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[AmuroChan]

Developers can lower costs quite a bit just by not opening studios in some of the most expensive cities in the world, especially in the post-COVID remote work world we live in now. It's financially idiotic to continue to pay premium rent for office space in cities like Lost Angeles and San Francisco.

 

[Shut0wen]

Every generation the developments of the AAA become bigger because the visuals get more detailed so they need more work to be done. In addition to this, the best selling AAA games are huge, so AAA companies continue focuing on huge games, even if some of them like Sony also makes smaller games.

This is true but the way the industry is now its either Triple A or go bust unless your an indie developer with less then 20 people, i hate the way its went because now 80% of triple A games are broken af, like i said i hope more studios go the other way like ninja theory did with hellblade

 

[yurinka]

This is true but the way the industry is now its either Triple A or go bust unless your an indie developer with less then 20 people, i hate the way its went because now 80% of triple A games are broken af, like i said i hope more studios go the other way like ninja theory did with hellblade

There are many studios making AA games. In fact now there are more AAA, AA, VR games, indies and mobile games being released than ever in gaming history.

Regarding these AA/'small' AAA games, you have stuff like Sony's Returnal, Sackboy, Dreams or Morales to name a few, in Nintendo you have most of their games, in MS you have stuff like Psychonauts 2, Battletoad, Ninja Theory, KI and many others. In 3rd party you have people like many Sega games, Platinum Games, and many other ones.

 

[Salty Popsicle]

Frostbite has since been reworked to be general purpose. Which saves money for the company overall. But Battlefield games are more ambitious after every game than whatever Remedy has been doing. Not that Remedy isnt doing anything creative (or good) but battlefield games keep upping what you can do in the game for multiplayer or single i player in terms of scope and complexity (good or bad). Increasing the players, weather, weapons, mechanics, destruction, modes whatever in a more open sandbox deals with multiple concurrent user interactions whereas Remedy is building third person shooters with characters, weapons and levels swapped out + some game specific mechanic. If battlefield was just making new single player FPS (multiplayer adds a whole lot more complexitiy and testing i.e. more money) every few years then yes they can probably make games with smaller budgets. But if they are going to make games at the scale and continue to do new things, thenit will cost alot of money.

If anything, Battlefield has been regressing in terms of content and destructibility for the past 10 years. There are less guns in 2042 than any previous iteration of Battlefield before it and the destructible environments are nothing compared to the maps in Bad Company 2 where every single building could be brought down with well placed C4s.

 

[gradient]

Console players have been trained to think a game is as good as its graphic quality.

That's why lower budget games do well on PC and Switch but not on consoles.

There's a good deal of truth to this.

Many userbases have been conditioned to place graphics and how "new" a game is above all else. The perception is that graphics and budget are indicative of quality and value for money, despite the fact that there is no direct correlation and it is a fallacy that is more often than not proven by one half-baked but graphically impressive realease after another. Add in to that the mentality that a game is only worth buying within a short time of it's release window, lest it's percieved value fall behind newer releases simply due to the PR hype surrounding a new release, and you have developers locking themselves into a nasty and often self-destructive development cycle and mindset.

There are some clear players in the market who realized this some time ago and started shifting focus to escape this trap, but a large majority still rely on pushing the "AAA" myth as it most directly benefits the biggest players to the disadvantage of the smaller developers and gaming consumers.

 

[jakinov]

If anything, Battlefield has been regressing in terms of content and destructibility for the past 10 years. There are less guns in 2042 than any previous iteration of Battlefield before it and the destructible environments are nothing compared to the maps in Bad Company 2 where every single building could be brought down with well placed C4s.

From what I understand for the mainline battlefields, the destruction always improves over time. And from what I also understand Bad company 2 destruction, you can destroy more in a more sandboxy way but any destruction in battlefield games were more physics based and more immersive/realistic but you were always limited in what they let you destroy. I don't play those games that much that's just what I heard/read over the years. In terms of raw count there doesn't seem to be a big difference based on a google search, it seems that the trade off is that the weapons they do have are a lot more customizable than ever before which seems to me as a worthwhile tradeoff.