Roundtable interview with AAA RPG devs at PC Gamer: 'We're running at a f**king wall, and we're gonna crash'

[Hagashager]

I don't buy that this is a "icky cootie womens" thing. "Low-born, down-to-earth" stories are far more classist than gendered. Stories of high concept struggle are often the struggle of rulers, leaders, Bourgeoisie, martyrs and people of great stature. Since the average consumer is much more concerned eith the petty gossips of their neighbor or putting food on the table, so too will the media they consume.

Fiction about and aimed at the working class is classist now? That’s a hot take.

I actually find myself thinking the opposite after seeing 99% of rich people in real life being completely shallow vain stupid evil assholes drunk on power, addicted to money, and not only contributing nothing of value to society or humanity at large but actively making the world worse. I can see where all those “kill the rich!” revolutions came from.

But J.K. Rowling should be canonized as a saint for taking herself off the Fortune 500.

Anyway, I like stories about the working class, particularly in speculative fiction. Space truckers are cool. Rich assholes are not, unless the story is a critique of them.

I mean that "high concept" stories are inherently classist in favor of the ruling class.

There's nothing wrong with a simple story of personal growth, *I personally* prefer those types of stories.

But you're kidding yourself if most these plots about romance, or gossip, finding your inner strength circulating around tv, video-games, books etc are being done in any kind of good-faith appeal to the average, working class consumer.

I also like space-trucker schticks, I'd rather have a story about Josiah the peasant living in a world of dragons, than the plight of King Arthur. I just find modern stories are usually written by those uber rich and they twist simple stories into yet more nonesense.

 

[SpaceWizardz]

ME3, DAI or MEA - all centered around low-level, downmarket personal drama,

Complete nonsense, Both ME3 and Inquisition are about world ending crises.
Andromeda tries to present itself as a more grounded story about space pioneers but not even an hour in the game gets bored and goes "haha fuckin SIKE idiot you're playing a Bioware game!!!" and has you spend the rest of the game shooting rock monsters so you can then shoot the big bad rock monster before he conquers the galaxy.

I don't buy that this is a "icky cootie womens" thing.

Any excuse to peddle essentialist evopsych cringe is a good one.

 

[cvv]

ME3, DAI or MEA - all centered around low-level, downmarket personal drama,

Both ME3 and Inquisition are about world ending crises.

MOST vidya plots are about world ending crises - an evil demon, wizard, dragon whatever villain trying to do something super eebul.

What I'm talking about is not the nominal plot, but the centre of mass, the focal point. ME1 crew gathering just feels like means to the overarching end - figuring out the central cosmic mystery. In ME2 the retarded plot feels like a flimsy pretext for a bunch of soap opera drama with your crew mates.

 

[SpaceWizardz]

What I'm talking about is not the nominal plot, but the centre of mass, the focal point. ME1 crew gathering just feels like means to the overarching end - figuring out the central cosmic mystery. In ME2 the retarded plot feels like a flimsy pretext for a bunch of soap opera drama with your crew mates.

The sitcom-ification of companions begins with Baldur's Gate 2, that's when the romances and trauma dumps really got started.
ME2/DA2's attempts to veer away from the insipid "good hero must defeat the dark evil" comfort zone makes them more "high concept" than whatever the fuck nuances you're pretending any of Bioware's other games had.

 

[cvv]

What I'm talking about is not the nominal plot, but the centre of mass, the focal point. ME1 crew gathering just feels like means to the overarching end - figuring out the central cosmic mystery. In ME2 the retarded plot feels like a flimsy pretext for a bunch of soap opera drama with your crew mates.

ME2/DA2's attempts to veer away from the insipid "good hero must defeat the dark evil" comfort zone makes them more "high concept"

Bruh.

When was the last time you played ME2? Perhaps you've forgotten about space bugs kidnapping people, using them to knock up a giant, goofy, googly eyed humanoid Reaper that our Space Jesus hero fights in one of the most retarded boss fights I've seen in my 20 years gaming career?

That's what high-concept means in your mind?

 

[Hagashager]

Reading this segment of the thread makes me think everyone here is misusing terms.

I'm assuming "High Concept" in this case means "stories that involve a person deciding the fate of entire nations, cultures or races" rather than a story about "one man's conquest over his insecurity" or, "John goes out with Jane and they live happily ever after".

