Yeah it's definitely not a AAA game in terms of budget, and one could almost say it reaches too far and stretches its resources a bit thin, but I have to admire the sheer balls they had, trying to make a game of this scope and complexity on low end hardware with a mid-tier budget.

So beautiful, love this game to death, hope Monolith continue on sequel

If this is what resources stretched thin looks like, Ubisoft, EA, and many other "AAA" game developers need to take some notes.  Cause XCX pulls off a ton with its budget that many "AAA" publishers seem to think you can't doo with how scores of millions of dollars spent and hundreds of developers working overtime to accomplish.  

Of course, this shouldn't surprise people who have studied business organization.  Smaller teams and less resources efficiently used is vastly superior to bloated, oversized teams working at maximum inefficiency.  I mean, the budget behind The Witcher 3 isn't nearly as high as many of the WB, EA, Activision, and Ubisoft games of smaller size.  The problem those monstrous companies have is they are breeding grounds of gross inefficiency.  

I don't disagree, but I am curious to what things those are in your opinion.

I definitely concur that the AAA sector has become grossly bloated.

Woops typos abound.  I meant to say "can't do without".  They do them, but they seem to think you need ridiculous resources to get it done.  The detail and size of XCX's world, the diversity of fauna, the quality of voice work, the graphics that make excellent use of the hardware but are also stable, these are all things AAA teams struggle to accomplish without spending absurd ammounts of money.  Shoot, the stability part is something they can't seem to do *period*.   And when they DO accomplish these things, they've spent so much money they feel they have to nickle and dime you to death with day one DLC and microtransactions and season passes.  

Yeah, it's definitely rare to see a AAA open world game with a framerate as stable as XCX. Even on more powerful hardware they tend to chug.

Framerate?  A lot of open world games outright crash.  I've not had XCX crash once in my 100+ hour playthrough.  

Nor have I in 90 hours. No major bugs or glitches either.

You can produce hella huge fps dip if you shoots the swarm in the bottom of the big rock thing in Primordia with your Doll. Apart from this the game works perfectly.

Oh absolutely, I didn't mean to imply otherwise. The fact Monolith Soft achieved as much as they did, with such a steady technical performance, with tough limits to their budget, manpower and the technology they were working with, is incredible. Like Chronicles with the Wii, X pushes the host hardware to its limits and Monolith Soft deserve a lot of praise for that. The performance is far smoother than open world games on comparable systems. X feels like the product of another age, when your ambition didn't need to be limited by whatever your potential sales were.