How Close Can Indies Get To AAA Games?

Yep, feel free to message me and I'll send you my standard template I use, which exposes a lot of options w/o much work on my part -- I just have to bring in the new textures and make sure things are named properly.

 

I'll keep it in mind, thanks!

 

The scale prototype is ready. Nothing special.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/fj56fu0dr3q4bit/WEBGL.rar?dl=0
It's just a VERY BORING flat graybox map with very crude placeholder and no optimization, and it took me 20+mn to go from starting zone to last zone in the opposite corner. Details about the process up until now below.

A lot of preparatory works was watching playthrough of top AAA games close to the RPG genre. I also lost time developing an extensive unnecessary lore, that has extension in sequel and prequel, and still fail to answer basic design need lol (what I called the prima dona vision trap), I trashed it, but it helpt me find the stake.

I choose to go with the "grandia 2" main idea (also harry potter and naruto, which loop back to the cliche I posted lol), main character is possessed by an evil separated in parts, hunts them to defeat the reconstituted evil, he is also hunted by a cult that want to revive this evil. It works because it's personal, has global consequence, has a clear goal, allow free form roaming and has clear opposition and opponent.

Spoiler: Process behind the demo

The first step was to find the correct scale of immediate elements. I was about to model them myself, but found the fantasy mega pack on the asset store and use that to gauge size.


Then I build a house using that pack as a test with adjusted scale, the goal was to test hand placement and basic density. It prompt to spend some time searching for level design tools, but that was still too early and could be done later.


I put some of these (empty) house together on a 100m tile to see what's the load of one rpg town, looks like I have enough, most rpg town have fewer houses. Tossed some tree made with unity tree to see how it fares, unity tree is not great for "design", things like the length of trunk, which affect design, can't easily be adjusted, manual adjustment is fiddly.


I had to think a bit more about the flow between region, I made a map in rpg mk, where each tile would be a 100m, to think about it. From this I decided to have divide the whole map in 4 quadrant each assigned to a macro biome, with each of their own quadrant being sub biomes, so I don't have to think about it any longer.


I had decided that they would be a load of 3x3 100m "activity" tiles, due to the spread of scale, which mean there would be a load of 25 activities area, town being one activity area for example. Among these areas, in one region, I decided their would be 1 capital city, 4 towns, 4 cave, 1 tower, 3 ruins, and 2 outcast places, aka 15 fixed activity area, remaining is wandering and wilderness. I color coded them in an mspaint image.


I could then bruteforce placements on unity, I used low poly graybox "symbol" with relative scale to their representation. It exposed early weakness in the workflow, If I want to work at such a scale I need to spend time perfecting the workflow, I have so many huge but repeated mistake to fix by hand in unity (rotation, missing mesh, absence of collider, misplacement, etc ), and that was with just a few set of simple objects.



However It did show that using macro tile is efficient, and it has an added bonus that at big scale some tiling is nearly invisible. I could do simpler (but big) games maybe faster than player consume them, if done correctly. The macro tile also lend themselves greatly to have "variation pcg" based on a few templates. If I mature that workflow it could be very powerful!

Final results:


It's one minute trip to go between the two closest city, on a flat land, running at full speed, with no enemy or distraction. The world is roughly skyrim sized.



This is really not a big deal yet, there is no occlusion, no interaction, no proper level design with landscape, no optimization, no gameplay. That just an illustration of the entire scale, it's boring and a slog to traverse as is.

Next step is to work on basic but fully featured town simulation, with npc schedules, which will be used as a template to populate the world.
Part of this will intersect with my current project, which is basically a 3D cinematic VN game, aka "dialogue" lol This is why I started this, I will work on my current project as part of validating the workflow for this project, which will ultimately help me for my next real project lol. I minimized the distraction of this exercise in my schedule.

One of the key design things to do is to continue the "story" too, my idea is to improvised going "nintendo", ie the gameplay that is needed in the world drive the lore. Lore and story are basically the design of a rpg, they tell you why things are here and why you are doing action, each region need an identity, that's lore. Lore will tell you what quest you can take, and will provide theme to fill out the region, therefore to continue listing all objects to be made, I need to establish lore.

