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What's wrong with modern AAA games?
| The introduction of update patches, battle passes and DLC's was their downfall
| Sorry, and I mean this without sarcasm, which AAA games are you thinking of?
All I remember is glowing reviews for Baldur's Gate 3, new Armored Core, Cyberpunk 2077 Phantom Liberty, and, well Starfield is just the normal flawed Bethesda deal but it's not bad at being that.
| I mean, there are definitely issues with AAA games these days. Too big, take too long to make, crunch culture, etc, but I don't remember any recent disasters.
... Well I guess there's Forspoken and that magic FPS thing whose name I don't even remember anymore.
| >shipped with tons of game breaking bugs because "we can patch it later"
>pandering/wish fulfillment stories with little/no challenging material and/or just plain bad writing
>focus on narrative over experience
>GRAPHICS bloat
>poor optimization
>little replay value
>open worlds with nothing of value to fill them
There's a bunch of reasons, pick your favorite
| What's wrong with them? They aren't Galaga
| >>976348
I wasn't being specific on purpose, there are games to which some apply, and games to which all apply. They are pervasive problems throughout AAA games as whole.
| They compare themselves to other game developers in a negative light, as an excuse to not improve their games because others are succeeding with flying colors. Honestly, wasn't it inevitable?
| What's not wrong with them?? The vast majority of AAA titles are just products with no creativity or passion behind them. Same thing as with Hollywood movies. There are good ones every now and then, but for the most part they just repeat the same shit people liked 20 years ago. It happens to every art form that has an industry built around it
| Genuinely, what are any of you talking about. Is no one going to name a single game? Or are you all just pulling shit out of your asses?
| >>976559
Gee, I wonder, why are we not being specific when talking about things generally? Pick a AAA game if you want to be specific, but if you can't find a AAA game with major problems then you aren't looking.
| >>976559 Witcher 3, Cyberpunk, any new Assassins Creed game, Watch Dogs 3, GTA trilogy remaster, Red Dead 'remaster', Fallout 76, any Dead by Daylight clone, Overwatch 2, Diablo. Named games from multiple companies just for you :3
| Hell I can add, Mario 3d Trilogy, Pokemon Games, Skyward Sword remaster
| Pretty small list
| >>976565
Witcher 3 and Fallout 76 are hardly new. GTA Trilogy remaster isn't AAA, they're just remaster (not a good one).
Cyberpunk 2077 have been getting praises left and right with the recent expansion.
Watch Dogs 3 and Diablo 3 are fair though. I didn't even know there is a Watch Dogs 3, and Diablo 3 is pretty much forgotten after the initial hype (which I suspect only thanks to ads anyway).
| >>976563
That's my point though. Some recent AAA is good. Some recent AAA is bad. So it's odd to me that you're asking "why are they generally bad/reviewed poorly?" when like, that's not true?
I'm asking for specifics so I can get a better understanding of why you think thay way, with a side effect that we can look at specifics instead of strawmanning some imagined flaws.
| >>976630
>Cyberpunk 2077 have been getting praises left and right with the recent expansion.
The only people still playing cyberpunk are the ones who liked it enough to play it when it was new. Just because an update is good enough to please them doesn't mean the game isn't shit
| some AAA games good
some AAA games bad
ten years later someone will make post "Why are AAA games bad in 2033 and not good like in 2023?" because they only remember the good.
2011 is remembered by Skyrim, Portal, Battlefield 3, Dark Souls and not by Call of Juarez, Transformer, and Duke Nukem Forever.
And 2020s will be rememberd for good games too and not for Forspoken and other bs.
| >>976630
Witcher 3 and Fallout 76 are good examples of ongoing problems with AAA games as a whole.
>>976634
Pick a AAA game, more have problems than don't, especially western AAA games. Baldur's Gate 3, for example, requires a staggering 150GB of space because devs don't bother optimizing resources anymore. And even then a whole mess of devs are saying it's unrealistic to have expectations based on it, so they can continue to make slop.
| >>976701
Open world games like the newer Zeldas and Elden Ring are worse off for being open world, as it's mostly space with some pointless grindy bullshit to take up space, and they still do it better than most. And no wants to be bothered replaying that shit, because it's not fun. Cyberpunk 2077 launched a buggy mess, as so many AAA games do - Ghosts of Tsushima had an 8gb day one patch.
