Is Drakensang an Indie game or not ?

Hello, well, sorry, but I'm in the mood for quite a provocative discussion here.

Also, I must say that I act as kind of a fan. You know what this means : I'm biased.

The reason why I open this discussion is that I would REALLY like to know how the international audience sees Drakensang. Is is an Indie title or not ?

Everybody knows hat it can't compete with Mass Effect or with Dragon age at all, so the side-question is : Is ANY game that isn't able to compete with these two automatically an Indie game ?
Not necessarily with the exact definition of an "Game made by independent developers", but rather in terms of size, quality, and most important : Money support ?

Or would it be rather "oh, well, I'm happy, they are deconstructing themselves with these fruitless discussions so much that there won't be any competors left for us" as a saying by an imaginary EA top employee ?

Well, as I said before, I'm in a rather provocative mood right now. Please don't take this personally.

Alrik

Everybody knows hat it can't compete with Mass Effect or with Dragon age at all, ...

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hmmm - this is simply not true - Drakensang - Am Fluss der Zeit - is one of the best rpgs I have played in a long time. Challenging combat, super hard puzzles, nice story and unique characters, choices & consequences, many quests, many unique items, very good weapon crafting and alchemy system, interesting character building system, a lot of humor, ….

There's only one minor thing to critisize:
The friend foe collision system don't work good - like in Drakensang you still cannot bar a narrow passage to avoid encirclements.

Drakensang is certainly not an 'AAA' game. Dragon Age definitely is.

It's also not an indie game but something in-between. A professional 2nd tier game. We could call it an 'A' or 'B' game. I don't know if these terms officially exist though.

"AAA Game - A game that earns a place among the top ten selling games in the marketplace. Usually this sort of top selling game required an extremely expensive production process. Also: "Triple-A." (Tom Sloper)

Note that the distinctive factors are sales and budget. Not quality.

edit:
The distance from Drakensang to an indie game is high. Radon Labs has nearly 100 employees. Jeff Vogel for example has 3 or so. IMHO 'AAA' simply means somebody decided to commit a lot of money to earn even more money. An example of a failed 'AAA' RPG would be Sacred 2. Or Hellgate: London.

Yep, definitely not an Indie, but not AAA either. Gorath is correct IMO that it's a second tier game where most Indies would be third tier. However, I often think that many second tier games are better than some AAA titles!!

What Gorath said. But unlike the guy quoted I don't think "AAA" has anything to do with the amount of units sold, although it is aimed at the mass market; it's all about production value, at least that's how I've seen the term used and how I would use it myself. AAA for games means what (summer) blockbuster means for movies. Very big budget, lots of eye-candy, easy to digest.

Yes, but that which goes down quickly, is often faster coming back up!!

Definitely not AAA, defintely not indie. I'd use the term "2nd tier", like Gorath. It's impossible to accurately define indie but my closest suggestion would be "a self-funded garage production". DraSa was funded by a publisher and had a sizeable production team.

That said, no, it won't match the production values of BioWare. That means they really need to offer something else, like unique gameplay or $10 cheaper or whatever to find a strong international market.

It was a good game, but not indie...

Indie is something like Eschalon or Avernum...do you see it in that catagory?

Does Drakensang focus on fancy next-gen 3D graffix to the detriment of the gameplay? Yes. That shows it is by no means an indie title and it strives to be as mainstream as possible. To really become AAA worldwide they have to do a bit more streamlining I presume.

To call it an indie game would be an insult to us indie game developers.....

To me Indie developer means a one man/woman production or small team (<10), no upfront publisher funding (and therefore necessarily smaller budget), no publisher control on content or deadlines.
One may call DsA a second tier game, but I don't see a principle difference to an AAA production, it follows the same mechanics and constraints, it simply didn't get thrown as much money at it. Its a fully commercial game by a (for europe) well sized development studio. A difference maybe as between a blockbuster Hollywood production and a competent TV primetime production.

Regardless, it might make some sense to qualify the degree of dependence on the publisher. Radon labs may be "independent" in that sense that maybe they do not have a formal relationship with a publisher, but basically develop a game project and then shop around for a publisher - I don't really know.

