Minnesänger wrote:

regmcfly wrote:

LivDiv wrote:

Yeah that was it. Fucking Quad A. What a dickhead.

No, it wasn't. It was whatever the Coalition's first Gears was, as they were set up as a "quad A" studio.

Page 14 of Krafton's investor relations presentation - they position Callisto as AAAA: https://www.krafton.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/KRAFTON_1Q22_Investor-Relations_ENG_vSend.pdf

For fucking page turn.

I'm having a great gaming year so far - replaying Witcher 3, moseying on with RDR2 and regularly dipping into FH5, Dead Cells and Disco Elysium. Don't know what the OP is on about.

Minnesänger wrote:

yourfavouriteuncle wrote:

I’m going to make a AAAAA game. It’s two better than nearly all the others so you should invest now whilst you can. It’s going to be amazing - like a film.

If you're willing to accept lowly AAAA staff to work in your AAAAA studio, then a bunch of people have left The Initiative, with Perfect Dark now being co-handled by Crystal Dynamics, a AAA studio sold by a AAA publisher to Embracer group AB (the As are getting fewer and fewer) who seem to be specialising in AA games.

Chef Kiss

Devs aren’t bringing their A game to AAA games.

Minnesänger wrote:

Minnesänger wrote:

regmcfly wrote:

LivDiv wrote:

Yeah that was it. Fucking Quad A. What a dickhead.

No, it wasn't. It was whatever the Coalition's first Gears was, as they were set up as a "quad A" studio.

Page 14 of Krafton's investor relations presentation - they position Callisto as AAAA: https://www.krafton.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/KRAFTON_1Q22_Investor-Relations_ENG_vSend.pdf

For fucking page turn.

CINTY THE QUESTION WAS WHO WAS FIRST LEARN READ

DrewMerson wrote:

retroking1981 wrote:

When did AAA become a term?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_(video_game_industry)

Interesting (to me) titbit from that.

the seventh generation saw a contraction in the number of video game developing houses creating AAA level titles, reducing from an estimated 125 to around 25, but with a roughly corresponding fourfold increase in staffing required for game development.

The whole scene (with notable exceptions) seems stale now. Tough for a newcomer to break in and shake things up. Same old companies bringing out less than great products that still make them money, rinse, repeat.

Is Final Fantasy still a thing people care about?

Count me in so!

regmcfly wrote:

Minnesänger wrote:

Minnesänger wrote:

regmcfly wrote:

LivDiv wrote:

Yeah that was it. Fucking Quad A. What a dickhead.

No, it wasn't. It was whatever the Coalition's first Gears was, as they were set up as a "quad A" studio.

Page 14 of Krafton's investor relations presentation - they position Callisto as AAAA: https://www.krafton.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/05/KRAFTON_1Q22_Investor-Relations_ENG_vSend.pdf

For fucking page turn.

CINTY THE QUESTION WAS WHO WAS FIRST LEARN READ

The question was "which game...?"

Fun fact: Ubisoft also described Skull and Bones as AAAA at one point lol

monkey wrote:

DrewMerson wrote:

retroking1981 wrote:

When did AAA become a term?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_(video_game_industry)

Interesting (to me) titbit from that.

the seventh generation saw a contraction in the number of video game developing houses creating AAA level titles, reducing from an estimated 125 to around 25, but with a roughly corresponding fourfold increase in staffing required for game development.

The whole scene (with notable exceptions) seems stale now. Tough for a newcomer to break in and shake things up. Same old companies bringing out less than great products that still make them money, rinse, repeat.

Yeah, this is most clearly seen in publishing - the likes of Ubi and EA in the 2010s used to pop out 40-50 titles a year, sometimes more. Now they're hovering around 10 - more and more focus gets put into the select hit titles with more riding on each. And, given the massive amount of work required to make assets for these games, more and more studios are now existing as support studios.

CoD has something like 10 studios working near full time on it, not including all the outsourcing for assets, biz dev, testing, voice and audio production and the like.

Is it possible that the expectations of the audience (and the publishers) is out stripping what can actually be done with the existing work force? Games have been generally on a consistent run of each generation pushing what is possible and the quality of how it is done. Maybe we have reached a peak for the moment? Maybe not every team is able to get the most from the tools available.

RedDave2 wrote:

Is it possible that the expectations of the audience (and the publishers) is out stripping what can actually be done with the existing work force? Games have been generally on a consistent run of each generation pushing what is possible and the quality of how it is done. Maybe we have reached a peak for the moment? Maybe not every team is able to get the most from the tools available.

I think there's truth here insofar as there's a limit to how much budgets and teams can expand before the whole thing just stops being viable. I think it has less to do with expectations and more the massive jumps in fidelity and complexity. 

We kinda saw this in the first HD gen, where a lot of Japanese teams massively dropped the ball and struggled with the new hardware. Their old asset production pipelines which were very meticulous and, I guess, artisanal just didn't translate to a gen which needed a lot of HQ assets. 

Budgets ballooned, games got massively delayed and they often ended up looking and playing rough anyway. Western studios relied a lot more on tools and automation, and were more keen to adopt middleware and external engine solutions.

