same with an insistence on every single piece of dialogue being voice acted; it's not always a firm indicator but all of these elements being present together usually indicate a VERY high budget behind a game!

I'd say the difference between AA and AAA is generally how much evident money goes into a game, IE if every interaction in a game has a bespoke animation someone had to cobble together, that's often an indicator of an AAA budget; canned animations are typically in the AA realm

I keep looking at how Sony set its budgets for top ticket games and thinking about how Insomniac begged them not to throw the kind of money they did at Spider-Man and its sequels because there'd be nowhere to put it and I can feel that waste every time there's a two-hour barely interactive cutscene

I feel like the world would lose literally nothing of value if games like that stopped being made forever; scaling projects back instead of this weird grift-centric panhandling the larger industry is doing with its customer base would probably restore a lot of faith and make much better games

I'm starting to see a lucrative market for AA titles like Clair Obscur and the Yakuza franchise on one end and an incredibly thriving indie market on the other; I'm like the most active Video Game Enjoyer I know and I would still not even flinch if every triple-A studio died immediately right now

Oh this wound up looking SO GOOD in motion!

The models design itself is based on artwork by 🎨
@daikanu.bsky.social
l who helped to visualize the big pear friend to begin with.

I completely get it, a 50ft tall woman does nothing for me but give me someone who’s like 9 to 13 feet tall in armor sized for their unusual physique and it immediately activates an otherwise-dormant part of my brain