Scientists prove that AAA gaming sucks.

[DevilMyEyes]

8 hours ago, The BMFG said:

most modern triple a games ive seen have turned out as just complete rubbish or a disaster launch. the only triple a companies im really interested in are id software and monolith. monolith made my absolute favorite game of all time

seriously shadow of war is a masterpiece

 

How about From Software?

[Budoka]

8 hours ago, 7Mahonin said:

I barely get interested in new AAA games. They have turned multiplayer into a money making scheme. DLC is used for trivial bullshit that in games of yesteryear would’ve been featured as unlockables either by finding secrets, items, or even just replaying on different difficulties, etc. Everything that has sold well gets rereleased sooner and sooner too, and multiple times at that. This stuff, and much more I don’t feel like typing out right now, annoys me, but you know what? We can’t blame the people making this shit up and selling it at this point. The blame is now on the people who continue to throw money into these schemes that make gaming like it is now. 

 

Exactly. As the cliche goes, vote with your wallet and all that. But, don't just say it. DO IT. I see too many people involved pop culture consumption in general who for some incomprehensible reason, when they expect an upcoming product to suck, proceed to get it anyway as if it's somehow the only possible option, and then whine like they're upset when it turns out the product sucks about as much as they knew it would. It's like, this behavior literally makes no sense, what else were you expecting? If you want a certain type of content to cease growing, don't engage with it. As long as you insist on paying attention, the people behind it have zero incentive to rethink their approach, and they're not going to no matter how much some people angrily scream at them about what they do.

 

I agree that level grinding has similar issues by the way, which is why I've never fought most of the superbosses in FF10. I overcame the ones in the earlier titles by circumventing whatever weaknesses I might have had due to my lack of grinding. The caveat being that when there's a way to do that, I want to be the one who figures it out, because copying a GameFAQs strat to the letter isn't exactly engagement.

 

[hybridial]

There's definitely some truth to this, about compulsions being unhealthy. I recently got an Xbox Series X, I stepped back into the AAA sphere of games, I checked out some that seemed interesting to me, including Sega's Judgement, Immortal's Fenyx Rising, the Hitman trilogy. 

 

I put lets say 30+ hours into each of those, maybe enough to get halfway through them. Here's the kicker, I think they are very good games. But I really lost interest by this point in them for varying reasons. But when you spent a fair amount of money to be able to play these games, I felt those compulsions. It wasn't like late last year when I really wanted to play Shin Megami Tensei V, and I was very focused on doing that. I played through the whole thing and I had a really good time; I'm not sure if the switch will get used a lot for other stuff but I do have some Mario games. The experience with the Xbox has mostly not been the same unfortunately. The end result was I only really succeeded in making another health problem I have worse, because I have RSI issues in my hands that can be triggered by too much gameplay over a given period of time. And I was aware that in the last couple of years because I completely abandoned mainstream AAA games in favour of stuff like retro shooters and platformers, games I picked because they explicitly are like games I used to play in my early teens when gaming felt far more like a fun pastime. And I didn't really struggle with those problems because I never played too much. Obviously the pain affected me and led me to quite harsh negative feeling about the way I was using my time, so I would definitely accept that this is a personal example. But when I decided to just drop them, unplug the Xbox, and definitely considering just selling it but I'll give it some time to ensure it's what I want, I felt a whole lot better just playing some Postal BD and Sonic Mania on my PC. 

 

It seems like common sense, if you are being compelled to do something that is only having a negative effect on you, stop doing it. But I get the feeling it's not always that simple, it really took me being in quite a pit before I resolved to change things up again. I feel now that this is going to permanently affect how I approach videogames, and is probably a good thing.

 

I think modern game design can be too insistent on people's time. It will affect different people differently and there certainly will be plenty of people who that won't be a problem for, but I have seen myself how easy it can be to fall into rather unhealthy patterns without realising.

 

 

[heliumlamb]

my earlier Caffeine Psychosis Inspired e-sport's ramblings aside (many such cases, always hurts to see), my issues with "game store" is only when it relates to real-life money. csgo skins in particular are some absolutely cursed bonkers shit. adding genuine gambling of virtual goods and poor-shame flexing into a tense competitive video game which is a already a caustic zone by default without the need for text or voice chat, just lol. it makes me very sad.

i have a feeling there will be a bit of a shift in the attitude espoused by independently developed games. a combination of blender, trenchbroom, godot, and the qodot plugin which lets you import quake .map files into godot gives those willing to learn a completely free and free to use set of tools to put a 3D game together with. trenchbroom is on par with doom builder 2 in its flow, a phenomenal tool to create brush-based environments. if cruelty squad is just the beginning of what there is to be done with those tools? let's get to it. it's gonna be hard to out-pretense someone like j. blow, like you would have to be be trying hard to be that pretentious.

