Why games are too big

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The continuity of your cardboard house as it slowly falls into disrepair and ruin is such a nice touch in all of your non-animated videos.

His house’s destruction arc is slowly yet rapidly evolving

Man I don't know about Y'all but when I initially heard that "setting a new standard" thing my first train of thought was not "yeah other games need to be as big as BG3" my train of thought was just, yeah, this QUALITY of game should be the standard, nothing to do with the size of amount of content, but the quality. The quality of a product that actually felt finished, like it wasn't trying to nickel and dime me, something that was trying to just waste my time, bloated mess. The size and amount of content was nothing to do with it, rather the quality of the content and being something actually worth my money and by that notion I really do feel BG3 sets the standard.

You got me until the Mimimi part. Framing that the studio shut down because they made an exceedingly high quality game is very dishonest

I remember a comment from an Escapist video that really stuck with me: The main pitfall of voting with your wallet is that there isn't a true 'no' vote; only 'yes' and 'abstain'. It made more sense the more I thought about it. I can't exactly give a company negative money, and me not buying 1 unit of a product does not cancel out someone else buying 1 unit of the same. A company is only realistically going to care about how many people bought their game, not how many conscientious objectors there were. Audiences both casual and enthusiast will eat up whatever slop hits the table (no we can't just go blaming casuals again for stupid monetary decisions, they're not the only complicit party in this mess), and the machine grinds ever forward. Short of a mass exodus of these people who otherwise aren't inclined to stop their purchasing habits, nothing will realistically change. People need to ask what they want out of a game, truly, but it's going to be an uphill battle convincing people to care about it. Anyways, everything will be paradise as soon as we turn Bobby Kotick into a fucking pizza.

Something crazy about this is that the film industry has been suffering in almost THE EXACT SAME WAY.

The initial impression I got from this video was that those people were trashing developers for not being able to meet the standards set by Larian Studios, but going back and viewing the videos in full individually now it seems like they were just lamenting the predatory nature of a lot of AAA companies. I'm sure a lot of people would appreciate some sort of follow-up to this video, especially when you straight up insult other creators and talk about how there's much more integrity on your end. I think the discussion those creators were trying to have was that the tweet thread was missing the point of why so many people are dissatisfied with the state of AAA games and why so many are giving BG3 extra praise. Something along the lines of "We're not saying 'Every AAA game should be like this' we just want our games to work and not be predatory!". Not saying there weren't people accusing him of saying things he didn't, just saying the ones you cited weren't those people and it's unfair to paint them as such.

I love that the examples you used for studios shutting down for making games way too big was the studio that made Gollum and the Saints Row Remake.

From an engineer's standpoint, it's actually really wild to see the ways focusing on the bottom line indirectly impacts the end product. Take Halo Infinite, for example. Microsoft and leadership at 343 started running the studio in the same way they would any other software development house: short-term project-focused contract workers provided the lion's share of the technical staff, and the full-time employees were mostly in non- or semi-technical managerial positions. This ended up coming around to bite them in the ass when the overhauled the Blam engine into the Slipspace engine. All of the contract workers who built the engine and understood how it worked, all ended up leaving once their contracts expired, in turn leaving 343 with huge gaps in their institutional knowledge. New devs ended up having to quite literally literally figure out how the engine worked before they could start developing it, which caused massive delays in dev timelines. Now they're switching Halo over to Unreal, which does not require that institutional knowledge that an in-house engine requires; new devs just need to know how to use Unreal in order to hit the ground running, making short-term contract workers a more viable model.

Armored Core 6 was great imo. It didn’t promise some big open world or grand things, it just provided a new game in a series I enjoyed. Good gameplay kept me playing for hours.

Fun fact: Noodle's house crumbling down is actually a metaphor of his argument and credibility falling down as the video goes on. Truly, an epic gaming poem.

no one expects small or medium sized teams to make bg3 level games everyone was talking about AAA teams

I remember being on that whole "vote with your wallets" mentality in the past because I felt very overwhelmed by the constant use of techniques that are used to either maximize profit or artificially increase player retention, trying to convince others that they should stop buying skins or ignore these kind of second job challenges most life service games have now a days. It took me some time (and several good Youtube videos similar to this one) to realize that I can't really do anything about it, so instead I just decided to stop playing these games outright since microtransactions, tedious tasks and other things corporations do to "make arrow go up" just heavily depreciated my experience as a player. And ever since I have never been happier playing videogames: Had a blast with Armored Core 6 and For Answer since I have never ever played a proper mech game, Pseudoregalia managed to make me not suck at 3D exploration, Friends vs Friends solved my question of what would happen if everyone had a gun playing UNO and BattleBit Remastered made me feel like I was in an actually war somehow. When I see people saying "there's no good games anymore", it kinda looks like they either have a hard time finding games that suit their preferences or can't get themselves to try other things, and I kinda wish I could help those people change their mind so they could have more fun too (or at least less frustration).

The best game I played recently was a game called Freshly Frosted. It was a short, puzzle game about making a donut factory. It wasn't like... a mega factory game, it had levels and themes and a chill background story. I finished it in a few days in-between working. It wasn't big or revolutionary, it was fun. I think that's what we've forgotten, we want to have fun.

Noodle we have to know, where did the middle of LegacyKilla's clip go?

“Don’t tax businesses, you’re going to hurt small businesses” is essentially the incorrect argument being made

“Tragically, the subject is nuanced.” “Knowing is half the battle, and battle is half the Royale.” No idea which one is my favorite

It's also worth noting that, even with Baldur's Gate 3 being a huge, huge swing, it's a lot more focused than people give it credit for. Almost all of the systems in the game were built piecemeal over the last three games Larian has built, all three of them in a genre considered by many to be pretty niche and unprofitable up until just very, very recently. All of the money they spent, all of the content they built, that started from a rock solid foundation of already having one of the best CRPG engines and teams in the world, and even THEN they spend so much time and money making it that it was a risky moonshot.

You see after watching both ArchWizard's video and this back to back, I feel like there was a big misconception here with what general people meant as the new """"standard"""" (and some people probably meant it even more differently than what I'm about to say. Thats how the internet works. Its impossible to generalize because there will always be a sizeable group of people who feel differently.) Noodle and Nelson thought the "standard" meant to a video game's scope and size and features, when people actually meant as a "standard" of quality, stability, and completeness. If there were more people arguing that AAA studios should make their games bigger in size and features (and I'm sure there are people who do, this is the internet) then Noodle and Nelson have a point. Its honestly the whole argument this video is based on. But there were people who were aruging that AAA studios should make their games stable, complete, and to a pleasant quality of not just Baldur's Gate 3, but great games of the past we look back on. Two completely different argument context. I'm sure there were people out there argued the points Noodle was debating (although he used youtuber footage that was discussing the different context so take that what you will) but thats not EVERYONE'S mindset on the debate of industry standard. Its like two groups of very loud people debating each other but they're not in the same room. tl;dr Arguing over the internet is a fools errand unless you can get an immediate 1 on 1 level to provide as needed context and clarification. Save your time and mental space.