By releasing the same game over and over for the most part, just with minor changes to the formula. Same engine, same mechanics, same style, same aesthetic, etc.
I agree and disagree at the same time here. AAA should and used to signify a higher level of quality. Lately, though, it seems like they finally realized they could shovel shit and still turn a buck.
Even with some negative accounts, other FromSoftware employees said working at the studio has been a great experience. One employee even likened it to FromSoftware’s own Dark Souls, saying, “There’s a lot of struggle to get things right, but if you get over the hump it is very satisfying. It’s just like you defeated a boss in Dark Souls.”
I’m not sure if we should be approaching work like Dark Souls.
I wouldn’t be surprised, but you also get those claims with a lot of Western developers as well. The only difference I’m seeing is how much more reputation is valued as opposed to something that can be sold off to the highest bidder.
I’d say it’s more because they’ve established a reputation and they’ve kept it up, which is were Japanese culture really shines. Compare it to, say, Blizzard, which cashed out and pissed its reputation away mostly. Sure, Japanese companies will try to cash out sometimes, but if there’s the possibility of them losing their reputation because of it, they will back off even at a loss and try to make up for it. Do not confuse with South Korean companies, by the way.
Are we just going to pretend Armored Core 6 wasn’t a development hell for a good while to the point that the original producer left to do Daemon X Machina?
Daemon X Machina features two prominent people behind the helm: producer Kenichiro Tsukuda and mecha designer Shoji Kawamori, who also worked together on the Armored Core series.
This is for staff, the hell comes from rumors about armored core 6 being made way before Daemon started it’s marketing cycle, then suddenly we have AC staff on marvelous instead of from, just do the math.
Feel free to do the math for me, because I just don’t see it.
Tsukuda hasn’t worked on armored core since 3, he was long gone from FROM before Armored Core 6 was even an idea.
Kawamori did mecha designs for Armored Core 6.
FROM said Armored Core 6 is in early development in 2016
Daemon x machina came out in 2019
The director of Armored Core 6 was Masaru Yamamura who worked on Sekiro until 2019, so outside of concept art and maybe early prototypes no major work had been done on Armored Core 6 before 2019.
At what point was the rumored development hell that you still haven’t sourced?
Did the development start in hell? Because the Daemon x machina producer, who according to you left FROM because AC6 was in development hell, presented Daemon x machina in 2018. At that point AC6 had already been in “development hell for a good while”, but they had only been in development for 2 years?
That’s not at all unusual. In fact, bigger studios will often have a few very small teams working on game concepts for years, to test an idea without spending too many resources.
what the hell does the number of As even mean? how does one quantify how many As your game has? if I made a game today and shipped it how many As could I get today?
It fits with my understanding as well, but comes from investment grade bond ratings where AAA usually signifies the highest quality (i.e. the best chance of getting paid back). A AA bond is still a good bond, but it has a higher risk of default.
But in practice, I just see AAA as a “high budget production,” both in development costs and marketing. It doesn’t mean it’s a better product, just one with a lot more money on the line.
You don't have to actually finish the game when a bunch of marks will treat every bug and inconsistency as some grand difficulty hurdle and some deep lore the normies don't understand
So frequently? Dude it’s been like 2 years since they announced DLC for their last game and it’s only finally coming this June assuming it does not get delayed.
But...they don't? Their mainline games are always a few years apart (with the exception of Bloodborne, which they had a separate team doing concurrently).
Unless you're referring to the other games they publish that no one really knows about or comments on? I don't think Metal Wolf Chaos XD, Déraciné, or Monster Hunter Diary: Poka Poka Airou Village DX should really factor into the discussion.
2-3 years is a very fast turnaround time these days and that’s where From is at. Look at Horizon by comparison. It was 5 years between the Horizon games despite using the same engine and some of the same assets.
Horizon is a bigger game with more cinematics and voice acting, so that’s part of it. But From is definitely faster at pushing out AAA games than most studios.
I’ve been replaying the Arkham games, and I was thinking about that. The first one came out in 2009, and the second came out in 2011. That’s a pretty quick turnaround for a video game sequel, even if they had started making City immediately after finishing Asylum.
For starters they keep making mostly the same game over and over. They're essentially doing the Bethesda shtick except their end results are better. Sticking to stuff that can mostly be made in the same engine as the thing you finished 15 minutes ago is going to shave off a lot of time compared to making a new game.
Of course that's not to shit on incremental improvements or engine reuse or anything. That is just sound thinking as long as the games are good.
You’re totally right. I’m a fan of the Xenoblade series and it’s obvious that they use the same engine with some slightly different tweaks and mechanics.
All of the 2D Mario platformers are the same format with unique aspects on top. The same can be said for the 3D games, but it couldn’t be said about the Super Mario series as a whole.
The mechanics are pretty different. Grappling (both terrain and enemies), high vertical jumping, less equipment (but strong diverse builds) and very different combat mechanics with deathblows.
I don’t know if it could be much different without literally changing genres.
I mean, make no mistake, it is fundementally different in lots of ways, but in terms of what the engine needs to do to work, what the character needs to do, how the player interacts with the world, at those basic building block production points Sekiro is almost the same as Dark Souls, I so can agree there.
Sekiro can jump, climb, grapple and swim. Those kinds of more agile behaviors add a lot requirements and considerations to the engine and content makers.
Definitely, but I'm also agreeing that a hugely significant chunk of what they'd already accomplished could save time when moving on to Sekiro. They did of course have to work on the engine and new mechanics as well, but it was far from starting from scratch.
I love the Dark Souls games. I use two moves in those games: swing big sword, dodge.
