Mirror's Edge 1-2 (PEGI 16)
Mass Effect 1 (rated 12 by BBFC)

Call of Duty: Ghosts (PEGI 16)

Well, I have been known to blow things out of proportion, I won't argue that. Certainly there are no games I know of with 60+ hours of combat OR dialogue. Even really grindy RPGs are only half combat. But it sounds like you're comfortable with a bit of hyperbole yourself, so I don't feel to bad. smile.png I think you brought up a great question when you asked "Why two Ellies?" That's because the logical necessity of social conflict, at any scale, is having difficult social choices, and that's only possible when two different and conflicting relationships have real weight. When you de-emphasize combat, and center on social conflict, then the social conflict has to be as engaging as the combat. Just like fighting the same foe over and over doesn't hold enough conflict for a mid-tier game, neither will a single relationship.

Well, I will just say to have the player immerse in a story of social conflict or social interactions you might need more than a single "person".... but these persons do not necessarily need to be just as fleshed out as an "ellie". These NPC / Player characters just need to give the player the illusion of being real, breathing persons. There are many ways to achieve that, and while the brute force way of giving each character a lot of story and room in the game to tell this story, as well as fleshed out AI that makes the character act in a realistic way seems to be the most obvious, game developers since the dawn of the craft have been ingenious about achieving more with less.

I am pretty sure when a good story writer, game designer, level designer, AI programmer and artist put their head together and try to come up with believable characters that don't need a lot of room in the game and deep AI, yet still seem very alive to players, they will find many good ways to generate that illusion. Even within the constraints of a tight budget that will let them do only one Ellie, but maybe multiple Ellie-look-alikes that seem just as relatable to the player.

Players in the end don't care how the expierience was crafted as long as it was good. And a good expierience neither needs to span dozens of hours of content, nor does it need to be totally open world and unscripted.

That said, I would not only agree that YA Games could do good and go one further and say that YA games DO do well. Life is Strange is a great example. Small team. Decent quality. A million in sales. It proves that there's an audience here. DontNod seems to be furthering the idea of social conflicts as central gameplay in Vampyr, so I think they're going to continue to develop these gameplay types. Telltale's success and growing catalog of quality licensed games says a lot as well, it's just the gameplay is so sparse people question if they are "really" games. What I haven't seen yet is a AAA version in these young gaming genres, and that's what all the cleverness would be needed for, just like decades of cleverness goes into the combat games to produce the stories and deep gameplay in them we all appreciate. I don't think non-combat gameplay is any less complicated or difficult to create and master creation of. Do you?

Well, then it seems we are one step closer to AAA games about YA themes.

One thing to take into account is that an AAA game most probably takes 2-4 times as much time to create than a small episodic game like life is strange or the telltale games even with the much larger teams that are used on them. It also seems to me AAA Studios only takle a new IP when their existing ones haven been "milked dry", and even then they are cautious not to stray to far from their existing games. Most probably because they have more inhouse knowledge about it, but also to build unto an existing fanbase.

Most probably either a big publisher sees an opportunity to make so much money with an AAA YA game compared to FIFA 999999 that they are willing to live with the higher risk (after all, FIFA will sell year after year, with minimal changes), or a small studio has a massive amount of success with YA games, and move up to the AAA league, starting to grow their games size to AAA level with it.

The Studios in the AAA Industry are just about as agile as any big company... that is, as agile as an oil tanker. You don't act on a whim when 100's of millions of $ are in play. That is why the decisionmakers are very careful with choosing a course, and why changes will take time to reach the AAA industry.

I'm also a bit skeptical that an audience necessarily brings about a surge in games of that type. Rhythm games and motion control games certainly proved they had an audience, but there were very few companies capable of tapping into those audiences for lack of expertise in those very different gameplay styles. Style that contradict in some ways the game design experience of the bulk of the industry. So, I, personally don't believe a wildly successful YA-Novel-styled indie will lead to a AAA game by itself. The expertise must also be built so that a AAA YA Novel Game is still an affordable prospect for publishers within the same time and budget constraints as a AAA combat-centric game. A big hit will cause them to evaluate the market, yes, but if the barrier to entry into that market is too much higher than the barrier to entry for the combat-centric audience, then the evaluation will naturally be negative.

