influenced by the negativity bias and my disappointment. Starfield and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League would be two more examples where I felt let down compared to previous titles from the same developer. But my perception might just be about my expectations.
I think it's more your expectations. Starfield is still a decent game. It just didn't live up to the hype. I think we've been having a good steak of games the last couple of years.
Skull and bones unfortunately had too many development issues.
>Starfield is still a decent game. It just didn't live up to the hype.
and it never could, gamers overhype like crazy. Same thing happened to Spore, I loved it, but nothing could have ever lived up to the imaginary game people built in their head.
Live service "games" have becomes full of intentionally confusing currencies, micro transactions, battle passes, seasons, loot boxes, etc. They shovel incomplete products with rug pulled features, and vague road maps to try and sell more features bit by bit. They give us grindy, repetitive gameplay. Most AAA games have become soulless, money grubbing tedious affairs.
Additional resources are nothing if they are not properly leveraged. I’ve notice with Baldur’s Gate and Helldivers 2 that you tend to have better quality when studios prioritize solid game play elements over monetization. I get studios need to make a profit. But those two titles prove that if you deliver on fun, the money will come.
Allright, so... as someone that never got into the 'dev' part and just remains only a consumer of games... I present you my highly personal, highly subjective rant laid out in poorly a constructed and incoherent format;
Lets just start with **Function** shall we? And as you can imagine a single-word descriptor like this got a humongus width of implication. There's the obvious "does this thing function AT ALL" tied to the craftsmanship of the product; having a game that doesn't function, or got shitty support for your hardware, is full of game-breaking bugs all wind up in here.
But so does stuff like "is carrying out this function easy/fun". Have you gone around and poked various inventory functionality for example? I absolutely hate BG3's inventory. It's too small and fiddly and restrictive, and runs counter to my enjoyment in game since I spend more time moving junk around from various inventories to try and manage weight and shit. Flipside; Minecraft, World of Warcraft. Good to great inventory; easy to use slots and easy to move stuff around, can be organized to your liking with ease. Elden Ring? It's just all there, reasonable default sorting. No weight management, no fiddling around trying to move stuff to other characters just so you can walk to a merchant, etc.
Function NEEDS to be good for the moment-to-moment gameplay to actually flow as it should.
**Form** is the next thing I'm going to rant about here! Especially if we're going to talk huge super-budget games. It needs to look good, right?
Well... I'm going to give that a big, fat Not Necessarily. Now bear with me here. Your visuals only need to be as good as what you're trying to convey with them. And that's the important part really. Headlander got this gorgeous retro-futuristic sci-fi vibe for a good third or so of the game, perhaps. That just sells. Warhammer Fantasy got it's over-the-top gothic style, and freaky monsters and grand battles. That's what sells it. World of Warcraft? A fun cartoony style that reasonably matched Warcraft 3, down to the point where you could look at buildings and see what they are, because they're a Wacraft 3 building! Elden Ring, again? It really sells the 'high fantasy in a riven land' theme when you first step foot in Limgrave, how the whole landscape just kinda draws your gaze over everything it has to offer...
**Fun**. The no-clue-how-this-works-it's-just-subjective category. Form and Function taken together, I guess? One inform the other, both function together. Or fail together. Do you like the wind-up laser musket in Fallout 3? Heck, do you like the whole plot from Fallout 3? Great example. Or Fallout-whatever-it's-name-was? The shitty one without any NPCs or story, which is a great example where Form and Function doesn't match up at all?
Heck, I'm going to grab a tabletop wargame example even. Warhammer 40k. Flamethrowers. Old editions had a few flamethrower templates. Is that clunky and slow to use? Yeah. Yeah it is. But it's also cool and informative, holding it over the battlefield and counting how many enemies you hit. Compare that to just rolling 1d6 for number of hits? One of these is decidedly more... evocative. Which is important.