But lore will be after the town simulation prototype and after basic gameplay prototype. Once those are established, the actual hard part of filling and building an optimized game world with great quality will start. Lore will help explain away the constrain and contrivance, and gameplay, tech and simulation will put the constrain that need to be worked with. Given the nature of the story, lore don't need to be super intricate either, I have a lot of flexibility.

 

Looking great. Any chance for a regular standalone build? I have no idea how to get WegGL to run in a regular desktop environment.

 

For some reason the desktop build is 200+mo while webgl is a quarter of that, so I went with webgl, it's just play inside a browser by opening the html normally? I can't host stuff on dropbox anymore. I'll see if I can do something ... now loading ...
https://www.dropbox.com/s/u2red429pelj8kw/timmy.rar?dl=0
Seems like compression is doing the work

 

Still getting a "rar files can't be previewed."

 

oh, just download them lol, click open below when it appear, it doesn't appear straight away.

 

Oh, gotcha. I'll be honest I didn't even think about just playing the game through the browser myself.

 

@neoshaman it definitely feels like a big place. The character is pretty slick looking. Not much else I can say because everything just seems to be there for world building test. Next time throw in some enemies and let the combat begin.

 

Just for information I use this for the character as placeholder:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/82048

I didn't make any character ... yet ... I will need to go in depth about the main character too.

Combat is third on the plan though, next is "town simulation" lol, aka basic scheduling, dialogue, services like shop and all, also "cinematic" scene hooks and trigger. I'm using asset so we will see how easy it is to add, especially with timeline and cinemachine now! I also already got ORK framework and a few other asset I haven't tested yet...

 

I start to question if our struggle for Tripel A quality is worth it, we are working on first person hands now, they are several magnitudes more polished than our closest competition. It has taken two months getting the IK ready, and rigging the items, and we are not even done with all the items... At the other hand, I would not be proud of myself if we did make it any less polished to be honest. Polishness is a balance I guess

 

It's a tactical decision, it's not necessarily relevant to success really depend on the audience, but is an interesting challenge to tackle, the game with best ROI aren't necessarily of AAA visual polish.

 

It isn't. I personally decided to stick with low-poly 3d visuals. Animation is still a major pain, but at least it is no longer necessary to waste time texturing things.

 

You can probably get stuck with polish in a low poly game too glad I outsource all artist work so I only have to focus on the mechanics

 

Yeah, however... IIRC single Witcher 3 character took 3 weeks. In a studio. Low-fidelity model is less likely to require same amount of time.

 

Ah, yeah I meant mechanics more than art assets here I wouldn't know about low FI though not my area, but it seems hard too, like cel shading. lots of games looks too PBRish while using cel shading for example

 

I agree with neginfinity. Don't even try to make it look like a AAA because they have millions of dollars and very large teams. You will end up with a bad looking clone. Low poly can look good. The animations are also simpler. It's pretty quick to build the models. You can even re-use them more often and they will look good. They attract a wider range of players rather than just hard core. They run faster on lower end computers and on the internet, and even smart phones.

 

That looks great! If you wrote custom scripts or custom models / rigs / animations, consider selling it on the asset store. Lots of other developers would pay to save the time it takes to figure out how to do what you did, and many would pay just to learn from you.

 

Thanks!
We have actually thought about selling the "engine" as an asset or similar. Its dependent on assets such as Final IK etc, so I dont know how it should be packaged etc If someone wants to make VR Shooter and needs a solid framework, contact me

 

Obviously I can't speak to the specifics of your asset, but there's lots of playmaker add ons, so one that extends Final IK seems like it'd work. Perhaps the fine people at Final IK would be interested in helping make sure you're optimized, so that users who use it are getting the best experience.

