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<blockquote data-quote="Ruin Explorer" data-source="post: 8211187" data-attributes="member: 18">AAA has nothing to do with how many people play them - it's solely a matter of budget and the aims of the developers. In the '00s and early '10s quite a number of AAA games basically &quot;sank without a trace&quot;, having had a huge amount spent on them and yet being bought by very few people - that didn't make them &quot;not AAA&quot;, it made them unsuccessful. Developers and publishers have got a lot better at mitigating that though, especially with the move to digital delivery as basically the primary way people get games meaning that if a game is sinking, a bit of advertising and a massive price cut can often get a decent amount of sales in and when the price goes back up it's quite likely people will keep buying it because now it's on people's radar.Call of Duty is complicated by the fact that it's more of a GaaS than an actual game, so one game bleeds into the next, and players are supposed to constantly spend on DLC, season passes, subscriptions of various kinds and so on - this has been referred to as AAA+ - <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_(video_game_industry)#AAA+" target="_blank">AAA (video game industry) - Wikipedia</a>BG3 is looking pretty good at the moment, but still has Larian's recurrent issue - an inability to make an NPC/companion who isn't, on some level, a massive jerk. Even if they make someone who seems nice, they always seem to have contrive a way to ruin it. This stands in stark contrast to people like Bioware and Obsidian, who can write flawed and difficult characters but not make them obnoxious (or at least not make most/all of them obnoxious). To be fair, Larian do seem to be aware of this, and have been trying to both tone it down and saying that these are the jerkier characters, and less jerky ones will be added, but I remain skeptical.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Ruin Explorer, post: 8211187, member: 18"] AAA has nothing to do with how many people play them - it's solely a matter of budget and the aims of the developers. In the '00s and early '10s quite a number of AAA games basically "sank without a trace", having had a huge amount spent on them and yet being bought by very few people - that didn't make them "not AAA", it made them unsuccessful. Developers and publishers have got a lot better at mitigating that though, especially with the move to digital delivery as basically the primary way people get games meaning that if a game is sinking, a bit of advertising and a massive price cut can often get a decent amount of sales in and when the price goes back up it's quite likely people will keep buying it because now it's on people's radar. Call of Duty is complicated by the fact that it's more of a GaaS than an actual game, so one game bleeds into the next, and players are supposed to constantly spend on DLC, season passes, subscriptions of various kinds and so on - this has been referred to as AAA+ - [URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AAA_(video_game_industry)#AAA+"]AAA (video game industry) - Wikipedia[/URL] BG3 is looking pretty good at the moment, but still has Larian's recurrent issue - an inability to make an NPC/companion who isn't, on some level, a massive jerk. Even if they make someone who seems nice, they always seem to have contrive a way to ruin it. This stands in stark contrast to people like Bioware and Obsidian, who can write flawed and difficult characters but not make them obnoxious (or at least not make most/all of them obnoxious). To be fair, Larian do seem to be aware of this, and have been trying to both tone it down and saying that these are the jerkier characters, and less jerky ones will be added, but I remain skeptical. [/QUOTE]

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