I happen to love PoE2 and think it's absolutely fantastic. I actually enjoy it more than the original even, I also really enjoyed The Outer Worlds and am looking forward to its sequel and to Avowed. And beyond that, talking about PoE and Pathfinder, not every game has to be the biggest thing, nor should they be. Both in terms of scope or popularity. Making the best game possible doesn't translate into making it the biggest. A lot of games benefit from being smaller, and in contrast a lot of games suffer for being made bigger than they should have been, and would have been better if the devs had allowed them to be somewhat smaller in scope. I think every AAA game should absolutely be polished and tested and complete in a way far too many are not (I also think it' presumptuous to assume BG3 is gonna come out a pristine work, not that I think it will be a buggy mess, but best not to tempt fate) but I think gaming, AAA gaming in particular would be better and healthier if everyone from executives to customers internalized the fact that scope doesn't translate to quality.
I don’t relate to your tastes or vision, so we are just going to have to understand that we are coming from dramatically different places; HOWEVER,
I think games are propelled forward by the megaprojects. Sure, smaller scale games have made contributions here and there, but the characteristics of the RPG have marched along with ambition, not with replication. I think of Morrowind, Oblivion, and Skyrim developing massive open worlds for their time with interactable items and environments. The development of procedural generation. I think of BG2 and its immediate successors bringing in more lifelike characters. I think of Rockstar breaking the mold with every release. Or of Nintendo’s mainline of products. Or of Minecraft 10 years ago. Or Paradox simulating centuries of history.
So much of a quality gaming experience is rooted in novelty, or doing something that hasn’t been done in that way or to that scale before. It’s possible to innovate without scale or scope, but you have fewer opportunities to do so simply because there is less “game” to do it within.
Is there really room for small dreams in the AAA space?
Remember the human (This is a forum for a video game):