 

I cant agree. Im a one man studio creating a survival game with a paralell universe story on a island. I have the terrain and the player to match up with far cry 4. I have worked on this soon 2 years. But I dont need 50M.. I have spent maybe 500€ on assets I cant make my self. And I see asset store like co-workers, difference is you dont need ti stand ther bullshit everyday

 

Can we see some screenshots please? I have never seen beautiful foliage in any Unity game actually

 

Matching the level of a previous AAA title is not really matching a AAA title. To compete with AAA, you need to compare your work to AAA titles shipping at the same time as your game. For example, Far Cry 4 shipped in 2014. If you ship your game in 2018 or 2019, then it is not a far comparison. You need to compare your game to either Far Cry 5 or Far Cry 6 (assuming that will actually ship).

The entire point of AAA is to pour dump trucks full of money into a game to create a bunch of the latest unique polished assets. If an indie purchases a bunch of assets from the asset store to build a game that looks similar to a AAA game from 4 years ago, then you are not really competing with AAA. Even if the indie game turns out to be amazing, it is still not directly competing with AAA titles released at the same time.

 

When you ask Gamers what the best graphics are these days, they still reference older titles like the Witcher 3 (2015) and surprisingly Crysis 3 (2013).

What you say might be true in the past where 1 year had enormous advances in graphics cards or a sparkling new version of DirectX.

These days 1 year isnt anywhere near the same advancement.

The grinding slowdown of CPU & GPU advancement makes me think titles released in the next few years wont be all that much better than what we see now.

Art style & a good eye for what makes things beautiful is IMO far more important than cutting edge tech. This has always been true IMO.

The AAA budgets are amount of content, constant revisions (tons of inefficiency and wasted work and Polish), and speed of creating huge amounts of content. There is also performance, which has become increasingly important as graphics fidelity has slowed significantly.

Indies have an advantage of significantly higher efficiency, tricks to stretch less content, and less polish & focus testing (which means less needless obsessive iteration). Within the limits of their game's smaller scope they can compete with AAA artwork.

I would also be surprise if Indies (who actually release a game) didnt have a higher skill level than AAA which relies heavily on crunching through hundreds of temporary fresh out of college amateurs with low pay and absurd demands (ex. Look at the recent TellTale abuse - they did just that). I'd say there is plenty to suggest talented people may trend toward autonomy (indie) and reject AAA (if they want to work as someone's wageslave they can make far more money out of gamedev).

Hell, just going 2D can radically reduce art costs by not requiring multiple artists for a single character (no mesh, no rigging, just a texture/sprite artist). Depends on the team size and the game requirements. There are some gorgeous 2D games and gorgeous 3D games which are over a decade old (although LOTRO is a dated engine with ugly characters, the environments are still gorgeous due to the amazing art direction).

I have seen modern games that are very ugly compared to older games, when it comes to art direction & color theory.

This is worth considering. A great eye for art can be quite impressive and many talented indies put AAA artists to shame.

It also depends on your definition of indie. I was impressed with the environments of SotA, and that is certainly not on an overblown 300mm art budget, but is also far wealthier than any indie mom & pop shop.

It also depends on if youre talking Environment or Character art. I've seen lots of gorgeous environment art from indies & old games. Very little gorgeous Character art outside of newer AAA.

 

I thought the SotA intro character creation area to be absolutely gorgeous. Very colorful foliage, magical atmosphere, lots of covering. Havent seen the rest of the game, but that first few minutes impressed me a lot... and I expect nothing but ugly from Unity games (ex. 7 Days to Die)

 

For anyone interested, I found this interesting. Feb 2017 opinions but...

What Are The Most Beautiful Games Youve Ever Played?

Surprising answers, including a Unity game!

 

Pretty funny to see my old video above, We have even perfected that mechanic even further since then. Now its even more alive with custom actions utilizing finger IK.

or trigger finger disciplin simulation

I think its in these areas that indie can shine, the attention to detail and game mechanics department. Open worlds not so much

 

Gonna have to call these out. I don't think 2 is true at all. Anything you or I can do, an AAA can do. They're already using proc gen for example, probably moreso than indies. And even if it IS something we can do an AAA can't, none of them are guaranteed to be good--there are downsides to everything. You say higher efficiency, I say easier to go in a totally wrong direction without proper checks and balances, leading to huge problems. You say less polish and focus testing, I say a far, far higher chance of landing on the market with a *splat* because you didn't identify what an audience wanted.

