AAA RPGs are successes more often than not...why aren't they tried more often?

[SageShinigami]

Because only a few developers created RPGs that penetrated into the mainstream market: Bethesda, Bioware, CDPR, and maybe a few others. Developers like Obsidian and Larian are beloved by hardcore RPG fans but their games don't sell as much to non-RPG lovers. It's hard to create a massively popular AAA RPG--it happens only a few times in a generation. It doesn't help that RPG games are normally harder (and more expensive) to develop because of their branching questlines and very varied character customization compared to non-RPG games.

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NGL when I see isometric even as someone who plays largely RPGs my eyes glaze over, so that's why I haven't gotten involved in Larian games. Having said that, Larian seems to be gaining some fame. I think they've grown considerably since Divinity: Original Sin and I think BG3 is going to be a decent sized hit.

Obsidian needs the budget and to make a specific franchise and commit to it.

 

[Teeth]

That changes the thread into a completely different subject. If it's that important to you I'd ask you make a thread of your own?

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I mean, i'm only pedantically bringing up the "what makes an RPG and RPG" because it supersedes the question you're asking.

Or to put it simply: Almost every AAA game is an RPG these days.

 

[iksenpets]

They're big and hard to make, and I'm not sure how many people buy them who wouldn't also by your smaller action adventure title with light RPG elements, so you just make the smaller one

 

[MatrixMan.exe]

They are colossally expensive to make.

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This. Expensive and time consuming. Doesn't matter if they're generally successful, they're still a massive risk for any publisher and / developer for those two reasons.

 

[Exposure]

I mean, aren't we seeing more companies try it now? Like just looking at the Western space:

We got Aspyr Media working on a KOTOR Successor.

Microsoft's got Fable, Avowed, and an unannounced inXile RPG.

Bethesda is of course Starfield and Elder Scrolls VI currently lined up, though the latter is still probably the farthest away of all the projects I can think of atm.

EA just recently decided that they would actually commit to a single player DA4 instead of Anthem Next.

And of course Ubisoft's just blending the concept of a RPG into all their games nowadays.

Plus major indie games like Larian's Baldur's Gate 3.

It's just that if you're doing a big budget RPG, it's just going take a lot of time to actually get to that point of release considering the scale of budgets nowadays.

 

[werezompire]

Marvel's Avengers is a recent AAA RPG that has been losing a lot of money.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, Too Human, and Hellgate: London are all all big budget RPGs of the past that were huge disasters.

 

[TheUnsungHero26]

Considering that BioWare was running out of money before it was bought by EA and they had a lot of critically acclaimed games before then, I don't think it's easy to judge how financially sucessful a game is as easy as you think OP.

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What's your source for this? Before being bought by EA, BioWare and Pandemic merged and were invested in by by Elevation Partners. They were also receiving funding from Microsoft for the Mass Effect series.

EA bought BioWare before Dragon Age even existed. Critically acclaimed and high-selling aren't the same thing.

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This semantics, but Dragon Age was pretty deep in development by the time EA bought them. In fact, it was announced before Mass Effect.

 

[Greywaren]

They're very expensive and very hard to make. It can pay off if they're successful, but they're a big risk, so it's understandable that they're not more frequent.

 

[rras1994]

What's your source for this? Before being bought by EA, BioWare and Pandemic merged and were invested in by by Elevation Partners. They were also receiving funding from Microsoft for the Mass Effect series.


This semantics, but Dragon Age was pretty deep in development by the time EA bought them. In fact, it was announced before Mass Effect.

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David Gaider said this at a Haven Con but I think it's now deleted that before BioWare were bought out they were running out of money, I was just shortening it to EA as pretty sure they were bought out by EA not long after that merging. Also have read the BioWare 25 years anniversary book and you get the distinct impression from it that they were basically going from project to project just making enough to make ends meet. Perhaps not that unsual for an independant studio though. Jade Empire though apparently wasn't profitable.

