In recent years, there has been growing criticism of bloated AAA games, whose budgets already dwarf those of Hollywood blockbusters and often take five to ten years to develop (and sometimes even longer). It would be one thing if this made the games better, but unfortunately that is not always the case, and we've seen some gruesome cancellations lately with developers losing their jobs.
Veteran Tim Cain, who once helped create Fallout, often shares his views on the industry in interesting videos, and now he has weighed in on today's big-budget games. He is not impressed, arguing that they are huge, inflated productions that are not really aimed at anyone in particular:
"...you can learn a lot from games that were required to be focused, because I think that's kind of an overriding possible issue with today's games is they don't really know what they want to be. They try to be everything to everyone: designed by committee, making a publisher happy, trying to guess what the largest demographic wants."
Cain argues that older titles did not have the same technical capabilities with unlimited performance and endless amounts of storage. Developers simply had to "write efficient code or your game doesn't work on the Atari console." Large production were not possible, so you had to focus on making the core so fun and entertaining that it could be played over and over again:
"We couldn't make giant sprawling games with tons of different things, like I think I'll go craft now. I think I go explore now. I go think I do this puzzle now. I go think I do combat now. I go think I talk to all these NPCs now. You couldn't do all that.
"You had to pick what section, what segment of all that gameplay do I want to represent? And then you did that. The idea that you could have a core game loop that was a huge variety of actions just pretty much did not exist."
Cain is always interesting to listen to, and you can find the video below. In short, he thinks developers can learn a thing or two from classic fun gameplay, and believes that this is precisely what creates indie successes that so often outshine the much larger AAA projects in terms of both entertainment and sales. In a nutshell, zoom in on what's good. He concludes with a pretty telling parallel, namely that the best restaurants don't brag about having the biggest menus:
"You need to be simple. You need to stay focused and whatever you do has to be extremely well executed. And then you'll be like that fancy restaurant. You don't got a lot of ingredients in that meal, but that meal was delicious."
What do you think? Does Tim Cain have a point, or is the AAA industry fine as it is?
<social>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YEF1Ankos0g</social>