“We want to excel,” Dead Space 3 executive producer Steve Papoutsis tells CVG. “We want to go beyond triple-A. We want to push to the next level. We’ve taken up just saying ‘quad-A’ all day.”
Meditate on these words for a moment. Then, if need be, meditate on them a little more.
For reference, you can’t just simply append A to the end of things to make it “more better.” “AAA” is a specific colloquial adjective for describing things that are high quality. AAAA, on the other hand, has no such meaning. It is not equal to AAA + A.
To be clear, the term “AAA gaming” is a rather arbitrary distinction to begin with. It isn’t as though the three letters stand for anything. Its use as a descriptor relies completely on the fact that there is a precedent in English for using “AAA” to mean “a high quality thing.” So really Papoutsis is simply heaping nonsense on top of nonsense in a big he-man stew of hyperbole, when all he might have said is, simply, he and the rest of Visceral’s Dead Space 3 team just want to make a good game. That isn’t so difficult, is it?
As for what Papoutsis actually has to say in his interview with CVG, it’s surprisingly little. On the subject of Dead Space 3’s co-op mode, he says:
[W]e’re hoping that when friends are playing they’ll be communicating with one another. Those types of interactions are going to help elicit some different feelings with players; whether it’s excitement, thrills, tension – I think that’s going to come from the unique interactions between the players as they’re talking.
So, a scary feedback loop. That kind of works, when you have a bunch of friends watching a movie, or one person playing Fatal Frame 2 while her siblings gasp and cower behind the couch, but it strikes a little different when the goal is to team up to kill –sorry, strategically dismember– a swarm of necromorphs. Or perhaps they’re neeeecroooomoooorphs now, who knows, more vowels are better, right?
Via CVG.