#AAA Game Development

[q99studio]

AAA Games: A Comprehensive Guide

AAA games represent the pinnacle of gaming, combining high budgets, large teams, and advanced technologies to deliver exceptional experiences. With massive investments in development, marketing, and distribution, these games feature expansive worlds, captivating storylines, and stunning graphics. The use of cutting-edge technology like Unreal Engine and ray tracing enhances gameplay immersion. AAA games often belong to successful franchises, ensuring loyal fanbases and high engagement. To create a game of this caliber, partnering with a leading game development company is crucial. Choose the best game development company in India for innovation, expertise, and quality to bring your AAA vision to life.

[300mind]

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[meglosthegreat]

If one more company puts out a statement saying they're becoming more "agile" and "focused" when what they really mean is "we're laying off dozens of experienced developers because we don't feel like paying them anymore and would rather bring in new hires that will work for less" I stg

[roguemonsterfucker]

Capitalism hell

[couriers-mile]

replaying Inquisition and getting irritated all over that I can't play a game I paid for on Steam without getting EA's storefront app involved so they can verify I really "own" the game i'm playing

[average-mako-enjoyer]

I think at some point we just have to accept that the citing of autism symptoms, the shallow resolution of the Rivaini vs. Qun conflict, the dinner scene, and whatever the fuck the "pull a Bharv" moment was are not just separate instances of questionable writing.

The entirety of Taash's story is just that shallow.

I keep seeing people trying to redeem this story, trying to find some positivity in it, and at best it looks like they're trying to do competitive swimming in the kiddie pool. Anyone is going to have a hard time finding depth in something so devoid of substance.

[bunabi]

Not pre-ordering because these past few years have been SO full of games that make huge promises they don't make good on and games are released too early and in shambles - it's a digital release, they're not going to run out. So mostly I'd like to give it at least a week to a month to make sure the game, you know, functions, and isn't a mess before spending the significant amount of money that a AAA release is nowadays

Mmhm after pre-ordering DAI deluxe on PS3 I totally understand 🫠

Though this time, since the first act of DAV is clearly really polished and they've had ten years of experience wrangling the Frostbite engine, I'm a lot more optimistic

But I'm still worried whether they have time to comb over act 2 & 3 just as much before Halloween, considering the layoffs & the fact they had to shift gears from live service to single-player only three years ago

[pixellangel]

WHOAH!! THE PARTY IS COLORED NOW!!!

for those unfamiliar, hi!! these are my initial designs for a currently unnamed cyberpunk rpg i'm making. their names are sylvie, v, xenon, and kori. you can read about them here!

anyway, these are only my initial designs and so they're still very much subject to change. i decided to just color the sketch instead of doing lineart because i don't want to spend excessive time on a simple lineup, but i might line it one day. who knows.

the weapons are currently just silhouettes because they're eventually getting their own post about designs!!

a bunch of stupid gifs under the cut for whoever wants em :3

rotating them in my brain at all times

[bluefuecoco]

it definitely wasnt helped by new horizons being such a botched release. I want to imagine all these people clamoring for new animal crossing content are just new horizons players exclusively, but I imagine some veterans of the series are also causing this problem.

Like, this new video game environment of sending out half-finished games and then "adding more content!" with updates and dlc is a real problem for Animal Crossing, and the fact that New Horizons drew in so many new players with that model is just...awful. New Leaf was released in 2012 and that was it. For YEARS that was the game you got to play. It wasnt until like...a couple years before NH was revealed that we got Welcome Amiibo, which like...a) was a free update and b) didn't "complete" the game, just added to it.

And at the time, everyone knew New Horizons release was rushed. Nintendo crunch time is a real epidemic, and the fact that half the content in the game that we have now wasn't available for MONTHS after the initial release? Like, idk, I don't want to hear about any Animal Crossing news for a few more years. Maybe spin-off games, but the next mainline game I want them to *really* work on.

[venezart]

MetaTailor 2.0: Revolutionizing Character Clothing for 3D Design

[quietwingsinthesky]

i mean i bought ac2 for the sole reason of 'this is an important piece of video game history and playing it feels essential to understanding this subculture.' and in that sense, it has succeeded in giving me an expanded perspective on gaming history. but i also didn't like it very much. :/ balances out i guess.

[ayrennaranaaldmeri]

bruh they did not release coral island ("full" version) without even finishing a main storyline and slapping WIP in your fucking journal 💀💀💀💀💀

[ooc-miqojak]

The State of AAA Games in the Modern Era

"Before the internet became a core facet of gaming, if a studio dropped an unfinished game, that game stayed unfinished." "If a game launched in a poor state, that became the game's legacy."