If you aren't seeing problems across AAA games you aren't looking.
| >>976702
Look I agree with most of your other points, but BotW, TotK, and Elden Ring are odd choices. I love just wandering around in them, so I'd say they use the open space to their advantage. The open space is the point, even. If you don't like it, then they're just not your type of game.
|
They only wanted to outline that you can't expect every new release to be as grand as elden ring or Baldur's gate. Larian almost went bankrupt twice during the development of BG3. They even had tools made specifically for their game development.
|
A perfect example is MIMIMI studios that released their magnum opus a stealth pirate shadow game. It was well received but they still had a massive amount of debt and went bankrupt.
|
So the whole discussion is coming from ign doing a half studied reaction to a twitter thread. Then it got mentioned in podcasts and youtuber responses to that bad summary.
|
For the record, devs like me never want the poor quality or to release a buggy game. It's our publishers that push us to fast and know that even if we don't complete it the consumer will still buy it.
So nobody is really wrong just ign for yet again doing half baked research and everyone liking the opportunity to sh*t on modern game publisher behaviour.
| PS. It's not like publishers will stop anytime soon either, since they keep getting rewarded for their behaviour. Publishers are not devs and they are not your friend. They are in this industry for the money and to fund what is the best product that will deliver.
Voting with wallets never works. It will never work as long as consumer behaviour stays the same.
| PPS. Gamers love commercials and false promises since we all gobble that up and experience so much joy from it. Take the "4 times the size of fallout 4" and "16 times the details". People made an outrage for those quotes since they expected the best fallout game in the series. Ding dong you got hooked but i did as wel so no blame
| wow this sure is a fun debate...
| >>976708
Larian is a small studio. There is no reason a studio backed by a large company(EA, Ubisoft, ect.) can't match up to it.
| >>976765
Not really. Larian stopped being a small studio almost a decade ago when they released Divinity Original Sin in 2014. 150 people worked on the sequel and 400 people worked on Baldurs Gate 3 fyi
| >>976741
You know it g/u/rl, this has become such a pit of nonsense, i just want another game to come out that is full of quality and polish
| Love or hate Jim sterling but they called it ten years ago.
| >>976701 >>976565 >>976362 what happened with the Witcher 3? I only hear good things about it. Did had a bad launch like Cyberpunk 2077?
| Blizzard is one of the companies at fault. Blizzard? More like Greedzard.
The huge MESS and disappointment that Overwatch 2 is, is because of Blizzard.
Diablo 4?
You and I both know that diablo 4 is a just a desperate cashgrab attempt. (That oddly works because there're people that get off to giving money to greedy companies)
Think about all those shitty things like microtransactions, extremely expensive and unrewarding gacha systems, battle passes and all that shit.
| Thank God I mostly play indie games.
| >>977149 empty open world, boring quest lines all being fetch quests after the bloody baron. Boring armor and weapon progression only made to pad out the game more, stale combat after a couple hours. Shitty npc animations and constant repeated side quests and voice lines. Main story kept getting sidetracked by all the shitty side quests making it a snorefest to play. And thats just the start of it
| >>976785
You're joking, right? EA is a several billion dollar company employing nearly 13,000 employees. Ubisoft has over 20,000 employees. If Larian can do it, EA and Ubisoft have no excuse.
| >>977160
This. It has some cool shit here and there, but it's just awfully fucking boring and ngl shouldn't have been open world. The exploration is just not fun and there's nothing fun to find so you just sit on your horse in on rails mode for 5min every time you wanna get somewhere
I think the reason people praise it is cause it can have pretty high highs, but everything aside from it (which is the majority of the game) is just the lowest of lows
| SAGE is always worth following
| >>977160 forgot to add because my brain purged it from memory, but the obvious durability system was there for more padding and the levelling system pretty much tied to the side quests making them more forced than optional and even then I can't remember any of the side quests other than bloody baron and quitting the game when I had to collect like 10 cards in the big city. Played like 30 hours because I was groomed into thinking it'd get better.
| >>976519
>It happens to every art form that has an industry built around it
This. Art always dies when money gets involved
| >>977173
EA and Ubisoft can't and won't make a game like like BG3, ever, because they're too greedy and won't take risks. They're soulless from top to bottom.
