I see that as a failure of the term AAA, but I might just be underestimating the size of Larian's team. I've always understood AAA to mean funded by a publisher.
Larian has a massive team and tons of money for BG3. It's insulting to indies and to BG3 to pretend BG3 is anything other than the product of hundreds of hardworking team members.
I enjoy many indies more than I've enjoyed BG3 so far, but that speaks more to the fact that production scale and enjoyment do not scale linearly. BG3 remains a behemoth of a project, however.
Yeah, I have already been corrected. I think the reason I assumed it had a smaller team was because the team clearly loved the game and you don't see that often in gaming outside of small-team projects.
I Always forget that Nintendo games are Triple A,
I always get that indie dev vibe in spite of being as far from indie as one can get. Not in community engagement, rather in the notable detail and unique art style each game has, like you can tell the developers care about what they're working on. You can definitely tell when Nintendo themselves develop a game vs. when they publish a game. (cough Game Freak cough)
There were countless developers that folded during the transition to HD, 3D graphics in the PS360 era, and I feel like Gamefreak would have easily been one of them if Pokemon hadn’t taken off the way it did.
You have to wonder if they ever played Cyberpunk 2077 (incl. Phantom Liberty) before they came up with that line. The only AAAA game. Maybe not the best game ever, but it definitely felt like the most expensive game ever.
I played base Cyberpunk and I'd like to refund the 60h I played. Thankfully I pirated it, I would not have payed a dime. However I hear comments like: "Phantom Liberty is what the game should be" I watched no spoilers, is it worth playing for me if I despised the base game?
I don't know how much I played down to the minute, but that's a good estimation. The reason is because I really would love to love this game. Everything is just a bit off from being good, after that shitass ending and copy-pasted sidecontent, I got so mad at the little things that the whole domino stack fell.
It's one of the newest RPGs yet it playes like (or worse tbh) than Skyrim. It rivals for best graphics, yet there is no life anywhere. The story urges you to play thur fast, yet the game wants you to discover every corner, making a huge disconnect between narrative and gameplay. The skill tree is so bad, I don't even want to talk about it, let's just act it doesn't exist. The drip in the game is rarer that in Elden Ring. Weapon modding is discouraged as all mods (at least shat I got) are bad and unremovable. Gun play isn't that bad, I give you that much. However, the guns that you choose to shoot (mostly the how you choose it) is bad, if higher fps than let's switch. All cybernetic augments are either skill tree replacements or fucking expensive good for nothings. The "hacking" in the game took everything that was bad from Watch Dogs and watered it down to a soulless version. The NPC's AI are super fucking dumb. Stealt is literally not an option because of this, it's a flagship openworld rpg, what you mean I can't stealth. The origin selection is a scam. They did nothing with braindance, yet it has a whole storyline. They did nothing with Johnny yet it's the whole fucking game somehow.
I could explain all of these points in a paragraph, however I don't have the time. I won't even proof-read, it might have a bunch of errors, it is what it is.
I'm surprised that they even thought that they would come even close to outperforming the AAAA battery and even dared to put themselves on the same level as it.
I know a lot of people really enjoyed this game, but I couldn’t play more than a few hours despite loving Doom 2016. Restricted ammo quantity really killed the enjoyment for me. Adding Denuvo only after it was reviewed was a really shitty move and the soundtrack isn’t as good either now that I think of it.