Actual High Concept literature is something like War & Peace, Of Mice and Men or All Quiet on the Western Front.

Absolutely *no* video game has ever come within sight of these works, though a few have tried.

 

[SpaceWizardz]

Bruh.

When was the last time you played ME2? Perhaps you've forgotten about space bugs kidnapping people, using them to knock up a giant, goofy, googly eyed humanoid Reaper that our Space Jesus hero fights in one of the most retarded boss fights I've seen in my 20 years gaming career?

That's what high-concept means in your mind?

ME2 relentlessly postures on being set in a more seedy side of the galaxy where the player has to do bad to do good mainly by working with Cerberus.
The execution is lousy but the intent is clear.

 

[Bigg Boss]

Yes, we know.

 

[Tyranicon]

Reading this segment of the thread makes me think everyone here is misusing terms.

I'm assuming "High Concept" in this case means "stories that involve a person deciding the fate of entire nations, cultures or races" rather than a story about "one man's conquest over his insecurity" or, "John goes out with Jane and they live happily ever after".

Actual High Concept literature is something like War & Peace, Of Mice and Men or All Quiet on the Western Front.

Absolutely *no* video game has ever come within sight of these works, though a few have tried.

It's a very high bar for any media to come close to literary greatness. Most devs are not ambitious enough to aim for it. In fact, the interactive medium of RPGs and video games might require a wildly different approach than something as linear as traditional literature.

Video games are an unique medium through which the human experience can be told with reader agency. I am constantly disappointed that ambitious artists either lack the tools or the will to create great art in video games, and the industry has gone the way of most media: pandering to mouthbreathers.

 

[Hagashager]

Reading this segment of the thread makes me think everyone here is misusing terms.

I'm assuming "High Concept" in this case means "stories that involve a person deciding the fate of entire nations, cultures or races" rather than a story about "one man's conquest over his insecurity" or, "John goes out with Jane and they live happily ever after".

Actual High Concept literature is something like War & Peace, Of Mice and Men or All Quiet on the Western Front.

Absolutely *no* video game has ever come within sight of these works, though a few have tried.

It's a very high bar for any media to come close to literary greatness. Most devs are not ambitious enough to aim for it. In fact, the interactive medium of RPGs and video games might require a wildly different approach than something as linear as traditional literature.

Video games are an unique medium through which the human experience can be told with reader agency. I am constantly disappointed that ambitious artists either lack the tools or the will to create great art in video games, and the industry has gone the way of most media: pandering to mouthbreathers.

Absolutely.

Call me a pleb, but I consider the "Would You Kindly" twist in Bioshock to be a textbook example of how to utilize story-telling in video-games.

The Randian commentary, the visual art-deco, the metaphors are all ancillary and decent for a video-game, but that **twist** is a thing no book or movie could ever replicate. If you want to tell a good story through the medium of video-games, having plot be unfolded through subtle manipulation of the player is a fantastic way to do it.

 

[Butter]

Absolutely.

Call me a pleb, but I consider the "Would You Kindly" twist in Bioshock to be a textbook example of how to utilize story-telling in video-games.

The Randian commentary, the visual art-deco, the metaphors are all ancillary and decent for a video-game, but that **twist** is a thing no book or movie could ever replicate. If you want to tell a good story through the medium of video-games, having plot be unfolded through subtle manipulation of the player is a fantastic way to do it.

Would work a lot better if you actually had the option to decline helping him.

 

[ind33d]

Bioware prefers to deal with personal stories. They really fuck up when dealing with macro stuff.

It's the typical female (personal drama driven) vs. male (high-concept driven) writing. There's a reason most respected, venerated novels and dramas in history were written by men and it's not because of oppreshun.

The Top 5 most famous and successful female novelists of all time are Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, Harper Lee and J. K. Rowling. Out of those Austen wrote lacy, maudlin literature for women, Agatha Christie wrote fun murder romps, Harper Lee wrote just one book and J. K. Rowling wrote a p. good children story and bunch of stuff nobody knows about or is interested in.

Btw Bioware could be high-concept back in the day when male nerds were still allowed to write male nerdy things. There are elements of high-concept ideas in DA1, DA2 and ME1. But then nerds were either pushed out for "toxic workspace culture" or they were infected by the woke virus (like Gaider) and started writing accordingly.

