Some people says that Unity is not for AAA games. But I’m sure that is not true. Far as I know “Wasteland 2” is AAA game…
I want to make people interested in Unity and assure them that Unity is not indie games only.
I wonder, how many AAA games made with Unity?
Is there a list of these games (AAA only)? Could you help me to get that list?
P.S. I searched in the google but there is no markers that game is AAA. Just popular unity games. popular games in Unity != AAA games made with Unity. So I want to know which games is really have AAA type
Hearthstone is probably the biggest game made with Unity.
I dont know if you would call it AAA. Is it gigantic obviously, but probably wasnt all that expensive to make.
Wasteland 2 doesnt look like a AAA game at all.
But i dont understand why AAA matters in the first place. Do you intend to make a game where 100 people work on it for a couple of years?
Other large games made with Unity are, for example, Cities: Skylines, Kerbal Space Program and with very nice visuals, currently in alpha, Escape from Tarkov.
If you want a detailed answers about AAA games made with Unity, you’d have to define what you mean with “AAA”.
I think the AAA concept is a bit floaty, just like Indie is, so you might object to some of these.
Pillars of Eternity and the upcoming Torment, too. Max & the Magic Marker by the late PressPlay. Hitman GO, Deus Ex GO and Lara Croft GO also. Might & Magic X was Unity.
I’ll add Inside and Limbo, although PlayDead techically speaking is an Indie Studio.
A decent number of large-scale developers and publishers frequently use their own in-house engines. This is usually so that they have sole control over their own technology, and have the freedom to customize that technology as needed, without having to rely on outside sources for changes. There is definitely merit to this approach, and certain advantages. However, this approach also relies heavily on having significant and permanent in-house programmers to work on the maintaining and improving the in-house engine.
Engines like Unity are frequently used when projects are low to mid-scale, even by major developers and publishers. (see the Hearthstone and Fallout: Shelter examples) For smaller-scale projects with mobile platforms as the target, the need for a proprietary in-house engine is considerably lower. Even major developers will forego their in-house efforts for such projects, and stick to Unity instead. Many of the advantages that Unity provides make it a good choice for such efforts.
Unity’s place in the market is more defined by market pressures than technical limitations. Unity can and has been used for larger-scale projects. It’s just a matter of who is using it and what is driving their choices.
However, the term triple-A is also used by a lot of people to describe the quality of a video game.
I believe it’s hard to find information how much budget various Unity games had. Finding information what games were received positively, should be simple though, e.g. check Made with Unity and look titles up on Metacritic.
How would you define a game as ‘AAA’? Quality of visuals? Size of team? Scale of the game?
To me, the labels of ‘Indie’ and ‘AAA’ are just a fuzzy blur. You now have big ‘AAA’ studios making relatively smaller experiences to what they usually output (Ubisoft’s Eagle Flight, Nintendo’s Super Mario Run, Blizzard’s Hearthstone etc) and smaller ‘Indie’ teams making very ambitious, beautiful and thematically bigger games (Campo Santo’s Firewatch, Moon Studio’s Ori And The Blind Forest, Rain Games’ World To The West, Bossa Studio’s World’s Adrift, Facepunch’s Rust, etc)
And then you have Play Dead’s ‘Inside’; which is, in my opinion, by far one of the most beautiful, incredibly polished, atmospherically consistent and utterly absorbing games to come out in a very long while.
By the assumed definition of AAA, id say quite a lot of games (Majority of which ive mentioned in this post) are AAA. And all of which are Made With Unity!
This. AAA is large scale production with a huge budget and marketing effort. They have a massive investment from the get go. The equivalent of a summer blockbuster, like a Star Wars movie or Michael bay flick. While they usually have high production value, it doesn’t speak necessarily to the final quality.
The better question is, are there any truly amazing games that were made with Unity? The answer is an unqualified “YES!” Some are listed above, and there are many, many more. Ghost of a Tale is one of my favorites.
When you have budget, resources and staff of AAA production, the engine isn’t really the biggest factor, in fact most build their own because they can tailor it to fit their production needs. A much better reflection of what a tool like Unity can do, is what one person or a small team can do with it. Forget AAA, quality and awesomeness is a better measuring stick. https://unity3d.com/showcase/gallery
Maybe AAA should be added to the auto-censor wordlist like Fuck or shit? Off the top of my head I can’t think of a single discussion we had here that was improved by mention of AAA somewhere. And it would make these threads a lot more entertaining when people are asking the usual things like “what assets would you pick to make a game in A** quality?”.
I second the idea of adding AAA to the auto censor. Aside from being fun, maybe it’ll help people focus less on what games are categorised as and more on actually making games.
To me, AAA means any game that fits the stereotype of what sits on the New Release shelf of my local EB Games store. This is convenient for me since in the absence of anything except the box, I can only judge the graphics of the game, so therefore beautyful graphics = AAA.
OK but seriously, I think there’s some ‘knowing confusion’ about what AAA means in terms of how it’s used on the forums. These discussions all devolve into some semantic argument, where the property of AAA-ness has an ability to retroactively cross time and space in a quantum fashion. When all people mean (far as I can tell) are “is it possible for Unity to be used to make something on the level of what typically comes out of Ubisoft, Activision, Bethesda, Bungie, Naughty Dog etc”.
I think it’s fairly obvious a couple of reasons why not, but I’m not going to go into them here. But Unity’s getting better and better, and I think for many reasons it’s worth staying with Unity until you have some chance of taking advantage of what it does not have, because much of what it does have is really well done.
PS came here to find a reference to Hearthstone, and was not disappointed…
Anecdotal, but it might be worth noting that Unity is potentially used for fast prototyping of concepts at some AAA-studios with in-house engines. Not something I can back up with anything, but it seemed to be the consensus a few years ago.