You say "needlessly excessive iteration," but that's nonsense. If it were needless, AAAs wouldn't do it. They're in this to make all the money, remember? What we don't think about is the fact that all this testing means that AAAs are very, very, very rarely flops. Seriously, imagine that the next game you released was basically guaranteed to be successful and turn a large profit. Lots of indies (not hobbyists, but people actually trying to make a living) would kill for that kind of security.

 

I have made a bet on this thread that's still holding, although I'm also hold by the need to find a new place IRL.

I had estimated that facial animation, voice acting, and animaton where the most costly assets to integrate, except the gap is rapidly closing on that with huge democratization happening with new technique ... I won't be surprise if a crappy webcam will be just enough for facial soon ...

The point is that this case is a problem of direction, production and lack of market, it's not tied to cost and quality, that's another good discussion to have, but the point is just the ability to do production values.

Again it's only tangentially link to production value, those iteration are needless to make quality works, they are bureaucracy step to allow validation to sink the money, the cost of validation is high for an indie perspective, but it's only a fraction for a big entity, so it's saving money by guaranteeing return.

You must validate concept art before going to full production, and each concept art is an actual high quality drawing made by an expensive artist. The cost is simply the slowness of the process x the wages of the artist. If you have a clear vision and control cost you can jumpstart earlier the production. In the case of AAA project start in completely different way than they end up, which mean large iteration cycle that essentially produce noise, that's largely documented, in general the process remove all originality from the initial proposal to make it more formatted, the faster production cycle are actually highly derivative from the start and iterate only on refining, that's why witcher 3 is based on a book, uncharted is using texto adventure tropes, etc.

Senua's sacrifice: hellblade, is precisely done by making this diagnostic, they cut the necessary, focus on a clear vision and produced high quality works for a fraction of the budget. And they still had the overhead of innovating in bringing the cost down for asset like motion capture.

Anyway, iteration is a definitive artifact of creative process, it doesn't matter if it is a book or a game, it takes generally 5 years on average, Game of throne is less costly to create than a TV show but the tv show catched up, despite involving much more higher production values and number of people, anime catch up to manga and need filler episodes, creating just takes times, production is actually fast once everything is laid down and you only have to execute.

Which bring the conclusion: if you are indie and want to match up to AAA:
1. have the relevant skills
2. adapt ready made works to have clear vision with a good hook
3. don't innovate that's too risky, but be clever about it, mashing style or genre together is a trick that often works
4. bet on a return proportional to your spending, you might not have the pull of AAA but you don't have the cost either.

That's not news, it's actually how we do high quality tv series, or some books author made their money by having a hi rate of publication, they use well known format and exploit plothole to create mysteries and expend on concept they didn't anticipate, they go with the flow.

But also books and audiovisual have way better pre production than game, scripts is super cheap to produce, storyboard allow to anticipate all the risk before sinking anything in high cost production. Current game dev are very bad at it, even AAA, we are already sinking money in hi quality asset before the ideas and structures are set in stone, that jeopardize the whole production and all post mortem point to that. A storyboard is basically a finish movie, you know it's good before the polish, game should do the same, not just a prototype "to test features", but literally the whole game should be made in that form (horizontal slice) before sinking any money into polish.

 

I don't completely understand what you're talking about, especially since those quoted sentences of mine are discussion totally different aspects.

However, to get at what seems to be the crux of the issue: AAA isn't just "high production value." If AAA is just "high production value" then "focus testing" doesn't even make sense as a point on the table at all.

Judging by Carter's post when he says AAA he's referring to the whole kit and caboodle: lots of management, focus-tested "mainstream" design, and yes high production values.

I was taking "higher efficiency" as meaning that there's less "red tape" for an indie to make changes to a game, because that comment doesn't make any sense in terms of "production values" or in terms of "efficiency of making content." Neither does focus testing. Less polish is definitely a production values thing but I didn't really address that.

