I constantly see really well made custom BR maps with tons of effort put in by talented creators that end up maxing out at about 10 players, it's a real shame because UEFN opened a huge amount of opportunities for creative freedom when it came to this but nobody ever seems to play them, with them instead playing box fight or red vs blue maps.
External link →Actually they do. AAA-grade games refer to advanced/high-end graphics with high budget/market systems insuring the studio gets high popularity. I think you need to learn a little more about game dev. If you think Fortnite has "AAA" quality, you're highly mistaken.
First if all, no, AAA has always been about the budget and scale.
Second, just because game has stylized visuals doesn't mean it doesn't have advanced/high-end graphics. Fortnite is currently the tech showcase for newest UE features in production.
Fortnite is definitely not the showcase for UE5.5, they don't even use motion matching. You're mistaken, and no, AAA games are not just about scale.
Not all the the features immediately make it into Fortnite, however Epic uses Fortnite to get these features production ready. Fortnite ships using most new tech first – it was the first game to implement Lumen and Nanite – and Fortnite is currently the only shipped game running on 5.5. Also I didn't say AAA is just about scale, I said it's about budget AND scale.
Games have never been and never will be only about "budget and scale". AAA games include high-end, advanced graphics. That's like calling Minecraft a "AAA" game because it has millions of players.
AAA games include games with high-end graphics, but are not limited to them. And scale is not about CCU, but about scope of features and engineering effort. Are you going to say recent Zelda releases are not AAA? Because they are.
Nobody said anything about CCU. If you think Fortnite has "other worldly" mechanics and functionality, you're highly mistaken. Fortnite is considered an AAA game, simply because of it's scale and it's AAA studio, not because it has ground breaking development that no other games have ever seen. Look at Ubisoft, they too are an "AAA studio" who produced an "AAAA" game, Skull and Bones, with millions of dollars and years of development, yet it failed horribly, so your logic is flawed.
Once again, scale has nothing to do with the amount of players. A game doesn't have to have ground-breaking never-done-before gameplay mechanics or features to be large in scope. UEFN itself was a tremendous engineering effort to make multiple different backend services to work together and let all this content be accessible across multiple different devices, including closed console ecosystems.
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