Wasteland 2 is an indie game
Shovel Knight is an indie game
Hell, Shenmue 3 is going to be an indie game
It looks like the Indie market is trying to be as open as possible, trying to take risks.
Yes, there are a lot of crappy indie titles out there, but that's what happens when putting your game out there gets easier.
I think in terms of AAA gaming, very few are truly amazing, but it's coming back round a bit now.
Witcher 3 proved you can strive for that open world goodness while having in-depth side quests.
MGSV was in my opinion, the biggest risk the series ever took and the Souls games prove that people still want a challenge.
The problem with F4, it took none of these risks in a year where AAA games were taking risks.
It played it safe, if it was released in either 2013/14, it probably would have gotten a bit more praise for being the diamond in the rough.
But as it stands, AAA gaming could be becoming good again, with the indie scene being by its side.
Both "AAA" and "Indie" are little more than marketing terms, and not very meaningful nowadays. It was much easier to distinguish between indie and AAA ("mainstream") in the past when indie gaming was such a small part of the gaming industry. With a few exceptions, game development was a grand studio-driven endeavour pursued by sizable dev teams, rather than the small, concentrated effort it often is today. But size and publishing methods aren't used to gauge whether games are "indie" or not - if we go by the literal definition, as in "independent from a publisher", that's not very practical as indie companies regularly grow and structure themselves similarly to big game publishers yet they're still called indie. And every AAA studio that exists started out as a smaller production team.
Is it, then, in regards to the creative involvement of the creators? Does it have to do with budget? Star Citizen is massively funded and does involve multiple studios, but Chris Roberts is still actively involved with the creative process. So either one of these two definitions can't be true, or we have a developer considered "indie" that is also pretty much an "AAA" company and both are true. Finances are the core of everything so budget would be the most "fair" dividing factor but that also doesn't mean anything to us because in that case AAA and indie are neither opposite nor mutually exclusive definitions.
Which brings us to my point, which is that "indie/AAA" is entirely irrelevant in modern gaming discussions. The words are meaningless. They tell you nothing about the software. They don't have a specific art style, no specific mechanics, no defined price, no specific subject matter... I also dislike those qualifiers on a personal level because of how easily people lump games they like as indie games and games they dislike as AAA games to try and justify the inane "everything is becoming more mainstream and worse" mentality that often plagues this kind of debate, even though in reality many of the games they are referring to as independent actually are huge productions and have a lot of mainstream focus while many games referred to as AAA are very niche.
Now, in the case of Fallout 4, that narrative initially seems to have some ground, considering it's clear the developers actively attempted to make the game less and less specifically built to a single target audience and focusing much more on accessibility. Many games do this to great success, but this is one case where the implementation fell flat on many areas.
When most people complain of "the stagnation of AAA games" or "AAA gaming only hasn't crashed because the 'indies' bring in creative value", they tend to treat it as a self-evidently bad phenomenon, but I can't think of a more creatively diverse and exciting time in gaming history. If anything, it feels like the industry is finally discovering a cohesive framework for generating almost constant change: there are established spaces for experimentation, and there are tentpole titles at the other end of the spectrum. Recognizing these games for what they are shows they are usually a mind-blowing achievement in coordination and refinement. Even if they don't reinvent the wheel with each title, they're still enormously complex projects involving tons of people and an ever-tightening relationship with a demanding audience. They are still their own form of creative feat. And of course, both the small, low budget productions and the ultra-high-budget massive ones are capable of producing either generic turds or incredible titles. All of that is a sign we should just move away from those simplistic classifications and focus more on understanding the creative processes of these games, whether the results are good or bad, for what they truly are.
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