 

[platypotamus]

I was just talking about this with some game dev friends while discussing the Bloodlines 2 news... and yeah, I wouldnt want to try to make a game like this today. Like, when we made the first one, our team size maxed out at like 35ish devs. No wonder it was buggy and delayed!

I feel like there was a bit of an underestimation of the work for taking a western style RPG into first person.

I work with a team size of like 150 now. If we had been the studio making Bloodlines 2... 150 isnt enough for that game with modern AAA expectations, unless the schedule is loooooooooooooong. Like Bloodlines 1 had like... 4 environmental artists? I think you'd need a world art team the size of our whole dev team from the first game, at least. There was a point on Vampire where one of the character artists did the shipping models for Janette, Therese, and Therette like... I dunno in an afternoon? That's literally weeks to months of work from multiple artists these days.

All that stuff is kind of basic all games are more expensive now shit tho. RPGs are an order of magnitude worse, if they are in anyway open to player choices and branching. Y'all know about how many big bugs Bloodlines 1 shipped with. You have no idea how many got caught before. I had doubts about beating the game as a Nosferatu so I did my own playthrough when we were "locked down" before going gold, and I discovered a haven bug that blocked progress, which I then fixed. Our QA team was pretty good, just not big enough, and our game had some many variables it was really hard to test thoroughly with the manpower we had.

I don't think it is super widely understood amongst gaming fans how much the constant push for higher fidelity costs, not in terms of money per se, but in terms of what AAA games choose fidelity OVER, because we have time to make it look good or we have time to add this other feature, but not both.

 

[MatrixMan.exe]

Marvel's Avengers is a recent AAA RPG that has been losing a lot of money.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, Too Human, and Hellgate: London are all all big budget RPGs of the past that were huge disasters.

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Was Kingdoms of Amalur a huge disaster? I thought it did okay, at least enough for EA to do port.

 

[Jawmuncher]

You don't need to make a AAA RPG when you can just cram some RPG mechanics into whatever you're making instead.

 

[Open Wound]

(Western) RPGs are long games, with tons of customization and gameplay options, plus tons of variables in quests and dialogues. They're very hard to make.

AAA games are super detailed and highly polished (ehhhh... very much not true, but still what's usually refered as "jank" is less prominent the more money put into them), and require a ton of people to deliver those highly detailed characters, stunning environments, and gorgeous animations, which means they're hard and expensive as fuck to make.

Combine the two and boooooom, it's a very hard genre to work with in an industry where nothing is easy. That's the reason why some "jank" that would be unacceptable in a Naughty Dog game is running rampant in CD Projekt games, or Bethesda games, or even Bioware ones.

Still, I think The Witcher 3 success has made an impact. Horizon and the 3 Assassin's Creed games, while toeing the line between genres, are clear efforts to get in that market.

Good news for the future though, InXile and Obsidian will be doing true AAA RPGs now thanks to that sweet MS cash (and hopefully Pillars 3. Pretty please? It will be good fodder for Game Pass, I promise!).

 

[Deleted member 46948]

RPG means japanese voice, story, anime, turn based battle or even ATB system.

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Uhhhhh....

 

[TheUnsungHero26]

David Gaider said this at a Haven Con but I think it's now deleted that before BioWare were bought out they were running out of money, I was just shortening it to EA as pretty sure they were bought out by EA not long after that merging. Also have read the BioWare 25 years anniversary book and you get the distinct impression from it that they were basically going from project to project just making enough to make ends meet. Perhaps not that unsual for an independant studio though. Jade Empire though apparently wasn't profitable.

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Makes sense as to why the Pandemic/Elevation Merger happened then. That would have been around the time Jade Empire released.

I recall Microsoft wanted to acquire them around 2006-2007, but the merger complicated that.

 

[GamerJM]

I mean the AAA in the name basically implies that the capital to make such games is limited to a handful companies in the industry, and they're hue investments for those companies.

