The Industry's Embarrassing Blinders

TheDalaiBomba · April 2023

https://gamerant.com/aaa-cinematic-bioware-rpg-crash-into-a-wall/

An entire article about how AAA "Epic" RPG games may be on the way out.... And they never mention art/visual fidelity as the culprit, even in part, for making these games quote-unquote "prohibitively" expensive to make. They even try to specifically attribute the increased dev costs for these games to the hiring required to create branching narratives, as if that were the predominant reason for increased costs in the AAA space. They make use of some very general quotes by a developer, putting words into the Dev's mouth in their odd attempt to blame some player choice as the reason big-budget RPGs aren't feasible moving forward.

They try to convince us that it's the branching choices that make the game's prohibitively expensive. Nevermind that games like Dwarf Fortress are concrete reminders that branching dialogue and a reactive world aren't what's driving ballooning development costs- they've got a narrative to sell you about why you should stop demanding your RPGs give you some player choice with regards to the narrative and how your story plays out. Shut up and drool at the shiny screenshots, that's what we're all here for!

Talk about absolutely, completely missing the forest for the trees.

Kyleran · April 2023

Folks might want to take a gander at the PCGamer article which spawned this conversation. Has some good insight on the how design choices can influence the cost of development. Here's an excerpt,

The triple-A crisis

"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 spawn or despawn objects, and change the weather or time of day. "Sometimes there's a scene of a guy behind a bar, and he's like, submerged waist-up to the terrain because we didn't have animation. So he's just sitting there. But he looks perfectly fine in that scene, and it looks like he actually matches and everything works.

"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 to Cyberpunk. This article really sparked that discussion."

CD Projekt's designers felt strongly that the "no-cuts" first-person perspective was important for the game, but Pawel said they need to find a solution for "scalability of narrative: you want your story to be long, but also be broad, so we try to provide all the branches and choices and consequences." Doing that with their current tools requires an enormous budget. Disco Elysium, he pointed to as a contrast, was able to add narrative branches incredibly cheaply, thanks to the text-heavy, top-down presentation.

https://www.pcgamer.com/were-running-at-a-f-ing-wall-and-were-gonna-crashcd-projekts-lead-quest-designer-on-big-budget-rpgs/

Vrika · April 2023

EDIT: Deleted. Kyleran posted 2 minutes faster and made my post unnecessary /EDIT

TheDalaiBomba · April 2023

Kyleran said:

Folks might want to take a gander at the PCGamer article which spawned this conversation. Has some good insight on the how design choices can influence the cost of development. Here's an excerpt,

The triple-A crisis
"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 spawn or despawn objects, and change the weather or time of day. "Sometimes there's a scene of a guy behind a bar, and he's like, submerged waist-up to the terrain because we didn't have animation. So he's just sitting there. But he looks perfectly fine in that scene, and it looks like he actually matches and everything works.

"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 to Cyberpunk. This article really sparked that discussion."

CD Projekt's designers felt strongly that the "no-cuts" first-person perspective was important for the game, but Pawel said they need to find a solution for "scalability of narrative: you want your story to be long, but also be broad, so we try to provide all the branches and choices and consequences." Doing that with their current tools requires an enormous budget. Disco Elysium, he pointed to as a contrast, was able to add narrative branches incredibly cheaply, thanks to the text-heavy, top-down presentation.

https://www.pcgamer.com/were-running-at-a-f-ing-wall-and-were-gonna-crashcd-projekts-lead-quest-designer-on-big-budget-rpgs/

Thank God another article got it right.

The issue isn't a branching narrative, the issue is that they want to present it like a CGI theatrical Hollywood release when most gamers can't even experience it that way on their home PCs due to hardware limitations.

Sovrath · April 2023

TheDalaiBomba said:

https://gamerant.com/aaa-cinematic-bioware-rpg-crash-into-a-wall/

An entire article about how AAA "Epic" RPG games may be on the way out.... And they never mention art/visual fidelity as the culprit, even in part, for making these games quote-unquote "prohibitively" expensive to make. They even try to specifically attribute the increased dev costs for these games to the hiring required to create branching narratives, as if that were the predominant reason for increased costs in the AAA space. They make use of some very general quotes by a developer, putting words into the Dev's mouth in their odd attempt to blame some player choice as the reason big-budget RPGs aren't feasible moving forward.

They try to convince us that it's the branching choices that make the game's prohibitively expensive. Never mind that games like Dwarf Fortress are concrete reminders that branching dialogue and a reactive world aren't what's driving ballooning development costs- they've got a narrative to sell you about why you should stop demanding your RPGs give you some player choice with regards to the narrative and how your story plays out. Shut up and drool at the shiny screenshots, that's what we're all here for!

Talk about absolutely, completely missing the forest for the trees.

But it seems that branching choices "do" add to cost.

It's so easy to add branching and other choices to a game that just has text and perhaps a very simplified background and avatar system. Dwarf Fortress? I don't see how having multiple branches would add enormous cost.