And then you got shit like ME2, ME3, DAI or MEA - all centered around low-level, downmarket personal drama, with a side of retarded, kiddie cartoon grade overarching plot.

Some of SWTOR's main questlines are on-par with good sci-fi. Talking shit about Mass 3 isn't fair, either. They only changed the story because the plot point about Mass Effect Relays destabilizing the universe so the Reapers had no choice but to destroy humanity was leaked. If they had left that ending in, then Mass Effect 2 would have felt less stupid by comparison because the Reapers are no longer Dragon Ball Z villains but just an AI trying to save the galaxy.

 

[Konjad]

The cancer eating AAA is partly the objective shit they're talking about - games are getting too complex, too expensive, too difficult to make, due to rising polygon count, animation fidelity and the retarded emphasis on cinematics.

But partly it's something they couldn't say out loud even if they weren't infected by the mind virus - diversity hires. Big western publishers have been steadily pushing out nerds and aspies for "laddie" and asocial behaviour (no fucking shit sherlock) and replacing them with dangerhairs and male feminists. If you think it was only Twitter, of all Kwan tech companies, that had to suffer 80% of useless activist dead weight, like Elon said recently, you're deluded. It's all the same, everywhere.

Just look how triple Asses are written today - nominally stronk empowered femyn everywhere you look (Forspoken, Horizon, TLoU 2, Uncharted DLC, that stupid slut from Andromeda and many others), in reality boring, unlikeable, obnoxious bitches with zero charisma. This garbage sure as shit isn't written by the kind of people who wrote Yennefer or Ciri.

Same for male chars - often some non-threatening, bumbling, blabbering betas and if they're the strong, stoic type (AssCreed Valhalla), they're just as bland and boring as their femyn counterparts.

In fact I know of only 4 exceptions to this rule since 2015, when all this seems to have started - Geralt, dude from Days Gone (didn't play, was told by a good, based pal of mine), Henry from KCD and Kratos (haven't played the sequel yet, I wouldn't be surprised to find they figured out how to castrate that one too).

Yennefer and Ciri are shit characters, but I agree about modern "women" in games. That said, it's not because they hire women. There are good women writers and some who wrote for games were great (i.e. Risen 2).

The problem is that people are not hired for skills, but as you said "diversity" which is just a cover for hiring cheaper people.

"We open our doors for women, gays, Indians, hamsters and LGBYUQGURT" is just a corporate speech "We open our doors for any worthless trash that will accept being heavily underpaid because they have no job/just graduated".

It's a great trick by lower managers to show to higher ups. "We hired more women AND saved money on the project! We are great managers!" *gets bonus* *project crashes but who cares he already changed jobs*

So the source of the problem isn't really women or whatever. It's shit managers who save every cent and under pretense of hiring more X and Y they hire people without skills.

 

[Konjad]

These are the guys Marx warned you about.

Marx? Karl Marx? All his children except his illegitimate son committed suicide. He squandered away all of his wife's wealth and never actually paid his wife's personal maid, but got her pregnant - and then refused to acknowledge the child as his. He never paid people for goods and services he bought and he was perpetually poor despite "earning" 4 times what a skilled craftsman made in a year. Marx never bathed and was covered in boils, even on his genitalia. Two of his children starved to death while he sat around a museum in London looking at the perfidious buregoise. Marx did about 6 hours of honest work in his whole life. He was basically employed for almost one whole day before deciding working was too bourgeoise for his tastes and went back to writing his garbage.

 

[Azdul]

Sasko's comments above kicked off a discussion on the technology behind today's big-budget games and the expectations players have for them. The "wall" Sasko referred to is the ballooning complexity and expense of making games like Cyberpunk 2077.

I'm so glad developers now have access to massive budgets which they can use to make their games look worse than games from 20 years ago.

Max Payne (the first one) was an example of unsustainable approach to game development. It was started in 1996 - and released in 2001. Five years to make short and extremely linear action game - with simple level geometry and recycled enemy models.

The engine was technological dead end. It could render large, detailed textures on Riva TNT - but not much else. With improvements to lightning and introduction of shaders all these large textures with painted on details will look dated.

