For me, I shy away from AAA games in general because the bigger the studio and higher the budget, the greater chance that there’s MBAs involved that will push design decisions that favour making more money over making a good game.
I think some people correlate that with graphics, maybe because the diminishing returns on effort put into graphics means those amazing graphics could have come at the cost of time spent on the gameplay elements, though I don’t personally think a great game and great graphics are mutually exclusive.
This view on things where a guy in a suit is telling a bunch of passionate artists how to do their day to day jobs is entirely separate from reality.
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of big, merecenary operations out there, but this is a) not how those play out, and b) very easy to sus out without needing to have a roll call of the studio.
Case in point, Baldur’s Gate 3, which people keep weirdly excluding from “AAA” was made by a large team that balooned into a huge team during the course of development. That never seemed a budget, size or graphics problem to me. Or about what degree people in the studio happen to have, for that matter.
If you don’t want to play hyper compulsive live services built around a monetization strategy that is perfectly legitimate. Gaming is very broad and not everybody needs to like everything. It’s just the categorizations people use to reference things they supposedly dislike that seem weird to me.
For me, I shy away from AAA games in general because the bigger the studio and higher the budget, the greater chance that there’s MBAs involved that will push design decisions that favour making more money over making a good game.
I think some people correlate that with graphics, maybe because the diminishing returns on effort put into graphics means those amazing graphics could have come at the cost of time spent on the gameplay elements, though I don’t personally think a great game and great graphics are mutually exclusive.
This view on things where a guy in a suit is telling a bunch of passionate artists how to do their day to day jobs is entirely separate from reality.
Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of big, merecenary operations out there, but this is a) not how those play out, and b) very easy to sus out without needing to have a roll call of the studio.
Case in point, Baldur’s Gate 3, which people keep weirdly excluding from “AAA” was made by a large team that balooned into a huge team during the course of development. That never seemed a budget, size or graphics problem to me. Or about what degree people in the studio happen to have, for that matter.
If you don’t want to play hyper compulsive live services built around a monetization strategy that is perfectly legitimate. Gaming is very broad and not everybody needs to like everything. It’s just the categorizations people use to reference things they supposedly dislike that seem weird to me.