AAA single player PC games?

[JordanM]

Hi guys, share your own top 5 single player AAA games for PC
Lara Croft Series
RE 2
Mafia DE
Witcher 3
Cyberpunk 2077

[Eldan]

Bit technical, but I don't think Witcher 3 qualifies as AAA, CD Projekt Red is not one of the prime Studios, or wasn't at the time.

[Zombimode]

Bit technical, but I don't think Witcher 3 qualifies as AAA, CD Projekt Red is not one of the prime Studios, or wasn't at the time.

Why should this matter?

Witcher 3 had a development cost of over 40 million $. And thats in eastern european wages. The marketing budget was other 35 million.

If thats not AAA then what is the term supposed to mean?

[Eldan]

The biggest of games go in to the hundred millions.

[Eldan]

The biggest of games go in to the hundred millions. Ubisoft, for example, spends up to 300 million on their latest games.

[Zombimode]

The biggest of games go in to the hundred millions. Ubisoft, for example, spends up to 300 million on their latest games.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...mes_to_develop

If a tripple digit budget is constituting characteristic of a AAA game then there are not a lot of AAA games in the history of games.

Sounds like a very poor definition to me and definitely outside of how the term is commonly used.

[Man_Over_Game]

Personally, I've sunk more hours into games like Dead Cells or Hades than I ever had with stuff like Witcher 3. Got burned with Borderlands 3 and Cyberpunk, so I'm thinking Triple-A titles aren't worth the risk, and I think a lot of decent developers are starting to figure that out, too.

The only Triple-A games I've enjoyed in the last decade are probably God of War and Horizon: Zero Dawn. Even Witcher got kinda old with the constant grimdark and repetitive combat. Farcry 4 and Shadow of War was pretty dope, too, if I look back that far.

[warty goblin]

In the last five or ten years, the amount of variability between AAA singleplayer games/games with singleplayer campaigns has kind of fallen off a cliff. So far as I can tell you've got:

1) Call of Duty and Battlefield, the only more or less pure FPS franchises still kicking. I haven't played one in a while, but last I checked in, they were still super linear, with braindead AI and a very shallow combat sandbox in singleplayer. The days of Crysis and Halo with open battlefields and challenging, dynamic enemies are pretty far behind us.

2) Third person games ranging from mostly to entirely open world, pretty much all of which share at least most of the following set of features:

• A stealth system of some sort, complete with detection meters over dudes' heads just to make sure there's no tension or ambiguity
• A bow, even if there are also guns. When there are guns, the bow is at least as effective as said guns.
• A parkour system, i.e. platforming but without any real requirement for player skill.
• A resource system forcing you to tear up every flower and smash every last bit of scenery for rubbish to feed into the crafting system
• A bunch of pointless side missions everywhere, probably with their own map marker and compass waypoint
• A crafting system wherein you produce incrementally higher numbered versions of stuff you already had, so you can keep up with the enemy number bloat as the game continues.
• A three-pronged skill tree, which roughly decomposes into melee combat stuff, ranged combat stuff, and stealth/crafting/other stuff. At least one skill will probably more or less break the game
• A veritable infestation of MMO daily quest type challenges, i.e. stuff that's even below fetch quests in terms of impactful content.

A lot of these features aren't even gameplay features, they're things you do in the inventory to make your numbers bigger or fill up a progress bar. You might have a lot of gameplay verbs (stealth/shoot/melee/loot etc) but they're usually quite simple, extremely transparent to the player, and don't have an enormous amount of room for player skill or expressive play. Because developing gameplay is expensive and difficult, most of the junk you unlock doesn't really expand your original set of gameplay verbs: They just give you bigger numbers, or add a status effect (probably fire, or if the game is leaning into fantasy fire/lightning/freeze/poison) to something you could already do.

Basically I think to a large degree we've replaced dynamic and skill based gameplay with static, progression based gameplay. I suspect this is because content has become increasingly expensive to produce, the audience's requirements for polish have increased substantially, and these are all very easy and cheap forms of content to produce, compared to iterating on AI and complex level design. Also because games, even singleplayer games, have steadily become more and more focused on social engagement, and all these are things that allow for easy creation of player content to drive that engagement. You can't write a guide to the AI in Halo in anything more than the most general terms because it is dynamic, but you sure can write a quest guide, or a build guide, and get people talking on Reddit and YouTube.

[PoeticallyPsyco]

Halo: The Master Chief Collection has almost all of the games in it, and is available for PC. Most of the single player campaigns are quite good, and all of them are at least fun; in particular, Halo 1 is one of my favorite games of all time.

Similarly, Halo Wars has a solid if not fantastic campaign, and Halo Wars 2 has an excellent one (you don't need to play the first one to enjoy it, either).

Back to the FPS genre, I've heard nothing but good things about Titanfall 2's campaign, though I haven't played it yet.

