During this year’sSummer Game Fest, I noticed that the video game landscape had shifted beneath our feet. Once upon a time, showcases like this would present a stream of triple-A and maybe a couple of indie games with little in between.That’s changed recently, and the announcement of a raft of double-A sequels confirmed it. WithResonance: A Plague Tale Legacy,Mortal Shell 2,High on Life 2,Bloodstained: The Scarlet Engagement, andAtomic Heart 2(plus its multiplayer spin-off The Cube), double-A is back and bigger than ever. But not too big, obviously.
Throughout the 2010s, double-A games pretty much disappeared. We got big-budget triple-A games likeRed Dead Redemption 2andUncharted 4: A Thief’s Endmade by teams of hundreds, or eveninto the thousands. And we got tiny indies likeGone HomeandStardew Valleythat were made by small teams or even solo developers. But double-A games, the games that straddled the line, with mid-sized teams and mid-sized budgets, were less and less common. This began to change as the 2010s came to a close and the 2020s roared to life.
Okay, given what the first year of the 2020s looked like, it admittedly roared much less than we expected to.
Double-A Is Back, Baby
With games like A Plague Tale: Innocence, Mortal Shell, High on Life, and Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night, this began to shift. All of those games got sequel announcements during last week’s Summer Game Fest, and I love the direction this points to for the future.
I’ve long felt that games are way too expensive, take way too long to develop, and are filled with way too much bloat. Double-A isn’t a magic bullet for that — these titles have all taken several years to make — but it is a step in the right direction. Not because they take any less time. Making a game that looks as good asClair Obscur: Expedition 33, for example, but with a significantly smaller core team than most triple-A studios would use for a similar project, is going to take longer (even thoughmore than 30 people worked on the game through outsourcing). You either lower standards or take longer.
Let Double-A Pave The Way
But the beauty of double-A games gaining prevalence is that their success can lead the way to a new era for the industry. While triple-A studios have accepted that their games need to be huge and campaigns that take 20-30 hours to complete, double-A games are more comfortable being shorter and smaller. The first High on Life took around ten hours to finish, as did the first Mortal Shell. Most players will be able to finish each of the Plague Tale games in well under 20 hours. Same goes for Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night and Atomic Heart.
These games were all successful enough to warrant sequels without delivering Ubisoft-level open-world bloat or a God of War Ragnarok-sized campaign. Atomic Heart apparently did so well that Mundfish is following it up with a sequel and a multiplayer spin-off set in the same universe. Clair Obscur, the best-reviewed game of the year and one of the best-selling, is a double-A game that will almost certainly get a sequel. As Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft bump up the prices for their first-party games, double-A is pointing the way to a future where you spend less money and less time on a single game.
