Gamers: AAA Titles Generally Aren't Shit.

[TrevHead]

What's so hard about saying "Oh, that's a good game, but it's not to my taste"?

I think ppl wouldnt care so much if AAA hadnt totally followed the big bucks and make games for a more casual market. The the AAA games of today no longer pander to their tastes.

Much of the reason so many PC gamers kicked up a fuss 5 years back was that pratically all the PC devs moved to consoles, with AAA games been very rare and mostly of shitty console port quality. If there would have been alternatives that they could have enjoyed playing hardly anybody would have grumbled.

Thats why with PC games starting to make a comeback and good PC games are been released even if they are still small in number its much rarer to see PC gamers ranting. Nowadays it tends to be just trolls and consolefanboys stiring things up.

 

[veloper]

"Shit" can simply mean mediocre to people who have a library of much better games to play in their free time.
Good and bad can be relative not just to all games out there, but also to your own selection.

So most AAA titles can be shit. Besides, "shit" sounds more definitive and edgy.

It's also important to note that for some it's much easier to say a game is shit rather than post reasons why they dislike it.

Yes I suppose I was approaching the OP too much from a monocle and twirly moustache point of view.

Shit to many gamers can simply mean a game they never even played, watched, read about, or even heared of before.

 

[ResonanceGames]

But that's not what you said. Your words were: "I think that the game is awful". You are making an objective statement, not giving your opinion - or worse, taking your opinion for an objective criterion. You are judging something (albeit ostensibly objectively) not based on its own merits, but on its appeal to you.

I didn't want to derail the thread with a self-indulgent mini-review, so I summed up my general take to make a point. I thought that was clear enough, but I guess not.

Also, my statement in no way implies that my opinion is an objective criterion -- you just pulled that argument out of thin air. It's nonsense.

If this were actually a discussion about a game I didn't like, I certainly would discuss more of its attributes -- good, bad, or neutral. But the fact that I can say a kind word about the art direction or animation wouldn't affect my overall view that a game like God of War is awful. Because I strongly feel that it is. If someone disagrees, that's fine. There is no right answer; which is kind of what my point has been the whole time, though several people seem hellbent on misconstruing it.

 

[Vegosiux]

It's also important to note that for some it's much easier to say a game is shit rather than post reasons why they dislike it.

Goes both ways, I know I know very well why I do or do not like a particular game I've played.

 

[Zoop]

Yes I suppose I was approaching the OP too much from a monocle and twirly moustache point of view.

Shit to many gamers can simply mean a game they never even played, watched, read about, or even heared of before.

Wherever monocles and twirly moustaches are involved, there is no such thing as too much.

I actually agree entirely with your previous post, though.

 

[Zoop]

Goes both ways, I know I know very well why I do or do not like a particular game I've played.

Indeed. I only meant that some people merely state that a game is shit, then they're too lazy to take the time to explain their point of view.

 

[Azuaron]

It's okay, 90% of everything is shit.

 

[JoesshittyOs]

I just have to say that the term "AAA game" is terribly misused on a regular basis.

AAA refers to high quality. Excellence. It is by definition something very, very good.

People seem to think it simply means "expensive".

Well, you're in part right. It just mean that it has a huge budget with generally large teams working on it. Marketing, execution, la did dah.

Excellence doesn't really have much to do with. In reality, people who say "expensive" actually are right.

OT: Yeah, it's pretty amusing how people still don't really understand your point at all. People who think triple A titles like Call of Duty and whoever said God of War probably have never actually played a shitty game before.

Are the games an automatic ticket for being a "good" game. Absolutely not. But are there really many AAA games that are bad? You'll be hard pressed to find one. Whoever said God of War up there... come on. Really?

 

[ResonanceGames]

OT: Yeah, it's pretty amusing how people still don't really understand your point at all. People who think triple A titles like Call of Duty and whoever said God of War probably have never actually played a shitty game before.

