Hey, the best game published by Ubisoft this year was a mid-sized Prince of Persia game. The second best was a small Prince of Persia roguelike. Neither did particularly well with audiences, both are great.
We’re still not agreeing in our definitions, though, because man, how can anybody put a first party Nintendo game, let alone their Zelda open world tentpole, anywhere outside AAA? TOTK is AAA as fuck. TOTK defines AAA. Six years in the making, insane polish, a seeming blank check to mess with design to blend Zelda and Minecraft and built by some mix of Nintendo’s top tier talent and massive, industrial outsourcing over to Monolith Soft, which itself has hundreds of employees.
The realization that even sensible, savvy people just don’t grasp cost, scope or size in game development is… not new, but still disappointing. I still think this entire conversation is entirely tautological. People are defining size and “AAA-ness” based on whatever vibes and superficial traits they’ve assigned to “AAA”, not any sort of measure of size, budget or scope.
how can anybody put a first party Nintendo game, let alone their Zelda open world tentpole, anywhere outside AAA?
I’m saying it is AAA, and that’s how other AAA games should be. BOTW graphics are good but not life changing, bugs were rare on launch, the game is fun, and it brings something new to the series. TOTK is the same way, but it gets to reuse a lot of the engine work from BOTW while feeling like a new game. BOTW was audacious in scope, and Nintendo rarely takes those kinds of risks, so they feel special when they happen.
Nintendo is perhaps the best example of what I’d like other AAA studios to be, as least from a game design standpoint. Take big risks occasionally, and ship fun, lower-budget games between them. If we look at Zelda games on Switch, we have:
BOTW - flagship for the console to show what it can do
TOTK - sequel to BOTW, which is a lot less risky given how popular BOTW was
Link’s Awakening - top down, relatively straight-forward Zelda game, remake from older game
Skyward Sword - remake from Wii
Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom - reuse engine from Link’s Awakening, but still takes a big gameplay risk
Only BOTW was truly risky here, and I imagine it cost way more than everything else.
If we look at Ubisoft, for example, they churn out massive AC games almost every year, and those cost hundreds of millions each time. Yeah, they have other games too (so does Nintendo), I’m talking more about the frequency of these massive world games they release, which is honestly absurd. I can’t speak for everyone, but I imagine many gamers would prefer to reduce the frequency of AC releases, improve the story progression (and eventually end it), and invest that budget into new IPs or smaller games.
That frequency is possible only because multiple studios are working on those. It’s not like people put together one of those each year, they are worked on concurrently.
I would argue that having too many games that are too similar is a major strategic mistake Ubisoft made for the past couple of gens. But that’s not because they’re big, or triple A or anything else. It’s a bad call by a mix of executives and creatives. It’s no more representative of AAA games or the industry than Nintendo having two iterations per franchise per generation or whatever they’ve decided is the sweet spot.
And once again, the budget has nothing to do with this. I am pretty sure that the open world Zeldas are quite expensive to make. All these good games people keep showing as examples of smaller games are not smaller at all. In Ubi’s case it’s kinda tragic, because they did invest in smaller games and it turns out those didn’t sell. Not only did they have the smaller PoP games, but they tried with a smaller AC game, too. At this point they’re throwing the kitchen sink at this. Hell, they have the very last AAA extreme sports title I can think of. I’m not sure when or if we’ll see another one.
And none of those have a problem with scope or are anywhere near as big as BG3 or Elden Ring, or probably even the big Zeldas. It’s not a budget problem. Which is not to say that games aren’t too expensive to make. The point is that they’re too expensive to make regardless of quality. The games you like are just as expensive as the ones you don’t.
That frequency is possible only because multiple studios are working on those. It’s not like people put together one of those each year, they are worked on concurrently.
Sure, and my question is, what could those other studios create if they weren’t building these massive, samey experiences?
that’s not because they’re big, or triple A or anything else
It absolutely is though. It doesn’t define AAA (that’s defined by dev and marketing budgets), but it’s what it has become. They compete on trailers to be the flashiest thing at whatever gaming convention they’re going to, so they dump their resources into technical improvements.
I am pretty sure that the open world Zeldas are quite expensive to make
They absolutely are, but they’re a lot less expensive than AAA titles designed for modern consoles and PCs. People would laugh Nintendo off the stage for trying to push BOTW on non-Nintendo hardware because it doesn’t meet the expectations for those other platforms.
I brought it up to highlight that big budget games are fine, if they’re released sparingly. If Nintendo kept releasing massive budget games, I’d have the same complaint about them, but they they’re pretty rare.
It’s not a budget problem
You’re right, it’s how they apply the budget. They should be investing a lot more into gameplay and writing than they currently do. They could kick out a lot more good games for the same budget.
