Those games did not have a high enough budget to be considered AAA.

fennecfoxy · 2026-01-14T11:26:55 1768390015

And did the concept of "AAA" truly exist back then? Let alone "AAAA"? It's not really a good benchmark, imo.

charcircuit · 2026-01-14T11:57:50 1768391870

Pulling up games from decades ago instead of the last few years isn't a good benchmark either especially considering the technical limitations that existed at that time.

croon · 2026-01-14T14:00:01 1768399201

I'm the last person to propose more LLM usage, but there is a reason DnD has exploded in popularity in recent years despite fancier games and graphics existing, and it's not because people find text/story telling restrictive on an immersion or technical level. If a Zork was released today with a hypothetical adaptive parser with world coherent output (big ifs) I think it'd be a huge hit personally. Though to be clear, I'm not saying someone could build it on an LLM.

As long as people still enjoy books I believe they will still want to interact with it if possible.

IAmBroom · 2026-01-14T16:50:48 1768409448

All of this subthread comes from an attempt to refute the statement, "Considering there has never been a AAA game of that genre...".

Never is a long time. However, now we're arguing the counter-examples aren't "AAA games".

charcircuit · 2026-01-14T17:05:41 1768410341

>Never is a long time.

It is bounded by the time AAA games became financial viable to create.

anthk · 2026-01-14T22:07:57 1768428477

False. Tons of games in the 80's and 90's where stupidly cheap to create and still AAA games on their own.

cubefox · 2026-01-14T11:20:12 1768389612

That's just their nature: they are very inexpensive to make. The original question was whether people find them fun and engaging. Clearly they did in the past. Though nowadays their standards have risen a lot. Even graphical adventure games (like Monkey Island) have long fallen out of favor due to a lack of action elements.