Triple-A gamescan execute ideas at the highest level, with impressive graphical fidelity, scale, and polish, but the best ideas tend to emerge in theindiespace. Big studios iterate, you could say, while little studios innovate.
That isn’t always the case.Breath of the Wild, for example, set a lot of trends that indies like A Short Hike andSablefollowed. But we often see big studios like Ubisoft make slightly different games year after year while indie devs like Supergiant are willing to try something new each time out of the gate.
And, because indies are often labors of love that only risk losing money for the developers involved, we tend to see a lot of new studios that are pursuing unique creative visions because, well, what have they got to lose? And what better way to stand out from the crowd than by being completely different?Disco Elysium,Minecraft,Cuphead,Undertale,Inscryption, and this year’s best debut indie winner at The Game Awards’Cocoon, were all the result of small groups of people (sometimes solo developers working alone) setting out to make something they wanted to see in the world with no real assurance that they would turn a profit. Once those ideas are proven to work, triple-A studios, who do need to make money for shareholders, can take them, make them look like a (hundred) million bucks, and put out their own version sans risk.
So, it isn’t necessarily surprising to see Sony studios making roguelikes. The genre has been around since the ’80s, and popular in the indie space for over a decade. But it is surprising to see two of the highest profile games in Sony’s roster introduce permadeath modes within a few months of each other. At The Game Awards, a free roguelike challenge mode, Valhalla, was announced forGod of War Ragnarok. It’s out now. But that comes on the heels of Naughty Dog’s announcement thatThe Last of Us Part 2 Remasteredwill include No Return, which also puts its characters through a partially procedurally generated gauntlet.
This isn’t the first time triple-A games have adopted roguelike design principles.Prey’s Mooncrashexpansion took that Arkane game’s rich systems and applied them to a randomized run structure where players were forced to interact deeply with the game in a way the main campaign never required, just suggested.Hitman: World of Assassinationintroduced Freelancer, a mode where players could take on the trilogy’s maps with randomized targets and item placements, earlier this year. And, Sony itself dipped a toe into the roguelike genre at the start of the console generation with Housemarque’sReturnal. But, seeing both God of War and The Last of Us embrace procedural generation seems like an indication that something has shifted.
Triple-A games take a long time to make. Four years passed between God of War 2018 and Ragnarok, and seven between The Last of Us and Part 2. Though other studios that take a long time in development, like Rockstar, have been able to generate revenue through live service offerings, that isn’t in the cards for every big developer. Introducing a roguelike mode seems like a smart way for big studios to bring new experiences to their players without having to reinvent the wheel. The next game from Santa Monica Studios will likely take another three to four years, so adding new content that didn’t require building new character models, weapons, or enemies seems like a positive development.
I’ve written about the ways thatTears of the Kingdom represents a healthy direction for triple-A games. Like theYakuzaseries, it reuses many assets from its predecessor, allowing Nintendo to focus on other things besides building an entirely new map. Triple-A bloat has become unsustainable, but God of War Ragnarok and The Last of Us Part 2 Remastered seem to be taking a page from the Tears of the Kingdom playbook. Hopefully fans can get on board, too.
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