Well, yeah, I would love to see what the Ubisoft staff can come up with when freed from AC’s clutches. I have seen it, in fact, and it was a really good Prince of Persia Metroidvania. Would have bought a sequel if everybody else hadn’t ignored it.
But the point is they weren’t stuck making AC because AC is big, they were stuck making AC because somebody at Ubi knew it was one of their two remaining moneymakers and couldn’t find the guts to take a risk or the creativity to find a new hit. And I wouldn’t necessarily have wanted that risk to be a small game. People didn’t buy the first few ACs or Far Crys or whatever because they were small. They bought them because they were new, innovative and impressive at the time.
And no, I don’t for a minute think Zelda is cheaper than other games. Monolith has three studios with three or four hundred people, total. Each of those games was in development for years. Pixels don’t cost money, people in chairs coding and modelling cost money. Sure, HD assets are more expensive to make because they often take longer, and there is arguably a tendency in some studios to overinvest in asset detail without letting design iterate enough first.
But I will keep stressing this, letting designers iterate is itself expensive, and neither Nintendo’s games nor BG3 are any cheaper than super raytraced global illumination or whatever.
And to your point, a lot of people DO apply their budget the way you describe. That’s how you got (takes deep breath) Zelda BOTW and TOTK, Astro Bot, The Last of Us, Marvel’s Spider-Man, Baldur’s Gate III, Elden Ring, Tekken 8, the Dead Space remake, the Silent Hill 2 remake, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Street Fighter 6, Alan Wake 2, God of War, Guardians of the Galaxy or Returnal.
All triple A AF, all different shades of weird and cool and inventive and extremely well made and all games I’ve finished, or at least played for dozens of hours. I love triple A games, and I refuse to let cynical online discourse reframe them as cookie cutter crap because it’s fun to dunk on Ubisoft this decade or whatever.
somebody at Ubi knew it was one of their two remaining moneymakers and couldn’t find the guts to take a risk or the creativity to find a new hit
And that’s exactly the problem with AAA, they tend to take the lower risk path.
Indies have to take massive risks to stand out, and while most fail, the few that stand out are absolutely incredible. They can’t rely on the GFX or marketing departments to carry the game for them, it has to be so good people want to share it with their friends. One of the first indies I played was FTL, and that was because a friend recommended it to me.
I don’t for a minute think Zelda is cheaper than other games
The estimates I’ve seen are that BOTW is ~$120M, whereas AC games are >$300M (even $500M). Figures like these are hard to come by, especially for Nintendo, and they’re generally not very comparable since different studios need different marketing budgets.
takes deep breath
So mostly Nintendo and Sony, and a handful of others. Note, these are pretty much all Japanese studios, who are generally known for more frequent, smaller-scale, and more inventive game releases.
The problem seems to be more an issue with western AAA studios, so Rockstar (Red Dead kind of diversified them), Activision/Blizzard (lots of samey games, little innovation), Ubisoft, EA (they’re great at killing interesting ideas), etc. They spend way too much on graphics and way too little on interesting content. Rockstar is the only one on the list that I’ve played a recent game from, assuming you consider RDR2 and GTA V “recent.”
Favorite studios release good games with a reasonable length that aren’t massive open-world collectathons. In fact, I didn’t even really like BOTW, despite praising them for trying something new (I hate that they killed the best part of Zelda to me: dungeons). It’s not that I don’t like open world games in general (love Elder Scrolls games), I just don’t like games that are open world for the sake of it, and that’s what seems to balloon budgets and encourages filler.
And that’s exactly the problem with AAA, they tend to take the lower risk path.
No, for Kojima’s sake, it’s not the problem with AAA, it’s the problem with Ubisoft. Some of Ubisoft, at that. I’m running out of ways to say this.
You keep trying to crunch this down to this small mental model of AAA as Ubisoft-like practices, or maybe Ubisoft, Bethesda and Activision or whatever. It’s just not accurate.
The budget estimates you’re using are almost certainly not accurate, and neither are your assumptions about Nintendo and Ubisoft’s relative sizes. Nintendo has 50x the capitalization of Ubisoft, and is famously one of the most cash-rich companies in the industry (and in Japan). Even if your estimate of Assassin’s Creed’s budget was correct, Nintendo could fund 100 Assasin’s Creed games tomorrow and still have resources left over to make a bunch of other first party games.
Also, no, my list isn’t “mostly Nintendo and Sony” or “all Japanese Studios”. At a glance it includes games made by ten publishers and fifteen development studios. It includes six games made primarily in the US, five made in Europe and seven made in Japan. It’s actually a pretty even split. Not that it matters, because I could put together a whole other list like that in two minutes.
