BG3 can happen periodically, it doesn’t need to be every game though.
Starfield is a perfect example of this. They wanted it to sell like Skyrim, but they didn’t commit to delivering what’s needed to make that happen. They should have limited the scope and delivered a really good game where you fast travel between planets without any of the space stuff and cut most of the procedural generation. That would’ve been a great game and probably would’ve gotten a lot of praise, especially if they put some of that saved budget into better animations. They could have later released the space stuff and procedural generation as a DLC or sequel, with all the polish needed to make that good.
GTA V would’ve been just as good or better with a smaller map, and I’m sure GTA VI will as well. The same goes for most big budget games. Make tighter experiences with incredible QA, good writing, and fun gameplay and it’ll sell. The indie scene proves that, and a lot of times the main ingredient missing is marketing. Give an indie studio a AAA budget and they’ll make a dozen good games, whereas the AAA studio will be late on one mediocre game, but it’ll look super pretty.
And that’s why I rarely buy AAA games. Yeah, it’ll probably be a decent experience, but for the same money, I could get a few great indie or AA games. The main issue is discoverability, which is something AAAs are great at solving.
But BG3 is at least as large in scope as Starfield. Likely bigger.
Why is scope the problem?
I mean, for one thing, BG3 isn’t every game. This year people can’t shut up about Balatro (which I like but not love, incidentally). Or about Metaphor Re:Fantazio (which I love and took a long time to make, but is decidedly mid-sized).
You’re assigning execution problems to scope as if the games that serve as a reference for being great were small. But they aren’t. They come in all sizes, including mind-bogglingly huge. Execution and scope aren’t the same thing.
This year people can’t shut up about Balatro (which I like but not love, incidentally)
Same. That said, the value for the overall budget was incredibly high. I’m not saying Balatro should’ve been done by a AAA studio, just saying I think many people would prefer more games like that than more Assassin’s Creed games with large, empty worlds. How many cool indie games could a typical AC game budget fund and market?
Why is scope the problem?
Big budget games have their place, and it’s awesome to have a few games with incredible eye-candy each gen, but the balance seems to be way off here.
Execution and scope aren’t the same thing.
They’re not, but it’s a lot easier to execute well when scope is limited.
For example, look at Tears of the Kingdom, it’s basically Breath of the Wild with a fresh coat of paint, yet both BOTW and TOTK sold like hotcakes. The scope of TOTK was merely a handful of changes from its predecessor, plus an all new story. The difference between TOTK and most AAA games is that TOTK put gameplay first and reused whatever it could from previous games. I’m guessing Echoes of Wisdom reused the Link’s Awakening engine as well, with some extra polish to make the gimmick in that game work.
I want AAA studios to act more like Nintendo than Ubisoft or Activision Blizzard. Nintendo tends to focus on gameplay first, QA second, followed closely by art style, and graphics aren’t really a consideration.
Give me a few big games with deep scope and execute really well on those, but fill it in with a bunch of high quality, lower budget games with great gameplay, writing, etc. Sometimes I’m in the mood for a mind-blowing, cinematic experience, but usually I just want to veg and have fun. I’ve largely written off the AAA industry for gaming because their cinematic experiences tend to be poorly executed (poor QA, mediocre writing, etc), yet they charge a premium.
Hey, the best game published by Ubisoft this year was a mid-sized Prince of Persia game. The second best was a small Prince of Persia roguelike. Neither did particularly well with audiences, both are great.
We’re still not agreeing in our definitions, though, because man, how can anybody put a first party Nintendo game, let alone their Zelda open world tentpole, anywhere outside AAA? TOTK is AAA as fuck. TOTK defines AAA. Six years in the making, insane polish, a seeming blank check to mess with design to blend Zelda and Minecraft and built by some mix of Nintendo’s top tier talent and massive, industrial outsourcing over to Monolith Soft, which itself has hundreds of employees.
The realization that even sensible, savvy people just don’t grasp cost, scope or size in game development is… not new, but still disappointing. I still think this entire conversation is entirely tautological. People are defining size and “AAA-ness” based on whatever vibes and superficial traits they’ve assigned to “AAA”, not any sort of measure of size, budget or scope.
how can anybody put a first party Nintendo game, let alone their Zelda open world tentpole, anywhere outside AAA?