On the topic of rythm and motion control games, I think we have seen a whole lot of them in the last console generation. They were there, they were big, and they were successfull.

But more than anything, they had to struggle with additional barriers to entry that in the end doomed many a game to a rather moderate success.

a) you need a new input device. Price, Space requirements, and sometimes lacking accuray (Kinect 1.0) were all stopping some people from getting on. When games started coming out with new input devices that were only compatible with the games from that one series (GH Guitars vs Rockband devices, Buzz Buzzers), it made things only worse. Some people newer bought it expecting the device they paid for to only be good for one game.

b) you need to get accustomed to a new way to play. To many, learning a new input method is charring... see the KB+M Masterrace vs Gamepad Console Peasant arguments all over the internet, when basically both can be just as accurate, given the right support by the game and quality periphery devices.

Many people quickly found out that these new devices transformed their traditional gaming session to something new. Which was cool, it made some people buy a Wii that never would have else. But for the guy that just wanted to sit on the sofa for 6 hours and have a blast in a game while eating snacks and drinking beer, having to do a full body workout most probably was not the right thing.

Hell, after some hard Wii partying playing raving rabbits minigames I had sore muscles all over... and I am quite sportive (okay, we went overboard with the competition that evening for sure)... go figure.

The rythm and motion control games of the last generation where more or less all party games. As such, they were never ever able to become video gaming mainstream.

Leaving that topic behind, I still fail to see why building a good game about "social conflict" would be so much harder to do than building a good shooter... after all, a good shooter already is not that easy to build. If you cheapen out on it, you get all kind of complaints from your audience... on-rails shooter, stupid AI opponents, cheating AI and whatnot.

There is certainly some adaption needed for studios that where only pushing out shooters before. But that is something you can test in a non-AAA sized expierience without problem.

Anyway, I guess all we can do is wait and see... or, if you are an Indie developer and love the YA genre, go and create successfull YA games. It might not be a surefire way to attract AAA interest to the genre... but without Indie success in the genre, you can most probably outright forget it.

Well, I will just say to have the player immerse in a story of social conflict or social interactions you might need more than a single "person".... but these persons do not necessarily need to be just as fleshed out as an "ellie". These NPC / Player characters just need to give the player the illusion of being real, breathing persons. There are many ways to achieve that, and while the brute force way of giving each character a lot of story and room in the game to tell this story, as well as fleshed out AI that makes the character act in a realistic way seems to be the most obvious, game developers since the dawn of the craft have been ingenious about achieving more with less.

I am pretty sure when a good story writer, game designer, level designer, AI programmer and artist put their head together and try to come up with believable characters that don't need a lot of room in the game and deep AI, yet still seem very alive to players, they will find many good ways to generate that illusion. Even within the constraints of a tight budget that will let them do only one Ellie, but maybe multiple Ellie-look-alikes that seem just as relatable to the player.

Players in the end don't care how the expierience was crafted as long as it was good. And a good expierience neither needs to span dozens of hours of content, nor does it need to be totally open world and unscripted.

Absolutely agreed! I think though when we talk about great short games, we're no longer talking about AAA games. I think when we talk about games with believable characters that don't take up a lot of room, we're no longer talking about a game focused on relationships over combat. Certainly tons of deep AI is not necessary to create believable social relationships, nor would I ever imply such a thing, but if social interaction doesn't take up a vast majority of room in your game, then your game is not about social conflict that typifies the vast majority of the conflicts in a YA Novel. This doesn't mean your game is bad or anything like that, it's just not a AAA YA game, which is, as you know, the topic.

Well, then it seems we are one step closer to AAA games about YA themes.

One thing to take into account is that an AAA game most probably takes 2-4 times as much time to create than a small episodic game like life is strange or the telltale games even with the much larger teams that are used on them. It also seems to me AAA Studios only takle a new IP when their existing ones haven been "milked dry", and even then they are cautious not to stray to far from their existing games. Most probably because they have more inhouse knowledge about it, but also to build unto an existing fanbase.