You are trying really hard to make this into a simple distinction between two types of games, broken by game size for some reason and I’m sorry, but reality just doesn’t want to play ball with that categorization. AAA isn’t just the four companies you don’t like (and, for the record, you keep mixing up publishers and developers through this whole thing) and those four companies aren’t even consistently bad or consistently producing only the types of games you describe. Your view of this is just overly simplistic.
Hey, the best game published by Ubisoft this year was a mid-sized Prince of Persia game. The second best was a small Prince of Persia roguelike. Neither did particularly well with audiences, both are great.
We’re still not agreeing in our definitions, though, because man, how can anybody put a first party Nintendo game, let alone their Zelda open world tentpole, anywhere outside AAA? TOTK is AAA as fuck. TOTK defines AAA. Six years in the making, insane polish, a seeming blank check to mess with design to blend Zelda and Minecraft and built by some mix of Nintendo’s top tier talent and massive, industrial outsourcing over to Monolith Soft, which itself has hundreds of employees.
The realization that even sensible, savvy people just don’t grasp cost, scope or size in game development is… not new, but still disappointing. I still think this entire conversation is entirely tautological. People are defining size and “AAA-ness” based on whatever vibes and superficial traits they’ve assigned to “AAA”, not any sort of measure of size, budget or scope.
I’m saying it is AAA, and that’s how other AAA games should be. BOTW graphics are good but not life changing, bugs were rare on launch, the game is fun, and it brings something new to the series. TOTK is the same way, but it gets to reuse a lot of the engine work from BOTW while feeling like a new game. BOTW was audacious in scope, and Nintendo rarely takes those kinds of risks, so they feel special when they happen.
Nintendo is perhaps the best example of what I’d like other AAA studios to be, as least from a game design standpoint. Take big risks occasionally, and ship fun, lower-budget games between them. If we look at Zelda games on Switch, we have:
Only BOTW was truly risky here, and I imagine it cost way more than everything else.
If we look at Ubisoft, for example, they churn out massive AC games almost every year, and those cost hundreds of millions each time. Yeah, they have other games too (so does Nintendo), I’m talking more about the frequency of these massive world games they release, which is honestly absurd. I can’t speak for everyone, but I imagine many gamers would prefer to reduce the frequency of AC releases, improve the story progression (and eventually end it), and invest that budget into new IPs or smaller games.
That frequency is possible only because multiple studios are working on those. It’s not like people put together one of those each year, they are worked on concurrently.
I would argue that having too many games that are too similar is a major strategic mistake Ubisoft made for the past couple of gens. But that’s not because they’re big, or triple A or anything else. It’s a bad call by a mix of executives and creatives. It’s no more representative of AAA games or the industry than Nintendo having two iterations per franchise per generation or whatever they’ve decided is the sweet spot.
And once again, the budget has nothing to do with this. I am pretty sure that the open world Zeldas are quite expensive to make. All these good games people keep showing as examples of smaller games are not smaller at all. In Ubi’s case it’s kinda tragic, because they did invest in smaller games and it turns out those didn’t sell. Not only did they have the smaller PoP games, but they tried with a smaller AC game, too. At this point they’re throwing the kitchen sink at this. Hell, they have the very last AAA extreme sports title I can think of. I’m not sure when or if we’ll see another one.
And none of those have a problem with scope or are anywhere near as big as BG3 or Elden Ring, or probably even the big Zeldas. It’s not a budget problem. Which is not to say that games aren’t too expensive to make. The point is that they’re too expensive to make regardless of quality. The games you like are just as expensive as the ones you don’t.
Sure, and my question is, what could those other studios create if they weren’t building these massive, samey experiences?
It absolutely is though. It doesn’t define AAA (that’s defined by dev and marketing budgets), but it’s what it has become. They compete on trailers to be the flashiest thing at whatever gaming convention they’re going to, so they dump their resources into technical improvements.
They absolutely are, but they’re a lot less expensive than AAA titles designed for modern consoles and PCs. People would laugh Nintendo off the stage for trying to push BOTW on non-Nintendo hardware because it doesn’t meet the expectations for those other platforms.
I brought it up to highlight that big budget games are fine, if they’re released sparingly. If Nintendo kept releasing massive budget games, I’d have the same complaint about them, but they they’re pretty rare.
You’re right, it’s how they apply the budget. They should be investing a lot more into gameplay and writing than they currently do. They could kick out a lot more good games for the same budget.
Well, yeah, I would love to see what the Ubisoft staff can come up with when freed from AC’s clutches. I have seen it, in fact, and it was a really good Prince of Persia Metroidvania. Would have bought a sequel if everybody else hadn’t ignored it.