Of course CD-Projekt goes into the other extreme - and blames the tools - not shitty management practices or high employee turnover for development troubles. So Witcher 4 will use Unreal 5 - and will look exactly the same as every other game - down to the visual errors:


IMO Sustainable development should be based on creating simple, but varied models, not faking details through extremely large textures, not prebaking lights and shadows, not making animations for one specific cutscene - and just using Inverse Kinematics and physics simulations for everything. If geometry is complicated enough to push path-tracing below 60 FPS - stop adding details.

No scripts beyond state machines, no cutscenes, no quests written by hand - just the world simulation and emergent gameplay. No voice-overs until AI is good enough to replace voice actors.

Faking everything till it looks real through years of hard work of hundreds of script writers, artists, animators and voice actors is a road to nowhere.

 

[Nifft Batuff]

The advanced technology implemented by The Looking Glass is still incomprensible for modern developers.

 

[Silverfish]

When was the last time you played ME2? Perhaps you've forgotten about space bugs kidnapping people, using them to knock up a giant, goofy, googly eyed humanoid Reaper that our Space Jesus hero fights in one of the most retarded boss fights I've seen in my 20 years gaming career?

That's what high-concept means in your mind?

ME2 starts with a machinery being implanted inside a man in order to save a life. It ends with lives being taken to implant men inside a machine. That's pretty high concept if you don't think about it at all.

 

[cvv]

When was the last time you played ME2? Perhaps you've forgotten about space bugs kidnapping people, using them to knock up a giant, goofy, googly eyed humanoid Reaper that our Space Jesus hero fights in one of the most retarded boss fights I've seen in my 20 years gaming career?

That's what high-concept means in your mind?

ME2 starts with a machinery being implanted inside a man in order to save a life. It ends with lives being taken to implant men inside a machine. That's pretty high concept if you don't think about it at all.

Listen bro, don't get mad, but this is finding Jesuses in coffee stains. You can find "high-concept" in fucking My Little Pony, if you really try. Red, yellow, pink and violet represent our deepest emotions, mixing and stirring in an unending vortex of the essential, existential foam of human destiny. See? I can do this all day.

Various inane theories about the deeper meaning of the retarded Matrix sequels haunts my dreams to this day.

This is at best audience-driven "high concept", people injecting their meanings and theories and patterns in every single thing around them.

 

[Zanthia]

Talking shit about Mass 3 isn't fair, either. They only changed the story because the plot point about Mass Effect Relays destabilizing the universe so the Reapers had no choice but to destroy humanity was leaked. If they had left that ending in, then Mass Effect 2 would have felt less stupid by comparison because the Reapers are no longer Dragon Ball Z villains but just an AI trying to save the galaxy.

That thread says that's not true, the supposed original ending is nonsensical, and scuppering your story for the sake of surprise is terrible writing.

 

[Butter]

Guys, "high concept" doesn't mean sophisticated or high-minded. It means something you can explain really succinctly, e.g. "Ocean's Eleven in space" or "What if the Cold War lasted 500 years?". Arcanum is a perfect example of this: "Typical high fantasy world going through an Industrial Revolution". The opposite would be something like BG2, where you can either describe the minutiae of the plot or else say something vague like "It's a Forgotten Realms adventure".

 

[J1M]

Bioware prefers to deal with personal stories. They really fuck up when dealing with macro stuff.

It's the typical female (personal drama driven) vs. male (high-concept driven) writing. There's a reason most respected, venerated novels and dramas in history were written by men and it's not because of oppreshun.

The Top 5 most famous and successful female novelists of all time are Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, Harper Lee and J. K. Rowling. Out of those Austen wrote lacy, maudlin literature for women, Agatha Christie wrote fun murder romps, Harper Lee wrote just one book and J. K. Rowling wrote a p. good children story and bunch of stuff nobody knows about or is interested in.

Btw Bioware could be high-concept back in the day when male nerds were still allowed to write male nerdy things. There are elements of high-concept ideas in DA1, DA2 and ME1. But then nerds were either pushed out for "toxic workspace culture" or they were infected by the woke virus (like Gaider) and started writing accordingly.

And then you got shit like ME2, ME3, DAI or MEA - all centered around low-level, downmarket personal drama, with a side of retarded, kiddie cartoon grade overarching plot.

