this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
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So Belgium isn't a western Nation? Or who does Anon think made Baldur Gate 3?
And Japanese AAAs don’t under deliver?
FromSoft had enough money to make 200 hours of content but apparently couldn't figure out 60fps on a 4090. Delivering!
Elden Ring is pretty good, though, don't let me crap on it. I just wish they'd hire the Bluepoint guys that did the Demon's Souls remake to handle their systems and engine work and just build content on top of that because, man.
It's almost like every game studio has their own strengths and weaknesses? Crazy.
Hey, I'm on board with that idea 100%, but then you can't complain online about "Western AAA under-delivering". That's just "the studio's own strengths and weaknesses". Can't eat your cake and have it, too.
I'm upvoting just for the proper version of the phrase
It's an awkward phrase in either version, but when I first encountered the original it was an immediate "Oh, so that's what it's supposed to mean" moment, so now I default to that. If people were shamed into abandoning "couldn't care less" we can make this happen.
My pendantry is either a sneaky precision strike or a carpet bombing, no half measures.
Um, isn't that the correct form? If you couldn't care less, then you care the absolute minimum amount.
Hah. I've internalized it so much I couldn't even bring myself to write it the other way on purpose. I'm not even editing that :D
Now I'm not sure if you could or couldn't care less.
I've played the campaign of Diablo 4 and watched the studio fumble a franchise that has historically printed money.
Definitely feels like underdelivering to me.
If you can't see any material difference between DLC bloated franchise zombies like CoD or the latest FF flop, relative to a sprawling open world action/adventure like Elden Ring or a tightly scripted RPG like BG3, I'm not sure you know what "cake" is.
You should give Diablo 4 another look, it's alright now. For the record, D4 seems to have sold pretty damn well. I'll say that I personally like launch D4 less than endgame D3, but maybe a bit more than launch D3. But hey, we're getting in the weeds there.
I can absolutely see the difference between good games and bad games, but I suspect you and I may disagree on what games we're talking about here and where the examples in the OP slot in.
People keep doing this. They say "western AAA" to mean "these five games I don't like" and, as pointed out above, Baldur's Gate is suddenly not western AAA despite being a European game with a budget of hundreds of millions, while now apparently Final Fantasy XVI actually IS Western AAA despite being from a Japanese studio.
I get that this would be much easier to talk about if there was a neat label to fit all the bad games, or if they all were bad for the same reason. But... you know, maybe it's just not easy to talk about in the space of a meme after all.
The thing that still amazes me about D4 is basically its optimization. In runs so damn smooth on my handheld it’s crazy. I can play helltide content on Torment with bazillion things going on at the same time and the FPS is rock solid at 60.
Hah. Say what you will about the decline of Blizzard, but they clearly still know how to do scalability from their "WoW must run on potato laptop" days. I played most of my D3 on a Switch and most of my D4 on a handheld PC.
But we can complain about AAA studios under delivering.
Game studios aren't individual people it's hundreds of individuals working together to make a game. There's no excuse for elden ring to be so laggy, there is most definitely some management decisions pushing back performance upgrades to the engine.
*Some
Don't forget that there's many indie studios that are a handful of people. Seas of Stars only had 20-30 people on staff IIRC
The original Dark Souls on PC was practically unplayable. Was completely saved by a single modder.
And fans are ridiculously mad that original DS1 was revoked and replaced by the Remaster when it was released on Steam.
I vaguely remember that, and I think that was more because the original was frequently available for under $5 while the remaster went up at full whack.
Once DSFix was installed, there wasn't actually a massive difference between the original and the remaster, but still nice that you don't have to download some random-ass software in order to play at more than 720p and 30fps...
Ehh, I take a bad performing PC version over a good performing PS5 version. Give me the Demons Souls remake on PC, so I can judge Bluepoint myself. I'm not gonna buy some weird console.
Consoles serve their purpose for hassle-free gaming at some cost and lower performance.