Why would you make that kind of assumption? I bought Daikatana and Trespasser back in the day. I remember when games were frequently released in a laughable technical state, or with goofy sound effects, awkward controls, and writing that makes today's scripts look like Mamet.

God of War is just as unplayable to me as many of those games, and it doesn't even have the excuse of having a small budget and a tiny team. The core game design of God of War is so fundamentally flawed that all the whizz-bang graphics and sound effects don't redeem it in the least. The whole experience has to be taken into account, not just the craftsmanship of certain elements.

 

[Scorpid]

I actually agree with a addendum. I don't hate MW series the Battlefield, Gears of War or EVEN darksiders. If Darksiders or MW3 had been my first experience with their gameplay style I would be happily calling them some of the best games of this console generation, but they're not. I've played MW1 and its clones, I've played Gears of War and IT's chest high wall clones, and God of War and it's massive amounts of clones. Most of these thanks to EA who thinks it's better to be so late to a party where the people that started it are already throwing up the nights content into a trash can. None of these games are bad, they're just rehashes, even the games you listed as bad suffer from this too. It's like if you went to a magic show and saw the magician do the same trick five times in a row and would only change his costume between each trick. It's still an amazing trick but it's the same thing over and over again with a different tacky suit.

Keep in mind that the internet is nothing if not a echo chamber but I still think that people don't hate these triple A games they expect better from them, I do at least. If MW had a maginificent epic story line that required a trilogy of games i could be more forgiving of the rehashing but it doesn't, Activision has released the same game four times in a row because that's four times the profit and that's it. The mechanics are still solid, the graphics superb, cinematic aspects are the best thing outside a blockbuster hollywood movie but it's the same kind of superb over and over again to the point that it become monotonous.

 

[Zoop]

reposted an older post, it seems. no idea how that happened.

 

[Exfil 22]

I'd say there's a difference between a terrible game and a game that isn't fun or was hyped up. The latter, such as DA 2 and Bioshock 2, are considered bad because they were boring, or had crappy characters, or were too short. These are legitimate grievances, but not reason to declare a game terrible. Truly terrible games are few nowadays, and so we expect much more and call below average games the worst thing ever. The problem is that there is too much hype. Honestly, if a game is playable, has even moderately good voice acting, the plot is understandable, and the playtime is multiple sittings (~10 hours), then I would consider it at least below average.

 

[CaptainOctopus]

Shit feels better to say than mediocre, also if you compare most of todays so called "tripple-A" titles to games that are actually great, fantastic or even amazing... well then they often are quite shit in comparison. Take most shooters for example and compare them to a 7 year old game like Half life 2. Besides some parts of the production value like the graphics most "AAA shooters" today still often have much worse ai, physics, facial animations, sound, no to little creativity in the weapons and enemies. Not to mention the all too often horrible level design, terrible pacing, poor art direction, shitty uninteresting story & locations, awful two-dimensional characters and so on.

So why the fuck would you give a game like Killzone 2 or Black Ops a near perfect score when those games totally fail at so many crucial levels?! And why do you take offense when someone like me thinks they are shit? Especially when they fucking ARE shit! Sure they might be great games if you just ignore the best and compare them to the absolute shittiest of games most idiot "professional" game journalist seem to do, but that does not change the fact that if compare them to the best, they're quite shit. And frankly I do not understand why you wouldn't compare all games to the best the market have to offer, even if or perhaps especially if it happens to be a 7 year old title. How else then would we see some fucking enthusiasm from the developers to create something beyond the shitty ordinary. Well that's just it, isn't it? We don't... shit.

