It seems like I cannot reliably produce AAA games of 7+ score. Leaping the moon with a Large game (or a Medium game, for that matter!) is worth far more than a mediocre AAA game in terms of profit, and it can be done far more reliably. The gap becomes even bigger when you account for the difference in required time. I don’t understand why creating AAA games would ever be desirable.
I’ve complained about this on the forums before, but I felt I really had to give it another go today when I got a review criticism claiming that “Technology isn’t state of the art”. I was producing a 3dv7 game on a 3dv7 console (WAY better than any other console on the market, at that), I broke my record for second-best tech score by nearly 400 technology points, and I pegged the T/D ratio. What in the world did that message mean? What was it telling me to do? That message was what drove me to the forum today.
What am I doing wrong?
One thing AAA games requires, that are not required for large games are specalists.
For an AAA game you need at least 3 specalist working in their respective fields (gameplay, graphics etc…)
That would be my only guess, that could be missing (but if that is the case, then is the message pretty misleading)
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At this point i don’t have a clue.
I know you are not new to the game, so i assume you know what you are doing.
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I admit I only had a single specialist (Artificial Intelligence). It was year 28 and I was producing a Simulation game (I’ve forgotten which type, but it was one of the great combos). The game’s score was 7. After that game, I trained up two more specialists (Gameplay and Level Design) relevant to the Simulation games I was producing (and did a bunch of other training as well). The next two AAA games I produced were at 7 and 6.75 respectively. One of the three didn’t even turn a profit (overhyped, underperformed).
At that point, I was starting to feel threatened by red ink, so I went back to Large games for most of the rest of that playthrough. I did make one more AAA title near the end of the run (Y33) which scored 9.75, but I have no idea how it earned that score. It wasn’t that much more awesome than the 777 trio earlier had been.
I thought the only effect of insufficient specialists was to turn 10’s into 9’s on the review page. I wasn’t really targetting an ‘epic’ score with the game that triggered this post. I was hoping for something between 8.25 and 8.75.
Argh! I decided to try a new strategy this time - seeing if AAA games were more reasonable to produce if you switch to them as early as possible, so you get to compete against a lower bar. Haha, no. No. That’s a way to go BANKRUPT. Are AAA titles supposed to be strictly inferior to other sizes of game?
EDIT: Didn’t actually go bankrupt. I just stopped making AAA titles. I shaved right up against the bankruptcy threshold, but I managed to squeak by. I ended up flying a respectable (but somewhat low for me) 68M score. It was kind of exciting, I guess.