Most probably either a big publisher sees an opportunity to make so much money with an AAA YA game compared to FIFA 999999 that they are willing to live with the higher risk (after all, FIFA will sell year after year, with minimal changes), or a small studio has a massive amount of success with YA games, and move up to the AAA league, starting to grow their games size to AAA level with it.

The Studios in the AAA Industry are just about as agile as any big company... that is, as agile as an oil tanker. You don't act on a whim when 100's of millions of $ are in play. That is why the decisionmakers are very careful with choosing a course, and why changes will take time to reach the AAA industry.

True, true true. This is all part of why we see the same games over and over every year, and speaks to another huge reason why we don't see AAA YA novel-styled games: because the AAA industry is only focused on a very small number of gameplay mechanics out of the infinite ones possible.

On the topic of rythm and motion control games, I think we have seen a whole lot of them in the last console generation. They were there, they were big, and they were successfull.

But more than anything, they had to struggle with additional barriers to entry that in the end doomed many a game to a rather moderate success.

a) you need a new input device. Price, Space requirements, and sometimes lacking accuray (Kinect 1.0) were all stopping some people from getting on. When games started coming out with new input devices that were only compatible with the games from that one series (GH Guitars vs Rockband devices, Buzz Buzzers), it made things only worse. Some people newer bought it expecting the device they paid for to only be good for one game.

b) you need to get accustomed to a new way to play. To many, learning a new input method is charring... see the KB+M Masterrace vs Gamepad Console Peasant arguments all over the internet, when basically both can be just as accurate, given the right support by the game and quality periphery devices.

Many people quickly found out that these new devices transformed their traditional gaming session to something new. Which was cool, it made some people buy a Wii that never would have else. But for the guy that just wanted to sit on the sofa for 6 hours and have a blast in a game while eating snacks and drinking beer, having to do a full body workout most probably was not the right thing.

Hell, after some hard Wii partying playing raving rabbits minigames I had sore muscles all over... and I am quite sportive (okay, we went overboard with the competition that evening for sure)... go figure.

The rythm and motion control games of the last generation where more or less all party games. As such, they were never ever able to become video gaming mainstream.

It's true that we did see many of them. The point I was making was that it only came from a small group of people, and others who tried to cash in on that medium were not able to because they did not have the expertise. The genre stagnated, and ended. Party games from last generation continue to be successful on this one, except for the music ones. I hear you on the workout issue, I'm just saying they were wildly popular moneymakers. The issue I think you hit on the head is that it required learning a new way to play, and I think what you've missed is designing new ways to play is at the same time designing new ways to design.

Leaving that topic behind, I still fail to see why building a good game about "social conflict" would be so much harder to do than building a good shooter... after all, a good shooter already is not that easy to build. If you cheapen out on it, you get all kind of complaints from your audience... on-rails shooter, stupid AI opponents, cheating AI and whatnot.

There is certainly some adaption needed for studios that where only pushing out shooters before. But that is something you can test in a non-AAA sized expierience without problem.

Anyway, I guess all we can do is wait and see... or, if you are an Indie developer and love the YA genre, go and create successfull YA games. It might not be a surefire way to attract AAA interest to the genre... but without Indie success in the genre, you can most probably outright forget it.

Hmmm... let's think about that for a moment. Making a shooter is difficult, therefore, making a game about social conflict, whatever that is, can't be harder, because making a shooter is already so hard. This assumes there's some thresh-hold of design difficulty and that shooters are at the top and thus, nothing could be harder, because shooters are as hard as game design can get. I'm quite convinced that assumption is false.

The answer to your question is "experience." If I'm making a AAA combat-focused game, I can hire guys who have 20 years of experience making such games who know exactly how to avoid cheating/stupid combat AI, and how to make linear combat scenarios not feel so linear, and have developed numerous techniques and especially tools to do the things that need to be done and ideas about how to push the genre forward that they know may work based on their experience.

If I make a game around a mechanic of, I dunno, asking questions to get information to open gated content, there's no experts. They're making more mistakes because they don't know exactly how to avoid stupid/cheating conversation AI, or how to make linear conversation scenarios not feel so linear. They have all the same problems of making a great shooter, without any of the techniques, experiences or tried and tested tools that shooter-makers have. They may not have to convince people to buy a peripheral but they have to learn a new way to play so well that they can make this new way to play fun.

