I can't remember a single AA game that was great. Actually, I can't remember a single AA game other than the ones I remember because of how bad they were.
I think AA in games has, for a long time, meant "We want to do a AAA but don't have the money or time" and this can only end in disaster.
I'm always skeptical of "I can't remember ____" as an assessment of any given historical record because, well, the average person just doesn't remember anything. Which is all well and good, you have no obligation to be ready for a pop-quiz, but snapshot moment of free-association is just not a reliable stand in for the actual record.
I actually couldn't think of any AA titles off the top of my head either, but after Googling and GPT'ing a bit I came up with: Hellblade, Plague Tale, Hades, Outer Wilds, Control, Metro, Outer Worlds, Shadow Warrior 2, etc. plus the numerous others listed by other commenters.
My point though is that it's fine not to remember, but that should never be our acid test for what does or doesn't exist in the historical record.
As an aside of this discussion: I do not get people who like Outer Worlds. I am a huge fan of New Vegas, I was so pumped for that game, and it was so, so bland. The combat damn near put me to sleep, the writing was atrociously heavy-handed and made me think the authors thought I was a complete fucking idiot (and I agree with them!), and the moment-to-moment gameplay was just thoroughly, thoroughly unsatisfying.
I know it has a loving if smaller community and man, I wanted to love it, but I just could not. I have hope for the sequel and will definitely play it if not day one, close to it, but yeah. Outer Worlds was one of my most disappointing games of all time.
just a note for inattentive readers: Outer Wilds from GP's comment is a very different game compared to Outer Worlds which the parent comment mentions.
(it doesn't help that they were both released in the same year, 2019)
Outer Wilds: action-adventure, open world mystery game with puzzles
Outer Worlds: action role-playing game, open world first-person-shooter (similar to the Fallout games)
I get them confused all the time and you'd be in for a ride if you got Outer Wilds while expecting Outer Worlds, but the (G)GP actually mentioned both of them.
I think many of my most favorite games have been AA games. Though "what counts as AA" is probably a big question.
Hi-Fi Rush, was a delightful game that earned every $ I spent, but didn't feel like a AAA title.
Hades is a delightful game that earned every penny but which wasn't a "AAA" title.
I wouldn't call either games "indie", as they both had dozens of people on the teams that made them. But I'd also guess that both games were still made by very different size teams (e.g. 2 dozen vs 5 dozen).
I get that "indie" is often viewed as the 3rd option alongside AAA and AA but I don't think that's the right definition.
For me AAA and AA is about scope of the project. The 3rd option is "small", not "indie".
Hades (I don't know Hi-Fi Rush) is by all means a small game, regardless of how many developers worked on it. Same for Minecraft, or many of the games that other commentors posted.
You want a good measure? Check the price. AAA are $60, AA are around $40 and small games are below.
PS: out of topic but I just saw that Hades 2 is out in early access.
Sadly, people use indie to mean small, rather than it's actual meaning of "independent of a publisher", and it's one of those things that I've nearly given up on fighting.
It's even more sad because the only reason that change happened was big publishers wanting in on the success of indie games as a label and concept, but by definition being excluded, so they pushed their own definition, and people gobbled up their corporate cooption.
> Sadly, people use indie to mean small, rather than it's actual meaning of "independent of a publisher"
That is way too imprecise a description for it to possibly be considered correct.
Indie is about financial and creative independence aka the publisher does not drive the game.
Many indies still go through publishers because they don't have the means or knowledge to handle distribution. This was even more so back when you had to distribute via physical media, but they start looking for publishers once the game is done or in good shape.
For instance back when they built Bastion SuperGiant had just 7 people and it was entirely self-funded. But they went to WB for publishing, mainly to ensure getting it on XBLA would not be too much of a hassle.
>That is way too imprecise a description for it to possibly be considered correct.
It's the most objective definition. We can easily see if a game studio a) has their own publishing wing (people forget this when saying stuff like "Valve is an indie!"... It's few but they have published others' works since 2004) and b) the game has an external publisher.