(and Larian Studios is AAA wether you like it or not)
| >>976287 Tell about which games but if you refer to OW, there was added battle pass which is slow, time consuming and sadly not as friendly as original lootboxes, which was surprisely fun at begin, and people review bomb it
>>976303 crunch culture is longer time problem old for decades, it's not just now, and most players don't care about what happens behind development
| >>976332 games are too complex than in past and they don't have chance to find all bugs than from times of dvd, cd etc. various hardwares and so.. about replay value i disagree, most new games are made as service, keep updated, adding content, dlcs etc. You may don't like it, but they have more content than games from times before PS3 (when was (console) games mostly offline)
>>976519 some are experiments sometimes, but they release what is most wanted and sell most money
| >>976332 games are too complex than in past and they don't have chance to find all bugs than from times of dvd, cd etc. various hardwares and so.. about replay value i disagree, most new games are made as service, keep updated, adding content, dlcs etc. You may don't like it, but they have more content than games from times before PS3 (when was (console) games mostly offline)
>>976519 some are experiments sometimes, but they release what is most wanted and sell most money
| >>976649 tbh this, but hardcore players will still remember i think, just like farewell, trauma center or project zero
>>976701 depends about games, reasons are also 4K textures for example if you speak specifically about ffxv. even if you don't see it i can recommend you run some game from PS2 and than PS5
>>976702 and this is how is replay value made, people can spend in game much longer than it would last. smaller formats i like personally more. but depends about if SP or MMO.
| >>976649 tbh this, but hardcore players will still remember i think, just like farewell, trauma center or project zero
>>976701 depends about games, reasons are also 4K textures for example if you speak specifically about ffxv. even if you don't see it i can recommend you run some game from PS2 and than PS5
>>976702 and this is how is replay value made, people can spend in game much longer than it would last. smaller formats i like personally more. but depends about if SP or MMO.
| >>977374 nope, just they make good arcade/adventure experiences, prices of these games are usually lower and they have less microtransactions
| >>977451
I'm not specifically calling you out or anything. I'm not the same person who started this debate either by the way, but someone definetly said
>Larian is a small studio.
which isn't true. Larian Studios latest games are AAA tier (and they're good games too). Back when they made the first original sin they only had 50 employees but they've come a long way since.
| >>977378
There's also a lot of Japanese games that doesn't apply to though. I'm not saying there's no good Japanese games, like all my favourite games are from Japan, but they still have a fuck ton of issues and there's plenty of toxic practices there too. It's literally the country that spawned the gacha genre, like
| >>977510 I'm not sure about which gacha games you talk about specifically, but if on phones, there is sick whole concept that games are "free" so you need to pay elsewhere. If you talk about MMO, this genre is similar, if you don't pay subscription
| Indie games rise up
| >>977551
Give it a break, jackass. EA are multiple development studios rolled into one and most of them are smaller than Larian Studios. You don't need 400 people to update the rooster for FIFA/Madden/Sportsgame Current Year.
| Where were you when Capcom was putting out bangers like Monster Hunter and Resident Evil?
| Anyone catch the Microsoft leaks, they're not dumb to it. They'll keep making them this way if we keep buying them. That's the free market baby.
We're on a slow decline into becoming those old people at slot machines that stare vaguely at lemons. Except it's nikke and mihoyo leading the charge.
If you mad go back to watching Xbox vs playstation videos, or stop buying it. I know you bought starfield you retard, don't look away.
| the current system incentives creating trash, so people molded their games to what the system wanted
| Real answer, stop buying shitty AAA games and she'll be right.
| >>977893
This
The whole "stop buying and they stopp selling" shit is such an annoying myth tbh. The only people who even remotely gives af about this are people who dwell on places like this. Normal people are gonna be buying as normal and will never see this sentiment in their life, and most people who are aware of that thing just don't care
"Gamers voting with their wallet" doesn't mean anything. At all
It's an issue with the current systems reducing art to, well, this shit
| >>977933
Stop whining about it every time it comes up, will ya? Economy 101 is not a myth but common fucking sense. As long as people enjoy the product they will continue to sell it. It's not rocket science. It's actually really fucking simple. AAA is not for you so stop your entitled behaviour and grow up.