Again I don't think this has very much to do with pure "production values" alone, but it's possible I misinterpreted Carter's statement. This sounds like the old "what is AAA?" discussion and I'm not interested in opening that can of worms.

Given that he (she?) used "iteration" in their parenthetical statement following "focus testing," I don't think they were talking about nitty gritty like iterating on a concept art image. Again, I could be wrong. But taken in the broader approach that would apply to a phrase like "focus testing" my comment still applies.

 

This is not possible, that's all.
When some indie or a small team could do the same amount of work a hundred team made in five years ?
Can we expect to get as good game as God Of War with same content and quality , art direction , gameplay and narrative from a small indie team ? Simply no.



Indies and studios like Santa Monica or Naughty are two different worlds.

 

Nah, indie is a small space rock burning up in orbit.

 

Yes I will post when it´s showable, still building my world, textures is semi doone now, but I have issues so I will allways inprove because when I´ve slept on it I realize the next day that I could do better

 

Allright, I see your point and agree.. It´s allways changable, espacially the terrain textures...well foliage too..

 

PBR HDR UI VR Ai SRP HD-RP. haaaa ..I'm burning...

 

hahahahahahahaha yupp

 

lol

 

It really depend on what type of asset and should be part of the production strategy, ie design with constraint rather than against it. Also AAA reinvent the wheel very often. Sure indies can't make god of war, it has too many unique asset that can't be any other way and also these asset play into brute force by being too specific. It's also have a game with a few hi quality character close up with detail facial expression. Now compare that to the last assassin's creed which don't have the same quality of facial expression (due to scope and data compression), it's a balancing act, not all AAA have the same quality everywhere, they are still constraint by the hardware.

That's why hellblade has an over the shoulder camera, instead of spending time tuning the camera to be adaptive to action, they design the action around the camera because it was cheaper, and spend their resources on facial animation of the main character, player don't notice the camera is as dynamics, there they cut many hours of manual labor, that's being smart. By being smart you can maximize impact and reduce cost, you CAN'T do everything, but you can appear to have great quality on the scale of AAA.

For example, you want a big epic game? well going sci fi would allows you to hand wave technical limitation into world building technology, it would reduce human facial expression but still have credible expressive alien character, etc ... It's really about the choice you made and the cost vs the impact they have.

Notice I'm always using the production angle, not the hd srp, pbr stuff ... which in the case of pbr is also a production save (less tweaking of material) not just hur dur realism.

 

I expect nothing less than book of the dead level of foliage now

 

Hell Blade is not comparable to a production like God Of War, it's comparing tomatoes and potatoes.

 

That's totally true and you miss the point by 10 miles?

 

I understand how they cleverly managed with a small team to achieve a good game, or indies are getting better tools and graphics. But the game level design, art direction, amount of quality content and gameplay are very very very far from a triple A game like God Of War.
You need many hundred people teams working together during three or five years to make a triple A quality and content game.

Triple A




Indies trying to do the same lol

 

Can doesn't mean Should.

There are significant advantages of having hand crafted content - mainly much higher quality. You dont need replayability if you have hundreds of content creators.

Procedural design amomg Indies is a crutch, not a positive. It is a shortcut to produce equivalent content to match AAA but suffers from the lack of quality attention to detail you get from hand crafting content.

If AAA use procedural content, it is in addition to their enormous budget of content and features, not in replace of it.

I find this hard to believe. Have any actual examples? I would love to see the best of both worlds: AAA content combined with procedural content? Tempting!

Um...okay? It goes without saying that a bad designer or risky innovation in uncharted waters can result in a bad game or lost time prototyping. This is irrelevant of AAA/Indie components. Both can have talented or untalented designers, good or bad luck, and good or bad core game idea foundations.

If it was nonsense, there wouldn't be numerous gamedev articles and lectures on how to not let perfectionism / OCD / needless obsession hold you back from progress.

Holy cognitive fallacy batman! I dont need to provide a rebuttal for this monstrous of logic. Read what you just wrote my friend!

Part of the beauty of many of the more successful Indies is their desire for Quality Games over Corporate Profit. The best games are bred from a personal desire to make games the developer's themselves want to play. (ex. Dwarf Fortress, Stadew Valley, etc.)