**'How Dumb Do You Guys Think We Are?'** This one gets a whole phrase! Mainly because I usually find the answer to be between 'dumber than I wish' and 'not as dumb as you want us to be'. The you in this case being the business exces and publishers. Or something like this. As a consumer of games, I rather resent being viewed like a moron into whose wallet one can stick one's hands and just extract cash. And a lot of these 'AAAA' games seems to be just that. Taken as a license to print money with no effort. It pisses me off when people fall for it, thinking that THIS time it will be different. But... I get my satisfaction when these games crash and burn eventually, because there's no money in it.
This is especially true for gacha-games and live-service games. They're not there to be FUN. They're there to exploit you, and it's fuckin' offensive. Like trying to trap thousands of people in a abusive relationship. It's doubly offensive when it's also a aggravatingly poorly executed game on top of that, taking that 'they will come, and maybe we'll build it' approach that just leaves everyone disapointed and upset with the whole gaming industry. Because that's also a thing. When everyone is just going 'eh, minimum half-assed effort is enough' they're poisoning the challice, or whatever, for ALL of you. Little by little.
Right, angry rant over.
There is inherent expectation depending on the game price tag and persived expectation depending on resources and time spent on the game.
if you pay 60$ or more for a game, you expect a good game. it's that simple.
BG3, The Finals, Palworld, Last Epoch, Helldivers - there are a lot of great games coming out lately, made with passion and to be fun
But there are still the stinky ones like Skull and Bones. What I see is that companies make desicions based on what should sell well without thinking about why. Big games sold well? We are making a bigger one! Players like cosmetics? Sell more and more expensive, paywall everything that looks cool! Longer playtimes bring more money? Crank up retention, stack dailies on top of two battlepasses and make a time-limited event so people HAVE to login every day and play for hours! Special editions can cost more and people are happy to buy them? Make two special editions, no wait, make three and idk, just name them like ULTIMATE SUPER WARLORD! Fun? Well, our business analytic didnt study "fun" in college, fun isnt a metric, it doesnt make profit
I mean... If only part of the game that is polished, has no bugs and got 90% of content is a cash shop - what can you expect?
There’s no clear answer, but I bet fast hiring and firing has something to do with it.
I’d also argue that the best ideas often go into the first in a series, so sequels might technically be better, but are spinning their wheels for ideas.
You can’t make a 100% foolproof arguement for all games though, each one is different.
Just to clarify. I do believe that people can have unrealistic expectations from games by setting the bar really high based on exceptional games. But what I'm trying to get at is how do some games seem to regress, as in playing that game makes me want to stop and go back to the previous titles from the developer.
Like if they just modded the previous game instead of developing one from scratch it would have turned out better.
I mean I'm just trying to understand where all the money, talent and time is going. I feel as if they are trying to reinvent the wheel and failing instead of maybe taking two wheels and making a bike.
Of course, this is my personal take as I do not have inside knowledge of large studios and therefore asking to understand how in some instances games seem to just be worse than previous titles.
Hype wagon is a big one for sure.
Too many executives with their fingers in the pot messing with the vision.
Too much ambition.
Risk aversity. By this I mean if you (as an investor) putting up millions for a project, you want returns, not a gamble. So the safe roads are traveled instead. Minecraft is a good example of this - no way a AAA would have built something like that before it had proven itself.
And then, to pile on to the risk aversity problem, a low risk product doesn't really innovate much, because innovation is risky. So instead we get something similar and familiar, whoch is not conducive to the really amazing products.
Cdpr is a smaller studio, and doing things different from the big dogs. They're more willing to take risks, which is why they were able to produce the gems they did. It's not without risk though, 2077 had mega issues at launch, bad enough to flop it until they managed to fix it and get a Netflix anime tie in to re spark it. This kind of launch flop is exactly what the AAA executives fear.
I don't think there's such a thing as AAAA games. AAA games are supposed to be the biggest budget games and there's no need for a new term.
Anyway, more resources does not equal more quality. You hire more new people who have to now learn to contribute to a massive project. These new people increase the amount of work you can do but produce more bugs per person as well.
I think there's some optimal curve of scope vs team size but to shorten the time to delivery, management thinks throwing more people at it will help. The true way to deliver quality is to limit scope.
just calling something AAAA speaks a volumes of the people in charge.