But as the GP said, this definition (just like in music) was perverted over the years into CDXS2the modern, colloquial definition that you mention. Much less precise because we do not in fact know how much the publisher drives any given indie, a term locked under contracts and NDAs we'll never see. We simply need to trust a publisher's branding.
But no one is particularly interested in changing the current defintion. Publishers want to have that branding, indies want to have that branding, gamers seem to intuit what kinds of games and styles that "feel indie". So I guess it'll go by the way of the definition of "literally".
"Independent of a publisher" is less precise than, "independent ideas and creative freedom"?
Mine is literally a binary, factual assessment, that is easily verifiable: did they use a publisher?
Yours is a standard that the public has no way to verify, and is regularly is lied about by devs and publishers. Every publisher says they let their studios have full creative control. No one says, "yeah, we interfere in design decisions all the time".
> Many indies still go through publishers because they don't have the means or knowledge to handle distribution.
No, indies didn't go through publishers, small studios do.
What you are describing is just indie studios signing on with publishers, becoming dependent* on them for some aspect of distribution. Literally ditching their indie status.
Why do you think *any* size developer that uses a publisher does so? To gain the advantages of their greater resources.
As another commenter pointed out, this term doesn't originate in video games, it comes from musicians who do not sign on with a record label.
indie is literally a shortening of independent though, the term i believe originated from musicians who would release their music without a label to publish them
Isn’t AAA vs AA about the funding of the project, and AA vs indie is about the publisher?
I don’t care for scope as part of this because scope is so heavily influenced by the type of game. Eg Call of Duty is the poster child for AAA games and has a pretty unimpressive scope compared to virtually any RPG. Even indie RPGs tend to have a broader scope; CoD has basically nothing outside of combat mechanics.
Then there’s weird questions about what counts as scope too. Tabletop Simulator has a much broader scope than MTG Arena, but Arena is far closer to AAA or AA.
I specifically said scope of the "project" instead of the "game".
You're right that CoD is simple, but it's still a massive project where most areas (graphics, networking, game engine, etc.) are infinitely more developed than a game like Stardew Valley which is a much broader experience _as a player_.
Star Citizen must be AAAA then with all that feature creep!
Jokes aside, it still feels very subjective to me. Eg I wouldn’t point to CoD as a shining example for any of that. Their in-game launcher sucks, the voice chat is 2003 cell phone quality, the graphics are nice but not groundbreaking, and the stability of the game/servers is worse than most of the indie games I play even after installing mods.
CS:GO has better voice, better stability, and now you can shoot holes through the smoke from grenades. Servers are also 128Hz, where CoD just went from 20Hz to 60Hz (just in time to be out of date again).
COD is the poster child of scope creep to me. It has half-assed support for just about everything under the sun. I wouldn’t really call any part of it “developed”, though.
Dave the diver is definitely not an "AA" game. It's so indie looking it was nominated for multiple indie awards (even if it's not an actual indie game). DRG is not AA either, according to its homepage GhostShip has 32 people 4 years after launching it. Same for Spiritfairer, it was built by a team of 16.
Wasn’t the case earlier in development since they didn’t have big financial backing, Ghost Ship only grew after DRG had sales
> Deep Rock Galactic aired a trailer at E3 2017, then the game had a huge bump after its Steam Early Access and Xbox Game Preview launch in February 2018. Its Early Access didn't skyrocket the game "insanely high" like titles such as Valheim, but Pedersen said it was solid enough to know they had a success. At that time there were only 12 employees, and everyone was contracted "because we didn't know if we'd have money the next month."
Well yes that's what I said, I didn't find what numbers they had at the time but I indicated that they had 32 people (which generally falls short of AA in the first place) 4 years after launching a successful game, so they'd most likely have had even less before then.
I personally would consider 10-40 person teams to potentially qualify as AA. Often we also outsource code/art so the team size can sometimes be misleading.
I suppose I would go by the budget. Maybe 5-10million+ IMO. It also kind of depends how they spend the money.