I’m saying it is AAA, and that’s how other AAA games should be. BOTW graphics are good but not life changing, bugs were rare on launch, the game is fun, and it brings something new to the series. TOTK is the same way, but it gets to reuse a lot of the engine work from BOTW while feeling like a new game. BOTW was audacious in scope, and Nintendo rarely takes those kinds of risks, so they feel special when they happen.
Nintendo is perhaps the best example of what I’d like other AAA studios to be, as least from a game design standpoint. Take big risks occasionally, and ship fun, lower-budget games between them. If we look at Zelda games on Switch, we have:
BOTW - flagship for the console to show what it can do
TOTK - sequel to BOTW, which is a lot less risky given how popular BOTW was
Link’s Awakening - top down, relatively straight-forward Zelda game, remake from older game
Skyward Sword - remake from Wii
Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom - reuse engine from Link’s Awakening, but still takes a big gameplay risk
Only BOTW was truly risky here, and I imagine it cost way more than everything else.
If we look at Ubisoft, for example, they churn out massive AC games almost every year, and those cost hundreds of millions each time. Yeah, they have other games too (so does Nintendo), I’m talking more about the frequency of these massive world games they release, which is honestly absurd. I can’t speak for everyone, but I imagine many gamers would prefer to reduce the frequency of AC releases, improve the story progression (and eventually end it), and invest that budget into new IPs or smaller games.
That frequency is possible only because multiple studios are working on those. It’s not like people put together one of those each year, they are worked on concurrently.
I would argue that having too many games that are too similar is a major strategic mistake Ubisoft made for the past couple of gens. But that’s not because they’re big, or triple A or anything else. It’s a bad call by a mix of executives and creatives. It’s no more representative of AAA games or the industry than Nintendo having two iterations per franchise per generation or whatever they’ve decided is the sweet spot.
And once again, the budget has nothing to do with this. I am pretty sure that the open world Zeldas are quite expensive to make. All these good games people keep showing as examples of smaller games are not smaller at all. In Ubi’s case it’s kinda tragic, because they did invest in smaller games and it turns out those didn’t sell. Not only did they have the smaller PoP games, but they tried with a smaller AC game, too. At this point they’re throwing the kitchen sink at this. Hell, they have the very last AAA extreme sports title I can think of. I’m not sure when or if we’ll see another one.
And none of those have a problem with scope or are anywhere near as big as BG3 or Elden Ring, or probably even the big Zeldas. It’s not a budget problem. Which is not to say that games aren’t too expensive to make. The point is that they’re too expensive to make regardless of quality. The games you like are just as expensive as the ones you don’t.
That frequency is possible only because multiple studios are working on those. It’s not like people put together one of those each year, they are worked on concurrently.
Sure, and my question is, what could those other studios create if they weren’t building these massive, samey experiences?
that’s not because they’re big, or triple A or anything else
It absolutely is though. It doesn’t define AAA (that’s defined by dev and marketing budgets), but it’s what it has become. They compete on trailers to be the flashiest thing at whatever gaming convention they’re going to, so they dump their resources into technical improvements.
I am pretty sure that the open world Zeldas are quite expensive to make
They absolutely are, but they’re a lot less expensive than AAA titles designed for modern consoles and PCs. People would laugh Nintendo off the stage for trying to push BOTW on non-Nintendo hardware because it doesn’t meet the expectations for those other platforms.
I brought it up to highlight that big budget games are fine, if they’re released sparingly. If Nintendo kept releasing massive budget games, I’d have the same complaint about them, but they they’re pretty rare.
It’s not a budget problem
You’re right, it’s how they apply the budget. They should be investing a lot more into gameplay and writing than they currently do. They could kick out a lot more good games for the same budget.
Well, yeah, I would love to see what the Ubisoft staff can come up with when freed from AC’s clutches. I have seen it, in fact, and it was a really good Prince of Persia Metroidvania. Would have bought a sequel if everybody else hadn’t ignored it.
But the point is they weren’t stuck making AC because AC is big, they were stuck making AC because somebody at Ubi knew it was one of their two remaining moneymakers and couldn’t find the guts to take a risk or the creativity to find a new hit. And I wouldn’t necessarily have wanted that risk to be a small game. People didn’t buy the first few ACs or Far Crys or whatever because they were small. They bought them because they were new, innovative and impressive at the time.
And no, I don’t for a minute think Zelda is cheaper than other games. Monolith has three studios with three or four hundred people, total. Each of those games was in development for years. Pixels don’t cost money, people in chairs coding and modelling cost money. Sure, HD assets are more expensive to make because they often take longer, and there is arguably a tendency in some studios to overinvest in asset detail without letting design iterate enough first.