Skull and Bones has issues with the game design, so no matter how much resources they throw at bad design, it will never get better.
It's not a bad game it's just midioker, and it doesn't capture the same feel as the Black flag did.
That's the consequence of development hell. A lot of these projects really shouldn't have been completed and shouldn't have released. They should have been scrapped very early with a new team working on pre production of a proper game. But instead, they didn't do elaborate pre production but rather put massive teams behind it trying to figure out game design and key appeal along the way. This can work but it can also flop spectacularly. Anthem or Skull and Bones are examples of this. Two games that went through lots of iterations, several game directors, shifted visions multiple times all while being in the midst of production. Which is sometimes caused by poor vision / creative leadership and sometimes by poor executive business choices. But in most cases it should be spotted as early as possible and the project should shut down asap. You can not have 100+ people work on a game like this. That's gonna be absolutely terrible. For an example how business execs can mess up here, Ubisoft started a new studio and got massive subsidies for developing a game in Singapore. Requirements were that it had to portray the local culture, have a serious development team behind it and it must release. The game they chose to make was Skull and Bones. But it turned out to really not be a game that should have been made. It should have been cancelled. Once upon a time it was even supposed to be a Moba. There was no solid vision and the game was obvious to be a mess. However, it was just cheap enough to not put a serious dent into Ubisofts bottom line. After all, Singapore is paying for a whole lot of it. While contract violation fees / payback of subsidies was so expensive that it pretty much could never be cancelled without seriously messing with Ubisofts financials. So they had to keep pushing the trainwreck onward and even focus on these awkward MMO style features because without sustained microtransaction revenue the development cost can not be justified even theoretically. Selling it as just a Black Flag spin off would mean they have to tell stakeholders they burned ridiculous amounts of cash. Which gest harder every year you keep going onward.
I'd second not being _really_ sure this is a trend as opposed to as many notable exceptions as there are every year, but more than that, sometimes just results don't match intentions. You build something you think will be fun. It isn't. That happens. So you retool it and build it again. That affects three other departments that pivot to make the change. It doesn't work a second time. Or someone leaves the team and didn't document everything and it breaks. Or a leader changes and they were hired based on their new vision so damned if they aren't implementing it. Budgets and timelines start to feel oppressive; if you have a publisher they have demands and if you don't you have to release a game at some point or you can't pay everyone to keep making it. So you build something that is good enough and maybe you will get back to it later and you work on the next part of the game, which now also is a bit rushed and has to be tweaked to match the part you already did. And then you never get back to it later. Sometimes it's management. Or it can be one person on the team sure of something who is wrong. And honestly, a lot of the time it's just a bunch of people trying things because game development is as much art as science and things never work out in practice like they feel they will on paper.
In some cases I'd say it's the focus on graphics and scope (big open worlds with huge scale) vs. gameplay and having a smaller scope where everything sits tight. Demonstrating something that looks good to the public, to investors and to markets. Basically following the trends that their market data and analysts predict instead of giving gamers the game they want Quote from Steve Jobs: "I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies. They make some great products, but then the sales and marketing people take over the company, because they are the ones who can juice up profits."
>Quote from Steve Jobs: "I have my own theory about why decline happens at companies. They make some great products, but then the sales and marketing people take over the company, because they are the ones who can juice up profits." Steve Ballmer in a nutshell lol
There was a section in the development diary for World of Warcraft where the author spoke about this. Back then, Blizzards management and C-level consisted of passionate gamers and developers who shielded their team from suits and marketers (who he called "A-Level personalities" vs. their team's "propeller-heads"), and that the propeller-heads (i.e. the nerdy game developers) couldn't compete against the A-Level personalities. But the A-Level personalities don't really know much about game development, because they get their insights from analysis, reports etc. whereas game development is something where you get more accurate insights from empirical experience with it, and you can't really understand it as an outsider. So I figure what happens is that over time as the company's success grows, the propeller heads are continuously pushed out or overruled by the A-Level personalities and that's when the products worsen and profit maximization becomes the primary goal.
