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"We're running at a f**king wall, and we're gonna crash on that wall really soon."
In March, PC Gamer released an article named "The cinematic BioWare-style RPG is dead, it just doesn't know it yet", which talked about how flashy games from top developers feel stale, while indie studios actually "push the genre forward".
Apparently, it spurred a discussion among CD PROJEKT RED's designers, and Cyberpunk 2077 quest director Paweł Sasko said everyone mostly agreed with the idea.
"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."
The "wall" is the growing complexity and expense of making AAA games. While The Witcher 3 was already intricately made, CDPR's stepped its efforts up with Cyberpunk 2077 even further. Where The Witcher used many "tricks" like when it would cut to black to stage scenes, Cyberpunk had no such luxury, according to Sasko:
"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."
Former Dragon Age creative director Mike Laidlaw added that to him, the main challenge is controlling player expectations – something Sasko also mentioned when talking about Cyberpunk's nonlinearity. "As soon as you're delivering something that starts to be cinematic, you then are essentially inviting comparison to the most cinematic things. So you are kind of keeping pace with Naughty Dog or Cyberpunk," Laidlaw said.
When talking about procedural narrative, Strix Beltran, the narrative director of Hidden Path Entertainment's upcoming D&D RPG, said the industry was "on the precipice of really figuring [it] out" and it should help triple-A development by making it easier and cheaper.
"We haven't done it yet. But there are a lot of people working on it. And I think that is going to be a game-changer."
Beltran also addressed the issue with big-name RPGs, saying many developers fall into a "thought trap" where they think that grandiose cinematics mean quality, and audiences were "accidentally trained" to believe it, too.
"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, like what actually reaches into a person and grabs them and makes them remember Morte [from Planescape: Torment], 20 years later, as opposed to, 'Wow, I could see the sunlight off of that water in that cutscene with that waterfall mist.'"
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