...worthy of a AAA title today.
Can you please specify, what is considered an AAA title, in general? I am not very good with the semantics in this matter. Is DOS2 an AAA? It has same amount (or more) mechanics than Dark Souls, which is considered an AAA in a different genre.
It is an informal classification for sure but, and I will leave a snippet from Wikipedia explaining the term, this project certainly falls within its bounds.
The term "AAA" began to be used in the late 1990s, when a few development companies started using the expression at gaming conventions in the US.[2] The term was borrowed from the credit industry's bond ratings, where "AAA" bonds represented the safest opportunity most likely to meet their financial goals..../
/...By the seventh generation of video game consoles (late 2000s), AAA game development on the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 game consoles typically cost in the low tens of millions of dollars ($15m to $20m) for a new game, with some sequels having even higher total budgets – for example Halo 3 is estimated to have had a development cost of $30m, and a marketing budget of $40m.[11] According to a whitepaper published for EA games (Dice Europe), the seventh generation saw a contraction in the number of video game developing houses creating AAA level titles, reducing from an estimated 125 to around 25, but with a roughly corresponding fourfold increase in staffing required for game development.../
/...With larger budgets, developers were able to find new innovative ways to present narrative as a direct part of gameplay rather than interspersed into pre-rendered cutscenes.../
/...During the seventh generation, AAA (or "blockbuster") games had marketing at a similar level to high-profile films, with television, billboard and newspaper advertising; a corresponding increasing reliance on sequels, reboots, and similarly franchised IP was also seen, in order to minimize risk. Costs at the end of the generation had risen as high as the hundreds of millions of dollars.../
/... Staffing and costs for eighth generation games increased; at Ubisoft, AAA game development involved 400 to 600 persons for open world games, split across multiple locations and countries.../
