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Comment by markus_zhang | Hacker News Reader

Modern AAA games are so huge that I don't even bother installing them anymore. I only play classic and indies nowadays. If I want to watch a movie I watch a movie, I don't play games to watch a bunch of movies.

CPR - Completely Personal Rant: ALL modern AAA games are 80% garbage. Yeah! Downvote my however you want. I don't care how much time you spend on optimizing those engines or making those assets. I *hate* the "progress" of modern graphics programming.

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I mostly agree with you, I straight up dropped World of Final Fantasy after I was 10+ hours in and still mostly just watching cutscenes.

They're not as good as movies and they're way longer too. It's like these game producers really wanted to be movie producers.

Mass Effect is a perfect example. I recently played through ME1/2/3 on the PS4 remake and am now playing through ME: Andromeda, so I've gotten to experience all that evolution in a few months.

ME2 was probably the sweet spot, the further you get into the series the more it becomes about the wow factor rather than the gameplay and the characters.

Yeah, I started with ME2 and really liked it. ME and a few others are among the few AAA games I enjoyed to play.

Nah, 80% of modern AAA games are 100% garbage :)

A tiny few of them still justify their size. Witcher 3 and Elden Ring come to mind.

Other than that, "more is better" seems to be a disease.

The Xbox Game Store has a "less than 1GB" category. It includes games you'd probably consider AAA. Certain categories of games like open world shooters are massive downloads but there's lots that aren't.

I don't think this is such a hot take. It's well known that publishers' AAA definitions are trash. Look at Ubisoft and their recent attempt at feeding people the AAAA concept to justify pricing while delivering another mediocre experience. Now everyone makes fun of them because while their game world is huge, it is still incredibly bland. If you want good experiences, you have to sift through all the marketing and propaganda first. But that doesn't necessarily mean you have to limit yourself to casual and indie games.

what game are you referring to?

AAAA Games? I believe that was the term Ubisoft's CEO used for Skull and Bones, mainly to justify the 70$ price tag

It's also becoming very apparent that the studios can't support the level of investment their having to make to develop AAA either. A bit like the movie studios, dropping billions on titles that can only make money back if they manage to be the #1 hit of the year.

Well, the total gaming industry is almost 10 times bigger than the entire movie industry. So it actually makes more sense to try and create a hit game than a hit movie. We already have seen two new surprise super hits since the start of the year on steam. When was the last surprise hit like that from a big movie production? Probably the Mario movie from almost a year ago.

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