AAA Games are Dead. The Reign of the AA Game Starts Now!
Michael Scott
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: 2020.
That’s all I really have to say, right? We all know the story. So let’s skip the pretense and not pretend like it wasn’t something we all have heard, thought about, and denatured in our soupy brains over the last 5+ years. This post is about how lockdown and the brutal (and stupid) industry standards in video game shave slowly but surely strangled the life out of the type of AAA games that used to be the backbone of the gaming landscape. Your CODs, your Halos, your Marios, and your Pokemon. And let’s not forget whatever playstation has going on…
The game du jour is Helldivers 2. If you haven’t played it by now you’re either not interested at all (fair) or you’re convinced that the hype or media attention is overblown, perhaps, unwarranted (misinformed but also fair). Trust me, I’ll be the first to admit skepticism whenever a media property of any kind is lathered up with this much foamy praise, but in this case it’s pretty much all accurate.
Helldivers 2 is plainly easy to describe: It’s a polished version of Earth Defense Force, with a touch of Star Wars Battlefront thrown in, and painted with a top coat ripped straight from the Starship Troopers movie. It’s cheesy, purposely unbalanced, and a ton of fun with friends.
I’ve often said that “saying a game is fun with friends is meaningless because throwing rocks at the side of a building with friends is fun. Anything is fun with the right group of people.” and while I stand by this statement, it’s worth saying that when a game is functionally unplayable without proper cooperation it’s worth emphasizing the importance of that comradery.
Critically, HD2 isn’t afraid to be unfair, unbalanced, and messy. Part of this is to align with it’s theming, but at the end of the day this is just a mask that lazy programming is wearing. Should the orbital railgun which kills most enemies in a single shot be able to accidentally target the scrub-level enemies who then wander into your hittbox, causing you to instantly die? No, probably not, but it’s definitely funny when it happens. Should the electro-fields, landmines, and auto-turrets attack through player’s in order to get to their targets? Again, no… but the fact that they do doesn’t exactly make the game worse in a fun-sense.
Because of this in-universe hand-waving away of mass amounts of death, the actual problems in the game become more apparent to those with a keen eye for game design. Falling into unmarked, infinite pits in the ground that don’t kill you is probably not a roleplay opportunity. The fact that dropped samples (in-game currency) isn’t prioritized as a pickup compared to primary weapons and special items means that it’s very common to get killed attempting to position yourself so the contextual prompt to pick up the item you want appears on your screen. These are the kinds of bugs, no pun intended, that need to be exterminated and for their part the developers know this.
Unfortunately the last thing that needs to be said about HD2 is the Sony angle. It’s not worth explaining the entire situation and it’s ins and outs, but suffice it to say that Sony, HD2’s owner and parent company, nearly killed the PC player base by trying to enforce an unnecessary data-harvesting scheme into the game. The result was a prominent community manager losing their job, the game being review bombed into “Mostly Negative” nearly overnight on Steam, and about 10,000 memes, some better than others.
Sony eventually reversed their position, but for a lot of folks, myself included, the damage was done. God of War Ragnarok was announced as another first-party Sony game coming to PC but I can’t imagine seeing myself spending any money on a Sony game after the HD2 debacle. Why spend money on something that’s at such a real risk to be stripped away from me? The HD2 backlash only happened because it was a hugely popular multiplayer game that was already strongly in the zeitgeist. If this same thing had happened a year from now, it’s extremely unlikely that the ground swell of gamer rage would’ve been enough to move the needle on Sony’s end. It would’ve been swept under the rug like every other legitimate (and illegitimate) cause that gamers are routinely mocked for. Despite how mainstream games are nowadays. Despite the fact that video games are the highest grossing entertainment industry in the world, gamers are still dismissed as irrational, dirty, basement-dwelling monkeys who send death threats to companies when their favorite anime girl is wearing the wrong outfit.
Indies and AA games are the new AAA
And it’s likely going to continue that way until we see a massive shift in the AAA publishing industry, liekly as a result of either mass unionization or(more likely) the AAA bubble bursting. Games that take millions of dollars, and 7+ years od development to release are by any metric unsustainable and they’ve become the norm for most true AAA studios. Exceptions like Call of Duty only maintain their breakneck release schedule due to the fact the series is
1. basically reskins at this point
2. worked on by a half dozen development teams simultaneously
and 3. Largely just a vehicle for Live-Service trash and microtransactions.
Just shoot me in the fucking head.
Sports games are just carbon copies of themselves and haven’t really been relevant to the discussion for years owning to the fact that only the names on the character models have changed.
In the last 5 years or so the only full-price games I’ve purchased have been Doom Eternal, Helldivers 2, and Animal Crossing New Horizons. And only HD2 has really been worth it, with Eternal being a major downgrade from its predecessor and ACNH being a temporary distraction from the crushing lonliness of the pandemic lockdown. And of the three, despite studio funding, I’d call HD2 a certified AA game. Not just because it sold for $40 on Steam, brand new. It’s live-service functionality is the only real hurdle keeping it from being a truly great game. Like For Honor, it’s very likely that as the player base shrinks, and stabilizes with age, the game will lean harder and harder into memes, ugly cosmetics, and bad balance changes that exist purely to “shake up” the meta. Eventually, like all live-service games, HD2 will be repainted and remixed so many times that’s what’s left will be unrecognizable from the strong and healthy game that launched earlier this year.
That’s where the true AA and indie games come into play. Earth Defense Force, Lethal Company, Little Kitty Big City, My Friendly Neighborhood, and Robocop: Rogue City. And that’s not even mentioning older or more obscure games like Among Us, Last Train outta’ Worm Town, and Boat Game.
While there are a few AAA franchises like the Souls games, EA’s Jedi series, the juggernaut Resident Evil series, and basically everything Rockstar makes, the reality is that AAA gaming died about a decade ago we just didn’t know. It was such a force that it wasn’t until years later that we realized it was just the bones that were left behind.
Arlo, what have they done to you!?
Unfortunately not every indie game has the sauce, an expression that I’ve been unfortunately using more and more. But for those that do, it’s important that we spend that $5-$20 on games if we can for the health of this industry that we love. If we don’t the bloated behemoths of Xbox, Nintendo, and Sony will continue to drive the industry into an unsustainable pit until we’re back living in mobile game hell.
I’d rather play a cheaply made, sorta broken game that was made with love and puts fun first, than a billion dollar monstrosity that’s 5% game from 2010, and 95% DRM and MTX.
Put on your cape, gamers. This war has just begun.
I am ugly and I’m PROUD.