But I will keep stressing this, letting designers iterate is itself expensive, and neither Nintendo’s games nor BG3 are any cheaper than super raytraced global illumination or whatever.
And to your point, a lot of people DO apply their budget the way you describe. That’s how you got (takes deep breath) Zelda BOTW and TOTK, Astro Bot, The Last of Us, Marvel’s Spider-Man, Baldur’s Gate III, Elden Ring, Tekken 8, the Dead Space remake, the Silent Hill 2 remake, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Street Fighter 6, Alan Wake 2, God of War, Guardians of the Galaxy or Returnal.
All triple A AF, all different shades of weird and cool and inventive and extremely well made and all games I’ve finished, or at least played for dozens of hours. I love triple A games, and I refuse to let cynical online discourse reframe them as cookie cutter crap because it’s fun to dunk on Ubisoft this decade or whatever.
somebody at Ubi knew it was one of their two remaining moneymakers and couldn’t find the guts to take a risk or the creativity to find a new hit
And that’s exactly the problem with AAA, they tend to take the lower risk path.
Indies have to take massive risks to stand out, and while most fail, the few that stand out are absolutely incredible. They can’t rely on the GFX or marketing departments to carry the game for them, it has to be so good people want to share it with their friends. One of the first indies I played was FTL, and that was because a friend recommended it to me.
I don’t for a minute think Zelda is cheaper than other games
The estimates I’ve seen are that BOTW is ~$120M, whereas AC games are >$300M (even $500M). Figures like these are hard to come by, especially for Nintendo, and they’re generally not very comparable since different studios need different marketing budgets.
takes deep breath
So mostly Nintendo and Sony, and a handful of others. Note, these are pretty much all Japanese studios, who are generally known for more frequent, smaller-scale, and more inventive game releases.
The problem seems to be more an issue with western AAA studios, so Rockstar (Red Dead kind of diversified them), Activision/Blizzard (lots of samey games, little innovation), Ubisoft, EA (they’re great at killing interesting ideas), etc. They spend way too much on graphics and way too little on interesting content. Rockstar is the only one on the list that I’ve played a recent game from, assuming you consider RDR2 and GTA V “recent.”
Favorite studios release good games with a reasonable length that aren’t massive open-world collectathons. In fact, I didn’t even really like BOTW, despite praising them for trying something new (I hate that they killed the best part of Zelda to me: dungeons). It’s not that I don’t like open world games in general (love Elder Scrolls games), I just don’t like games that are open world for the sake of it, and that’s what seems to balloon budgets and encourages filler.
BG3 can happen periodically, it doesn’t need to be every game though.
Starfield is a perfect example of this. They wanted it to sell like Skyrim, but they didn’t commit to delivering what’s needed to make that happen. They should have limited the scope and delivered a really good game where you fast travel between planets without any of the space stuff and cut most of the procedural generation. That would’ve been a great game and probably would’ve gotten a lot of praise, especially if they put some of that saved budget into better animations. They could have later released the space stuff and procedural generation as a DLC or sequel, with all the polish needed to make that good.
GTA V would’ve been just as good or better with a smaller map, and I’m sure GTA VI will as well. The same goes for most big budget games. Make tighter experiences with incredible QA, good writing, and fun gameplay and it’ll sell. The indie scene proves that, and a lot of times the main ingredient missing is marketing. Give an indie studio a AAA budget and they’ll make a dozen good games, whereas the AAA studio will be late on one mediocre game, but it’ll look super pretty.
And that’s why I rarely buy AAA games. Yeah, it’ll probably be a decent experience, but for the same money, I could get a few great indie or AA games. The main issue is discoverability, which is something AAAs are great at solving.
But BG3 is at least as large in scope as Starfield. Likely bigger.
Why is scope the problem?
I mean, for one thing, BG3 isn’t every game. This year people can’t shut up about Balatro (which I like but not love, incidentally). Or about Metaphor Re:Fantazio (which I love and took a long time to make, but is decidedly mid-sized).
You’re assigning execution problems to scope as if the games that serve as a reference for being great were small. But they aren’t. They come in all sizes, including mind-bogglingly huge. Execution and scope aren’t the same thing.