In Sekiro, there were many more moves I was forced to use, with precise timing, and split second reads to know which moves I needed to use. My aging brain cannot do that. So I didn’t enjoy Sekiro.
There is an art to parrying. It’s a deep rabbithole with parrying frames, different weapons being better or worse, and a lot of practice. Parrying in Sekiro is way different than souls parry
It looks fun as hell if you can get it down, but it was just too difficult for me. I really didn’t enjoy dying repeatedly until I figured out the rhythm. The other soulsborne games felt more fair somehow, and often give you a way to make the boss fights significantly easier.
There’s a candy you can use to reduce posture damage so you can start out just holding block instead of trying to parry. That can make learning attacks and timings much easier.
Almost every mini boss can be backstabbed
Most can be made much easier with the right prosthetic tool
Well, it’s still the same as Dark Souls. Engine wise, it’s the same. Someone who made models for Souls, can make models for Sekiro. The debugging tooling is the same, etc etc.
The best example of this is actually Armored Core. They used their engine again, yet the game obviously plays different than anything else they released. And yet, it’s the same techstack, the same engine and the same programmers. Nothing changed.
Compare that to the jump from Oblivion to Skyrim, the engine is no longer recognizable. The models need to be of a very different quality. Etc etc.
To anyone who’s played the games it’s very evidently exactly the same engine used in Morrowind, running on faster hardware and with less functionality due to it being unable to handle the higher quality graphics. (Morrowind had mostly open cities - except for Vivec - and flying, for instance; later games had to sacrifice those and add more and more loading screens…)
It’s the same gameplay concept on a basic level, but that simply comes with the genre. I don’t think you could really change much more than they did without changing genres.
The three games I was most interested in last year were Kerbal Space Program 2, Cities Skylines 2, and Zelda Tears of the Kingdom. Two of them had newly designed game engines. The third used the engine from the previous game.
Guess which one I enjoyed playing the most?
In software development sometimes you do have to rewrite some code to improve things. But if you have something that functions really well, it’s better to be just continually making improvements. A lot of what makes a game great is going to be artwork, story, creative level design, creative enemy design, etc. But all of that work can be wasted if the software is buggy, which will happen if most or all of the code is written on a tight deadline.
I’d like to add that from a technical point of view, their games don’t really push the boundaries and at least on PC, their games often aren’t the most polished. Elden Ring had severe shader compilation stutter at launch and a 60 FPS limit - which is a big no-no on PC if you ask me. Nothing game breaking like the state some publishers (EA) release their games in, but not great either.
Not to mention they were actively hostile towards ultrawide gamers. The engine would render it, but then put black bars overtop the sides. Kind of amazing really that level of hatred towards gamers.
I think it’s less hatred and more… Not understanding the wider audience, afaik it’s just not as common in Japan for uw to be a thing in general. Also it adds even more complexity to performance tuning which… They’re not known for. They clearly make games targeted for consoles over PC, the Bethesda comparison is pretty apt in engine reuse and odd decisions to limit fps/uw gaming, Bethesda is at least more open towards modding, but they also don’t make multiplayer games mainly, and while the MP aspects of FromSoft games are unusual, it’s definitely a large part of the appeal/design process and does inherently limit modding due to cheating.
It’s not common, period, but because the people most likely to brag about a setup are those with more money than good sense, it gets misrepresented. Same deal with top of the line hardware – look at Steam surveys, most people are still gaming with 5+ year old hardware.
I guess that makes sense, if it’s not that common … but then … why go OUT OF YOUR WAY to make the experience worse? It’s like, why didn’t they just say “oh hey, they have a wide monitor, nice!” but instead they said “oh hey, they have wide monitor, GO FUCK YOURSELF”
There was a time when 16:9 was also weird because 4:3 was the norm. I wouldn’t call it weird, I think over the next decade it’s going to become a bigger norm in PC gaming.
I was a sceptic as well but when I needed a new monitor and saw a decent UW monitor for cheap I decided to give it shot, after all if it sucks I’ll just use it in 16:9. Turns out it’s one of those “once you try you can’t go back” things. I love it for gaming, it feels so much more immersive. So much that 16:9 feels small and constrained. It’s just a superior experience in my humble opinion.
I don’t think UW is a, must for games, I’m well aware how small minority UW monitors are. But having UW support increases my enjoyment of the game.
This studio is not just known for an even by Japanese standards exploitative work culture, but it also reuses assets of all kinds far more liberally than other developers. Art is by far the biggest cost factor in games development and they are taking significant shortcuts wherever they can.
I will say that reusing assets is 100% okay, and I actually wish more studios did this. You don’t need to make everything from scratch. It’s okay to reuse the thing you made previously.
I dunno. If the dlc is like the rest of the game and I see the same dungeon changed slightly 20 times I’m going to be disappointed. But I guess that’s what reviews are for.
Note a difference between that and what we’re talking about. We’re saying that if you modeled a table in your previous game, just use that same table again.
Repetitive use of assets within a single game is another thing
Like that recent thing where people were talking about how a Halo map used a single rock in it, just scaled and rotated in different ways. Clever recycling of assets happens all the time and people never even notice. Even in the trailer for Shadow of the Erdtree, you can see they reused some model rigs - like how Messmer has the same standing idle pose as the Cleanrot Knights (though knowing FromSoft, there’s probably some lore implications behind it).
Though, if they make us fight a pair of Ulcerated Tree Spirits in a Scarlet Rot room or something, I might have some unkind words to say…
Elden ring dungeons and dungeon bosses did get kinda samey. But god i did not care, there was a list of i think 120 bosses in the game, and i had to be sure each and every one got murdered. I honestly hope this new dlc is a window to the past and the whole ass map gets reused to form the new lands, and we get another 120 bosses to slay.
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