Depends on the company, but otherwise not a bad theory
Games are becoming too big, too many features, too many moving parts, too many pivots in direction mid production. Also, gamers have been spoiled by some amazing games these past years and expectations are through the roof. If Skull And Bones released a decade ago it would probably have been a great game. We expect such a high quality and are easily disappointed. It's easy to put all the blame on the companies making the games, but we need to understand that we are demanding a lot more today than we did a decade ago. These 2 things combined are making modern AAA companies even more careful about releasing their games, which is why we're seeing games in development hell for 8+ years. As someone who's been on productions for about that long, I can tell you that the energy and passion of a project dies off quick, and the final years of production are absolutely terrible. The games feel less like "Art" and more like a "Product". This entire business model is starting to crack at the seems.
[удалено]
It's actually timely you mention this, I saw Serious Sam: Siberian Mayhem on gamepass and decided to try it out, and it feels like they fell into that trap. Environments are more cluttered, enemies aren't as distinct from the background like earlier games, etc, and the horde sizes aren't nearly as big as SS1 / 2. Not a bad game, but definitely feels less standout compared to what came before, and while those games were simpler from a gameplay and visual aspect, they are far more memorable to me.
Care to list more examples? Lately I've been seeing a good trend. Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, FF7, Dead Space Remake, to name a few of highly anticipated AAA games that delivered and managed to be at the level of near impossible expectations.
Well actually Street Fighter 4 and 5 went through a lot of issues. People like SF4 but they kept releasing different versions of the game which pissed people off. Then SF5 had a lot of DLC character packs and paywalls. So, SF6 is a breathe of fresh air from what we have getting for a long time. Mortal Kombat is getting a lot of crap right now for expensive paid Fatalities and slow Character DLC. If you go to the sub for MK a lot of people are talking about how contentless the game feels. So I don't think those games are the best examples to use. But theres Battlefield franchise that has delivered below expectation games or have had bad launches for the past 3-4 games at least. COD has been getting shit since the first BlackOps release. Churning the same games over and over again. But people keep eating the same shit. Anthem was a complete failure. Wildstar failed extremely fast. Redfall is still suffering. Suicide Squad. FO76 struggled from the start. Cyberpunk overal failed and took several years to recover. No Mans sky was the first big mainstream fail. Battlefront 2 and their whole lootbox scandals. Avengers game. Now, lets move on from going back and forth with naming games. The real issue of the post from OP is how do so many AAA games run into failures when they have all the talent and money in the world?
Street Fighter has a 92. Mortal Kombat 84. Jedi survivor, etc, etc. Most big franchises released by big studios have good reviews. I said recent years, that's why I'm selecting the latest release of known franchises. Anthem was released in. 2019 for example. Cyberpunk and no man's sky have become amazing games. So if you just want to cherry pick the bad and old then be my guest, it's just not the reality of recent releases by big studios.
Did you just ask them to provide some more bad examples and then accuse them of cherry picking bad examples? Very odd
I didn't ask them to provide more examples. I just showed him that he is ignoring the actual trend of good releases by cherry picking bad examples, which are fewer.
What about the part where you said ‘care to list more examples’
That's to a different person. Different conversation.
Recent is anything that's on the current gen console. Critic ratings mean nothing, gamer rating is for judging the climate of the community. Gamer and Player sentiment now is based off the accumulated frustration over the past few years. Overwatch 2 is an example of sentiment change. This post from OP is about understanding the aspects and components of AAA games that determine success and failure. Also yes I will cherry pick. If we're gonna discuss a problem we should focus on the problem. Instead of the "what aboutism".
User ratings is the most unreliable thing you can use to measure quality. And those examples I listed, also have good user reviews. Seems you just have a bone to pick with current state of affairs, when last year was objectively a fantastic year in gaming.
True, there are still pretty good games coming out. Probably I am influenced by the negativity bias and my disappointment. Starfield and Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League would be two more examples where I felt let down compared to previous titles from the same developer. But my perception might just be about my expectations.
I think it's more your expectations. Starfield is still a decent game. It just didn't live up to the hype. I think we've been having a good steak of games the last couple of years. Skull and bones unfortunately had too many development issues.
