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Ryuu96 said:
Hmm. I don't know if I'm misreading this. I'd say that they can only judge the title as it is and its lack of polish in certain areas shouldn't be given a pass due to the budget it has, if they don't have enough budget to go big then they should have reduced the scope in certain areas. Plus there are a lot of AA's with way more polish than most AAA's, Hi-Fi Rush being a good recent example. |
Well, there are often limits to the budget that you can get as an indie studio. Their publishing partner is Focus Home, who to my knowledge have never funded a truly AAA game, just higher budget AA's. On top of that, their studio size is about 80 devs, definitely in the AA territory (though larger than the 40 devs that Compulsion had for We Happy Few at least, so it stands to reason that it did review higher than We Happy Few, 74 vs 63 average). Both were games that definitely drew AAA expectations from fans and critics for being Bioshock spiritual successors in a post-Bioshock Infinite market that has yet to see Bioshock 4 announced by 2K after 9+ years (even though Bioshock 4 has been in active development since 2018 they still haven't announced it). Because it has been 9+ years now without a Bioshock game, Bioshock fans are hungry for something similar, both critics and fans alike, so every time something similar to Bioshock is announced, the fans start hyping it and suddenly people have AAA Bioshock-like expectations even though these smaller indie studios can't possibly deliver on AAA expectations even with lots of staffing up and drumming up as much funding as they can.
Both Compulsion and Mundfish seem to have fallen into the trap of trying to deliver on those AAA Bioshock-like expectations, even though they knew they couldn't deliver a truly AAA game. They would have been better off playing down those AAA expectations and letting people know to expect a AA experience.
Last edited by shikamaru317 - on 20 February 2023