 

4 minutes ago, DevilMyEyes said:

How about From Software?

they need to make something in first person again, it's been demon's darks nonstop for pretty much a decade at this point.
 

Spoiler

still love them, if armored core vi never comes around, i will be still be eternally grateful for all they have made.

 

[Rudolph]

Weirdly enough, once I reached Level 72 with my Moze character in Borderlands 3, the game started feeling actually meaningless all of a sudden. I started playing the Hammerlock DLC, which looked great and all, but, I do not know, I was no longer enjoying myself. 

 

I mean, there is technically still a lot to do in addition to going through all the DLC campaigns (improving my build even further, unlocking Vault Card rewards, etc.), but I do not know... I am not sure if it is because I can no longer get more skill points or if it is because I just need a break from the game after playing through it four times already. 

 

In a way, I hate that most RPGs require me to play them over and over in order to unlock new difficulty modes. As controversial as it was, Diablo III at least had the good idea of getting rid of that mechanic in favor of a reworked difficulty system that made enemies and loot scale and that gave you the ability to increase or decrease enemy health and drop chances. Technically, Borderlands 3's system works in a similar manner with the Guardian Rank points, the Vault Card system and Mayhem Mode, but it is not quite the same, especially because Mayhem Mode comes with randomly-assigned modifiers that can make the game considerably more frustrating.

[GooberMan]

Having worked on a BAFTA-award-winning AAA game with no microtransactions and a reputation for requiring a high degree of skill, I feel I should point out that the game likely to win the same BAFTA next year can be described in the same manner.

 

And that the AAA game that's likely to win the same award next year has many players saying how rewarding it is to progress after grinding out better weapons and stats points to get past their progression blocker.

 

You basically can't release a mobile game without the practices highlighted here - unless you expect to make $bugger-all from your game.

 

These practices continue to make money. The gnashing of teeth that they suck is a sentiment that I share, and entirely expected from a community based around a nearly-29-year-old game where satisfaction for most comes from freely-available user made content.

[The BMFG]

1 hour ago, DevilMyEyes said:

How about From Software?

never played a title from them before if im being fully honest

[PKr]

I started to notice this trend somewhere around ~2008. Or rather, I didn't notice it straight away, but in a retrospect I want to call ~2008 the "beginning of an end". I am not sure why this particular year stands out for me as a "fall of 'AAA' video games", but there MUST be something that has changed about video game releases that year. Maybe it's an adaptation of "Oblivion Horse Armor" on a mass scale? Or maybe it's the release of Assassin's Creed in late 2007 that opened the door for AC clones, and almost every video game franchise has become AC in one way or another? Or maybe it's something else entirely - I don't know.

 

That said a decade or so ago I promised myself to never bother with this topic again since it lead me to a lot of frustration and disappointments, and I simply stopped caring about AAA games all together.

 

Nowadays I follow a simple rule to determine the quality of the game, to distinguish whether I like the game or if there is some "marketing trick" that's being played on me to make me play the game: after an hour or so I consciously ask myself whether I would be ok with losing my save file (due to a bug or something) and starting the game over again? If the answer is yes, then it means I like the game. If not, then I refund the game, and forget about it forever. Just like that.

 

I have already mentioned this in another topic on this forum, but I guess this could be a good advice for people who can't understand whether they are playing the game for fun, or see games as "another job".

[ReaperAA]

22 minutes ago, The BMFG said:

never played a title from them before if im being fully honest

 

Finally someone like me. Never played a single From Software game as I have next to zero interest in their main games like Dark/Demon's Souls and Elden Ring.

[heliumlamb]

28 minutes ago, The BMFG said:

never played a title from them before if im being fully honest

 

3 minutes ago, ReaperAA said:

 

Finally someone like me. Never played a single From Software game as I have next to zero interest in their main games like Dark/Demon's Souls and Elden Ring.

if yall play at least one of from's soft wares, make sure it's either evergrace or king's field iv/the ancient city

[mrthejoshmon]

Keep thinking about writing a long post explaining how AAA gaming is wank but you really don't need me to do that, you're a functional human being (presumably).