Same. That said, the value for the overall budget was incredibly high. I’m not saying Balatro should’ve been done by a AAA studio, just saying I think many people would prefer more games like that than more Assassin’s Creed games with large, empty worlds. How many cool indie games could a typical AC game budget fund and market?
Big budget games have their place, and it’s awesome to have a few games with incredible eye-candy each gen, but the balance seems to be way off here.
They’re not, but it’s a lot easier to execute well when scope is limited.
For example, look at Tears of the Kingdom, it’s basically Breath of the Wild with a fresh coat of paint, yet both BOTW and TOTK sold like hotcakes. The scope of TOTK was merely a handful of changes from its predecessor, plus an all new story. The difference between TOTK and most AAA games is that TOTK put gameplay first and reused whatever it could from previous games. I’m guessing Echoes of Wisdom reused the Link’s Awakening engine as well, with some extra polish to make the gimmick in that game work.
I want AAA studios to act more like Nintendo than Ubisoft or Activision Blizzard. Nintendo tends to focus on gameplay first, QA second, followed closely by art style, and graphics aren’t really a consideration.
Give me a few big games with deep scope and execute really well on those, but fill it in with a bunch of high quality, lower budget games with great gameplay, writing, etc. Sometimes I’m in the mood for a mind-blowing, cinematic experience, but usually I just want to veg and have fun. I’ve largely written off the AAA industry for gaming because their cinematic experiences tend to be poorly executed (poor QA, mediocre writing, etc), yet they charge a premium.
Hey, the best game published by Ubisoft this year was a mid-sized Prince of Persia game. The second best was a small Prince of Persia roguelike. Neither did particularly well with audiences, both are great.
We’re still not agreeing in our definitions, though, because man, how can anybody put a first party Nintendo game, let alone their Zelda open world tentpole, anywhere outside AAA? TOTK is AAA as fuck. TOTK defines AAA. Six years in the making, insane polish, a seeming blank check to mess with design to blend Zelda and Minecraft and built by some mix of Nintendo’s top tier talent and massive, industrial outsourcing over to Monolith Soft, which itself has hundreds of employees.
The realization that even sensible, savvy people just don’t grasp cost, scope or size in game development is… not new, but still disappointing. I still think this entire conversation is entirely tautological. People are defining size and “AAA-ness” based on whatever vibes and superficial traits they’ve assigned to “AAA”, not any sort of measure of size, budget or scope.
I’m saying it is AAA, and that’s how other AAA games should be. BOTW graphics are good but not life changing, bugs were rare on launch, the game is fun, and it brings something new to the series. TOTK is the same way, but it gets to reuse a lot of the engine work from BOTW while feeling like a new game. BOTW was audacious in scope, and Nintendo rarely takes those kinds of risks, so they feel special when they happen.
Nintendo is perhaps the best example of what I’d like other AAA studios to be, as least from a game design standpoint. Take big risks occasionally, and ship fun, lower-budget games between them. If we look at Zelda games on Switch, we have:
Only BOTW was truly risky here, and I imagine it cost way more than everything else.
If we look at Ubisoft, for example, they churn out massive AC games almost every year, and those cost hundreds of millions each time. Yeah, they have other games too (so does Nintendo), I’m talking more about the frequency of these massive world games they release, which is honestly absurd. I can’t speak for everyone, but I imagine many gamers would prefer to reduce the frequency of AC releases, improve the story progression (and eventually end it), and invest that budget into new IPs or smaller games.
That frequency is possible only because multiple studios are working on those. It’s not like people put together one of those each year, they are worked on concurrently.
I would argue that having too many games that are too similar is a major strategic mistake Ubisoft made for the past couple of gens. But that’s not because they’re big, or triple A or anything else. It’s a bad call by a mix of executives and creatives. It’s no more representative of AAA games or the industry than Nintendo having two iterations per franchise per generation or whatever they’ve decided is the sweet spot.
And once again, the budget has nothing to do with this. I am pretty sure that the open world Zeldas are quite expensive to make. All these good games people keep showing as examples of smaller games are not smaller at all. In Ubi’s case it’s kinda tragic, because they did invest in smaller games and it turns out those didn’t sell. Not only did they have the smaller PoP games, but they tried with a smaller AC game, too. At this point they’re throwing the kitchen sink at this. Hell, they have the very last AAA extreme sports title I can think of. I’m not sure when or if we’ll see another one.
