A recent PC Gamer editorial, “Cinematic BioWare-style RPGs are dead. Cyberpunk 2077 quest director Paweł Sasko said on PC recently.Gamer Roundtable Interview (opens in new tab)“In fact, after reading this article, everyone said: We, in fact, pretty much agree with the paper. At least when it comes to triple A, we’re running for a fucking wall.” That wall really quickly.”
Sasko’s comment above kicked off a discussion about the technology behind today’s big-budget games and what players expect from them. The “wall” Sasko mentioned is the increased complexity and expense of creating a game like Cyberpunk 2077. Prior to release, many RPG players thought that if CD Projekt did such a great job with The Witcher 3, they should be able to do the same with Cyberpunk.
But Cyberpunk’s more immersive, first-person presentation made it a very difficult game to build in a way that wasn’t obvious to most players.
Triple A Crisis
“The Witcher 3 has so many tricks,” Sasko said, explaining one in particular. It’s a way for developers to spawn or despawn objects and change the weather and weather for staging scenes or transitioning between bits of a quest. Times of Day. “Sometimes there’s a scene with a guy behind bars. He’s kind of waist-deep in the ground because there was no animation. So he’s just sitting there. But he’s Looking perfectly fine in that scene, he actually matches and everything works.
“Then look at Cyberpunk. No cuts, no black screens. You’re always inside V. Staging is done face-to-face. It’s incredibly costly to generate branches. It was very easy to add a branch to The Witcher 3 compared to Cyberpunk.This article really sparked that discussion.
CD Projekt’s designers felt strongly that an “uncut” first-person perspective was important to the game, but Pawel wanted the solution to be “narrative scalability: we don’t just want the story to be long, we want it to be wide.” Said I need to find it. So I’m trying to give you all the branches, choices, and outcomes. ” To do that with current tools would require a huge budget. His Disco Elysium, he pointed out by contrast, was incredibly cheap to add narrative branches to, thanks to its text-heavy top-down presentation.
Former Dragon Age creative director Mike Laidlaw says his main challenge is controlling player expectations. “As soon as you start offering something cinematic, it inherently encourages comparisons to the most cinematic, which is keeping pace with Naughty Dog and Cyberpunk,” he said. rice field. Laidlaw witnessed the rise of cinematic RPGs first-hand at BioWare, and when he was working on games like Jade Empire and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, he found simple tools for quickly creating most dialogue. said to have had
“We dragged the stage into the level and there was basically lights and cameras, a series of animations, etc. It became a tool that we could use to place symbols in our conversations. We could turn those conversations into ‘bronze’. “Gold” conversations are art Moreover. Have someone do the slow zooms, rotations, dutch angles and everything else. And we had to budget for those things, so we were very consciously looking at the scene and thinking, ‘How much gold can we get? ”
“I think what you guys did with cyberpunk was very offensive. I’m afraid what that must have done to all of you,” Laidlaw said, referencing Sasco’s comments. “It was like the uninterrupted perspective of Half-Life 2, but with all the branches and elements from all the titles. Although I think it was a phenomenal achievement.” , on top of the money, I think it’s expensive on a very personal level.”
What about procedural generation?
Laidlaw cited Wildermyth as an example of a game that used procedural narrative effectively, pointing out that tools could be built to enable more effective (and cheaper) procedural storytelling.
Strix Beltran, Narrative Director of Hidden Path Entertainment’s upcoming D&D RPG, said: “We haven’t done it yet. But a lot of people are working on it. And I think it’s going to be a game changer.”
Beltran predicts that procedural narrative tools, while not a panacea, can help “break the code” of expensive triple-A game development by making it easier to tell large-scale stories. .
“I love content that is narrative-preemptive and narrative-first,” Bertrand said. “That’s where I live. I think that’s why a lot of people love the BioWare style, because we can really get it. I’ll have to figure out how to make it cheaper…
“There’s a thought trap here that happens to be easy to fall into: ‘The cinematics are the best. The cinematics are the best. The best cinematics are the best games.'” I think we’ve inherited some of these things from the time we actually talked about them on TV…the stories too! Look at how fantastical we are, we’re the best.
“I think even as a developer there are times when you have to take a step back and say, ‘No, really the story of fame ‘gold’ cinematics are tools we can use and they don’t make us better’ I also think I’ve mistrained my audience to think that way too — that if you have the best cinematics, you have the best quality game.There are a lot of things that make a game good. I prefer to focus on emotions. Morte20 years later, as opposed to “Wow, with that waterfall fog I could see the sunshine through that water in that cutscene.”
Our RPG roundtable was also joined by Obsidian Entertainment’s Josh Sawyer and Lis Moberly and covered topics ranging from tabletop systems video games should steal to your favorite NPC companions.You can read more and listen to the full 80-minute conversation here (opens in new tab).