CRACKING THE CODE
The designers of some of the BIGGEST RPGs think more complex tech is making things harder
During a designer roundtable, Cyberpunk 2077 quest director Pawel Sasko and other RPG veterans discussed the “staggering” complexity of triple-A games. The article titled ‘The cinematic BioWare-style RPG is dead, it just doesn’t know it yet’ caused “a commotion” at CD Projekt Red, said Sasko: “Everyone, after reading this article, said, ‘We mostly agree, actually, with the thesis. At least when it comes to triple-A, we are just running at a fucking wall, I think, and we’re gonna crash on that wall really soon.’”
Many RPG players assumed that as CDPR had done such a fantastic job with The Witcher 3, it should be able to do the same with Cyberpunk. But Cyberpunk’s more immersive first-person presentation ended up making it a vastly more difficult game to build. “Witcher 3 has so many fucking tricks,” Sasko said, explaining one in particular – the way it would often cut to black to stage scenes or transition between bits of a quest, letting the developers change elements easily. “Sometimes there’s a scene of a guy behind a bar, and he’s like, submerged waist-up in the terrain because we didn’t have animation. So he’s just sitting there: but he looks perfectly fine. Then you look at Cyberpunk. No cuts, no black screens, you’re ‘in’ V all the time. Staging is in-person. It got so incredibly more expensive to generate branches. Adding branches to Witcher 3 was so easy in comparison.”
Former Dragon Age creative director Mike Laidlaw said the
THE CHALLENGE IS CONTROLLING PLAYER EXPECTATIONS
challenge is controlling player expectations, adding that while working on games like Jade Empire and KotOR, BioWare had simple tools for creating most conversations.
“I do think what you guys tackled with Cyberpunk was so phenomenally aggressive and I’m terrified at what that must have done to all of you,” Laidlaw said. “It was like the unbroken perspective of Half-Life 2 but with all the branching and stuff from all your titles.”
A QUESTION OF QUALITY
Laidlaw mentioned Wildermyth as an example of effective procedural narrative, and Strix Beltran, the narrative director of Hidden Path Entertainment’s upcoming D&D RPG, predicted that procedural narrative tools will help “crack the code” of pricey triple-A game development by making it easier to tell larger-scale stories, though they won’t be a cure-all. “What is quality? I don’t want to interrogate how you judge a game, but there’s so many things that make a game good. I prefer to focus on emotionality.”
Wes Fenlon