And none of those have a problem with scope or are anywhere near as big as BG3 or Elden Ring, or probably even the big Zeldas. It’s not a budget problem. Which is not to say that games aren’t too expensive to make. The point is that they’re too expensive to make regardless of quality. The games you like are just as expensive as the ones you don’t.
Sure, and my question is, what could those other studios create if they weren’t building these massive, samey experiences?
It absolutely is though. It doesn’t define AAA (that’s defined by dev and marketing budgets), but it’s what it has become. They compete on trailers to be the flashiest thing at whatever gaming convention they’re going to, so they dump their resources into technical improvements.
They absolutely are, but they’re a lot less expensive than AAA titles designed for modern consoles and PCs. People would laugh Nintendo off the stage for trying to push BOTW on non-Nintendo hardware because it doesn’t meet the expectations for those other platforms.
I brought it up to highlight that big budget games are fine, if they’re released sparingly. If Nintendo kept releasing massive budget games, I’d have the same complaint about them, but they they’re pretty rare.
You’re right, it’s how they apply the budget. They should be investing a lot more into gameplay and writing than they currently do. They could kick out a lot more good games for the same budget.
Well, yeah, I would love to see what the Ubisoft staff can come up with when freed from AC’s clutches. I have seen it, in fact, and it was a really good Prince of Persia Metroidvania. Would have bought a sequel if everybody else hadn’t ignored it.
But the point is they weren’t stuck making AC because AC is big, they were stuck making AC because somebody at Ubi knew it was one of their two remaining moneymakers and couldn’t find the guts to take a risk or the creativity to find a new hit. And I wouldn’t necessarily have wanted that risk to be a small game. People didn’t buy the first few ACs or Far Crys or whatever because they were small. They bought them because they were new, innovative and impressive at the time.
And no, I don’t for a minute think Zelda is cheaper than other games. Monolith has three studios with three or four hundred people, total. Each of those games was in development for years. Pixels don’t cost money, people in chairs coding and modelling cost money. Sure, HD assets are more expensive to make because they often take longer, and there is arguably a tendency in some studios to overinvest in asset detail without letting design iterate enough first.
But I will keep stressing this, letting designers iterate is itself expensive, and neither Nintendo’s games nor BG3 are any cheaper than super raytraced global illumination or whatever.
And to your point, a lot of people DO apply their budget the way you describe. That’s how you got (takes deep breath) Zelda BOTW and TOTK, Astro Bot, The Last of Us, Marvel’s Spider-Man, Baldur’s Gate III, Elden Ring, Tekken 8, the Dead Space remake, the Silent Hill 2 remake, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Street Fighter 6, Alan Wake 2, God of War, Guardians of the Galaxy or Returnal.
All triple A AF, all different shades of weird and cool and inventive and extremely well made and all games I’ve finished, or at least played for dozens of hours. I love triple A games, and I refuse to let cynical online discourse reframe them as cookie cutter crap because it’s fun to dunk on Ubisoft this decade or whatever.
And that’s exactly the problem with AAA, they tend to take the lower risk path.
Indies have to take massive risks to stand out, and while most fail, the few that stand out are absolutely incredible. They can’t rely on the GFX or marketing departments to carry the game for them, it has to be so good people want to share it with their friends. One of the first indies I played was FTL, and that was because a friend recommended it to me.
The estimates I’ve seen are that BOTW is ~$120M, whereas AC games are >$300M (even $500M). Figures like these are hard to come by, especially for Nintendo, and they’re generally not very comparable since different studios need different marketing budgets.
So mostly Nintendo and Sony, and a handful of others. Note, these are pretty much all Japanese studios, who are generally known for more frequent, smaller-scale, and more inventive game releases.
The problem seems to be more an issue with western AAA studios, so Rockstar (Red Dead kind of diversified them), Activision/Blizzard (lots of samey games, little innovation), Ubisoft, EA (they’re great at killing interesting ideas), etc. They spend way too much on graphics and way too little on interesting content. Rockstar is the only one on the list that I’ve played a recent game from, assuming you consider RDR2 and GTA V “recent.”
Favorite studios release good games with a reasonable length that aren’t massive open-world collectathons. In fact, I didn’t even really like BOTW, despite praising them for trying something new (I hate that they killed the best part of Zelda to me: dungeons). It’s not that I don’t like open world games in general (love Elder Scrolls games), I just don’t like games that are open world for the sake of it, and that’s what seems to balloon budgets and encourages filler.