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.

So copy what Kingdom Come: Deliverance and Baldur's Gate did and make good replayable games.

Also stop listening to the C suite and start listening to the gamers.

It's okay, we can just not play AAA games.

Almost all AAA games are online live service games. I have absolutely no interest in those games. I have been surviving off of indy or lower budget games pretty well while the big guys are off trying to make all the money doing boring shit.

Have they considered not spending half a billion dollars giving hair strands shadow effects, and instead developing interesting stories?

They aren't bad, they just aren't doing anything out of the ordinary. Ubisoft keeps pumping out effectively the same game for every iteration of Assassins Creed and Far Cry. Activision is the CoD machine and has been for some time. EA is... EA. Microsoft refuses to make a good Halo game because they won't leave their developers alone long enough to see what they can come up with before mandating that it has to be X, Y, and Z.

It's no wonder that smaller, usually indie, developers are seeing such success. Sony's been doing well because the games they're publishing are legitimately good experiences, but that's only going to last so long before they get tired of spending oodles on singleplayer games and not seeing the returns they want.

Everything's turned into a live-service game because they're the only thing that actually generates any kind of consistent return on investment, and everything fancy in those games is out of reach for the common person struggling to get by, so the entire game is held up by a small group spending WAY too much on them.

Call me crazy, but I don’t want to play a game “with staying power”.

I want to play games that are fun, I finish them, then move on.

I don’t need a “forever game”. I don’t want seasons, season passes, dailies, battle passes, time limited, time gated content.

The budgets are too big

People have been saying that AAA games suck since at least 2007, with the brown and bloom era, the rise of modern military shooters, and gameplay becoming increasingly trivial with quicktime events and so forth.

In my opinion they weren't wrong then and they aren't wrong now; indie games, then and now, are where innovation comes from. Though from an aesthetic perspective I think if anything AAA games are actually a little bit better now, since at least they're using more colors than "gunmetal grey" and "piss yellow".

I think the last AAA I tried was Baldur's Gate 3.

Pretty good tbh.

We are at a point now that games from the PS3/X360 era still look and play well, so newer titles need to contribute something new in order to make an impact.

If a AAA-studio releases a 7/10 title in 2026, it’s not just competing with the 8s, 9s, and 10s also releasing the same year - but also every single such title from the past 20 years!

This will also only continue to get worse in coming years as the backlog of exceptional titles will continue to build.

And then you have Clair Obscur schooling studios on how it should be done.

Whole industry has been saying that for a while. It's unsustainable and to a large extend large studios have fallen to the sunk cost fallacy since they are often on 5-10 years development cycles (!), with very rigid schedules (since they rotate development teams).

Now the big studios are going bankrupt/getting sold to MBS while Expedition 33 is doing tricks on their grave (at least relatively, in absolute numbers their sales numbers aren't high with normies who only play CoD and FIFA).

Bring back games that you're passionate for and gamers will love instead of designing a gamified soulless money funnel.

There are thousands of amazing indie games created by people who have an idea and a will to make something. I'll spend my money there instead.

Games are ok, meaning there are good ones. Trying to release more and more to get more and more money - that's going to fail, yup

Also, look out the window: we have so much more to spend time and resources on

This is what happens when you chase trends instead of just having a solid idea.

Newsflash: You aren't going to turn random horror IP into the next Dead By Daylight. DBD is already Dead By Daylight

You aren't going to make a multi-player online shooter that is the next Fortnite. Fortnite is already Fortnite.

Actually now that I've said that aloud it seems like the problem is that they're trying to be the next big multi-player experience when they should be focused on a solid single player

That's because it was replaced with the far superior AAAA games, of course!

I dunno about anyone else. I don’t wanna pay 100 for a half finished buggy as fuck game. Wait a year for bugs to maybe be fixed. Only to then pay another 50 to get the 3 dlc’s to make it the complete game. So I can finally buy the same game the for 67th time as cause it’s got a new skin or some shit this year. All while the dev calls it staying power.

We won't have enough RAM for new cutting-edge AAA games anyway. System requirements will plateau for the foreseeable future while they continue to raise game prices and complain that it's too hard.

Painkiller wasn't great either. Just saying.

I have played all the way through all the resident evil series, picking up the last 3 when they came out, which is rare for me. I am usually a patient gamer. I assume RES is a AAA game, but correct me if I am wrong.

Point is each one has been fantastic. Not many games hold my attention like those do. So apparently it can be done. Hoping the next one out soon is just as good.

Oh, and I played all of them on Linux, they worked flawlessly.