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Comment by jicea | Hacker News Reader

Housemarque hadn't released any AAA games before launching Returnal on PS5, which is, in my opinion, still one of the best games on this platform. Smaller studios can innovate on gameplay and stories before creating a hit.

Another example is FromSoftware. They kept iterating on their games going from KingFields to Demon Souls, Dark Souls, etc...You can't have Elden Ring without all this earned experience.

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FromSoft is putting out some really interesting experimental bangers too. If you haven't tried the new Armored Core, I highly recommend it -- it's a great bridge from a beloved-but-niche genre (mech games) toward the mainstream. It's small, focused to a point, tells the story it wants to tell and gets out of your way. I'm still thinking about it 9 months later...

Sounds like this sort of risky niche title would earn a studio closure if it came from Microsoft's corner.

Elden ring was the shitty mainstream version of dark souls. The open world was just a big forgettable grind of annoying mini dungeons that you probably had to look up and then didn’t enjoy, collectible items that you were never going to use 95% of the time, shitty quests that were difficult to engage in without external guides, and powerful buffs that were very useful but guarded by enemies that don’t scale; leading most players to follow the main quest to the first boss and then just run around the entire map exploring for the warp points/permanent buffs ignoring every enemy possible and then basically forgetting it was an open world game and just hitting the highlights.

The memorable parts of the game are the bosses which are generally cool but very gimmicky, and the legacy dungeons. Which is… the dark souls bits. The open world was stinky garbage that made the game much worse.

> Housemarque hadn't released any AAA games before launching Returnal on PS5, which is, in my opinion, still one of the best games on this platform. Smaller studios can innovate on gameplay and stories before creating a hit.

Yeah I never said the contrary. Actually you see this quite commonly with small unknown studios that release stuff like educative or mobile games and suddenly are handed a big project.

> Another example is FromSoftware.

Please, they've been releasing AAA since Demon Souls. They're definitely not AA games.

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