 

EDIT: Nah play Armored Core, you're missing out on those games.

[DevilMyEyes]

17 minutes ago, ReaperAA said:

 

Finally someone like me. Never played a single From Software game as I have next to zero interest in their main games like Dark/Demon's Souls and Elden Ring.

I was about to say that you could check out Bloodborne but if you have no interest on souls type of games then that's fine (Bloodborne's also kinda tricky to get because it's a ps4 exclusive, at least rn).

[Gez]

4 hours ago, Graf Zahl said:

I don't think so. Younger people who grew up on games that became ever more photorealistic will have to change their expectations to accept graphical standards from 20 years ago. And not all will.

It's not "caring about graphics", but learning to accept a very different artistic standard than what is technically doable today.

There are tons of kids playing games such as Minecraft, Terraria, Stardew Valley and the likes which have very simplistic or retro graphics.

15 hours ago, scalliano said:

I can speak from personal experience on this - it's the reason I no longer play GTA Online and the reason I bounced the fuck off Gran Turismo 7 pretty much as soon as I rolled credits on the bugger. And the reason I don't play mobile games at all. Once a game starts to feel like a job in itself, it stops being fun. And seeing those iconic cars and garage staples from previous GT games being locked behind insurmountable sums of ingame currency just soured me on the whole experience. Of course, you could always drop a few extra quid, couldn't you? That would make the game fun again, right? And so the demon of AAA game design reveals itself.

Yep, if a game has any FOMO-fueled mechanism I'm not interested. I only want to buy games where I get to own the game, not games where there's extra content gated behind bullshit. One of the reasons why I'm not interested in Doom Eternal with its stupid collectable skins and podiums and shit.

[Kinsie]

47 minutes ago, GooberMan said:

and entirely expected from a community based around a nearly-29-year-old game where satisfaction for most comes from freely-available user made content.

A good few years ago, I had a conversation with someone at a certain, respected AAA development studio known for first person shooters. We'd been talking about Doom mods and such for a bit, and I wondered aloud about the possibilities of some of the Retro FPS style of play getting a bit of a revival, and was told that it was fairly unlikely on account of the potential market being entirely "self-serving" - they had their regular flow of mods and mapsets and were happy with those. That made sense to me, so I didn't disagree.

 

A quick glance at online retailers suggests that we were perhaps a bit off the mark with our prediction.

[Graf Zahl]

27 minutes ago, Kinsie said:

...and was told that it was fairly unlikely on account of the potential market being entirely "self-serving" - they had their regular flow of mods and mapsets and were happy with those.

 

Market analysts suck. It's a typical case of misidentifying a certain group's behavior. Yes, we love our mods - but really - getting a new professionally made game in the same art style every now and then would be even better. But how to buy if there's nothing on offer?

 

[Rudolph]

1 hour ago, GooberMan said:

Having worked on a BAFTA-award-winning AAA game with no microtransactions and a reputation for requiring a high degree of skill, I feel I should point out that the game likely to win the same BAFTA next year can be described in the same manner.

What would that game be?

 

39 minutes ago, Kinsie said:

A good few years ago, I had a conversation with someone at a certain, respected AAA development studio known for first person shooters. We'd been talking about Doom mods and such for a bit, and I wondered aloud about the possibilities of some of the Retro FPS style of play getting a bit of a revival, and was told that it was fairly unlikely on account of the potential market being entirely "self-serving" - they had their regular flow of mods and mapsets and were happy with those.

So no Classic Doom III, eh? Bummer. :(

[Budoka]

2 hours ago, Gez said:

One of the reasons why I'm not interested in Doom Eternal with its stupid collectable skins and podiums and shit.

 

I just pick my favorite cosmetics elements among the ones I've happened to acquire by sheer coincidence. Works well enough.

[CBM]

18 hours ago, scalliano said:

In a nutshell, it's better to want to play a game than to feel as if you need to.

I agree... I have stopped playing many games because of this... both mobile and pc games.

 

Doom is one of those games that I WANT to play instead of feeling like I HAVE to play it.

[7Mahonin]

7 hours ago, heliumlamb said:

they need to make something in first person again, it's been demon's darks nonstop for pretty much a decade at this point.

Yeah, I’d love to see a new King’s Field. 

