you can’t complain online about “Western AAA under-delivering”.
I’ve played the campaign of Diablo 4 and watched the studio fumble a franchise that has historically printed money.
Definitely feels like underdelivering to me.
Can’t eat your cake and have it, too.
If you can’t see any material difference between DLC bloated franchise zombies like CoD or the latest FF flop, relative to a sprawling open world action/adventure like Elden Ring or a tightly scripted RPG like BG3, I’m not sure you know what “cake” is.
You should give Diablo 4 another look, it’s alright now. For the record, D4 seems to have sold pretty damn well. I’ll say that I personally like launch D4 less than endgame D3, but maybe a bit more than launch D3. But hey, we’re getting in the weeds there.
I can absolutely see the difference between good games and bad games, but I suspect you and I may disagree on what games we’re talking about here and where the examples in the OP slot in.
People keep doing this. They say “western AAA” to mean “these five games I don’t like” and, as pointed out above, Baldur’s Gate is suddenly not western AAA despite being a European game with a budget of hundreds of millions, while now apparently Final Fantasy XVI actually IS Western AAA despite being from a Japanese studio.
I get that this would be much easier to talk about if there was a neat label to fit all the bad games, or if they all were bad for the same reason. But… you know, maybe it’s just not easy to talk about in the space of a meme after all.
The thing that still amazes me about D4 is basically its optimization. In runs so damn smooth on my handheld it’s crazy. I can play helltide content on Torment with bazillion things going on at the same time and the FPS is rock solid at 60.
Hah. Say what you will about the decline of Blizzard, but they clearly still know how to do scalability from their “WoW must run on potato laptop” days. I played most of my D3 on a Switch and most of my D4 on a handheld PC.
I’ve played the campaign of Diablo 4 and watched the studio fumble a franchise that has historically printed money.
Definitely feels like underdelivering to me.
If you can’t see any material difference between DLC bloated franchise zombies like CoD or the latest FF flop, relative to a sprawling open world action/adventure like Elden Ring or a tightly scripted RPG like BG3, I’m not sure you know what “cake” is.
You should give Diablo 4 another look, it’s alright now. For the record, D4 seems to have sold pretty damn well. I’ll say that I personally like launch D4 less than endgame D3, but maybe a bit more than launch D3. But hey, we’re getting in the weeds there.
I can absolutely see the difference between good games and bad games, but I suspect you and I may disagree on what games we’re talking about here and where the examples in the OP slot in.
People keep doing this. They say “western AAA” to mean “these five games I don’t like” and, as pointed out above, Baldur’s Gate is suddenly not western AAA despite being a European game with a budget of hundreds of millions, while now apparently Final Fantasy XVI actually IS Western AAA despite being from a Japanese studio.
I get that this would be much easier to talk about if there was a neat label to fit all the bad games, or if they all were bad for the same reason. But… you know, maybe it’s just not easy to talk about in the space of a meme after all.
The thing that still amazes me about D4 is basically its optimization. In runs so damn smooth on my handheld it’s crazy. I can play helltide content on Torment with bazillion things going on at the same time and the FPS is rock solid at 60.
Hah. Say what you will about the decline of Blizzard, but they clearly still know how to do scalability from their “WoW must run on potato laptop” days. I played most of my D3 on a Switch and most of my D4 on a handheld PC.