#AAA game development

[askagamedev]

Ex devs of Halo accused Microsoft for "Incompetent Leadership", thoughts?

In any sufficiently-large team, the likelihood is pretty good that there will be some non-trivial number of workers who are dissatisfied with the decisions of the leadership. It's quite normal for 5-10% of a studio's staff to choose to leave each year even without job cuts. This is one reason most game studios are always hiring senior devs, they need to backfill positions that open up through normal attrition. When a company is looking to lower costs gradually, they go on a hiring freeze and let enough workers eventually churn out to get to their target headcount.

I am also not discounting the claims of "Incompetent Leadership". It's entirely possible that the leadership of the Halo Infinite team made some really frustrating decisions along the way, and most of us game devs are very opinionated when it comes to development decisions. Sometimes the leadership makes a call and it's a bad one. I've seen it happen and had to support those bad decisions to the best of my ability. It's certainly a morale hit when that happens, but no can hit 100% with every shot forever.

I don't think Halo Infinite is particularly unique or different in their situation. It's a AAA game built by an enormous team that was generally positively reviewed, but clearly had its flaws. That puts Halo into the same bucket as most major AAA games - Call of Duty, FIFA, Assassin's Creed, and so on. I would actually be more surprised if there weren't any former devs from any of those games calling the team leadership incompetent. The real question isn't whether there was incompetence in the leadership (there probably was), but how much incompetence was there?

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[300mind]

AAA games aren't just for players but investors as well. There are myriad benefits to investing in AAA game development. Read our blog to find them. https://bit.ly/3RMbtUZ

[trutown-the-bard]

You want to get an idea for how complex AAA games have become, they had to do all this work for a 20 second sequence.

[thedisablednaturalist]

If fucking roblox can have wheelchairs your AAA or indie game can too

[cinna-bunnie]

having vague thoughts about E3 and the current state of AAA game development in general..

like yeah direct promotions have had more of an impact than Big Events for me, and the main thing I'd want to see out of E3 are trailers for new games or the conversations that follow online - but a few points on that

I can just as easily look up “new games for [platform] [year]” on youtube

Something about the way AAA games are built these days makes me get bored of them ⅔ of the way through, if I even make it that far, on top of them charging more for less content and hiding away the rest behind multiple DLC packs

I've mostly been buying indies the past few years and have gotten a lot of fun out of them; they continue to deliver a nearly unrivaled experience of fun gameplay mechanics and interesting/emotional stories at a ridiculously low cost

I also have emulators for going back and playing old games I really liked so I'm not exactly desperate for new games

and idk!! weird to see E3 officially ending but I also think the landscape is very different these days including the game companies themselves. I'm not a game dev so I can't rly speak to what the change has looked like on their end over the past 10-20 yrs.

[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

[heart-forge]

there's like a scale of inconvenient mechanics by design. on one end you have what remains to me as the most mind-boggling stupid thing to put into a video game for aesthetic purposes, the cyberpunk seizure inducing lights. and then on the other hand you have "well you won't die if I don't add an entirely separate reroute through the menus"

[ayrennaranaaldmeri]

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

[banana-boots]

I made a game!! This has been a little pet project of mine for months now and it's finally done!

I've made a game of the God of Arepo. It's quite simple and shouldn't take too long to play through but I hope it's an enjoyable experience!

[klysanderelias]

on some level I have to finally admit to myself that the reason I think elden ring is bad is that fromsoft is a different kind of autistic than I am - all the things I want to know, and want the focus on, are things that they seem completely uninterested in, and the things that they want to linger on and explore I couldn't give less of a shit about

inb4 the DLC comes out and there's literally nothing about the frenzied flame or melina

[zevranunderstander]

people love the mantra "i want shorter games with worse graphics and longer development times and im not kidding" and then theyre like "😔 AAA devs are soo scared of baldurs gate because now they have to deliver quality" "baldurs gate should develop additional free content forever because i am personally unstatisfied with act 3's scope" "they are neever gonna release hollow knight silksong 🙄" "remember in the good old days, when games actually came out on the day they were promised to be released at?" WELL WHICH ONE IS IT?