[scalliano]

17 hours ago, Rudolph said:

I would object to framing the study as "proof", as science is ultimately more about sharing findings that are subject to change.

 

TBH I was being flippant for the purposes of clickbait, but point taken!

 

9 hours ago, Daytime Waitress said:

Sugar, next time there's a Gabesale, do youself a favour and grab Assetto Corsa. Tens of thousands of mods: practically any car and track combination you can imagine. And while it will chug on a true potato, if you're capable of running modern games you can crank the shit out of it thanks to some truly impressive filters - again, community provided.

I actually have AC (the first one anyway). Haven't jumped in for a good while - maybe it's time to give it another shot...

 

15 hours ago, Mr. Freeze said:

For people that don't like AAA games, you lot seem to be spilling a lot of virtual ink over them. 

I've become very selective about which big name titles I play these days - I initially gave GT7 a pass because the previous one was primarily aimed at esports with nothing for the virtual car nerds among us. Lesson well and truly learned on that one. But for the overwhelming majority of the time, I stay away from live service games because I've fallen into that trap before and it's tough to get out again.

[Doomkid]

lol when you run a YT channel based on gaming in any way, even something old like Doom, you end up getting recommendations for videos that pertain more to modern / AAA gaming. Not only that, but you end up getting plenty of comments from younger/more “modern” gamers.

 

This is probably an “old man yells at cloud” thing to the max, but the general culture of gaming and of how games are perceived by modern audiences baffles me. Everyone wants an endless supply of potato chips. Never really that enjoyable, honestly leaves you feeling kinda gross afterwards, but so easy to just mindlessly consume. The allegory of a good game being like a gourmet desert - it doesn’t last forever, but you love what you had, and look forward to having it again some time - is basically dead on the so-called AAA end of things.

 

Every game now has to have 9999999999 hours of content, more hypnotic in nature than “genuinely thrilling”, and it is usually pay-to-play in whatever roundabout, deliberately-confusing way possible, so the consumer doesn’t realise just how much money they’re pissing away on this garbage.

 

I’m just glad Doom came out when it did, in the culture it did, and was so easily modified. The cost-to-fun ratio is already incredible in stock standard Doom, even for the era.

 

This is a side rant, but old games also taught me all I ever needed to know about game design. Keep things moving at a reasonable pace, preferably erring on zippy movement and attacks. Reward the player with a sense of progress, and as soon as things even hint at getting boring or samey, know when to place the finish line. It’s supposed to be a fun break from reality, it’s not supposed to last forever - No Hypnosis Required. Keep it engaging but not enraging. Give the player new music or graphics to look at and listen to for new stretches. All kinds of great lessons that were learned, taught, and learned again over the course of two decades, all on the long gone side of the 2000s.

 

It cracks me up hearing younger gamers thinking some game from 2016 changed the world with fun mechanics/gameplay/design choices that were all done 20 years earlier :) I think that’s natural though. I see younger people acting like “lol random” humour is new too, even though it’s old as the hills. I’ve known it for a while already, but the older you get, the more you see that everything is just a slight rearrangement of what came before. Games, music, culture, language.. and grey haired people ranting about this very topic!

[GarrettChan]

13 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

It cracks me up hearing younger gamers thinking some game from 2016 changed the world with fun mechanics/gameplay/design choices that were all done 20 years earlier :) I think that’s natural though. I see younger people acting like “lol random” humour is new too, even though it’s old as the hills. I’ve known it for a while already, but the older you get, the more you see that everything is just a slight rearrangement of what came before. Games, music, culture, language.. and grey haired people ranting about this very topic!

Lol, precisely this. I'm not saying I'm old enough to see everything, but honestly rarely "new stuff" is appealing to me, especially new games from around 2020. Occasionally I still find puzzle games with interesting thoughts with it, but things like FPS/RPG feel a bit of... dull.

 

I sometimes joke about, I can only handle games with A/B buttons. Anything more than that, my brain can't handle. Now you think about it, it's funny that games back then... it's mainly about 2 buttons. Now, you have 2 trigger buttons each side, 4 main buttons, and you still need to do some sort of jugglery to pull off some combos or whatever... I do miss the day when "mechanic" is the most important part of a game, or the game needs to be carefully crafted due to limitations (eg: vanilla mapping in Doom).

