Can DA4 even compete in today's quality of games?

I think they will. We know at least this upcoming generation is.

I do too. Having physical games are like having a physical book. There's just an experience there that having it digitally can't bring. 

Weird... I'm reading the words here and the concept is utterly failing to penetrate. Somewhere along the line I got tired of being tied down by all the stuff. Now I can't remember why a physical embodiment of intellectual property was ever desirable.

Physical copies were my way of getting around game censorship in Germany - for example, buying a physical copy of Sleeping Dogs from the UK made sure that I got the full English language, uncensored game.

Sylvia raised a good point yesterday which I wanted to touch on...

David Goldfarb @locust9

Still amazed by how clueless the general public is about game development. What assumptions make you crazy?

Sylvf @sylvf1

That every studio putting out games people slot into the "AAA space" is at least a thousand people strong, and any inability to hit the scope/fidelity of a 1,000+ workforce is a studio failing.


Okay - first off, the industry isn't very transparent to general public, and things like team sizes and production budgets are things studios may or may never reveal. And even if they do share any of that info, it's usually some time after the game is already out. And without that info, it is hard to manage expectations.

But setting aside that, it is a good reminder that "AAA" productions do vary a lot in team sizes and budgets.

For DA4, at a guess based on previous games, I figure they have a team of ~350 and a budget of 35-40m. Which is solid, no doubt. But there are studios like Ubi, CDPR, Rockstar that can put 1,000+ devs on a team, with production budgets ~$100m.

1,500 were involved in building Witcher 3, so managing expectations is important. And I'm probably one of the most guilty here for having a pie-in-the-sky wishlist for DA4. I'm going to have to work on dialing that back. But yeah, those new features and fleshed-out side-quests do take Dev-time & $$$.

And now we're seeing upcoming games like AC: Valhalla, boasting 15 studios working it. Who knows how many devs that translates to, or their budget, but you can bet it's huge. Same with Cyberpunk. BW can't compete on that scope of production, even if you were to factor out other issues like production woes, etc. BioWare seems to have this perception that it's a huge company as they have multiple studios and a long history. But all of BW put together is probably around 550-650 devs, while a company like Ubisoft has 13-14,000.

The costs and expectations for AAA development are rapidly spiralling out of control. Studios like Bioware, or even Rockstar, could release a game every 2-3 years in the 360PS3 era and now we're lucky if we get a new game from the same studio every five years. The cost of AAA game development has also lead to the games themselves becoming more and more risk averse leading to most games becoming a faceless open world-RPG lite blob as that's what the market wants.

Crazy to think last gen we had entire gaming trilogies begin and conclude on the same console.