Uhh… today’s AAA studios have THOUSANDS of employees, hundreds of millions of dollars in budgets, and huge IPs on which to draw. Elder Scrolls, Fallout, Assassin’s Creed, Diablo, Warcraft, Mass Effect, Dragon Age… these studios have VASTLY larger resources than Larian. Like, an order of magnitude larger. This is gaslighting and whining. I’m not having it. Do better, AAA devs. Do a lot better.
That’s why their games suck. Smaller teams and budgets make better products.
Well I wouldn’t say that exactly. GTA 5 had a huge budget and a huge team and it’s objectively a better product if you compare the two (which is only to say they’re both great games but the bigger budget game has and does more).
It’s a matter of the motivations of the developers and their financial backers. If your goal is to make an ok game that maximizes profit focused mechanics, most of these AAA developers are hitting the mark perfectly. If your focus is to make a good game like it seemed to be with the BG devs, they absolutely hit the mark and are being rewarded for it.
This is just a reminder to an industry that is trying to tell us that pay to win mechanics are the standard that they do not in fact get to dictate what those standards are. We do. If a game is shit people will abandon it even if you poured millions into that product. The recent battlefield game is a prime example of this. Even something as guaranteed as a new battlefield game isn’t enough to overcome a shitty leadership team emphasizing the wrong things. The community bailed on their product and they’ll never get them back. All those millions in guaranteed revenue are gone forever.
IMO the most important distinction is a game that puts play experience first vs profit.
I have no problem if games reached this via a similar model that Larian used here (lots of experienced staff, pre-built systems, 6 years of development, 3 years of expertly done early-access with a highly engaged player base) but they’re not going to. They’re going to implement more crunch, more abuse, more destruction of the few people who want to work in games in order to get there. And that’s where I have the issue.
I want shorter games, with worse graphics, made by people who get paid more to do less. Because that’s what’s needed to make truly great games. People who are passionate, not burning themselves out just to barely make deadlines, make great games.
I want shorter games, with worse graphics, made by people who get paid more to do less.
Honestly that’s an excellent summary.
Don’t get me wrong BG3 is probably one of the best games I’ve ever played and I eventually want BG4 or whatever expansion/spin-off/sequel they want to make. However I waited 23 years between BG2 and BG3, I don’t want to wait that long again, but I can wait.
But to your point I want good games. I don’t need 100+ hour adventures. In general I don’t want 100+ hour adventures. Those should be rare. I want games that I can finish (at a casual pace) in a weekend or two.
Portal 1? Braid? Both are short puzzle games that are absolutely fantastic.
Stanley Parable? Gone Home? Excellent story games. You can beat them in about as much time as it takes to watch a movie.
It’s disappointing that AAA studios don’t recognize this. I don’t want a bloated game that takes 300 hours to experience most of it. I don’t want a giant map. I want a good game. I want a small map filled with life, not a large one with soulless procedurally generated dungeons.
I think that one (HUGE) part of BG3’s success is that it was in Early Access for, what, 2-3 years? During which it grew a dedicated modding scene, received a metric fuck-ton of feedback, and regularly dropped large content patches. This wasn’t an average dev cycle, and I think it shows. In some ways, the Dev. Feedback and interactivity reminded me a lot of the way Warframe does dev interactions.
Complaining about it having funding… AAA… lol. Thats the fucking point of AAA. Big fucking budget.
Why are they getting so much attention for it?
Nintendo does the same with BoTW and ToTK. Long dev cycles that releases a functional game without micro-transactions.
FromSoft does the same with most of their games. Where people actually beg them to release DLCs.
But no… it’s Larion they seem to go after.
Nintendo is huge. FromSoft has their own cult. But Larion? What’s can they blame there? Nothing. Most big studios that bitch about this is larger than Larion. Maybe because they are more scared that if Larion can do it. There’s no excuse anymore.
I think the “problem” for those people is that the game broke out of its bubble. nintendo, from soft and also larion up until now all had their own bubble of fans. Larion broke that mold and even people who have nothing to do with the genre celebrate it.
How does it go?
I want smaller games, with lower quality graphics. Made by happier developers who are paid more to work less. And I’m not kidding!
I mean we can have large games with detailed graphics and have employees treated well. We just need to accept 10+ year timelines for releases on big games which I’m ok with as long as we get quality results and the team is treated well.
I follow star citizen though so I could be the weird one here lol
And then you need someone to foot the bill for all that. Preferrably ahead of time.
That’s kinda how lucky Star Citizen got, but that’s not a business model you can replicate a second time.
That’s a valid point. As long as there’s a publisher and investors we’re more than likely never going to see what I suggested, I kinda forgot star citizen is what it is because it’s funded by us.
It’s always the same crunch time for employees and rushed buggy products to feed the investors from “AAA” corps. Hope we can push for some positive change :/
The main differences with Star Citizen are that it’s
- Funded in advance
- Funded by people who have no say in how the product/company should work
- Massively overfunded
This means, CIG has no pressure to ship soon or even at all (if the project fails, they have no liability). They also have nobody telling them what to with the money. They have already made their profit.
I am not knocking CIG for this situation, but if you put it like this, it’s easy to see why for each CIG out there, there are tens of thousands of games on crowdfunding sites that either
- Failed to raise funds
- Failed to get a decent company/legal structure running with the money they raised
- Failed to actually ever deliver anything in an usable state
- Are just pure scams
So as a general business model rather than just an insane stroke of luck, I don’t think this is a good option.
A business model that only earns money after release (like the classic publisher-funded development model) is bad for the obvious cash-grabby and buggy reasons, but at least it consistently delivers games. Contrary to the “earn money before you start development” model that is enabled by crowdfunding, which in general does not deliver games.
In my (not very educated) opinion, early access is probably the best middle ground. You start off with little initial funding required, but by the time you turn to the crowd, you already have a working prototype and company structure. That makes it much more likely for the game to eventually be released in a full version. This option obviously comes with its own downsides as well, but many of my favourite games have been small studios or even individuals who use early acces to fund development.
People have been saying this game is exciting because of the lack of mtx, but it seems to me that any big rpg gets a lot of attention. Eldan Ring got similar praise last year. Bioware was making these kinds of games fairly consistently about a decade ago and then stopped to make shit like Anthem. It’s a design decision not a budget problem.
Microtransactions come with specific challenges. Specifically, you have to give the players a reason to pay them, and that’s usually done by making the game purpously worse for those who don’t pay.
Or the other trend these days, Wich is to remove content from the base game and sell it as dlc or just money-gate it even if it’s on the base disk/release.
“these days” that’s been going on for over a decade
Yeah, but some of us oldies still remember the before times when we just had 35 Sims 2 expansions.
Well Shawn. How about this is the new standard for AAA games and if you can’t reach it than you are a AA studio at most.
We should make sure to label games exactly like this. Beta at release? Depending on microtransactions? -> It’s an AA game at most, no matter the production costs.
Would it be so bad if games didn’t have insane budgets? Most of my favorite games from the past decade are from small studios operating on pizza and hope.
Lower budgets would probably be better. High budgets mean high risk, developers and publishers try to minimize that risk and you get bland games that try to cater to too many tastes. Movies suffer from the same problem. They get budgets in the hundreds of millions and you wonder what they spent it all for.
