6 ms·

The problem is with these "AAA" games. I've spent a dozen years having great fun with perfectly enjoyable and memorable 7/10 games. Nowadays a 7/10 is a death s

by eur0pa 3y ago

The problem is with these "AAA" games. I've spent a dozen years having great fun with perfectly enjoyable and memorable 7/10 games. Nowadays a 7/10 is a death sentence for a gaming studio. The industry is poisoned.

whywhywhywhy 3y ago
The criteria has changed I feel, a 7/10 in the 90s/00s probably meant it had some good ideas, a highly creative setting, an innovative tech or gameplay mechanic so the end product, while 7/10 because one of the parts just didn't hit the mark or it was just very buggy, the actual game was still enjoyable. The modern AAA mentality has stripped too much of it down to formulas they consider working or "best practices" (e.g the "UbiSoft Towers" phenomenon) or they're literally shaping the whole game to try and force a specific business model that is more important than shipping good content (Bungie Destiny 2). Difference is when a game built with that ideology doesn't hit the mark it ends up just being insanely dull and has no spark to keep you going or win you over. Instead of Flawed But Fun you get Competent But Boring.
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  In hindsight, we spent a lot of time on said 7/10 games, and they were just fine. But it was a different time, mainly in terms of what was available, how much time you had, and how much time a game took. Most games we had were copied shareware games from diskettes; on occasion a CD with loads of shareware games, and on rare occasions someone had a copy of the full version of a game like Doom. But nowadays a lot of games - AAA and indie both - are at least 40 hour games, if not (a lot) more; Assassin's Creed Valhalla takes 123 hours to "do everything" (platinum); I've got over 300 hours in Factorio and about half that in Kerbal Space Program; FFXVI took me 60 hours to finish, I still have outstanding sidequests, and that one doesn't even have that many side activities or time sinks. And then there's the "live services" (or MMOs if they have a multiplayer aspect, or MMORPGs if it's WoW or FFXIV) which are designed to have great / tight gameplay loops but effectively infinite game. I've got a lot of hours in FFXIV and they keep adding Stuff to it. If I had infinite time there's a few side activities in it that cost just as much time to "finish" as the base game's stories.
- thereddaikon 3y ago
  I don't know if you can even say competent at this point. So many "AAA" games with their army of developers still launch with performance issues and bugs. If massive teams should be good at one thing, it is making a polished and well running product. But that doesn't seem to be the case. Devs cried for years to get the ability to make their own custom shaders. Now that DX and Vulkan allow it, we find they didn't know what they were asking for and every AAA game suffers from massive shader compilation issues. A problem that never existed when it was left up to AMD and Nvidia. You also don't see this problem in indie games because they never have the bandwidth to even consider writing their own shaders. And that's just one example.
Goronmon 3y ago
"Poisoned"? Or just more competitive? If you thought Half-Life was a "7/10" back in the day, what would you play instead? Quake? Unreal Tournament? Both were mainly multi-player games and not really a direct alternative.
- chungy 3y ago
  Unreal Tournament didn't exist yet, and both Quake 1 and 2 were very much single-player focused games.
  - sitzkrieg 3y ago
    laughs in quakeworld
- devnullbrain 3y ago
  Other games that released in 1998: - Ocarina of Time - Final Fantasy VII - Baldur's Gate - Starcraft - Metal Gear Solid - Resident Evil 2 - Pokemon Yellow If only it was as competitive as 2023, in which some of the top games were: - A Zelda game - A Final Fantasy game - A Resident Evil remake - A Baldur's Gate game
  - 1123581321 3y ago
    He is talking about first-person shooters. If you had a taste for a certain kind of game in the late 90s you didn't have many choices that were done by a full studio and polished. Most of the games you listed had the same "problem" of being unparalleled at the time. Now you have a lot of clones of the same idea, plus so many of the classics are still replayable or remastered and rereleased. A good-but-not-great game has many substitutes with a similar scope and feel.
    - devnullbrain 3y ago
      In 1998 we still called them Doom clones. Goldeneye didn't even use conventional twin-stick aiming. There's a reason there weren't many. How many non-Nintendo 3D platformers are there today?
bitcharmer 3y ago
Sadly today 9/10 just means the game is actually finished upon release.
rib3ye 3y ago
Somehow audiences will respect effort vs resources as long as there is community outreach and the price makes sense. There are a lot of 5/10 games that are successful on Steam because the devs set the right expectations for the experience. Recently Vampire Survivors comes to mind. Definitely a 6/10, but something about the balance of no-effort art and masterful game tuning makes it VERY sticky.
- devilbunny 3y ago
  Goat Simulator is not a good or deep game, but I definitely got my $3 or whatever I paid out of it. It’s just mindless fun.
- ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
  > Vampire Survivors comes to mind. Definitely a 6/10 That's fighting talk round my way! There's something they've got incredibly right between the no-thinking gameplay and the gradual progression through the various secrets and unlocks. I thought I'd grown tired of it after finishing the base game and not being bothered about gold farming, but I bought the DLC the other week and I was instantly hooked again.
  - leviathant 3y ago
    Everything about Vampire Survivors made sense to me upon learning that it was developed by an Italian guy who used to work on slot machines. It also reinforced that I've been right to avoid casinos my whole life. I get that the art was a no-effort import, but everything else about that damn game is a good illustration of something that only seems simple because it's exceedingly well done.
  - riffruff24 3y ago
    Same thing with Dead Cells and Slay the Spire. Many similar games but very few of them managed to imitate the delicate balance of carrot and stick.
- jimbob45 3y ago
  no-effort art In fairness, isn't is specifically meant to look like a ported Italian game with laughably incorrect translations?
devnullbrain 3y ago
I see it as overspecialisation. When GTA 6 costs 10 years and a billion dollars, it needs to be an unmatched hit. But what if it's just bad on a conceptual level? More money can create more models, textures and 'content' but it can't create fun. For GTA 3, it would have been a setback for a year. For GTA 6, it could be fatal.
- bonton89 3y ago
  I remember reading Bullfrog would take the engine from their last game and build a prototype to play to see if it was any fun. Then they'd throw it away and start over.
filoleg 3y ago
I suggest trying the new Robocop: Rogue City game. It is pretty much a perfect encapsulation of a 7/10 or AA type of a game, where it is just fun, solid, well done, has quite a great amount of soul in it. But isn’t aiming to be some do-it-all open world AAA michael bay type of an affair. One of the most enjoyable games this year for me, and it says a lot (given how many amazing games of all kinds we got this year). And yet, it isn’t overly ambitious. Just overall, that’s pretty much the exact type of a game that you are talking about, which I’ve noticed we had an almost complete drought of over the past decade.