And while we do have to wait and see, we certainly can discuss. That's how indie games come about, from discussion about ideas and themes and what may or ma not work based on the experiences with social mechanics that we all do have. I agree, again, that indie and AA success is a part of the process we're both agreed on, I simply also believe that public discussion is part of the indie process as well. But I appreciate the gentle 'put up or shut up.' I really do have too many ideas to do nothing but talk about them, so thanks for that.

I was at the bookstore today, and I took a good look at the YA books and I came to this conclusion: YA books aren't AAA products. In this context it makes a lot more sense that the most direct game equivalents of YA books aren't AAA games. In fact, the percentage of AAA novels has been decreasing annually in the same pattern that the percentage of AAA games has been decreasing annually.

To be fair most paper back books that you see in book shops weather they are YA or not would not fall into a AAA category. Most of them are simply pulp fiction.

However if you want YA fiction that could be called a AAA production the only one that springs to mind is Phillip Pullmans Dark Materials Trilogy or probably some of William Gibsons early stuff but, then Gibson would probably be classified as New Adult (NA) rather than Young Adult(YA).

Hmmm... I wouldn't be able to make a convincing argument that Harry Potter and The Hunger Games are NOT AAA products. I could say that about Divergent perhaps, even Ender's Game at a stretch, and of course most YA novels are not AAA, because the common usage of AAA is meant to describe the elite set of things. Certainly we wouldn't say that most video games are AAA, or most films, or most... anything. Novels, or YA Novels are not special in that regard.

But can we say Harry Potter is of lower quality in some meaningful way than Call of Duty? What metric can we use to say that the Hunger Games books aren't a AAA franchise, but Assassin's Creed is? I can't think of one. Can you?

Most interestingly, the relatively small audiences for these books ("only" 30 or so million sold for some of the best entries in the biggest franchises), translate into a much larger audience for the movie market. The video game market may not be any different, even if the best movies outstrip the best book sales, a high quality Hunger Games movie still almost breaks a Billion Dollars.

Absolutely agreed! I think though when we talk about great short games, we're no longer talking about AAA games. I think when we talk about games with believable characters that don't take up a lot of room, we're no longer talking about a game focused on relationships over combat. Certainly tons of deep AI is not necessary to create believable social relationships, nor would I ever imply such a thing, but if social interaction doesn't take up a vast majority of room in your game, then your game is not about social conflict that typifies the vast majority of the conflicts in a YA Novel. This doesn't mean your game is bad or anything like that, it's just not a AAA YA game, which is, as you know, the topic.

Oh, absolutely, you have a point there.

I might have to point out though that the escalating costs of what is seen as AAA nowadays is the reason why a) AAA games become more and more conservative, and b) AAA games tend to produce sequel after sequel while the publisher tries to milk the one huge effort they did with incrimental updates until the players no longer are willing to pay, and the series needs to be rebooted.

I personally don't think "everything but the kitchen sink" open world designs like GTA 5 are really that brilliant, as they often lack focus in their aim for the broadest possible audience, and I don't think this is a sustainable business model for the future. It can be highly rewarding if successfull but is a huge risk. And in a time when AAA more and more is linked to such designs, it gets harder and harder to design a game for a broad audience on a budget.

Now, I don't think I did make my point the right way. What I wanted to say is: "You can produce an YA AAA game with the same budget and complexity as any other game, as long as you keep FOCUS and are ready to prevent the feature creep".

If you do need the whole party of ellies and a similar group of AI enemies to keep the social interaction interesting, maybe you need to save money somewhere else. Do you need the big explosions and action scenes of AAA shooters when social interaction should be your center point? Do you need the photorealistic graphics?

There where more than enough "Budget AAA" games lately that chose ingenious ways to keep the budget down while making sure they where seen as AAA games by their audience.

For example the original Borderlands certainly was on the other end of the AAA budget spectrum compared to a GTA 5. Yet still nobody contested its AAA status even though the story was clearly hacked together (but hilarious in my eyes), the graphics was quite wellmade but clearly budget friendly, and the weaponsystem was built in a way to save money by leaving item creation to procedural generation.

