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HoloDust on 24 July 2018
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DonFerrari said:
HoloDust said:

South Park games ..............

I hope the real animation doesn't take as much effort, because it look to ugly to have this much effort being throw at it =p

Apparently, they have 70 animators doing episode for a week. Not sure what their salaries are, but I think episode costs around $1.3M (that is whole budget, not just animation). Not sure why it's that much, Star Wars: Clone Wars episode was $1M, SW:Rebels is $500K. Family Guy is $2M a pop, American Dad is $1M per episode (or other way around, can't recall). Lot of that money goes to actors, I suppose...

The_Liquid_Laser said:
HoloDust said:

South Park games have great content value and very high production value - still, they are treated as "low-cost AAA title" that require "a relatively smaller investment than other (AAA) titles due to its simple animation" (THQ on South Park: The Stick of Truth).

So, maybe South Park shouldn't be $60 game since its production value is not as high as high-cost AAA games...then again, maybe it should:

"...when you’re animating to a very specific look and style, there’s not really compromising. There’s no shortcuts. And it’s funny that with something that’s more like a traditional 3D model-type rig, there’s actually a lot of ways that Maya and other programs help. They smooth things out. They give you some of the in-between positions, and you set targets for where those limbs will go. Not so with South Park. You have to move those frames. So you’re stepping animation all over the place, and if you want to have a unique facial expressions—and so much of the action of the show actually takes place on those big eyes and little mouth shapes—if you want it to be really expressive, you’ve gotta animate that too. You’ve gotta show pain, show effort, show all this stuff." (Jason Schroeder, game director of The Fractured But Whole)

I'm just hoping you're not implying that Octopath Traveler production value in on par with something like South Park...cause it's really nowhere near it.

It depends on what you mean by production values.  When it comes to art and animation, both OT and the South Park games pale in comparison to games like God of War 4 or Zelda: Breath of the Wild.  South Park's art is like something a person drew on the back of a paper napkin.  But that is cool, because that is the look that they are intentionally going for.  OT is intentionally going for a 16 bit look.  Neither one is investing much into art compared to the average AAA game made today.

Instead the art of South Park is there to make a person feel like this is really a South Park game they are playing.  And players are hoping that the game is going to be just as funny as watching South Park.  Octopath is going for the 16 bit look, because they are telling players that the gameplay, story and music are going to be of the same quality as Final Fantasy 6.  In both cases the art is there to tell people what the game is really about.  The art is not the draw in itself like it is in a game like God of War 4.

That's what this discussion is really about.  Does $60 mean, that the game needs a huge art budget?  Or is it enough to be really exceptional in other ways like gameplay, writing, music, etc... without having a huge art budget?

Yeah, South Park might not have high end AAA art budget, yet it is hand animated, and that still costs pretty penny - I'd wager much more than retro visuals of Octopath, given that  South Park (at least first one) is treated as lower cost AAA.

I think the whole problem with $60 is that it's accepted as sort of a ceiling (bar some fancy editions) - which in turn, at least in my view, should warrant a game that has both content and production values at highest level. Not just one...or the other. In the case of Octopath, from everything I heard, content value is quite high...but I don't think production value is up their with the best.

Let me give another example from fairly similar, yet different field - boardgames.
Content value would be how good the game is, how good mechanisms are and how well they click with a theme (if game is not abstract), how long the game is for what it offers, how replayable it is...and other similar things.
Production value would be amount of components, quality of art, quality of materials used for board, cards, tokens and inserts and such things.
So (and I'm speaking about hobby boardgames, what is often referred to as designer board-games, not mass-market ones) there is way more difference in prices - there's no artificial $60 cap like in video games - you can have games as low as $5 (for simple card games) all the way to $400 (Kingdom Death: Monster), probably even more.
It's not even uncommon that very same game is picked up by another publisher few years after initial release, made with higher quality components and art and than sold at higher price.

Video games, on the other hand, are stuck in the mass market - for example, Witcher 3 (game that I rate as 8/10) is high quality both in content and in production - yet it's $60 game, because of that cap that is there cause of mass market. If you take that $60 cap into account, you can understand why I think only highest quality content + production value deserves that price tag.

I can see why Octopath might be worth for many $60 - I'm guilty of similar thing with Combat Mission games (tactical simultaneous turn-based wargames) for last 17 years, games with high content value (for its genre), yet not that great production values - $60 per pop, sold only on their site - because they're worth that much to me - yet, not for a second, would I ever think that in this $60 capped video game economy, value of those games is actually that.