[Rudolph]

1 hour ago, Doomkid said:

Reward the player with a sense of progress, and as soon as things even hint at getting boring or samey, know when to place the finish line.

Eh, I would argue that even an absolute classic like Doom II struggles in that regard. While I do not have much problem with the individual maps, my Doom II playthroughs usually end after MAP32. I guess this is an aspect it has in common with Borderlands 3!

 

And to be fair, knowing when to end is something that a lot of creators still struggle with, regardless of the medium!

[Egg Boy]

1 hour ago, Doomkid said:

It cracks me up hearing younger gamers thinking some game from 2016 changed the world with fun mechanics/gameplay/design choices that were all done 20 years earlier :) I think that’s natural though. I see younger people acting like “lol random” humour is new too, even though it’s old as the hills. I’ve known it for a while already, but the older you get, the more you see that everything is just a slight rearrangement of what came before. Games, music, culture, language.. and grey haired people ranting about this very topic!

I think it is a bit odd to pretend that Doom 2016 plays even remotely similar to the same game from 1993, while some of the design philosophies and goals may intersect, the way the designers go about this is completely different. Make no mistake, Doom (2016) has a distinctly modern approach to how it uses its mechanics and systems. 

 

Now, onto this thread's primary discussion. While many modern publishers have decided that the "live service" is for whatever reason the only possible way for your game to make any money (this is proven time and time again to be false by modern singleplayer masterpieces), I think its extremely disingenuous to imply that there aren't companies that put stock in singleplayer, story, gameplay, or otherwise driven experiences. I'm going to be honest, most of my favorite games have come out in the past 10 years, and not all of them are AAA, but a sizable portion of them are. I hate grinding, I absolutely despise it. I'm not interested in unlocking skins, or getting XP boosts or whatever the fuck. But its interesting to me that the study is about intrinsic vs extrinsic rewards, and yet you spin this into modern AAA games and classic titles/indie games, respectively. Specifically, you focus on live services, the thing is that I find odd is that the study seems to focus specifically on the "gamer's" mental state, do they want to play because they like the game? Or do they feel obliged to because of a battle pass? This, according to the study, has nothing to do with what game they are playing. 

 

Quote

 [...] including basic games, such as Animal Crossing: New Horizons, racing simulators such as Gran Turismo Sport and more competitive games, such as Apex Legends and Eve Online.  And, says Professor Przybylski, there was no difference in impact on mental health – whether game involved moving to a new town with talking animals, as in Animal Crossing, or taking part in a battle royal-style game, such as Apex Legends.

 

There are no microtransactions in Animal Crossing. In pretty much any game you can think of, there are extrinsic rewards. Arcade games were built upon this, you insert more coins so that you can get a higher score. Can modern games, especially multiplayer ones be predatory? Of course they can, I'm of the opinion there should probably be a bit more legislation on what exactly can be sold to a player within a game. I don't think the article is implying that these two groups were playing different games, and that it was the game's fault (even if in some cases it certainly could be) but rather their mental state was dependent on why they played the game.

[Rudolph]

23 minutes ago, Egg Boy said:

Arcade games were built upon this, you insert more coins so that you can get a higher score.

Holy crap, you are right! And in some cases, they were made almost impossibly hard so that players would have to spend even more coins.

 

If anything, this is all oh so ironic, given that pinball machines and later video game arcades had to introduce a notion of skill in order to stand out from lottery machines and circumvent legislation in that regard. I guess things have come full circle!

[Doomkid]

Heck, I never said Doom 2016 was like Doom, I just plucked a random year out of my ass. It could have just as easily been 2013 or 2019, heh. My point is that any game is a collection of mechanics that have existed for ages now, just arranged, paired or executed differently. In the way that an awesome “new” recipe uses ingredients that have existed for years.

 

I don’t mean to take away from well designed games with this analogy, it just cracks me up hearing about how some specific mechanic from some specific game, or even something more vague like sense of progression, are ever “new and revolutionary” for gaming. People seem to frequently say that stuff when they mean “fun and worth imitating”. I’m sure there are some ways to execute these ideas that are more common now and weren’t as common in prior eras (and vice-versa), but it’s been a long, long time since I’ve seen something “new” introduced, and that’s fine. That doesn’t mean doing something old-but-better isn’t awesome, a concept or mechanic being “new” and being “fun” are not really related, and saying a game does an old thing in a better way is not at all a slight. It just means that Goodyear, despite making a better tire that was often imitated afterward, still didn’t invent the wheel.