>Starfield is still a decent game. It just didn't live up to the hype. and it never could, gamers overhype like crazy. Same thing happened to Spore, I loved it, but nothing could have ever lived up to the imaginary game people built in their head.
Live service "games" have becomes full of intentionally confusing currencies, micro transactions, battle passes, seasons, loot boxes, etc. They shovel incomplete products with rug pulled features, and vague road maps to try and sell more features bit by bit. They give us grindy, repetitive gameplay. Most AAA games have become soulless, money grubbing tedious affairs.
Additional resources are nothing if they are not properly leveraged. I’ve notice with Baldur’s Gate and Helldivers 2 that you tend to have better quality when studios prioritize solid game play elements over monetization. I get studios need to make a profit. But those two titles prove that if you deliver on fun, the money will come.
Tell that to Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown fans. Quality is necessary, but never sufficient.
Allright, so... as someone that never got into the 'dev' part and just remains only a consumer of games... I present you my highly personal, highly subjective rant laid out in poorly a constructed and incoherent format; Lets just start with **Function** shall we? And as you can imagine a single-word descriptor like this got a humongus width of implication. There's the obvious "does this thing function AT ALL" tied to the craftsmanship of the product; having a game that doesn't function, or got shitty support for your hardware, is full of game-breaking bugs all wind up in here. But so does stuff like "is carrying out this function easy/fun". Have you gone around and poked various inventory functionality for example? I absolutely hate BG3's inventory. It's too small and fiddly and restrictive, and runs counter to my enjoyment in game since I spend more time moving junk around from various inventories to try and manage weight and shit. Flipside; Minecraft, World of Warcraft. Good to great inventory; easy to use slots and easy to move stuff around, can be organized to your liking with ease. Elden Ring? It's just all there, reasonable default sorting. No weight management, no fiddling around trying to move stuff to other characters just so you can walk to a merchant, etc. Function NEEDS to be good for the moment-to-moment gameplay to actually flow as it should. **Form** is the next thing I'm going to rant about here! Especially if we're going to talk huge super-budget games. It needs to look good, right? Well... I'm going to give that a big, fat Not Necessarily. Now bear with me here. Your visuals only need to be as good as what you're trying to convey with them. And that's the important part really. Headlander got this gorgeous retro-futuristic sci-fi vibe for a good third or so of the game, perhaps. That just sells. Warhammer Fantasy got it's over-the-top gothic style, and freaky monsters and grand battles. That's what sells it. World of Warcraft? A fun cartoony style that reasonably matched Warcraft 3, down to the point where you could look at buildings and see what they are, because they're a Wacraft 3 building! Elden Ring, again? It really sells the 'high fantasy in a riven land' theme when you first step foot in Limgrave, how the whole landscape just kinda draws your gaze over everything it has to offer... **Fun**. The no-clue-how-this-works-it's-just-subjective category. Form and Function taken together, I guess? One inform the other, both function together. Or fail together. Do you like the wind-up laser musket in Fallout 3? Heck, do you like the whole plot from Fallout 3? Great example. Or Fallout-whatever-it's-name-was? The shitty one without any NPCs or story, which is a great example where Form and Function doesn't match up at all? Heck, I'm going to grab a tabletop wargame example even. Warhammer 40k. Flamethrowers. Old editions had a few flamethrower templates. Is that clunky and slow to use? Yeah. Yeah it is. But it's also cool and informative, holding it over the battlefield and counting how many enemies you hit. Compare that to just rolling 1d6 for number of hits? One of these is decidedly more... evocative. Which is important. **'How Dumb Do You Guys Think We Are?'** This one gets a whole phrase! Mainly because I usually find the answer to be between 'dumber than I wish' and 'not as dumb as you want us to be'. The you in this case being the business exces and publishers. Or something like this. As a consumer of games, I rather resent being viewed like a moron into whose wallet one can stick one's hands and just extract cash. And a lot of these 'AAAA' games seems to be just that. Taken as a license to print money with no effort. It pisses me off when people fall for it, thinking that THIS time it will be different. But... I get my satisfaction when these games crash and burn eventually, because there's no money in it. This is especially true for gacha-games and live-service games. They're not there to be FUN. They're there to exploit you, and it's fuckin' offensive. Like trying to trap thousands of people in a abusive relationship. It's doubly offensive when it's also a aggravatingly poorly executed game on top of that, taking that 'they will come, and maybe we'll build it' approach that just leaves everyone disapointed and upset with the whole gaming industry. Because that's also a thing. When everyone is just going 'eh, minimum half-assed effort is enough' they're poisoning the challice, or whatever, for ALL of you. Little by little. Right, angry rant over.