 

[TrollofReason]

As my name implies, I am a reasonable fellow. Yet the more I thought about this thread, the more it angered me. There are plenty of reasons for gamers, especially gamers who frequent this website, to be disillusioned by so-called AAA titles.
A lot of the people who come here are likely to be PC gamers, which means a few things. First, it means that they posses love.hate relationship with the major publishers of the modern video game industry. Find me a PC Gamer who doesn't generally have a strong dislike of EA, and I'll be safe in assuming he or she either hasn't bought an EA game recently, or has access to extremely fast Internet connections. EA has an atrocious record in terms of putting its customers' interests in playing a game worth $60-70 first; with its history of "strategic releases" ensuring that one or more heavily hyped titles is sold to the public as a broken pile of horse dung.
Then, of course, there is the current lack of innovation among AAA titles. Gears of War 3 is basically Gears of War. End of story. The mechanics are the same, the ultra-linear campaign progression is the same. The obvious shooting galleries which are obvious is the same, and the multi-player is largely a mash-up of GoW2 and offers little to nothing new. The entire thing was an expansion pack that you paid a lot of money for. And now queue the fanboys who are going to rage and ignore these completely reasonable, thought out points.
The same can, and has, been largely said about Modern Warfare 3, which was not only an uninspired, overpriced expansion of Modern Warfare, but was also a blatantly bad console port to PC. It gave people headaches; it punished people for paying for and playing the game on PC. I want you to think about that.
If people around here have reasons for being wary or outright hostile regarding the so-called AAA title of your chosen fandom, then they have reasons for it. Now, I'm not telling you to stop whining when someone else whines. That would be hypocritcal, and fuck the micro-conformist counterculturalism of hipsters for being hypocrites themselves, but I would like you to understand that things have happened and relationships are broken.

 

[Martijn Nijkeuter]

To quote the Grinch
"Well one man's toxic waste, is another mans pot-pourri..."

You don't like I a game, I do, you like something else, I think it's barely passable.
As is life

I wish it was that simple;

-The bigger the following of a franchise, the more likely it will sell ridiculously well. regardless of duration, game play or quality. Basically rewarding major developers/publishers by releasing crap.
-Many big time publishers/developers have tons of copyrighted franchises under their belt of which they tend to only use the ones that brings the most profit. some near forgotten franchises actually had very good game play, some of it perhaps way past it time. but it won't see the light of day now.

Bottom line is, if crud quality games sell well enough other games suffer.
and i think that is where most of the hate comes from, not the fact that most are mediocre or overpriced but that it overall stunts game development.


It's the same reason why i can't bring myself to like square enix games. The Tactics Ogre series won't see light of day (outside of remakes at best) because it isn't as economically viable as Final Fantasy and they won't give away the copyright.

 

[Compatriot Block]

I think this relates to the argument that game reviews need to use more of the 10-point scale.

Reviewers might use more than 6-10 scores if gamers stopped calling everything they didn't love "shit."

 

[michael87cn]

You're right, AAA titles usually have financial backing and professionals behind the desks. But it isn't stupid to claim they're generally shit in this generation. Because its true. Most AAA titles are shit this generation. All the good games are indie right now.

That's because big budget companies have lost all sense of creativity, innovation and GAMING SPIRIT.

They're businessmen, not gamers. They know HOW to make a blockbuster, but they don't CARE if its a great game, just that a bunch of us buy it.

TLDR... im sick of these type of regenerating health marksman based, who-can-twitch-their-fingers-faster type FPS games.

I want to shoot a rocket at my feet and launch myself 20 feet into the air so that I can switch weapons, equip a jetpack and fire a 6 foot wide laser beam into someone's face.

I'm tired of hiding behind walls because OWW it hurts to be shot oh but its sooo reallll *yawn*

 

[Zen Toombs]

Yeah, but DAII wasnt a terrible game, it was terrible compared to DA:O/what people were expecting. Just looking at it from a neutral perspective, its simply mediocre, nothing more and nothing less.

This reminds me of what happened with Portal 2: It was a fantastic game, but it will always be in the uncomfortable position of being compared to Portal 1.[footnote]I didn't realize until halfway through writing that statement that I was basically quoting Yahtzee. *shrug*, I thought the same thing.[/footnote] I feel that most AAA games are in the same general position, in that they need to live up to expectations that are often unreasonable.