AAA replace this with focus testing. Doesnt mean it is superior. That is as subjective as "What is your favorite game?"

While I wont disagee being ignorant of the actual data, I have been told numerous times I am wrong to think this because most games dont make their money back. They might just be thinking of the olden days of Atari/NES, if things have changed though.

You are right that many, maybe even most, Indies could kill for that security. In fact this happens all the time with indies I see in discussions, deciding to make games they think others want rather than games they know they'd love.

It may be good or bad advice, I don't know the data, but many believe the best thing to do is make games for yourself. Games you want to play. The idea is that if you want to play it, others will too.

I have seen several articles speaking this idea. And there are many successful indie studios who have accomplished success by doing just that! (Ex. Albion Online, Darkfall, Neo Scavenger, etc.) Likewise I remember one developer failed time after time making what others wanted until he learned to make what he would play instead.

 

Great post. Lots of important details and information.

Reading about the writing speed of George R R Martin and the TV series Game of Thrones reminded me of the writing speed of Stephen King (an author I highly respect).

It's very interesting how one creative can create several masterpieces in the same time another creates just one. Writers, Artists, or even Programmers - everyone.

It was very interesting when I learned among two amazing artists, one took a week while the other took a day. Fascinating to me at the time since the end products were equivalent in quality but the speed was so drastically different.

 

Time and technology are big factors a AAA team could be 200+ developers over 2-3 years making massive amounts of content for a single game. So you are talking about 1,500,000 talented hours of work on a game (assuming 5 days a weeks 10 hours a day for 3 years and 200 people).

Then you also need to factor in the technology as some of that development time is probably used to provide development/creation pipelines specifically for the game e.g. Weapons in an FPS will probably need dedicated toolchains or NPCs in an RPG. Or terrain and scenery toolchains.

Now you as an indie can go to the asset store and buy pre-made toolsets/models and assets to maximise your time but with the potential of compromising the style and cohesion of your game world.

The thing is though once a AAA game is made in a genre especially on top of a game engine it should open the door to modders and other game developers to push the boundaries further than before and inherently use less time and manpower.

If the game industry were like Hollywood the entire sets, actors, props and costumes would be re-used through the industry. And it is heading that way to some degree, we see AAA game developers re-using in house game engines and technology and assets across a range of games.

It should be interesting to see what happens when it becomes easier and easier to generate a high quality game.

Maybe we should set up a set of benchmarks for game development technology, how long to make a game level that looks and plays like DOOM 2016, Crysis, Farcry 5, Battlefield 1 and other games genres.

It took me 5 days to attempt to re-make the first level of the Doom the 1993 version, from scratch. Note I took the wrong approach by not making a DOOM level file reader and renderer or level editor so toolchain is a big factor.

 

Amusingly, I agree with your overall point but disagree about proceduralism being a crutch (or that it's always a crutch). I feel like it can be used to lend consistency to places human's might not be good at. The problem with proc gen right now in indie-land is how it's used, not its existence. We need to spend more time tweaking the variables when we throw it in.

As a slightly tangential example, I spent hours and hours yesterday trying to build a bunch of Linux stuff on my PC to be able to use the NASA ModelE global climate model, rather than just use the climate cookbook to build the climate for my world. I feel like inputting a bunch of variables into a simulation and running that will give more accurate results than me building something by hand.

A few examples include Horizon Zero Dawn, Mass Effect Andromeda (they wound up not sticking with it due to a host of issues, but they still used it extensively for a while and planned the game around it), and AC Unity (this last one is undoubtedly still in the pipeline). This is ignoring the obvious SpeedTree, though I'll point out that if there were more assets like SpeedTree for other objects we might see more like that.

My point here is that none of these are objective "indie are better than AAAs in this area." They're actually "indies are different than AAAs in this area" and there are associated benefits and drawbacks.