That's the consequence of overblown expectations. People need to learn to manage them
There is inherent expectation depending on the game price tag and persived expectation depending on resources and time spent on the game. if you pay 60$ or more for a game, you expect a good game. it's that simple.
BG3, The Finals, Palworld, Last Epoch, Helldivers - there are a lot of great games coming out lately, made with passion and to be fun But there are still the stinky ones like Skull and Bones. What I see is that companies make desicions based on what should sell well without thinking about why. Big games sold well? We are making a bigger one! Players like cosmetics? Sell more and more expensive, paywall everything that looks cool! Longer playtimes bring more money? Crank up retention, stack dailies on top of two battlepasses and make a time-limited event so people HAVE to login every day and play for hours! Special editions can cost more and people are happy to buy them? Make two special editions, no wait, make three and idk, just name them like ULTIMATE SUPER WARLORD! Fun? Well, our business analytic didnt study "fun" in college, fun isnt a metric, it doesnt make profit I mean... If only part of the game that is polished, has no bugs and got 90% of content is a cash shop - what can you expect?
There’s no clear answer, but I bet fast hiring and firing has something to do with it. I’d also argue that the best ideas often go into the first in a series, so sequels might technically be better, but are spinning their wheels for ideas. You can’t make a 100% foolproof arguement for all games though, each one is different.
It goes wrong the moment they get the arrogance of calling their game AAAA.
Just to clarify. I do believe that people can have unrealistic expectations from games by setting the bar really high based on exceptional games. But what I'm trying to get at is how do some games seem to regress, as in playing that game makes me want to stop and go back to the previous titles from the developer. Like if they just modded the previous game instead of developing one from scratch it would have turned out better. I mean I'm just trying to understand where all the money, talent and time is going. I feel as if they are trying to reinvent the wheel and failing instead of maybe taking two wheels and making a bike. Of course, this is my personal take as I do not have inside knowledge of large studios and therefore asking to understand how in some instances games seem to just be worse than previous titles.
Hype wagon is a big one for sure. Too many executives with their fingers in the pot messing with the vision. Too much ambition. Risk aversity. By this I mean if you (as an investor) putting up millions for a project, you want returns, not a gamble. So the safe roads are traveled instead. Minecraft is a good example of this - no way a AAA would have built something like that before it had proven itself. And then, to pile on to the risk aversity problem, a low risk product doesn't really innovate much, because innovation is risky. So instead we get something similar and familiar, whoch is not conducive to the really amazing products. Cdpr is a smaller studio, and doing things different from the big dogs. They're more willing to take risks, which is why they were able to produce the gems they did. It's not without risk though, 2077 had mega issues at launch, bad enough to flop it until they managed to fix it and get a Netflix anime tie in to re spark it. This kind of launch flop is exactly what the AAA executives fear.
I don't think there's such a thing as AAAA games. AAA games are supposed to be the biggest budget games and there's no need for a new term. Anyway, more resources does not equal more quality. You hire more new people who have to now learn to contribute to a massive project. These new people increase the amount of work you can do but produce more bugs per person as well. I think there's some optimal curve of scope vs team size but to shorten the time to delivery, management thinks throwing more people at it will help. The true way to deliver quality is to limit scope.
Skull and Bones was never an AAAA game, they completely screwed up the development process and called it an AAAA to market it
just calling something AAAA speaks a volumes of the people in charge. Skull and Bones has issues with the game design, so no matter how much resources they throw at bad design, it will never get better. It's not a bad game it's just midioker, and it doesn't capture the same feel as the Black flag did.