 

Edit: to be more on the original topic, “old games good and new games bad” is really false and reductive, I’m just glad Doom doesn’t fall into “modern cash grab” traps (pointless overpriced DLC, paid access to new weapons, that stuff), and being made when it was helped a lot with that as it wasn’t quite so normalised at the time.

 

There were still plenty of cheap cash grab moves in the old era - mainly, producing whole games that just sucked from start to finish, usually based on a movie or show. It was all about that initial sale, with access to game reviews being as rare as they were, it was harder to avoid out-and-out trash. Now games need to extract extra money in more “insidious” ways - when it comes to games that are more product than art, that is. Definitely doesn’t apply only to newer games, I don’t mean to imply at all that shady tactics in gaming are new. They’re just executed a little differently. Every era has its hits, surrounded by mountains of junk. It’s just easier to forget older junk! 

[Egg Boy]

9 minutes ago, Doomkid said:

Heck, I never said Doom 2016 was like Doom, I just plucked a random year out of my ass. It could have just as easily been 2013 or 2019, heh. My point is that any game is a collection of mechanics that have existed for ages now, just arranged, paired or executed differently. In the way that an awesome “new” recipe uses ingredients that have existed for years.

 

I don’t mean to take away from well designed games with this analogy, it just cracks me up hearing about how some specific mechanic from some specific game, or even something more vague like sense of progression, are ever “new and revolutionary” for gaming. People seem to frequently say that stuff when they mean “fun and worth imitating”. I’m sure there are some ways to execute these ideas that are more common now and weren’t as common in prior eras (and vice-versa), but it’s been a long, long time since I’ve seen something “new” introduced, and that’s fine. That doesn’t mean doing something old-but-better isn’t awesome, a concept or mechanic being “new” and being “fun” are not really related, and saying a game does an old thing in a better way is not at all a slight. It just means that Goodyear, despite making a better tire that was often imitated afterward, still didn’t invent the wheel.

oh my mistake, I thought you were using that year specifically. I agree there aren't necessarily "new ideas" but there are old ideas that are executed in ways that distinguish them completely from how they were done in the past. "Destructible environments" has been a thing since Breakout. But (and I hate to compliment these guys) Ubisoft's "Rainbow Six: Siege" did it in a novel way that completely changed how you gather and use information in a competitive FPS. For example, you use a drone to spot a player in a room or hear them moving around, rather than engage the player, who could be hunkered down within, shoot through the wall, or use a breach charge to make a new doorway, or punch a hole in the wall and throw a grenade in. The way the mechanic is executed in the game makes it easy to make precise, small holes in the wall, or to breach it entirely, and limiting this to only certain walls, which can be barricaded adds a unique attack and defense mechanic not found in other multiplayer shooters.

[Doomkid]

That sounds awesome. Sure destructible environments and drone control have been done before, but it sounds like they actually bothered to make a really engaging gameplay loop with them, rather than just “haha wall break!”. That’s a great example of taking mechanics that existed before but getting so much more out of them.

 

I think to word what I was getting at differently (in case I’m being clear as mud) I want to say new “gameplay loops” - I think that’s the right term - are still out there just waiting to be found, and are still being found by new games I’m sure. You can assemble a bunch of old mechanics / assets / etc into a new and irreplaceable experience, absolutely. I don’t want anyone to think I’m distilling this all the way down to that stupid “all games are just Tetris variants” theory!

[DJVCardMaster]

I don't see the appeal of being a 100% indie-gamer, feels like a teen trying to be edgy or different in such things as playing games. Not to mention, indie games are constantly trying to do something new only at narrating a story, forgetting that games are for you to enjoy the gameplay, not to watch a movie. 
I just prefer playing my old games as there is nothing interesting the market can offer me. At the end of the day, best games of the year end up being the ones that are actually a joy to play, like Elden Ring, or Hades last year, regardless of what the critics say.

AAA games are usually bad because companies just want to make money, and it's easier for them to make more of the same without taking risks and still earn some cash, rather than thinking out of the box. Indie-games prove that thinking out of the box is the go-to, so, in the next years, things will balance, and AAA companies will be forced to make good games again. Everything going as natural as possible, that's how it works.

Side note: indie-game prices are starting to sky-rocket... 


 

[Artman2004]

I don't play AAA games, mostly because they don't look as appealing or distinct as older games do.