by eur0pa 3y ago

whywhywhywhy 3y ago

The criteria has changed I feel, a 7/10 in the 90s/00s probably meant it had some good ideas, a highly creative setting, an innovative tech or gameplay mechanic so the end product, while 7/10 because one of the parts just didn't hit the mark or it was just very buggy, the actual game was still enjoyable. The modern AAA mentality has stripped too much of it down to formulas they consider working or "best practices" (e.g the "UbiSoft Towers" phenomenon) or they're literally shaping the whole game to try and force a specific business model that is more important than shipping good content (Bungie Destiny 2). Difference is when a game built with that ideology doesn't hit the mark it ends up just being insanely dull and has no spark to keep you going or win you over. Instead of Flawed But Fun you get Competent But Boring.

Cthulhu_ 3y ago
In hindsight, we spent a lot of time on said 7/10 games, and they were just fine. But it was a different time, mainly in terms of what was available, how much time you had, and how much time a game took. Most games we had were copied shareware games from diskettes; on occasion a CD with loads of shareware games, and on rare occasions someone had a copy of the full version of a game like Doom. But nowadays a lot of games - AAA and indie both - are at least 40 hour games, if not (a lot) more; Assassin's Creed Valhalla takes 123 hours to "do everything" (platinum); I've got over 300 hours in Factorio and about half that in Kerbal Space Program; FFXVI took me 60 hours to finish, I still have outstanding sidequests, and that one doesn't even have that many side activities or time sinks. And then there's the "live services" (or MMOs if they have a multiplayer aspect, or MMORPGs if it's WoW or FFXIV) which are designed to have great / tight gameplay loops but effectively infinite game. I've got a lot of hours in FFXIV and they keep adding Stuff to it. If I had infinite time there's a few side activities in it that cost just as much time to "finish" as the base game's stories.
thereddaikon 3y ago
I don't know if you can even say competent at this point. So many "AAA" games with their army of developers still launch with performance issues and bugs. If massive teams should be good at one thing, it is making a polished and well running product. But that doesn't seem to be the case. Devs cried for years to get the ability to make their own custom shaders. Now that DX and Vulkan allow it, we find they didn't know what they were asking for and every AAA game suffers from massive shader compilation issues. A problem that never existed when it was left up to AMD and Nvidia. You also don't see this problem in indie games because they never have the bandwidth to even consider writing their own shaders. And that's just one example.