Now though, it's far worse than the 480 / 720p era (unless you're on Switch in which case you're still there lol) - think about the geometric and environmental complexity of your God of War running at 4K. The amount of time, money and effort that goes into rocks, foliage, door frames, axe hafts...

And you do kinda need that - if the textures are plain or low res, it really sticks out in high resolutions. People are gonna get up close and very personal with these things, and there's no CRTs to hide it anymore. There's ways around it, of course - Horizon games use a procedurally generated map which is then hand-tweaked. There's no way they could build those whole worlds from scrap. Naughty Dog lent heavily on motion matching to make animations look smooth without having to account manually for every possibility. 

But, there's still huge amounts of work to be done. The way characters are rigged and setup massively constrains what is possible for them to do, and needing to change that mid-dev can take teams entire months to handle. But it's often necessary - again, the better games look, the more awkward and visible jank becomes. 

There is going to be a lot more AI / procedural / automation kicking in now, I'm sure of it. But even then, these games have become monsters and there's not much that can be done.

Minnesänger wrote:

RedDave2 wrote:

Is it possible that the expectations of the audience (and the publishers) is out stripping what can actually be done with the existing work force? Games have been generally on a consistent run of each generation pushing what is possible and the quality of how it is done. Maybe we have reached a peak for the moment? Maybe not every team is able to get the most from the tools available.

I think there's truth here insofar as there's a limit to how much budgets and teams can expand before the whole thing just stops being viable. I think it has less to do with expectations and more the massive jumps in fidelity and complexity.  We kinda saw this in the first HD gen, where a lot of Japanese teams massively dropped the ball and struggled with the new hardware. Their old asset production pipelines which were very meticulous and, I guess, artisanal just didn't translate to a gen which needed a lot of HQ assets.  Budgets ballooned, games got massively delayed and they often ended up looking and playing rough anyway. Western studios relied a lot more on tools and automation, and were more keen to adopt middleware and external engine solutions. Now though, it's far worse than the 480 / 720p era (unless you're on Switch in which case you're still there lol) - think about the geometric and environmental complexity of your God of War running at 4K. The amount of time, money and effort that goes into rocks, foliage, door frames, axe hafts... And you do kinda need that - if the textures are plain or low res, it really sticks out in high resolutions. People are gonna get up close and very personal with these things, and there's no CRTs to hide it anymore. There's ways around it, of course - Horizon games use a procedurally generated map which is then hand-tweaked. There's no way they could build those whole worlds from scrap. Naughty Dog lent heavily on motion matching to make animations look smooth without having to account manually for every possibility.  But, there's still huge amounts of work to be done. The way characters are rigged and setup massively constrains what is possible for them to do, and needing to change that mid-dev can take teams entire months to handle. But it's often necessary - again, the better games look, the more awkward and visible jank becomes.  There is going to be a lot more AI / procedural / automation kicking in now, I'm sure of it. But even then, these games have become monsters and there's not much that can be done.

Interesting points. At first I thought it was an UE cpu-gpu optimisation thingy (which is undoubtedly a massive factor) but your arguments make a lot of sense too. It's also interesting most of the new games suffering issues are all x-platform and need a lot of vram to run properly. nVidea really dropped the ball this pc gen with giving mid range cards just 8gb of vram. Amd has a big oppurtunity to 1up them there but you never know because.....amd.

hunk wrote:

Interesting points. At first I thought it was an UE cpu-gpu optimisation thingy (which is undoubtedly a massive factor) but your arguments make a lot of sense too. It's also interesting most of the new games suffering issues are all x-platform and need a lot of vram to run properly. nVidea really dropped the ball this pc gen with giving mid range cards just 8gb of vram. Amd has a big oppurtunity to 1up them there but you never know because.....amd.

Yeah, I mean, I was mainly talking budgets and team sizes, as opposed to reasons behind technical hiccups but yeah there's likely overlap there. For the X platforms - i mean, budgets will be the same, and team sizes will be the same, but they're dealing with 3 SKUs at least. Differences in CPU and GPU won't matter too much, but differences in memory will make porting to S non-trivial. 

That's not an argument against the S at all - it's a great machine and i think it's smartly positioned - but it will always give the PlayStation 5 a defacto advantage performance wise as there's one set of hardware specs, and it'll often be the lead platform for development due to market share. 

All game dev cycles are a matter of bandwidth - how much money do we have, how many team members and resources, how much time? Then, that has to be allocated according to need and return. You have a highly complex game with tight budgets and deadlines, how much of that do you dedicate to going out of your way to make sure the xbox versions (which will likely sell less just die to market share) are 100% as good as the PS5 one? 

This is purely on the AAA side, btw. Gamepass makes things very different for indies and there's the whole store visibility blah blah blah. 

But on the AAA / AAAA / AAAAA side it's less lazy devs / bad hardware / cut corners and more a reality of what can be done on that scale and that time with increasingly complex and expensive products.

Yup. 

Good point of reference is the talk Cory Barlog had after GoW 2018 came out - he said each boss fight added would take 30 devs 18 months to make. That's just a huge commitment, and you have to be brutal about exactly how much you can commit to that kinda thing. You can't just throw people / money at that either - as you're looking at a serious period of time needed to train people up to actually being useful.