And a quote from the video linked in #2 in my sources below: "This corporate mindset has encouraged studios to ship now, fix later, and exploit the wallets of players for years down the road. And oftentimes we do see some of the lead developers from these studios even brag about how to pull off this scheme at GDC conferences: [Quote from developer] 'Overdelivery is actually dangerous. With every release that you put out there, you're setting a pattern for your community and for your players. Because it's hard to tell a team, a team that has extra cycles and they have energy and they wanna do something amazing and know how to do it and it totally would be amazing and awesome for the game! Sometimes we have to tell them, like, we shouldn't ship this because it's an overdelivery. Beware of overdelivery, overdelivery is actually dangerous.' "

These are objective facts that people were ready to tear my throat out about during what I thought was a fact-based, adult debate earlier today. Instead, I just had people repeatedly say the same thing to me over and over: "But games still had bugs on console!" Which was something I never countered. I even agreed! My point, however, was that bugs in games were much rarer, and far less impactful to the overall experience of the game - and modern games are often released in a half-finished state, with bugs that massively impact gameplay - just look at Cyberpunk 2077. It's notorious for that very thing! And yet, more than one person was willing to twist my words, and take things out of context (repeatedly trying to nitpick things like Pokemon Gen 1 bugs - things that were not relevant to the discussion, as they were not bugs even remotely comparable to those in modern AAA games upon release) to desperately cling to some idea that console games were released in as bad of a state as modern games are? I don't know why, when console games would have literally killed consoles and gaming as a hobby, if they had been regularly released in as bad of a state as current digital/online only games currently are. It's a fact, and not an opinion that more games in the modern era release in a half-finished, buggy state that makes games unplayable upon release. That is not an opinion. Here's another article about it! (There's lots of videos/articles about this very thing, with just a cursory Google search.)

Yes, console games had bugs - and the ones notorious for those bugs that made story or gameplay basically impossible... bombed! A modern game, like Cyberpunk, that releases with massive bugs? Simply promises to keep patching the unfinished product, which you could not do on a physical product. This is a fact, and not an opinion. Someone claimed that console games would just make a better version, and re-release the game... which doesn't amount to much, because the game already has a bad rep, and no one will pay twice for the same thing (were your parents going to buy you the same $40-60 game a second time back then? Doubtful. No one in their right mind would.), nor would you trust that publisher a second time. That's not the same thing as releasing Cyberpunk in a half-made state, unplayable and bug-ridden and missing core/promised features, and just... finishing it over the next couple years after taking people's money for the half-baked product that wasn't what you promised. They're not asking you to pay for the game twice, they're just making you buy an unfinished product that won't be complete for another year or so (if it ever is). As the video states, there were two years of class action lawsuits - which I don't recall hearing about with console games, because you simply couldn't release only a partial part of a game you claimed was complete, and hope people stuck around for patches, because you couldn't just try and clean up your mess once a disc or cartridge was purchased. If there were incomplete textures, and you couldn't progress the story/engage in gameplay due to game-breaking bugs, that was it. You were screwed.

The modern era and advent of online-only products has led to AAA publishers releasing more and more unfinished products with game-breaking bugs because "we can fix it later"/it's cheaper to fix after launch/because executives simply don't care how it impacts the players, because they have pre-order money in their pockets already/they continue to mistreat the devs of the games, and force them to release unfinished products, and move on to the next cash-grab. These are facts. Not opinions.

Anyways, here's more fact-based sources. One

Two

Three...this video is even from five years ago! (And quotes someone from 8 years prior to that stating that: "The answer for us as publishers is to actually sell unfinished games..."

Four

Five

Next time you find yourself heated by facts that aren't opinions, don't attack the person dealing out the facts, and claim they said something they didn't say - especially if it's the exact opposite of something they said multiple times. Once you start taunting and being childish in a debate, it becomes clear you're not an adult, and shouldn't be partaking in serious, adult conversations - no matter the topic. Objective facts may make you mad, but hey - I'm mad that modern games release in a shitty state thanks to being fully online these days, and not releasing in a physical state that encourages Publishers to release a full, and mostly bug-free game (free of bugs that impact gameplay or story in a serious way, at least. The occasional NPC glitched into a wall or the sky isn't a huge deal, and a wacky texture here and there is mostly hilarious.) Anyways, Donald Trump simply attacks people who use facts in a debate! Don't be like Donald Trump. Don't choose to attack the other person, instead of using objective-based-facts to debate/discuss things. Debates shouldn't make you mad - they should be interesting, and enlightening, and you (or the other person, or all parties) should learn from them. And inevitably, in fact based discussions...someone is wrong! I'm often wrong. I like learning new things. But letting your emotions guide you in a fact based discussion that is very literal and not rooted in emotional appeals... just makes a mess.

[lancecharleson]

Playing Bioshock 1 again for the first time in a long while, it made me realise just how much of 7th generation gaming we take for granted.

Among all the piss-filtered dark-age talk of how so many AAA games around this time eventually became homogenously Gears of War/COD-like in order to capitalise on their success, we tend to memory hole how this generation started off with a bang with titles like this, Prey (2006), Kameo: Elements of Power, and Little Big Planet.

It was also the last time we would ever see this many original single player games with AAA backing debut in a generation, until the 2010s where said industry would start going all in on the live-service multiplayer model.

While the indie/mid-budget gaming scene has picked up the torch of continuing to bring us fantastic SP games that have themselves become legends in their own right, there's something I find truly magical about playing a SP game that, not only has a solid premise and design philosophy going on, but also has the kind of high production values that AAA can afford them.

[ebbywaffle]

Hey if any game devs or savvy gamers come across this: could someone walk me through how smaller games would be more worker friendly than the usual 5 year dev?

I ask this with full sincerity and ignorance (i'm as casual as casual gets lol). Smaller games with AAA devs would still contribute to crunch, no? Or would it be good because employment would be more consistent? I'm not sure how to frame this question for a proper internet search...

[coylesboytoy-moved]

wanting a $100 game to be fully finished without 3000 game-breaking bugs isn’t unrealistic or a high standard.