EDIT : After some further reflection, From personal experience I'd consider a AA game one where everyone on the dev team knows each other fairly well. AAA games get so large that you don't end up knowing everyone super well by the end of the project.
> I suppose I would go by the budget. Maybe 5-10million+ IMO.
Which is not really useful, because we usually don't have budgets.
Team size x development time might be an approximation for it, but if you assume an average salary of 80k and a development time of 30 months, by your reckoning AA is a team of 50... which is basically the low end of what's normally considered an AA team size.
> From personal experience I'd consider a AA game one where everyone on the dev team knows each other fairly well. AAA games get so large
Team Meat is just two people, four if you include the producer and the composer, I would very much assume they knew each other fairly well, but there's no meaningful interpretation of AA where Super Meat Boy is an AA game.
> Which is not really useful, because we usually don't have budgets.
The majority of the AAA/AA projects I've worked on have budgets. I'm struggling to think of a project that didn't have a budget.
> Team Meat is just two people, four if you include the producer and the composer, I would very much assume they knew each other fairly well, but there's no meaningful interpretation of AA where Super Meat Boy is an AA game.
Of course you would expect a small indie team of 2-4 to know each other. I'm saying that once you hit AAA size teams that no longer becomes feasible.
> The majority of the AAA/AA projects I've worked on have budgets. I'm struggling to think of a project that didn't have a budget.
We don't have budgets, as in the people not involved in the project don't have any access to the projects so have no way to "rate" on that metric.
> Of course you would expect a small indie team of 2-4 to know each other. I'm saying that once you hit AAA size teams that no longer becomes feasible.
How is that relevant? This here discussion is about the lower limit of AA, not the higher one.
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.
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.
It depends what type of game you like. There are a million AA RPGs, Metroidvanias, etc. that are enjoyable. Both RoboCop: Rogue City and Terminator: Resistance are good, budget games. Looking through recent games: Dead Cells, Bloodstained, anything from Bitmap Bureau, a lot of Way Forward titles, Altus, etc.
The list of great non AAA games would be so long, here, as to be obnoxious. A lot of game greatness is found in the explicit avoidance of AAA conventions, like extended cut scenes. Many AAA games are masterpieces, and yet few to no no AAA games are 2D platformers for example. Which is one of the all time great formats for pure fun.
I've worked on some titles very similar to Yakuza and I keep espousing the way they develop their titles. I don't know for sure because I haven't worked at the studio but it really seems like they've streamlined their development to keep costs down and allow them to develop quickly via asset reuse and resisting major engine upgrades across titles in favor of a slower, more focused pace.
Often in my experience in the west we tend to re-author assets, do major engine upgrades or re-implement gameplay systems across sequels when we could have iterated on existing systems and use the time we saved to work on new stuff.
Standards change and game development standards have skyrocketed. the best AAA titles in 2005 would barely be AA in 2015, and by 2025 it gets to a point where a small (but very talented) team can achieve the same scope with better graphics. That's part of the reason I don't particularly like "AAA" as a nominer. It's a moving target with budget levels we usually have no clue of.
>I think AA in games has, for a long time, meant "We want to do a AAA but don't have the money or time" and this can only end in disaster.
I don't know, because we have even less idea what "AA" means. Would Demons' Souls 2009 be AA?
That the thing, a lot of the biggest AAA titles didn't knock it out of the park day one. Overwatch in 2016 may have been the last new IP that was AAA from the get go and truly nailed it in one. IDK why companies keep trying to do it that way.
Were you gaming back in the PlayStation 2 / original Xbox days? There were a TON of AA games in that era. Most of those studios have been bought up by the big studios that peddle AAA (and in some cases, claim to peddle AAAA) garbage.
I can't remember a single AA game that was great. Actually, I can't remember a single AA game other than the ones I remember because of how bad they were.
I think AA in games has, for a long time, meant "We want to do a AAA but don't have the money or time" and this can only end in disaster.