But adding branches and different outcomes that then require additional voice acting, additional animations? Just check out Kylran's post. It's all there.

My Skryim mod (

I do love mentioning it) was going to have a LOT of different choice options. And other things that I found out were technically not feasible.

Slowly but surely I ended up cutting things or just not implementing things because it took a lot more work. And I was already wayyyy over my own deadline. And, while some extra branches or outcomes could be interesting or cool, implementing might be a hard choice to make.

I can see the developers deciding on implementing some interesting branch/outcome only to realize that a majority might not find it interesting or that a good many people might not choose that outcome. That's money and effort being spent on something that might have little bang for the buck.

Again, my mod has two instances of separate outcomes that I don't believe any players end up picking. I"m glad they are there but I long for someone to say "whoa!!!! I didn't realize that would happen!"

Anything extra in an involved graphically complicated game will add to cost and development time. Don't get me started on when things just don't work!

Kyleran · April 2023

I think this article does a good job of illustrating that most of us really don't have much insight or knowledge on how game design really is.

Sure, I've been delivering software solutions for 30+ years in a variety of industries, yet I've not faced the design challenges and choices presented in just the one example I've highlighted.

Sure, we've got something similar, like algorithms with thousands of branching paths, but they don't require the extension graphics customization outside of the standard UI built into the apps.

ValdemarJ · April 2023

Thanks for posting the article. I love GameRant, regardless whether I agree with them, because they often post articles that could spark good discussions like this one.

Thanks for the follow up link to the PC Gamer article which sheds a lot more light on the topic.

Overall, I think both takes have a lot of truth and value. Where I think the disconnect shows its head is that the industry still expects gamers to buy each title and then likely spend money on the DLC, extras, and cash shop. While this may still be a solid direction for many service-oriented games, I think it is much less true for single player especially narrative driven games.

Maybe it's just my bias as a GamePass subscriber, but I just can't justify paying a box fee for most "one and done" narrative games anymore. Sometimes, if I have a real favorite I might buy it on >50% off sale, maybe. Just like movies though, I'm not interested in spending so much on building a purchased library of titles. In the future I see more of these AAA titles being heavily subsidized by a platform vendor (Sony, Microsoft, Nintendo, etc) and then offered on their subscription service with an optional purchase for those who want it.

Dattelis · April 2023

To a degree, it is believable that 'branching narratives' can get pricey since most games are expected to be voice acted these days. Couple that with the voice actor strike I think that happened a few years ago? I think it was over royalties or something. Anyway, it does add-up quite a bit. Not to mention competition over some of these voices or more renown ones quitting etc. ONTOP of all that is global inflation, so honestly, it kind of crazy how games have stayed at $60 (even though the micro-transactions have increased and started to bleed more into the obvious that devs are cutting story bits and selling them on the side as 'added content'). Of course greed is involved, but I think its just the ratio of all of those things vary from studio to studio.

cameltosis · April 2023

Just goes to show: designing your RPG with a story-first attitude is wrong!

Uwakionna · April 2023

Reminds me of some of Larian's interviews and comments about their dev cycle with BG3. Like their big thing about supporting branching narrative, but also wanting to ensure player hit key plot points no matter what.

For Larian who had not developed any kind procedural system or something to map the scenario for them, they had to manually map out the different scenarios and their contingencies. It became a logistical nightmare that pushed back the development of the game. Seems like they have addressed this problem since then, but it did already cause delays, which they were very open about.

Choice in game narrative is not by itself the thing that drives cost up, it'd be better to extrapolate it out to conflict in design goals as compared to the current toolkit available.

TheDalaiBomba · April 2023

Kyleran said:

I think this article does a good job of illustrating that most of us really don't have much insight or knowledge on how game design really is.

Sure, I've been delivering software solutions for 30+ years in a variety of industries, yet I've not faced the design challenges and choices presented in just the one example I've highlighted.

Sure, we've got something similar, like algorithms with thousands of branching paths, but they don't require the extension graphics customization outside of the standard UI built into the apps.

Aye, but it highlights the folly of pushing graphics before design ideals. Specifically in genres built out of tabletops that were rooted in player choice. The RPG genre still includes that as a core pillar of gameplay. Without choices in how your character develops, you're playing an action game.

Narrative-driven corridor shooters or action games don't have to tackle this issue, so it would be better if studios decided which kind of game they want to make and created art that fits that idea, instead of trying to shoehorn in a level of graphical fidelity that precludes one of the core pillars of a genre. Titles like RE:Village don't have to compromise narrative design to push graphical fidelity like, say, CP77. AAA doesn't just mean pretty graphics- WoW was AAA when it released and it was relatively basic visually.

TLDR: maybe if a branching RPG game is your plan, trying to melt graphics cards with brand new ray-tracing techniques shouldn't *also* be your plan. It doesn't take photorealism to tell a good or grand cinematic story.

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The Industry's Embarrassing Blinders

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Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

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The Industry's Embarrassing Blinders

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Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV

Fools find no pleasure in understanding but delight in airing their own opinions. Pvbs 18:2, NIV