Some of SWTOR's main questlines are on-par with good sci-fi. Talking shit about Mass 3 isn't fair, either. They only changed the story because the plot point about Mass Effect Relays destabilizing the universe so the Reapers had no choice but to destroy humanity was leaked. If they had left that ending in, then Mass Effect 2 would have felt less stupid by comparison because the Reapers are no longer Dragon Ball Z villains but just an AI trying to save the galaxy.

Even your own link contradicts this false statement.

 

[RaggleFraggle]

I wouldn’t mind seeing crpgs where the main plot isn’t “save the world/galaxy/universe.” There’s nothing wrong with personal scale stakes.

For example, let’s use the Black Isle/Troika games:

Fallout is about saving your vault. Not the world, just your vault. You do save the world, but only because the villain is a threat to your vault. If you take too many days, then many places other than your vault will be destroyed with nothing you can do about that.

Planescape: Torment is about the protagonist searching for his identity. Sure, you do save people but that’s not the main goal.

Vampire: Bloodlines is about the protagonist simply trying to survive a bad situation while a bunch of vampire mafia bosses are trying to use him/her as a pawn in their vendettas. You do save people, but that’s not the main goal. Nothing you do makes the city itself much better, since vampires are still in charge and still play their petty power games.

I’d like to see more crpgs with personal stakes as the main plots, not these homogeneous predictable depersonalized “save the universe a bazillion times” main quests.

 

[J1M]

Guys, "high concept" doesn't mean sophisticated or high-minded. It means something you can explain really succinctly, e.g. "Ocean's Eleven in space" or "What if the Cold War lasted 500 years?". Arcanum is a perfect example of this: "Typical high fantasy world going through an Industrial Revolution". The opposite would be something like BG2, where you can either describe the minutiae of the plot or else say something vague like "It's a Forgotten Realms adventure".

Thanks. Was worried I would have to explain it. It's not a phrase that's obvious to people who first hear it, so no shame to the numerous posters making this mistake. People associate value with the term 'high' instead of realizing it means zoomed out.

 

[Monocause]

I'm hearing this argument now for at least 10 years, and yet devs still keep pressing themselves into making bigger and unwieldier games that contain thousands of bugs at launch. Why?

The answer's pretty simple, actually - this argument was always correct but was offset by market growth. Up to a certain point you could offset growing the budget by pushing more sales, and pushing more sales became an option as going multiplatform got easier and the PC market got dominated by big digital distributors.

Problem is I don't think there's much growth to be had anymore and you can't offset the growing risk anymore. So we're reaching a point where one way or another you want to start maintaining the sales while cutting the costs.

 

[Cat Headed Eagle]

I'm hearing this argument now for at least 10 years, and yet devs still keep pressing themselves into making bigger and unwieldier games that contain thousands of bugs at launch. Why?

The answer's pretty simple, actually - this argument was always correct but was offset by market growth. Up to a certain point you could offset growing the budget by pushing more sales, and pushing more sales became an option as going multiplatform got easier and the PC market got dominated by big digital distributors.

Problem is I don't think there's much growth to be had anymore and you can't offset the growing risk anymore. So we're reaching a point where one way or another you want to start maintaining the sales while cutting the costs.

It's the growing pains of an industry in transition. SaaS will be the future of the gaming industry, not because it is good, but because it's the model that's taking hold right now in the software development world. The most obvious element would be the cloud system, like Game Pass or the Play Station one. They aren't unpopular, but at the same time, console gamers are used to having to pay for multiplayer features. In fact, console gamers are used to pay for things that pc users (not just gamers) haven't thought of in their lives. I remember being very surprised when I learned that fact, like, why would you pay for access to the multiplayer portion of the game if you're already paying your ISP for your internet connection?
Regardless, SaaS also allows for constant monetization of a service. You're paying once for a video game. And you're paying 60 bucks. So a SaaS model allows you to pay 4,99 (for instance) per month so you can play a 60 bucks game. From a consumer standpoint, getting to play 5 AAA games for 5 bucks is a win win scenario, but then you have to consider other factors like the quality of your internet connection, which should only be a worry if you don't have access to fiber optic stuff or live in a country that cucks paying customers, like the First World countries (and in particular the USA), and then other, more nebulous aspects like ownership or even the ammount of money that studios are receiving per "stream". Streaming has been another way for higher ups to fuck the creator before they get fucked by them. However I wouldn't doubt that someone has already spoken of a Steam Pass during one of Valve's meetings.