But the point is they weren’t stuck making AC because AC is big, they were stuck making AC because somebody at Ubi knew it was one of their two remaining moneymakers and couldn’t find the guts to take a risk or the creativity to find a new hit. And I wouldn’t necessarily have wanted that risk to be a small game. People didn’t buy the first few ACs or Far Crys or whatever because they were small. They bought them because they were new, innovative and impressive at the time.
And no, I don’t for a minute think Zelda is cheaper than other games. Monolith has three studios with three or four hundred people, total. Each of those games was in development for years. Pixels don’t cost money, people in chairs coding and modelling cost money. Sure, HD assets are more expensive to make because they often take longer, and there is arguably a tendency in some studios to overinvest in asset detail without letting design iterate enough first.
But I will keep stressing this, letting designers iterate is itself expensive, and neither Nintendo’s games nor BG3 are any cheaper than super raytraced global illumination or whatever.
And to your point, a lot of people DO apply their budget the way you describe. That’s how you got (takes deep breath) Zelda BOTW and TOTK, Astro Bot, The Last of Us, Marvel’s Spider-Man, Baldur’s Gate III, Elden Ring, Tekken 8, the Dead Space remake, the Silent Hill 2 remake, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Xenoblade Chronicles 3, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, Street Fighter 6, Alan Wake 2, God of War, Guardians of the Galaxy or Returnal.
All triple A AF, all different shades of weird and cool and inventive and extremely well made and all games I’ve finished, or at least played for dozens of hours. I love triple A games, and I refuse to let cynical online discourse reframe them as cookie cutter crap because it’s fun to dunk on Ubisoft this decade or whatever.
And that’s exactly the problem with AAA, they tend to take the lower risk path.
Indies have to take massive risks to stand out, and while most fail, the few that stand out are absolutely incredible. They can’t rely on the GFX or marketing departments to carry the game for them, it has to be so good people want to share it with their friends. One of the first indies I played was FTL, and that was because a friend recommended it to me.
The estimates I’ve seen are that BOTW is ~$120M, whereas AC games are >$300M (even $500M). Figures like these are hard to come by, especially for Nintendo, and they’re generally not very comparable since different studios need different marketing budgets.
So mostly Nintendo and Sony, and a handful of others. Note, these are pretty much all Japanese studios, who are generally known for more frequent, smaller-scale, and more inventive game releases.
The problem seems to be more an issue with western AAA studios, so Rockstar (Red Dead kind of diversified them), Activision/Blizzard (lots of samey games, little innovation), Ubisoft, EA (they’re great at killing interesting ideas), etc. They spend way too much on graphics and way too little on interesting content. Rockstar is the only one on the list that I’ve played a recent game from, assuming you consider RDR2 and GTA V “recent.”
Favorite studios release good games with a reasonable length that aren’t massive open-world collectathons. In fact, I didn’t even really like BOTW, despite praising them for trying something new (I hate that they killed the best part of Zelda to me: dungeons). It’s not that I don’t like open world games in general (love Elder Scrolls games), I just don’t like games that are open world for the sake of it, and that’s what seems to balloon budgets and encourages filler.
No, for Kojima’s sake, it’s not the problem with AAA, it’s the problem with Ubisoft. Some of Ubisoft, at that. I’m running out of ways to say this.
You keep trying to crunch this down to this small mental model of AAA as Ubisoft-like practices, or maybe Ubisoft, Bethesda and Activision or whatever. It’s just not accurate.
The budget estimates you’re using are almost certainly not accurate, and neither are your assumptions about Nintendo and Ubisoft’s relative sizes. Nintendo has 50x the capitalization of Ubisoft, and is famously one of the most cash-rich companies in the industry (and in Japan). Even if your estimate of Assassin’s Creed’s budget was correct, Nintendo could fund 100 Assasin’s Creed games tomorrow and still have resources left over to make a bunch of other first party games.
Also, no, my list isn’t “mostly Nintendo and Sony” or “all Japanese Studios”. At a glance it includes games made by ten publishers and fifteen development studios. It includes six games made primarily in the US, five made in Europe and seven made in Japan. It’s actually a pretty even split. Not that it matters, because I could put together a whole other list like that in two minutes.
You are trying really hard to make this into a simple distinction between two types of games, broken by game size for some reason and I’m sorry, but reality just doesn’t want to play ball with that categorization. AAA isn’t just the four companies you don’t like (and, for the record, you keep mixing up publishers and developers through this whole thing) and those four companies aren’t even consistently bad or consistently producing only the types of games you describe. Your view of this is just overly simplistic.