I'd put it on the same level as Dragon Age production wise. Marketing wise however, it is on an entirely differant level.

Pretty much the same as with movies really. You got these big announced blockbusters (Harry Potter, Transformers, ect…), but apart from a big marketting campaign they aren't any differant from other A movies.

I personally regard Indiegames as games that reflect being developed by people who create games as a hobby, not someone who creates games as a job. If I offend people (GothicGothicness) by saying that, sorry

Second tier I'd say, not FTSE 100, not AIM but somewhere in the FTSE 250.

Gorath said:

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"AAA Game - A game that earns a place among the top ten selling games in the marketplace. Usually this sort of top selling game required an extremely expensive production process. Also: "Triple-A." (Tom Sloper)

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Well that's a personal definition from Tom, less original but more common is this definition took from wiki:

AAA, or Triple-A, may be a three-letter acronym or may just mean something that is high-quality, premier, or excellent.

In the video game industry, AAA game is an informal description for a video game that has a high budget.

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But well the original question was if Drakensang is indie. Here few characteristic not making it indie:

• multi language support,
• professional voice actors,
• a lot of contents in a full 3D quality,
• boxed edition in multiple countries,
• collector edition in some countries,

Just enough to close the debate.

That said, unlike many younger people I don't think that large budget involve lower creation quality, in one word I'm not a snob. But there's an obvious link between the sum of money put and the design.

It's certainly not any Indie but IMHO it's much closer than a game like Risen.Dragon Age and Mass Effect are in another league.
The absence of voice acting stikes to more than anything else.
I would categorize(not based on quality) it as a B game with Risen being an A game and DA being an AAA.

There are the AAA games, these are very few, with tens of millions of $ and, on this day, almost required to be multi-platform to recover the investment. Most of the times they have a lot of 'fluff' (full voice over, super duper graphics, lots and lots of cinematic cutscenes and high quality music, etc), but at the same time, gameplay is usually a 'take no risks' approach. Nothing new, not too difficult, simple gameplay, as they need to target the widest user base to recover the investment.
Then there are the 'normal' games. This is what we had for PC gaming for the last 20 years until about 4 years ago. Drakensang falls here, like 90% of the games. Not as much fluff here, limited or no voice-over, ok music, few 'standard looking' cutscenes, etc), but gameplay is more varied, they take more risks as they can make money by targeting specific audiences.
Then there are the 'indie' games. The work of enthusiasts. Not really there to become rich, but because they want to do their own game (and if they can make some money out of it, the better). Gameplay varies wildly and it's the place where you'll see the real innovation. Gameplay aspects shine here, while the 'fluff' is almost non-existant.

wolfing said:

Most of the times they (AAA) ...
gameplay is usually a 'take no risks' approach. Nothing new, not too difficult, simple gameplay, as they need to target the widest user base to recover the investment.

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I agree in general but I don't consider DAO failed in this at all. The gameplay isn't simple, the fights are very rude for many beginners, if after to have played once the game I know enough tricks to almost never lost a fight, that was a quite different picture the first time I played it. I haven't died in a CRPG so much since a very long time.

Also the game didn't failed into the standard design flaws that many young kids enjoy a lot like ton of magical objects.

Speaking of development cost, I found a random Top 10 list of most expensive video games budgets, without citations, so take them with a grain of salt.

Whether they were all good is probably debatable; I haven't played any of them. I heard good things about Shenmue, but alas, it was never released for PC.

Arhu said:

Speaking of development cost, I found a random Top 10 list of most expensive video games budgets, without citations, so take them with a grain of salt.

Whether they were all good is probably debatable; I haven't played any of them. I heard good things about Shenmue, but alas, it was never released for PC.

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At least the truth is restored DAO is a low budget game that's the proof… Am I boring with "my" DAO?

Myself I played one, Halo, well the beginning of it and recently, it's a shooter with some story. Even if this list is true the number of platform included in the budget is a key element not mentioned.

Pheew, thats some number in there. And I haven't played a single one of these.
I guess I am just not AAA(A) target market....