[askagamedev]

Why don't AAA studios take a turn at making smaller games every once in a while? I'd imagine with modern tools and techniques a team of "merely" a hundred or so people could make a game with the scope of something like a PS2 game in a few months to a year. It seems like the market between indies and massive ultra-budget titles underserved.

Publishers try this from time to time to varying degrees of success. Here are a few examples of some smaller budget games from AAA studios using modern tools and the like:

Uncharted: The Lost Legacy

Far Cry: Blood Dragon

Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light/Temple of Osiris

Spider-Man: Miles Morales

Assassin's Creed III: Liberation

Assassin's Creed Chronicles: China, India, and Russia

Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite

Saints Row: Gat out of Hell

You've probably heard of some of these games. You may have even played some of them. Generally speaking, these games tend to get mediocre receptions at best. I suspect that a large part of that is the expectation level that players have going in - these games are built using the same tools and reusing assets from the big budget AAA titles, but don't have the sort of scope to create all new high quality assets so the players actively feel the content reuse and smaller scope of the smaller-budget title within a much larger-budget franchise.

This isn't to say we won't continue to try, but the player expectations on games in this style set us at a disadvantageous position from the start, and with good reason. When they come from our big budget game to our lower-budget offering, they can see and feel that change quite keenly. Instead, publishers generally get more value from having the smaller teams create high quality paid DLC content instead of stand-alone games in part because DLC doesn't have the kind of expectation and stigma associated with a stand-alone title built from reused tools and assets. Once we finish our DLC support of the title, the team can then transition over to the next full-sized AAA iteration of the next game in the franchise.

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[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.

[rawliverandgoronspice]

god i felt like i was losing it seeing everyone praise totk's story as better than botw! mostly i'm just frustrated that botw gets so much shit for its story when imo it's one of the most compelling stories in the franchise! just because a story isn't ~epic~ with bombastic music 24/7 doesn't make it bad :/ anyways thanks for your post about totk's story its nice to know i'm not alone :')

Haha no problem! I relate to the frustration so I'm glad to help in that regard!

I think BotW's strength is how coherent its proposition is overall: it makes sense in this story that everything would be open, the world is fractured and faded and it's up to you to pull the pieces back together, or to ignore this and focus on your task. It's a game about reclaiming the land from a disaster and injecting meaning back into it, and I think it does wonders in that aspect. I have some issues with some of the game writing at a craft level (and I've never been sold on the idea that Zelda needed voice acting also, I think it shows the writing's limitations and always feels somewhat awkward and low-grade anime to me but that's another subject and my own opinion), but Zelda's character works really well, and the story is tragic and hopeful at once, which makes the world more believable and engaging in my opinion.

I'm warming up to the sidequests in TotK, I think some of them are pretty good! But it bugs me that you have to get out of your way to get any sort of emotional investment from the game, and I'm bothered that I feel more emotions for a random 20 minutes series of tasks than for the main quest where all the budget has been sunk (also a lot of it is poorly designed; that's a LOT of back-and-forth you're asking me to do for no good reason, game). I think this gripe is my own experience speaking, but I seriously wish companies in the modern age would stop being so precious and cagey about their main quests and dare show heart and take emotional risks --even though I know how difficult that can be in practice given how many eyes and hands are on the damn thing at any given time. Gamedevs call working on a main quest "being caught in the eye of Sauron", because it's exactly how it feels like and it's an almost universally awful experience --and maybe it's just projection on my part, but TotK's main quest really gives off that exhausted, sanitized vibe and this is partially why I have trouble enjoying it overall.

[nullcasting]

New record: lasted a bit over one week into the new year before coming up with an insanely out of scope idea