AAA doesn't mean "everything but the kitchen sink".... AAA means the customer is expected to pay 60+ bucks for the game, but most customers are actually getting their moneys worth in entertainment. Is a Telltale game an AAA game? Most probably not, too short. If you bundle all the episodes together, would people be ready to pay 60 bucks and would feel they get their moneys worth? Is it an AAA game now? To inexpensive to produce? Maybe, but this is now the publishers view. What about the player? Will the player notice that you saved half your budget by going with a simplified graphics? Does he care?

So I guess the problem here is that "AAA" is kind of a not so welldefined monicker... correct me if I am wrong, I am happy to learn something new.

Hmmm... let's think about that for a moment. Making a shooter is difficult, therefore, making a game about social conflict, whatever that is, can't be harder, because making a shooter is already so hard. This assumes there's some thresh-hold of design difficulty and that shooters are at the top and thus, nothing could be harder, because shooters are as hard as game design can get. I'm quite convinced that assumption is false.



The answer to your question is "experience." If I'm making a AAA combat-focused game, I can hire guys who have 20 years of experience making such games who know exactly how to avoid cheating/stupid combat AI, and how to make linear combat scenarios not feel so linear, and have developed numerous techniques and especially tools to do the things that need to be done and ideas about how to push the genre forward that they know may work based on their experience.

If I make a game around a mechanic of, I dunno, asking questions to get information to open gated content, there's no experts. They're making more mistakes because they don't know exactly how to avoid stupid/cheating conversation AI, or how to make linear conversation scenarios not feel so linear. They have all the same problems of making a great shooter, without any of the techniques, experiences or tried and tested tools that shooter-makers have. They may not have to convince people to buy a peripheral but they have to learn a new way to play so well that they can make this new way to play fun.



And while we do have to wait and see, we certainly can discuss. That's how indie games come about, from discussion about ideas and themes and what may or ma not work based on the experiences with social mechanics that we all do have. I agree, again, that indie and AA success is a part of the process we're both agreed on, I simply also believe that public discussion is part of the indie process as well. But I appreciate the gentle 'put up or shut up.' I really do have too many ideas to do nothing but talk about them, so thanks for that.

Well, trying to gauge how hard or easy something is to do compared to something else is certainly just a guessing game until you sit down and try it yourself.

You do have a point though, that today you will find many a studio with a lot of expierience creating shooters, but not so many with expierience in creating a fun expierience centered around social interaction between intelligent seeming AI agents and player characters. While I am not sure these "social interacton" elements are as unexplored as your comments sometimes make it sound (many RPGs of the last few years experimented with them, in different ways and with varying degrees of success), certainly not many a game tried to make these social interactions elements the corner stones of their design... they where merely a decoration for a more conservative combat and story driven expierience.

Thing is, that MIGHT just be another way how the first true AAA YA game comes to be. Maybe, one day, studios have so much expierience with social interactions in "combat first" games, that they decide to turn the design on its head and create a "social interaction first" design, where combat is second thought or maybe even absent. That might evolve into a design that could be used as a base for a game based on a YA novel.

I mean, if they have a design that works and actually reaches what they THINK is the right audience for a YA novel (yeah, lets not go into that again :) ), picking a YA that was a raving success is the logical next step to sell your next big AAA game.

I was at the bookstore today, and I took a good look at the YA books and I came to this conclusion: YA books aren't AAA products. In this context it makes a lot more sense that the most direct game equivalents of YA books aren't AAA games. In fact, the percentage of AAA novels has been decreasing annually in the same pattern that the percentage of AAA games has been decreasing annually.

Which books are AAA products? Books todays are read a lot, but are overshadowed by movies. On the other hand, the lower cost of entry in the market means there are A LOT more books to pick from.

That is why it makes sense to not only look at books, but also at the YA movie adaptions. These often are not-so-faithful adaptions twisted to reach a broader audience (Can certainly say that for the LOTR Movies... not to faithful following the books, making things look way more fantastic, with a heavy emphasis on the action side).