Just checked, and it looks like the whole Devil May Cry series is on Steam. I've only played DMC (the reboot) and 5, but I really liked both. DMC has much better aesthetics and an easier to learn combat system, and has a bit of a secondary focus on platforming that works well; 5 has a stronger story, an insanely deep (but very complicated) combat system, better boss fights, and features the original characters instead of the attempted reboot versions. (Also, I hate 5's lock-on mechanic. I can't believe people preferred the lock-on to DMC's ability to aim each attack and dodge.)

Is Subnautica a AAA game? Regardless, if you like survival games at all, it's one of the best.

[Rynjin]

Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition is still probably the best in the series, IMO, but 5 is a close second. Would be higher but playing as V sucks ass. 4 is really good too, and I imagine the Special Edition is even better, but I didn't play it.

Devil May Cry 1 IMO didn't age well, and 2 was garbage on release.

[Fergie0044]

2) Third person games ranging from mostly ... snip

Sounds like you're describing "the ubisoft game", which used to be called Assassins creed before gradually becoming the only game they make, in various skins. It has become worryingly common outside of Ubisoft too.

On topic; The Witcher 3 has taken up most of my time this decade, with some of the Total War RTSs also coming close. Dishonoured 2 was also decent.

Outside of those though, I'm finding myself increasingly playing non-AAA games like Outer Worlds, Kingdom Come Deliverance or Crusader Kings.

[Rynjin]

...Is Paradox not considered a AAA publisher? They sure monetize like they're one.

[snowblizz]

Is Subnautica a AAA game? Regardless, if you like survival games at all, it's one of the best.

I think we already established that AAA is hard to nail down as people measure on different axises, but no I don't see Subnautica qualify. The one thing AAA doesn't measure on is generally "fun".

[noob]

In the last five or ten years, the amount of variability between AAA singleplayer games/games with singleplayer campaigns has kind of fallen off a cliff. So far as I can tell you've got:

1) Call of Duty and Battlefield, the only more or less pure FPS franchises still kicking. I haven't played one in a while, but last I checked in, they were still super linear, with braindead AI and a very shallow combat sandbox in singleplayer. The days of Crysis and Halo with open battlefields and challenging, dynamic enemies are pretty far behind us.

2) Third person games ranging from mostly to entirely open world, pretty much all of which share at least most of the following set of features:

• A stealth system of some sort, complete with detection meters over dudes' heads just to make sure there's no tension or ambiguity
• A bow, even if there are also guns. When there are guns, the bow is at least as effective as said guns.
• A parkour system, i.e. platforming but without any real requirement for player skill.
• A resource system forcing you to tear up every flower and smash every last bit of scenery for rubbish to feed into the crafting system
• A bunch of pointless side missions everywhere, probably with their own map marker and compass waypoint
• A crafting system wherein you produce incrementally higher numbered versions of stuff you already had, so you can keep up with the enemy number bloat as the game continues.
• A three-pronged skill tree, which roughly decomposes into melee combat stuff, ranged combat stuff, and stealth/crafting/other stuff. At least one skill will probably more or less break the game
• A veritable infestation of MMO daily quest type challenges, i.e. stuff that's even below fetch quests in terms of impactful content.

A lot of these features aren't even gameplay features, they're things you do in the inventory to make your numbers bigger or fill up a progress bar. You might have a lot of gameplay verbs (stealth/shoot/melee/loot etc) but they're usually quite simple, extremely transparent to the player, and don't have an enormous amount of room for player skill or expressive play. Because developing gameplay is expensive and difficult, most of the junk you unlock doesn't really expand your original set of gameplay verbs: They just give you bigger numbers, or add a status effect (probably fire, or if the game is leaning into fantasy fire/lightning/freeze/poison) to something you could already do.

Basically I think to a large degree we've replaced dynamic and skill based gameplay with static, progression based gameplay. I suspect this is because content has become increasingly expensive to produce, the audience's requirements for polish have increased substantially, and these are all very easy and cheap forms of content to produce, compared to iterating on AI and complex level design. Also because games, even singleplayer games, have steadily become more and more focused on social engagement, and all these are things that allow for easy creation of player content to drive that engagement. You can't write a guide to the AI in Halo in anything more than the most general terms because it is dynamic, but you sure can write a quest guide, or a build guide, and get people talking on Reddit and YouTube.

You actually can write an ai guide for Halo.
50% of the "weird behaviours that happens once" are scripted for a specific place then the rest is a subtle mix of randomness(or sequential behaviour) and adaptation to positions of the varied actors for which you can actually write a guide if you can reverse engineer the code or do enough observations.
Being able to use the ai guide during play might be significantly harder because when you have to check the 15 squares flowchart to predict the odds of the monster behaviours you better pause the game for doing that checking.
But there is elements of the ai guide that are considerably easier to use like the reaction times(and the variation in those) of the varied monsters on seeing the player(and if it is different when seeing the player for the first time or not) and the most likely first contact engaging actions of the varied monsters.

[Vinyadan]

Doom was fun. If I had to tell the actual top five, however, we'd end up in the Jurassic -- something like Supreme Commander, Battle for Middle Earth, Morrowind, the first Half Life, and Age of Kings.