at least in the realm of video games AAA only refers to funding, not quality. in fact it’s pretty consistently shit because terrible business practices almost inevitably result in late and premature releases because they have to meet arbitrary deadlines and believe they can always fix things later. to be fair the community is pretty idiotic and they consistently reward this behavior so they have nothing to lose in most cases.
games are famously terrible at boycotts. if people didn’t buy spidey2 the most probable reason is that the reviews are full of thumb downs saying it runs like shit even on the best hardware.
W2TNC was back when they still said SJW before woke became their boogeyman word but yeah. the comments section for the trailer was full of SJW complaints because the morons who didn’t even get the obvious message the first game were suddenly aware of politics when they saw a black woman in the mix.
it definitely is significant. that game has insane amounts of voice work and voice audio takes a lot of space. it used to be a huge problem with physical media
it’s a game with an insane amount of dialog and narration, with branching stories. that’s a lot of audio. people underestimate how much voice acting adds to the size.
also this is not a old-school isometric game with prerendered assets converted to 2d backgrounds and sprites; it’s fully 3d, and it uses closeup angles for dialog and cut scenes so the textures should be geared towards that while regular isometric games can get away with lower textures because they keep the camera distant from the assets at all times.