[sandworm101]

Games that challenge the standards, therefore making them good art: Factorio. Papers please. Obra Dinn. Prison Architect. Even old-school Minecraft did amazing work challenging definitions. (Subnautica?) I haven't seen an artistically interesting AAA game in decades.

[Arainach]

When have AAA games ever been the source of challenging standards? AAA implies a level of budget at which that much risk isn't taken. If you look back multiple decades, it was so much cheaper to make a game that the definition of AAA doesn't makes sense. Even first-party major publishers were at most "AA".

Doom challenged standards, but Doom could be made by 5 people crammed in a house. Metal Gear Solid. The Sims had more people credited for music than Programming, Design, and Graphics combined (21). Minecraft was one person for the most part.

Look at the credits list for Morrowind: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Credits

And for Skyrim: https://www.mobygames.com/game/windows/elder-scrolls-v-skyri... At the time, development costs were estimated at $100M.

The latest Skyrim Anniversary Edition remaster will surely have a credits list dramatically longer than the 2011 release. AAA games are expensive now, and no one's going to invest tens of millions on the hope that billions of people across the world understand your cryptic commentary about nuclear weapons or whatever.

[sandworm101]

>> When have AAA games ever been the source of challenging standards?

SimCity. The original Civilization/Colonization. The Wing Commander series (privateer). Syndicate (1993). F-19/F-117. (The Janes sim series??) AAA doesn't mean high budget, just the highest budget games in the market at the time, those backed by market leaders.

[t-writescode]

This sounds like a redefining of AAA Games. When everyone's new at the gaming market - especially Sid Meiers and Will Wright were developing their early games, those were *absolutely* indie-tier.

[Arainach]

Hard disagree. Back then, market leaders were small companies that had to take risks to differentiate, and where you could fundamentally still self-fund if you had enough savings to live for a couple of years. Now the quality of a top-tier game requires a huge team, a huge amount of funding, and guarantees to the source of that funding.

[numpad0]

What about CoD4? I think CoD4 gave me more understanding to the reality of a war than a layman teenager needed back then.

[garaetjjte]

Prison Architect though? It's not a bad game, but seems like ordinary entry in simulation/tycoon genre.

[sandworm101]

Except that it teaches you to care about prisoners. The "win" is to keep them happy. That makes the capital punishment sequence downright disturbing. It is also the only game I know of that was reported for violations of the Geneva convention. (Misuse of the red cross symbol.) That had to be worth some artistic credibility.

[tweetle_beetle]

Taking an atypical narrative stance seems like a low bar, in and of itself, for defining challenging standards. I'm in agreement with parent that it's well executed, but to reach for a lazy description, it's basically "[..] with a twist". I'd be surprised if it's remembered as milestone. (Your last sentence sounds like classic PR fare and not noteworthy.)

This is reinforced by how it came to be. Basically Introversion spent too much time and money on a tech demo without any concept of turning it into a game [1]. Prison Architect took a safe, well-trodden paradigm that was easier to turn into a finished, profitable protect. Subversion was the sort of game that could have broken the mould if they'd ever figured it out. I remember being underwhelemed hearing about what their new project would be when they gave up on it.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subversion_(video_game)