My question is: “How close do you think that a game developed by indies can get to an AAA game from the technical and artistic point of view?” and a side-question: “Can it be done in Unity?”, since we’re discussing this on the Unity’s forums :).
We should not include here mobile games and cartoon-ish games but only AAA desktop/console titles.
First of all I’ll define some terms and give the references so that we’re not loosing the point, and get lost in discussing the definitions of what are indies and what AAA games we take as reference :).
The way I see things is, of course, not absolute, I just think that they are the most relevant point of view for the stated question.
We shall discuss strictly from the artistic and technical point of view. I think we should not discuss about gameplay/story and promotion importance here.
I think we ‘could’ consider indies teams of 1 - 5 members and maybe 0-3 external non-full time contractors
For references we shall take:
‘Uncharted 4’ by Naughty Dog
‘Battlefield 1’ by EA
‘Start Wars Battlefront’ by EA
‘Horizon Zero Dawn’ (open world) by Guerilla
We shall look at the following, all very well covered in the reference games:
Asset quality
Texture quality
Model quality
How good they look up close
Evironment and level design quality
Style and good composition
Diversity of design
Vegetation quality
Well populated and vibrant world. Not a barren wasteland
Critter and creature quality
Character quality
Animation quality
With the advancement and improvement of game engines, technology and art, along with the change in pricing plans that made possible for indies to have access to incredible tools, I think this question is very important for the future of game development
That’s why I invite everyone to comment and express their opinions.
Depends on what you call indie, and depend on what AAA, there was a small windows where I thought indies could match at a “lower scale” AAA, but high level AAA took a huge jump in some signifier of quality (mostly facial animation) that put them out of reach of indies. But would you consider outlast 2 indie? They are certainly small and match a low bar AAA.
But what is signifier of quality? In old games, due to technical limitation, in order to wow the player and gave the impression of bigger scale the machine could actually achieved, dev use some trick like isolating some effect in their own space. For example megaman on nes used the big enemy sprite you had to defeat to progress using background tile to build them, bigger boss even used all the graphical resources to make screen giant enemy against a black background. In early 3D games, you have isolated room with little interactions and amazing but costly effects, round objects that blew the polygon budget just for that scene, but on the average gameplay case they were not there. Or some other tricks like spawning an enemy as soon as one is destroy to gave the illusion of more sprite than the engine can handle. This effect is further enhance with good pacing, seamless connection between hi quality zone and average zone will taint the impression of the average zone toward being better to what they are, and leave an overall impression of quality much bigger than it is actually. This has a name, it’s call making set pieces.
The thing is that modern AAA have turn set pieces from development tricks to actual heavy investment, game series like final fantasy, call of duty and uncharted seems to entire rely on set pieces polish to a tee. That’s where the strain on indies start to happen, making set pieces is hard and costly, it ask the best of the best to punch boundaries in complex and sophisticated domain, and even though the knowledge trickle down, it happen after they moved on the next target. For example I believe an indie can loosely match the visual of final fantasy XV on the average gameplay cases (roaming the land) it’s not easy but achievable, partly because hardware limit act like an equalizer, partly because the knowledge and tool has trickle down to hobbyist level … But the set pieces and cinematics? they do participate in a huge part in the AAA feel of this games, they are out of reach, just talking to character like the infamous Cindy has a high quality intro that show a hi quality model with fleshy skin and perfect facial animations, even though the discussion itself use average model and animation. Indie can only have the average.
But all is not lost, you can use the memory of the player to trick him, like in lost souls abide, a game made by one person with razor cut focus on a few model not using them outside the possible range. Using proper tone, you can stay in a range that evoke AAA quality without going into place you can’t match.
Yes, a AAA game can be made in Unity, but not by a tiny indie. By definition, a AAA project involves pouring a lot of money and man hours into the project, so a AAA game will have a lot more content than an indie title. You need to plan on spending $50M to $150M per project to compete at the AAA level.
In terms of amount of content, it can be done with semi-procedural tools - at least that’s what I’m betting on for mine. For every hour that you put into your procedural tools, the equivalent ‘volume’ of content should be 200 man-hours, then you can compete with the amount of content in an AAA game.
In terms of quality, you won’t be on par with latest gen stuff, not even close. But if you take characters as an example, something like Eve’s character creator should be more than sufficient.
So basically, you have to build a game-building machine, otherwise forget it. To produce the amount of content in Uncharted 4 by yourself, even if you did it in lowpoly flat color, would be a huge waste of effort even if it was possible.
ok, lets start off with the wiki definition of AAA-games
"An AAA game (usually pronounced “triple A game”) is an informal classification used for video games with the highest development budgets and levels of promotion. AAA game development is associated with high economic risk, with high levels of sales required to obtain profitability.
In the mid 2010s the term AAA+ began to be used, describing AAA type games that generated additional revenue over time in a similar fashion to MMOs by using software as a service (SaaS) methods, such as season passes or expansion packs.
so, per definition, this will be pretty hard to achieve for indies
but creating the same level of quality like major AAA titles is not that hard for anyone who knows what they are doing, at least art wise
the problem is that AAA art takes a lot of time to create and therefore it would be really difficult to
create a lot of unique assets
but with the right game idea and clever design decissions you could compensate for that to a certain degree
this always boils down to how skilled your team is
Well the OP didn’t even commit the heinous crime of calling the indie product a AAA game, only the references. I think all of the games being referenced fit that bill.
