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▲ so-gala-massey 4 hours ago

BG1 & 2 were clearly labors of love. You could feel it in the game play. But the 90s were a different time before gazillion dollar budgets and expectations.

▲AlexandrB 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think the best way to keep quality up is to stay small. Supergiant Games is a great example of this approach. Once you have a massive publisher and expectations to ship AAA (or, heaven forbid, AAAA) games it's usually just a matter of time.

▲hinkley 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

We should learn the lesson of John Carpenter. Some people have a medium that they’re brilliant in, and the scarcity of resources is part of what makes them brilliant. Give them an infinite budget and things go to shit.

Timur Bekmambetov might be a more recent example. The Night Watch movies were wonderful. Then he made Wanted, which was expensive dross. The best thing about that movie is that he put a couple actors from Night Watch as supporting cast in it. He’s done one or two things since that rate mention, but going Hollywood made him worse, not better.

▲GolfPopper 13 minutes ago | parent [-]

The term for this that I got from a C.J. Cherryh story is 'Wave Without a Shore'.

▲darth_avocado an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> Once you have a massive publisher and expectations to ship AAA (or, heaven forbid, AAAA) games it's usually just a matter of time

Having to ship AAA games isn’t the problem. The problem is the incessant need to only focus on live service games so that they can milk their consumer left and right. Studio executives come in with unrealistic sales expectations, which then means you can only try and make games that have a live service component to generate a constant revenue stream, which then means you can’t make good games anymore. You’re either making games that are similar to other and get lost in the crowd or are forced to differentiate by promising something that’s never done before, which adds scope, risk and budget to the game.

If you noticed all AAA failures in recent times, almost all of them were live service games. Meanwhile the single player market seems to have finally recovering from the neglect it’s gotten in the last decade.

Also, look at the BioWare successes and failures. They did well when they did single player games, failed when they ventured into live service.

▲hx8 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

It's surprising what a small team can accomplish, but there are some projects that need a large team to be feasible. It would be nice if there was a clear path on how to grow a game studio and continue to deliver quality.

▲hinkley 3 hours ago | parent [-]

It’s too bad Spore tanked so badly. He thought he had a solution to the high production values issue, but it panned out so poorly that nobody has tried since.

▲Forgeties79 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It helps when you have a hit like bastion be your financial foundation and you don’t have AAA aspirations though. A lot of those deals with publishers and such are because it’s that or the game never gets made (or worse, never finished). And despite how much folks scoff at AAA’s, idk man, it’s fun to play a tentpole title. It was fun to get excited for Ace Combat this year. I can’t wait for the new Metro game (I would say they’ve exited AA territory).

▲zem 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

wasn't bg3 pretty universally praised too?

▲nrjames 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

That was developed by Larian, not Bioware.

▲zem 3 hours ago | parent [-]

ah, didn't realise that!

▲hbn 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes but Bioware didn't make it

▲hinkley 3 hours ago | parent [-]

Larian hasn’t broken our hearts, yet. And they’ve made overtures that they will avoid doing so for at least another game or two. But eventually people will retire and then who knows.

▲acdha 2 hours ago | parent [-]

I really think it’s going to depend on how big they get. Early BioWare very clearly had everyone committed to building games they were proud of; EA’s management equally clearly are just moving money around for things they don’t care about or believe will negatively impact them personally.

I think that pattern is widespread around the greater tech industry: antitrust enforcement, etc. would be great for having fewer cases where decisions which affect thousands of people are being made by executives who are really detached not just from consequences but simply awareness of what’s going on in each of the different segments of their business.

▲cherrychon 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

▲blanched 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I'm having a lot of difficulty reading this and I'm not sure if it's because of the style or the terminology.

I don't mean to be patronizing but did the formatting go wrong here?

▲qnpnpmqppnp 3 hours ago | parent [-]

I don't think so, it's just that bad of a comment.

▲gambiting 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Dude, are you ok?

▲moron4hire 3 hours ago | parent [-]

This is a typical example of what one would call a "gamer".