This is most probably how a YA AAA Game will look like, even if that isn't too faithful to the original book. Yes, Micheal Bay Style explosion orgies, action scene retrofitting and all that kind of crap can be expected. A small quiet story about social conflict will become a huge loud struggle of worldwide consequences.

Or worst of all, my main pet peeve with the Hunger game movies -> Handcam Galore! Weeeeeh, I almost got sick of all the cam shake!

I don't even know if YA fans WANT an AAA YA game.... or if they would be happier with an Indie Product that actually TRIES to stay faithful to the story.

Oh, absolutely, you have a point there.

I might have to point out though that the escalating costs of what is seen as AAA nowadays is the reason why a) AAA games become more and more conservative, and b) AAA games tend to produce sequel after sequel while the publisher tries to milk the one huge effort they did with incrimental updates until the players no longer are willing to pay, and the series needs to be rebooted.

I personally don't think "everything but the kitchen sink" open world designs like GTA 5 are really that brilliant, as they often lack focus in their aim for the broadest possible audience, and I don't think this is a sustainable business model for the future. It can be highly rewarding if successfull but is a huge risk. And in a time when AAA more and more is linked to such designs, it gets harder and harder to design a game for a broad audience on a budget.

Now, I don't think I did make my point the right way. What I wanted to say is: "You can produce an YA AAA game with the same budget and complexity as any other game, as long as you keep FOCUS and are ready to prevent the feature creep".

If you do need the whole party of ellies and a similar group of AI enemies to keep the social interaction interesting, maybe you need to save money somewhere else. Do you need the big explosions and action scenes of AAA shooters when social interaction should be your center point? Do you need the photorealistic graphics?

There where more than enough "Budget AAA" games lately that chose ingenious ways to keep the budget down while making sure they where seen as AAA games by their audience.

For example the original Borderlands certainly was on the other end of the AAA budget spectrum compared to a GTA 5. Yet still nobody contested its AAA status even though the story was clearly hacked together (but hilarious in my eyes), the graphics was quite wellmade but clearly budget friendly, and the weaponsystem was built in a way to save money by leaving item creation to procedural generation.

AAA doesn't mean "everything but the kitchen sink".... AAA means the customer is expected to pay 60+ bucks for the game, but most customers are actually getting their moneys worth in entertainment. Is a Telltale game an AAA game? Most probably not, too short. If you bundle all the episodes together, would people be ready to pay 60 bucks and would feel they get their moneys worth? Is it an AAA game now? To inexpensive to produce? Maybe, but this is now the publishers view. What about the player? Will the player notice that you saved half your budget by going with a simplified graphics? Does he care?

So I guess the problem here is that "AAA" is kind of a not so welldefined monicker... correct me if I am wrong, I am happy to learn something new.

True, true. AAA is a messy term overall that seems to have a lot more to do with projected sales than anything, including Budget or, well, actual sales. And I just generally agree with you, the open world checklist style is highly overrated and is based around giving expected value rather than crafting an incredible experience.

I may have missed explaining my idea as well. When I think of the game form of Hunger Games or Divergent or The Host or The Giver of even Maze Runner or Harry Potter, I don't think about the enemies, or their AI. There are explicit enemies in those games, to be sure because there is always a war, but the opposing soldiers are largely generic, and that's an important theming point. The Evil Mastermind gets developed, and certainly the rival, the same-side characters who conflict with our heroes. There may be several rivals at different times, but all the tension comes from the conflicts that happen before the fists start flying.

So to do a 'budget AAA' YA-styled game, I'd start by making the bad guys generic, like the Formics, or the Peacekeepers or zombie-fied Dauntless or whatever. The combat system would be about as deep as the conversation system is in other games, and as much time would be spent developing it, and because combat is so repeatable, much less time would be spent writing unique engaging lines for it. A simple combat system also means vastly reduced time working on weapons, enemy AI and the like. That's a lot of extra development time, and I think, with a little luck, the right group of people could make $60 worth of magic out of what is essentially post apocalyptic high school clique drama.

I think Telltale's gameplay is a tad light, which is why they needed to release the way they did. That's why I suggested they'd need more density if they wanted to be considered 'AAA.' Which again, is a poor moniker, since I suspect they provide as much value dollar/minute as any game or movie.