Regarding quality, AAA assets are also highly iterated, there is a lot of waste, it’s more about finding the sweep spot of “(relative) artistic” quality. Technically it’s possible to do away with the iteration and decrease the cost, at the expense of coherence generally. Also there is a lot cutting edge R&D that makes building while driving, which create all sorts of problem (tool not ready, pipeline to establish, training to be made, etc …). And to top all of that, all these system must work together seamlessly, which create it’s own sort of dependency problem.
So in theory it can be done for less cost (in fact ninja theory are trying to do that), but what can be done for less mean it will scale for more, moving the definition of AAA quality.
We have seen indie, putting hi quality works already, rivaling with AAA in asset quality, but generally not in term of scope or number of system. The secret of Edith finch is such a game for example. However, while asset quality is not up there in term of production value, I don’t expect indie to make a game like BOTW, because of the number of system and contents (unless early access lol after some years).
Things indies will have hard time to emulate:
Quality voice acting across hundreds of character
acting and especially facial capture
animation in general (there is 3000 animation just for assassin’s creed 3 main character)
big scope with high local details (can be approximate with pcg, but there is a lot of r&d to do something that have each local tell a distinct environmental story).
huge number of interdependent system.
While people like to point at the budget, part of it is absorbed by tools and engine, and we can further decrease it using library. HOWEVER the more specific your idea the less likely you will find a corresponding assets in a library, and the less specific you are the less you will be notice under the flood (but that’s a distinct problem than quality itself) not mentioning that these assets might not be coherent artistically with each other.
The other solution is to indulge into R&D and break new ground by adopting early new technique to drive cost down, which is risky (might not work and have poor quality, work only in some condition so less flexibility). With the advent of AI generated content thanks to the deep learning revolution, who know if we will have a great equalizer (for some time at least)?
Since AAA and big business stick to tried and true methods of their success I’d think logically it would be easy to exceed them in quality metric but shear volume of output.
The newest techniques don’t stay behind closed doors anymore since university and government research, Unity, UE4, and so on are now available.
However, remember this - with Assets like Speed Tree and Gaia even creating shear volume of art assets in big titles is becoming easier and possible; add in licensing from 3D model art studio businesses and what seemed completely out of reach is possible. It really comes down to who has the better eye and feel for a fun, exciting game.
It seems to be about fifteen years difference. Indie games today are roughly equivalent to the AAA games from fifteen years ago. For solo devs the gap is larger.
That’s probably about as close as you are going to get. It’s always going to be impossible for 5 people to do the same thing as 100 people in the same timeframe. But technology moves fast, meaning stuff that used to take years can be done in minutes today.
AAA games’ main characteristic is the thousands upon thousands of manhours that goes into them. How do you make Uncharted 4 without a mocap department? So this is an oxymoron.
To make AAA game, you need to be a AAA team. If you aren’t a AAA team, you can’t make it.
Please, can we stop with this? It doesn’t matter anyways, there is nothing to be gained by answering this, there is zero practical application, we could be discussing more interesting stuff.
And it has been talked to death many times before.
I’ll grant that solo developers and (I’ll think I’ll use this term) ‘micro team’ indies (this needed clarifying) can beat 8 bit games, mostly. 16 bit games however, I find that the console developers of yesteryear still beat micro teams.
Entering 90s, generally, AAA beats most tiny teams, so I’d say 15 years was actually generous. Plenty of PS1 titles blow anything most tiny indies do away.
Fancy engine demo with glossy post FX does not mean a finished game. Unless its finished and on sale, it doesn’t count.
A lot depends on how you define indie, AAA and a bunch of other terms. Which often makes this debate pointless. Here are some specifics I used:
I took the 15 years from the release of Diablo II to the release of Path Of Exile. Admittedly Grinding Gear Games is a fairly big team as indies go. Maybe not the type of indie the OP was thinking of.
From Frogger to Crossy Road is about 33 years. The original Crossy Road team was only two people, although the team got bigger as the game was successful. And of course the scope of Crossy Road is bigger then the scope of Frogger.
So somewhere between 15-35 years, depending on exactly how one defines terms.
There are some AAA, cartoony console games out there. Zelda Breath of the Wild, is one such good example and is a cartoony looking adventure game, that’s on 2 nintendo consoles.
And even that game, is one of those epic games, that goes even kinda beyond
what is termed, as AAA level.
And as mentioned above by other posters, the term AAA can mean many
different things, to many different game developers and gamers.
The thing is that it’s all relative, it’s like everyone is talking about different aspect of indie and AAA … Given I have seen small indie team using mocap, or have some AAA visual quality.
But let’s be frank, I don’t expect any indie team, let alone solo dev do a game that is on the same scale than ff7, and no sizeable indie team can touch ff12 even if they tried (mostly because, outside of scope, many things it does as set pieces is still expensive today).
So yeah there is part of AAA that we cannot touch ever. But the discussion was always about WHICH part exactly in which context. I beleive that the ILLUSION of AAA can be achieved.
But that’s just “a polished game”. The OP gave specific examples of specific games all of which have production values through the roof and require multiple teams of people working together.
Let’s just take AAA out of the way and focus on how to create good and polished games.
It’s like obsessively asking if a specific video camera will allow you to create a blockbuster film.
I mean… Let me rephrase the OP a bit.
"My question is: “How close do you think that a movie shot by a lone director can get to a hollywood blockbuster from the technical and artistic point of view?” and a side-question: “Can it be done with Camera X?” 3. For references we shall take: - Transformers by Michael Bay - Pirates of the Carribean - Lord of the Rings - Star Wars the Force Awakens"
This sort of thread is started again and again but it all comes done to personal opinion. How can the biggest budget video game for baseball for example compare to actually playing baseball? It can’t.
AAA games really aren’t that much superior to what many indies are doing, it just takes the perspective of recognizing what is hype and what is substance.
