Have you ever seen triple-A-rated games at the game store and wondered what it means? Well, the truth is a little complicated. Let’s take a deeper dive into triple-A titles and find out what the fuss is about.
Big Names, Big Games
If you have been paying attention to the games that get released, you must have noticed that all triple A, or AAA, rated games come from the big games publishers. This doesn’t mean that giving a game a triple A rating is a part of a marketing campaign, but it does sometimes feel like that. The truth is, to make a triple A title, you need to invest heavily in the game, and it needs to be big and beautiful. It takes a powerful publisher who has the time and money to plow into a game to make it triple-A-worthy. Independent publishers simply cannot compete at this level; it’s a game for the big boys.
They Need a High-Quality Gaming Rig
If your laptop is close to its fifth birthday, or it has been a long time since you gave your PC an upgrade, then you may struggle to play a modern triple-A game. These titles push graphics cards and central processing units to their limits, even at low resolutions and lowered framerates. You need a powerful PC with plenty of RAM and a dedicated graphics card or two if you want to play these games at their best settings.
Look at these Lenovo Gaming Workstations to get an idea of what it takes to play AAA, i.e., lots of RAM, lots of Giga-hertz on a hyper-threaded CPU, and a graphics card that costs as much as some laptops.
Quality of Graphics Guaranteed, But Not Gameplay
This is the Achilles heel of AAA games. They may look pretty and have some amazing motion-captured video cut scenes, but if the gameplay is not up to standard, it is all form over function. The AAA rating is a mark of quality for graphics and not for gameplay. AAA titles still boom with gamers despite their beauty if the gameplay is boring or repetitive. Many non-AAA titles enjoy massive success without the rating and can even be more profitable.
Next time you are game shopping, bear this in mind. Just because your graphics card will love the game, doesn’t mean you will too.
There Are No AA or B-Rated Games
This is the strangest quirk of the system. There are only AAA-rated games or non-AA rated games. There are no B’s or double-B’s or C’s, just AAA.
Many questions are raised by this. Why AAA and not just A? Why not rate other games with this system? This led many people to believe the whole thing is just for marketing, but it actually came from discussions between PC component manufacturers and publishers.
There needed to be some kind of standard set to ensure that there were commercially available parts and PCs capable of playing the games. Your computer and its components may be AAA rated too, helping you the consumer to make the right choices. Has this cleared things up? Hopefully a little, but like most things in the gamer-sphere, the truth is complicated, and no one seems to agree on anything. Just enjoy the games and keep on playing.