Well, trying to gauge how hard or easy something is to do compared to something else is certainly just a guessing game until you sit down and try it yourself.

You do have a point though, that today you will find many a studio with a lot of expierience creating shooters, but not so many with expierience in creating a fun expierience centered around social interaction between intelligent seeming AI agents and player characters. While I am not sure these "social interacton" elements are as unexplored as your comments sometimes make it sound (many RPGs of the last few years experimented with them, in different ways and with varying degrees of success), certainly not many a game tried to make these social interactions elements the corner stones of their design... they where merely a decoration for a more conservative combat and story driven expierience.

Thing is, that MIGHT just be another way how the first true AAA YA game comes to be. Maybe, one day, studios have so much expierience with social interactions in "combat first" games, that they decide to turn the design on its head and create a "social interaction first" design, where combat is second thought or maybe even absent. That might evolve into a design that could be used as a base for a game based on a YA novel.

I mean, if they have a design that works and actually reaches what they THINK is the right audience for a YA novel (yeah, lets not go into that again ), picking a YA that was a raving success is the logical next step to sell your next big AAA game.

I could see that too, a gradual expansion of social interaction mechanics in combat first designs until they become viable to build a game around.

Gauging difficulty is a guessing game, but they can be educated guesses and people who have sat down to do it seem to lean in the same direction.

I was at the bookstore today, and I took a good look at the YA books and I came to this conclusion: YA books aren't AAA products. In this context it makes a lot more sense that the most direct game equivalents of YA books aren't AAA games. In fact, the percentage of AAA novels has been decreasing annually in the same pattern that the percentage of AAA games has been decreasing annually.

Which books are AAA products? Books todays are read a lot, but are overshadowed by movies. On the other hand, the lower cost of entry in the market means there are A LOT more books to pick from.

That is why it makes sense to not only look at books, but also at the YA movie adaptions. These often are not-so-faithful adaptions twisted to reach a broader audience (Can certainly say that for the LOTR Movies... not to faithful following the books, making things look way more fantastic, with a heavy emphasis on the action side).

This is most probably how a YA AAA Game will look like, even if that isn't too faithful to the original book. Yes, Micheal Bay Style explosion orgies, action scene retrofitting and all that kind of crap can be expected. A small quiet story about social conflict will become a huge loud struggle of worldwide consequences.

Or worst of all, my main pet peeve with the Hunger game movies -> Handcam Galore! Weeeeeh, I almost got sick of all the cam shake!

I don't even know if YA fans WANT an AAA YA game.... or if they would be happier with an Indie Product that actually TRIES to stay faithful to the story.

That's also a really salient point. The blockbuster engine would not be interested in delivering the feel of a YA novel, and would demand changes to cater to the largest audience possible. Now, I still got a similar feel from the YA movies as the books, but I would agree that such a thing would probably be diluted further in a game. Such is the way of most adaptations, I think.

That said, I'd still want a AAA YA Game. If a major studio was gonna sink 20-50 million on The Host as a third person shooter, I'd be there. Fill the maze from The Maze Runner with tons of enemies and leave the gladers as more static guys who sell you equipment and upgrades, and I'll still be there. Some of these ideas and themes stand up even when turned on their head a bit. Some don't, but even those who don't, their combat sections could be expanded by a passionate team with a bankroll, like I said before, Hunger Games: Gods of the Arena, Ender's Game: Battle School (why hasn't this happened again?), Erudite Takeover following an alternate character during those conflicts, all that works, and I'd so be there. I think a lot of other people would too, unfavorable comparisons to the books and all.

I doubt it will happen. Licensed properties are hard to get done in a smart way. How we ever got Arkham Asylum to get greenlighted but not rushed, the world will never know (I'm sure it does know, I just don't).

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Do you know what would really make a YA Novel Game faithful? Minigames. It seems like these characters are always involved in contests and tests that allow them to have a physical conflict with people who are, ostensibly, on the same side of the war as they are. The Hunger Games games are technically this taken to a logical combat-ready extreme. Quiddich and Dueling do this in Harry Potter, though Dueling also functions as an extensive combat tutorial. This theme is also is a huge part of RPGs, ala Blitzball from Final Fantasy X.