Josh Soyer: Small games are useful for AAA studios and ‘directly contributed to the creation of The Outer Worlds 2
According to the Director of the Studio Josh Sawyer from Osbidian, the allocation of time for small, perhaps more unusual games between large projects can help maintain the health of large AAA studios.
Sawyer touched on the topic of the scale of games in response to Twitter’s message to Jeris Dianingana from Cliffhanger Games, who is currently working on the game about the Black Panther. Diangana claims that "It would be nice if large AAA studios made (and not published) more low-scale games", indicating such examples "Aa", Like Hi-Fi Rush from the Tango GameWorks studio, which created The Evil Within.
"We would have more diversity, experiments", – He adds. "Release more games in the same company more often. For good mental well-being, it would be good to get away to something else. Not everything should be "Big"".
Other games developers supported the thoughts of Diane in their answers. Soyer claims that even small games created as part of AA alone can have the same creative effect, and that "This is also a positive moment for the end consumer – holding personnel".
Soyer indicates the expansion of the development cycles of AAA as one of the potential causes of the burnout of the industry and the fluidity of the personnel.
In large projects with a large number of employees, especially in those where there are problems with the selection of personnel and the compilation of graphs, high staff turnover is not uncommon. Such fluidity can occur at all levels, which leads to a loss of a large number of institutional knowledge. In some cases, the developers completely leave the industry. Many developers promise before the release, and then either immediately leave or dismiss them, because the leaders need 1/3 staff to prepare the next game. The loss of institutional knowledge is destructive at the level of the team, where leaders often do not feel the consequences.
In the interval between such large -scale projects, games of AA or less level may appear. "If the company has the means to overcome the gap between projects, then the use of a level of level A or AA as a way for (I hope, not completely) burnt out developers to refresh and get very useful to recharge", – Soyer counts.
Soyer claims that the creation of games of this scale has brought tangible benefit Obsidian, which is most famous for such grandiose role -playing games as the upcoming continuation of The Outer Worlds 2 and Avowed. Sawyer carries the Grounded survival game to the AA camp, and Pentiment’s narrative adventure is to class A, and says that both of these games "directly influenced how we think about current and future projects". (He does not call The Outer Worlds 2 and Avowed here, but these are the only well -known Obsidian games preparing for the exit).