But me personally? Yeah, I default to PC as well in most cases. I'd definitely take that Demon's Souls PC port, right alongside Bloodborne, and I'm not even into Soulslikes that much.
You can play Demon's Souls for PS3 on the RPCS3 emulator if you want to play the original on PC
Benefits of having shitty eyeballs I suppose is that I can't tell what fps my games are running at anyway.
Hey, that's all good. Then you don't need a current-gen GPU that costs over a grand, you're all set with a cheaper PC or a console. That's a perfectly valid use case.
People do care, though, and it certainly matters when you're giving people crap for "underdelivering".
Usually whan people make this argument with BG3 as evidence it comes with the implicit assumption that Larian is a AA developer, not a AAA one. I haven't done enough research on what constitutes AAA vs AA and where Larian fits in that so I don't know if that's reasonable, but that's the argument.
I'm not really sure on which planet they think Larian is a AA developer. BG3 was certainly north of $100 million to make, and had like 300 people working on it.
Ubisoft recently coined AAAA games in order to justify price rises on their latest mediocre drivel, and the only games I've seen that deserve the term AAAA are BG3 and Red Dead Redemption 2.
To me, that's a product where absolutely no compromise has been made.
because Larion was 100% a AA developer before BG3 came out, and it's hard to justify changing their place in the industry based solely on the success of their breakout game. It's also important to remember that Wizards of the Coast were major bankrollers of the project, it wasn't solely Larion. Larion is independent again, and I imagine their next project will be closer to the quality of Divinity 2 (still an incredible game btw) than BG3.
They probably bought into the propaganda that all of Europe is overrun by Muslims.
Europe is what? How does one even come up with that? Who says it?
Racists.
Meanwhile, stats show a total of 6% Muslims in Europe (mainly because of Turkey), and 3.2% in the EU.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_Europe#Abrahamic_religions
Fear mongering from the RN/AfD/PVV/PP/FdI/PiS/Fidesz and other Nazis like them
Hmmm, I'm a bit out of touch with politics, but I think FdI are much more vocal against migrants (in general, regardless of religion) and queers, I'd say Muslims are among their "least attacked" minorities. But I get the point
The anti-Muslim rhetoric comes out more in foreign policy discussions, and the degree to which more liberal-leaning politicians and talking heads let it slide unchallenged makes people not pay as much attention.
I guess that's not totally wrong but I think being Muslim is definitely one of the things that is scary about the migrants
I thought that was only France? Or have they expanded their intolerance now?
Aren't the "Western AAA developers" the ones complaining? Not the ones that made the mentioned games?
Then my question becomes what Larian Studios is, if not a AAA game dev.
An indie studio that had luck and got big. Let's hope they stay independent and can keep doing what they want.
AA in the parlance
Absolutely not. I know plenty of so-called "AAA" studios that would murder for whatever deal with Raphael Larian had with Hasbro to fund a 200 million dollar early access six-year-long development cycle.
Larian is "independent", sure, in that they're a private company. They are AAA+, though, both in size and, depending on their licensing deal, on available resources as well. At least since halfway through the BG3 EA process.
Oh well they used to be thought of as AA, it at least III (lol these shorthands, man...).
They don't really have a AAA aesthetic imho, as much as such a statement makes sense. Do you know what I mean? Like their game feels ambitious, yes, but it hasn't been polished into a featureless sphere.
Yeah, but that's my problem with the entire conversation in the first place. If you define "AAA" fully tautologically as "soulless game that feels corporate and is kinda shitty" then sure, AAA has a major issue, in that it seems to be consistently soulless and kinda shitty.
But if the definition is somewhat reasonable, either as a major production in terms of budget and scope, or even as a production from a major studio then all of a sudden AAA games are way more diverse and way more interesting than these types of posts give them credit for.
Not a Western AAA studio, lol.
The meme is saying that Western AAA game makers are too lazy to make good games and are upset at other, NON-Western game devs for producing good games and making themselves (the westerners) look bad.
Larian isn't in the group of complainers. The meme isn't putting them in any category.