Goronmon 3y ago

"Poisoned"? Or just more competitive? If you thought Half-Life was a "7/10" back in the day, what would you play instead? Quake? Unreal Tournament? Both were mainly multi-player games and not really a direct alternative.

chungy 3y ago
Unreal Tournament didn't exist yet, and both Quake 1 and 2 were very much single-player focused games.
- sitzkrieg 3y ago
  laughs in quakeworld
devnullbrain 3y ago
Other games that released in 1998: - Ocarina of Time - Final Fantasy VII - Baldur's Gate - Starcraft - Metal Gear Solid - Resident Evil 2 - Pokemon Yellow If only it was as competitive as 2023, in which some of the top games were: - A Zelda game - A Final Fantasy game - A Resident Evil remake - A Baldur's Gate game
- 1123581321 3y ago
  He is talking about first-person shooters. If you had a taste for a certain kind of game in the late 90s you didn't have many choices that were done by a full studio and polished. Most of the games you listed had the same "problem" of being unparalleled at the time. Now you have a lot of clones of the same idea, plus so many of the classics are still replayable or remastered and rereleased. A good-but-not-great game has many substitutes with a similar scope and feel.
  - devnullbrain 3y ago
    In 1998 we still called them Doom clones. Goldeneye didn't even use conventional twin-stick aiming. There's a reason there weren't many. How many non-Nintendo 3D platformers are there today?

bitcharmer 3y ago

Sadly today 9/10 just means the game is actually finished upon release.

rib3ye 3y ago

Somehow audiences will respect effort vs resources as long as there is community outreach and the price makes sense. There are a lot of 5/10 games that are successful on Steam because the devs set the right expectations for the experience. Recently Vampire Survivors comes to mind. Definitely a 6/10, but something about the balance of no-effort art and masterful game tuning makes it VERY sticky.

devilbunny 3y ago
Goat Simulator is not a good or deep game, but I definitely got my $3 or whatever I paid out of it. It’s just mindless fun.
ndsipa_pomu 3y ago
> Vampire Survivors comes to mind. Definitely a 6/10 That's fighting talk round my way! There's something they've got incredibly right between the no-thinking gameplay and the gradual progression through the various secrets and unlocks. I thought I'd grown tired of it after finishing the base game and not being bothered about gold farming, but I bought the DLC the other week and I was instantly hooked again.
- leviathant 3y ago
  Everything about Vampire Survivors made sense to me upon learning that it was developed by an Italian guy who used to work on slot machines. It also reinforced that I've been right to avoid casinos my whole life. I get that the art was a no-effort import, but everything else about that damn game is a good illustration of something that only seems simple because it's exceedingly well done.
- riffruff24 3y ago
  Same thing with Dead Cells and Slay the Spire. Many similar games but very few of them managed to imitate the delicate balance of carrot and stick.
jimbob45 3y ago
no-effort art In fairness, isn't is specifically meant to look like a ported Italian game with laughably incorrect translations?

devnullbrain 3y ago

I see it as overspecialisation. When GTA 6 costs 10 years and a billion dollars, it needs to be an unmatched hit. But what if it's just bad on a conceptual level? More money can create more models, textures and 'content' but it can't create fun. For GTA 3, it would have been a setback for a year. For GTA 6, it could be fatal.

bonton89 3y ago
I remember reading Bullfrog would take the engine from their last game and build a prototype to play to see if it was any fun. Then they'd throw it away and start over.

filoleg 3y ago

I suggest trying the new Robocop: Rogue City game. It is pretty much a perfect encapsulation of a 7/10 or AA type of a game, where it is just fun, solid, well done, has quite a great amount of soul in it. But isn’t aiming to be some do-it-all open world AAA michael bay type of an affair. One of the most enjoyable games this year for me, and it says a lot (given how many amazing games of all kinds we got this year). And yet, it isn’t overly ambitious. Just overall, that’s pretty much the exact type of a game that you are talking about, which I’ve noticed we had an almost complete drought of over the past decade.