Also they're not actually that rare? We have FF16, Elder Scrolls 6, Starfield on the horizon. We just got Cyberpunk. There's also stuff like Horizon and God of War that have RPG elements.

 

[MayorReynoldsTV]

I was actually thinking the opposite of this recently. Many of the big RPG's that are launching are failing and inflicting massive damage on their developers. Cyberpunk and Anthem come to mind.

 

[SageShinigami]

I mean, i'm only pedantically bringing up the "what makes an RPG and RPG" because it supersedes the question you're asking.

Or to put it simply: Almost every AAA game is an RPG these days.

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Literally every post you're making in this thread makes the thread's existence pointless lmao. Because before we ask the question of the thread, we have to ask "what makes an RPG an RPG", and yes I already knew that and I didn't wanna have that discussion lmao. I suppose I should've codified it in the OP.

Marvel's Avengers is a recent AAA RPG that has been losing a lot of money.

Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, Too Human, and Hellgate: London are all all big budget RPGs of the past that were huge disasters.

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Reckoning actually was not a disaster. This was my favorite video game of Gen 7 so I followed it pretty closely. Reckoning performed well, but the studio mismanaged everything around it. So even though it's one of those projects that sold decently (two million copies at launch I believe) and was a "good start", it never got a second game because the guy in charge was a knob.

The other two you got me on. As for Marvel's Avengers, I think if it'd been an actual RPG instead of a Destiny-like RPG it would have been a bit more liked by fans going in, even if the glitchiness of the game would've probably sunk it eventually.

 

[Magic Mushroom]

I mean the AAA in the name basically implies that the capital to make such games is limited to a handful companies in the industry, and they're hue investments for those companies.

Also they're not actually that rare? We have FF16, Elder Scrolls 6, Starfield on the horizon. We just got Cyberpunk. There's also stuff like Horizon and God of War that have RPG elements.

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Yeah. I don't think they're rare at all. On top of the ones you mention, there is a new Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Fable, Avowed, Project Athea, Elden Ring and probably some others I forgot.

 

[SageShinigami]

I was actually thinking the opposite of this recently. Many of the big RPG's that are launching are failing and inflicting massive damage on their developers. Cyberpunk and Anthem come to mind.

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Cyberpunk sold some absurd number of copies, reviewed well, and has a MASSIVE defense force of people who either think the game is good or think it would be great if they "just got rid of the bugs". The only reason it failed was because they launched it too early--if they'd delayed it into this Fall it likely would've been even more of a critical darling than it was.

Anthem was a failure, but again. More of a Destiny-like with RPG elements.

 

[ThereAreFourNaan]

Note also that almost every big game is an RPG or pseudo-RPG these days. The genre has always been nebulous once it merged with action gameplay, but in 2021 like 80% of aaa games have character progression systems, crafting systems and all that jazz.

 

[werezompire]

Reckoning actually was not a disaster. This was my favorite video game of Gen 7 so I followed it pretty closely. Reckoning performed well, but the studio mismanaged everything around it. So even though it's one of those projects that sold decently (two million copies at launch I believe) and was a "good start", it never got a second game because the guy in charge was a knob.

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You can't look at AAA game and see it sold a lot and call it a success without comparing it to the budget involved. And AAA games by the very definition have massive budgets.

NPD estimated 330k sales at launch. The founder of the company said that they had sold 1.2 million by the 3 month mark. The governor of Rhode Island (the company borrowed a lot of money from Rhode Island to make the game) said that the game needed to sell 3 million copies just to break even.

They released the game, couldn't pay back the loan they took out to develop the game and went bankrupt. Releasing a game and going bankrupt because it didn't make enough money is a disaster.

 

[Cerulean_skylark]

I think the issue I have is that most of the games OP cited are all either sequels to proven series, some of which started when games at the AAA level were much cheaper to make, or they did not start as AAA games, the Witcher 1 was not AAA.

I cannot think of a brand new AAA rpg other than maybe cyberpunk, and that was a developer that was at the time beloved and had so many problems.