Iva Demilcol
Member
AAA games require a lot of money, time and -of course- manpower to exist. Even among big publishers there are some that invest huge amounts of money in order to polish their games and steal attention from their competitors, particularly EA, Activision-Blizzard and Take Two Interactive (or was it Bethesda?) are recognized as the publishers that nobody can compete with in terms of budgets and presence (citation needed, but I remember I read this in a report to investors by Capcom), therefore they've created some sort of oligopoly that other companies cannot compete with, which is some sort of double edged sword because they have to be sure the audience for their games is so big they'll make their money back and then some more (which usually they do). To be sure there's a lot of people willing to spend their money on their games, the games have to have a wide appeal, which is something we've discussed a lot on communities like GAF.
Games for portable systems and other smaller games don't look as spectacular as let's say Mass Effect, but ironically the teams working on them may have more freedom than bigger developers at times. And so, more often than not they can make things better than gigantic teams. Do you have a comparison you want to make? I certainly have one:
After Mass Effect: Andromeda's recent backlash and the subsequent reports that say Mass Effect as a franchise won't continue for a while I feel the need to talk a little bit more about the original trilogy. Mass Effect came out in 2007, followed by ME2 in 2010 and it concluded with their third game in 2012. Before the release of the first game I just read reports of how huge it was, how Bioware were dedicating a lot of resources for the facial expressions of ME's characters, how big and clever was the implementation of systems that allowed you to affect the game story with your decisions; and that's just without taking into account obvious things like how incredible the game looked at the time (it still kind of does). Let's just save time and say that eventually ME became a very successful trilogy that ended with a bang... And this is the point I wanted to make: the games became so big that in the end Bioware decided that no matter what choices you made, the story will always ended in the same way; and we know what followed: a massive backlash bigger than what we saw for Andromeda.
And this is the point where I finally mention a game that made the whole "your choices affect the story" better: In 2009, Atlus released Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor for Nintendo DS. Devil Survivor is an urban fantasy turn-based 2D isometric RPG that doesn't even use the DS touchscreen as a... well a touchscreen. With nice sprites, a pretty good soundtrack, a high difficulty and a time management system, it manages to present the player different routes that lead to several endings based on the decisions you take even early in the game. The time management system works like this: there are several missions available that causes the time to move forward a little bit, by deciding what missions you do at a certain time you can follow certain storylines in which an ally can even get killed without the possibility to correct your decisions that lead to that event; there are other moments that will affect the story depending on your stance to certain issues, especially when you get close to the end. But the whole beauty of this system is that you can have five different endings and, when the game was re-released for 3DS they added even more content that lead to other conclusions.
In the end, we have a story for a handheld game that you can affect so you can get one of 5 possible endings vs a millions of dollars trilogy made during a span of 7+ years that ended literally with an explosion.
Yes, you can argue that Mass Effect is much better than DeSu in every other single way, but then you'd be missing the point of this thread: "that time when a game with a limited budget made things better than a AAA game"
Have other examples, GAF? Please, tell us more about them.
Games for portable systems and other smaller games don't look as spectacular as let's say Mass Effect, but ironically the teams working on them may have more freedom than bigger developers at times. And so, more often than not they can make things better than gigantic teams. Do you have a comparison you want to make? I certainly have one:
After Mass Effect: Andromeda's recent backlash and the subsequent reports that say Mass Effect as a franchise won't continue for a while I feel the need to talk a little bit more about the original trilogy. Mass Effect came out in 2007, followed by ME2 in 2010 and it concluded with their third game in 2012. Before the release of the first game I just read reports of how huge it was, how Bioware were dedicating a lot of resources for the facial expressions of ME's characters, how big and clever was the implementation of systems that allowed you to affect the game story with your decisions; and that's just without taking into account obvious things like how incredible the game looked at the time (it still kind of does). Let's just save time and say that eventually ME became a very successful trilogy that ended with a bang... And this is the point I wanted to make: the games became so big that in the end Bioware decided that no matter what choices you made, the story will always ended in the same way; and we know what followed: a massive backlash bigger than what we saw for Andromeda.
And this is the point where I finally mention a game that made the whole "your choices affect the story" better: In 2009, Atlus released Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Survivor for Nintendo DS. Devil Survivor is an urban fantasy turn-based 2D isometric RPG that doesn't even use the DS touchscreen as a... well a touchscreen. With nice sprites, a pretty good soundtrack, a high difficulty and a time management system, it manages to present the player different routes that lead to several endings based on the decisions you take even early in the game. The time management system works like this: there are several missions available that causes the time to move forward a little bit, by deciding what missions you do at a certain time you can follow certain storylines in which an ally can even get killed without the possibility to correct your decisions that lead to that event; there are other moments that will affect the story depending on your stance to certain issues, especially when you get close to the end. But the whole beauty of this system is that you can have five different endings and, when the game was re-released for 3DS they added even more content that lead to other conclusions.
In the end, we have a story for a handheld game that you can affect so you can get one of 5 possible endings vs a millions of dollars trilogy made during a span of 7+ years that ended literally with an explosion.
Yes, you can argue that Mass Effect is much better than DeSu in every other single way, but then you'd be missing the point of this thread: "that time when a game with a limited budget made things better than a AAA game"
Have other examples, GAF? Please, tell us more about them.
