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"Triple-A is in crisis" and games "don't have staying power because they're bad," says ex Gears of War director and Painkiller creator (www.pcgamesn.com)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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[–] 234 points 10 months ago (10 children)

Hey, remember when Baldur’s Gate 3 came out, was pretty excellent, mostly everyone loved it, and then all the AAA studios started whining that it was an unrealistic standard to be held to?

Pepperidge Farm remembers.

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  • [–] 60 points 10 months ago (8 children)

    Best early access ever.

    Act 1 was released like 18 months before the game actually released, and they legitimately listened to feedback from players.

    Early access is pretty much the only way to do it too. If they had gotten investors there would have been pressure to release early or cram in micro transactions to increase return.

    When the players are the early investors, they just want a good game.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (7 children)

    Early access might legitimately be the way to save the failing AAA market. You get a real chance to learn what players actually want, and how to appeal to them, while slotting your game into its proper niche.

    I mean sure, there's bound to be stinkers, there always is. But Early access would kinda rock for these games. "The game runs like shit, we don't want to play it." Then next month you get a dedicated patch for performance and begs get squashed faster and more efficiently. Imagine if they didn't fuck around with borderlands 4 and released as an ea title. Could have worked.

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  • [–] 15 points 10 months ago (6 children)

    Early access is more about getting revenue during development and some limited QA potential. There shouldn't be any surprises in the feedback, that would be a sign of major problems. EA also generally comes with a discount for the player which is anathema to the AAA crowd.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago

    I find the QA potential to be enormous. I've seen my share of good EA games and the paper feedback is really what makes the difference. You'll have devs revisiting assumptions that would be really difficult to challenge if you didn't have a stream of real reactions to what you're doing.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    That's not all ea has to be, it can be more than that, all we have to do is make it look like more money can be made that way for AAA and we can have our cake and eat it too.

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  • [–] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    EA is great for small and medium sized studios to get games out that might be a bit more ambitious than they could manage with traditional models. The point of AAA is that they have the money to do big impressive things. They can already do focus groups and closed betas to get community feedback. The thing that might attract AAA attention is you could make a good amount without actually releasing anything.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (1 child)

    Idk, id love to see it properly done from AAA. That would be a great way to prove you right or wrong.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago

    I think their point is AAA studios could already have been doing things to gauge feedback but that they are largely greedy entities which would prioritize the profit that could be extracted from a scenario over the value it could provide to the game.

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