You're conflating AAA iteration with OCD "perfectionism." I can't see the two as equivalent at all. One's fundamentally emotion-based, while the other seems business oriented. The AAA iteration cycle doesn't involve one guy in charge of art and story and gameplay making changes in one area and making subsequent changes in the others and then going back to the first, then finding a new tool that lets him up the quality in another area, yada yada. It just doesn't seem the same.

That in itself was not intended to be a logical argument. But it's reality. These people do these things for a reason, and recognizing that reasoning and not putting it all onto some absurd "they hate originality" line of logic (I'm not saying you're doing that, but that's something one sees a lot in gamer communities) is critical.

The fact is, these companies are very successful. The fact is, these companies have certain processes so common among them that we've classified them as part of "AAA development." The inference is that these common processes among these companies are a part of what makes them so successful.

At this point you're just taking individual sentences out of context. This has nothing to do with what makes a "best game." This is a continuation from the previous sentence--it's talking about the reasoning behind these companies' actions. They want to make all the money. If they were losing money by focus testing, they wouldn't do it (within reason of course--it's impossible for them to know with certainly that it's ineffective. But if they found that not doing these kinds of things got them the sales that they get with it, I strongly believe they'd drop it).

I find that very hard to believe. These are companies that will axe some of their most beloved (by the community) subsidiaries if they're not being successful.

I don't really disagree with this. But it has no bearing on the "indie vs. AAA" topic. Between the two, AAA wins out. When AAA makes big and bombastic experiences, they eclipse indies (for obvious reasons). When they make (relatively) small and intimate productions like Rayman or Child of Light, they're as good or better than many indies (in a non-emotional sense)

We don't need to bother with trying to convince ourselves we're better than AAA on any scale or that we can "beat" them. Just make what you want to make. If it's got you in it, it's unique, and if someone resonates with it no AAA game can replace that.

 

The biggest problem I have with AAA in later years are that the games are dumbed down more and more for every year so they can target a bigger audience, not a development I like

 

Indie procedural plugins are very simple , lacks quality and very very limited.
I never seen an indie procedural tool able to do the same ; able to create houses, towns, roads, terrain, textures distribution and vegetation.

Short version

Long version

The quality in triple A games is not comparable to indies, look at Horizon animations and traversal system.
I never seen an indie game with such quality.
https://www.guerrilla-games.com/rea...hanics-in-the-vast-world-of-horizon-zero-dawn

There is a huge gap between triple A teams tools and indie tools.
For a triple A game each sub system is very important.

Even with the best tools i doubt lot of indies have level design great skills and game design talent to make a good game.
Look at Far Cry 5 arcade mode, all players maps are crap level design, not interesting or unbalanced.
The only good maps are made by Ubisoft teams

 

Surely that's why last year we got (I'm gonna do it, I'm doing it!) the Dark Souls of Assassin's Creed games (I'm sorry, really...), Nioh, For Honor, Breath of the Wild, Mario Odyssey, Nier Automata, Ghost Recon Wildlands, ME Andromeda (as much as I hate what they did to the series, the combat is not dumbed down in any way), Persona 5, Prey, Mario+Rabbids, Dishonored Death of the Outsider, Total War Warhammer 2, Wolfenstein 2 The New Colossus, Battlefront 2 (sure the progression system was problematic but they clearly tried to increase the gameplay complexity compared to the first, and included a campaign), and Xenoblade Chronicles 2

The only AAA games that came out last year that "dumbed down" would even make sense for might be Dragon Quest Heroes 2 (though as that spinoff was always conceived as a Musuo game I don't know if such a claim would be justified) and Sonic Forces.

Games I'm not sure about include Horizon Zero Dawn, The Evil Within 2, Shadow of War (again, a progression system issue, not sure about gameplay), Gran Turismo Sport, Forza Motorsport 7 (progression system, gameplay, etc.), Agents of Mayhem. COD WW2, and NFS Payback (again as I understand it the progression system is garbage, but I'm not sure about the actual gameplay).


There's nothing wrong with not enjoying certain types of games. I only own 4 of the first 16 I mentioned. But the idea that these games are "dumbed down" or whatever pejorative one chooses is just ridiculous.

 

I smell Ubisoft employee here