Just because your preferences differs from ordinary happy peoples it won't make it any less true. No one cares about your standards because if they did they would go bankrupt.
| >>977938
Idk what you're mad about, cause we said the same fucking thing lol
I said majority of people don't care about "holding corporations accountable" or whatever tf cause normal people just wanna play some fucking games and don't care, and that's the reason it'll continue even if basement dwellers scream "vote with you wallet"
I wasn't taking a stance on it. Personally idgaf, I just play whatever I feel like, which includes AAA games I think look fun. You're yelling at air
| I'm also very obviously not saying that "if nobody buys product there's no consequences and they'll continue trying to sell it regardless". I'm saying that the people who yell at others for buying games they deem unethical or bad are fucking retarded cause nobody except a few ultra nerds are actually gonna do that. That's why it's a myth, not cause it in theory doesn't work, but because it in praxis is useless cause who tf cares
| yo momma
| >>977944
You seem to spout a lot of emotional nonsense for someone who claims she doesn't care... Why even start whining about something you don't care about?
AAA is not for you so why cry about "holding corporations accountable" etc if you don't care abt it. Obviously, people who play and enjoy the product don't see anything that the companies should be held accountable for, right? You project your own values onto other people and then blame them for not agreeing, which is retard
| It's simple.
1. Don't pay for stuff you don't want.
2. If something is bad enough then people won't buy it or demand their money back. This is why voting with your wallet works.
3. Your personal preferences doesn't dictate the value of a game. Period. No one in the business cares about your personal tastes.
All I see when I read your posts is a peeved whiner who's upset because his one vote won't make a difference.
| Remember Mass Effect: Andromeda for example? They didn't continue the franchise because people voted with their wallet and/or demanded refunds.
Sure, never trust EA/Ubisoft etc to replace their failing products with anything new but at least they're not making bank either. If you want originality you'll have to go indie or AA games.
| What I find sad is that most big developers dropped their side titles and only focus on main franchises, I wish we coould go back to when companies like R* would drop smaller releases like manhunt or midnight club
| >>978134
Yeah aight you're either trolling or illiterate lol
Your versions of what I said VS what I actually said are so wildly different it's gotta be one of the two
| I wonder why film doesn't quite have the same problem. You don't have to just consume indie trash recorded on an iphone to find something good in that medium.
| >>978271
You don't have to in games either. There's plenty of good AAA games, just like there's plenty of good Hollywood movies. But if you follow games closely you'll notice there's also a lot of mid and trash AAA games, just like how if you follow Hollywood movies closely you'll notice there's a lot of mid and trash Hollywood movies
(I'm saying Hollywood cause that's the majority of big movies, but it applies to all expensive productions)
| "AAA Game" is a buzzword and it just keeo changing meaning
| >>8dcebd talking about averages, like I dislike marvel movies. But they're okay and some of them are good. Can't say the same for EA. They don't hand off a game to a director who's a bit whacky or different.
| >>978504
I wasn't necessarily talking about Marvel. But like, most big movies that are released you don't hear about, yk? And there's a reason for that. A lot of them are just not fun and boring af. There's usually only, like, 2-3 actually good movies that drop each year. Same as with AAA games
| >>8c9d6e talking averages. Barbie, Oppenheimer and spoderman just off the dome. For games Baldursgate 3? And even then it's independently funded.
I just think there is way more creative autonomy there, in service of pleasing a large audience of course but they still pump out interesting product.
Where as games fundamentally are treated like pachinko machines, like that writer for fallout 4 that said gamers are too stupid to waste good writing on because they'll just tear the pgs
| >>978542
Baldur's Gate 3, Armored Core 6, Street Fighter 6 and Tears of the Kingdom off the top of my head for games
Again, to me the industries look very similar. I'm not saying they're the exact aame, obviously, but they're very similar in the amount of good and mid they produce imo
| >>978469 AAA game is basically expensive game with big budget (expensive production, marketing etc.), from known publishers. It's not mean anything about quality. Basically check 50k-chan she can't draw better than 4 y.o. kid, but want money like if she drawed Mona Lisa.
>>978581 earning on popularity of old brands is easier than make new IP, it's reason why it's looks "similar"? Because you said games from 1998, 1997, 1987, 1986?
| >>8c9d6e baldurs gate is independently funded as said, and the other two are jp devs which have a different company culture to the west which allows for more autonomy at the top. Think kojima getting away with murder and CEOs commiting financial sodoku.
Where as Bobby kodek runs with the bag.
I just disagree with the relativism your proposing. There are general trends of just copying old ips but games are treated much more like slot machines imo.
| Ever seince cyberpunk, there’s been a pattern of unfinished games.
>forgot to mention, most AAA games are nothing but gambling and dopamine echo chambers.
They do this for money
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| Seems like most new AAA games now are getting shit on online review or social media no matter what. Wtf has happened to modern games?