The Cinematic Clothesline

Off the turnbuckle!

Often times it feels like the single most commonly discussed topic for modern gamers is the growing disparity between what games of today are becoming and what games of the past achieved. Typical wisdom would insist that with the steady march of technology we'd all be seeing grander and more ambitious games that forever push forward what the industry can do, but such a view is pretty narrow- not taking into account the plethora of factors that actually go into making a piece of art like that. Afterall, the movie industry has been granted excesses of technological improvements over the years and yet somehow Marvel is worse today than it has ever been before. Clearly more goes into the production of entertainment than the number of terraflops running in the rendering computers. Although that is an important metric too. There are other metrics, however.

Recently a comment brought by a senior member of CDPR development raised my attention on this particular topic once again, and in itself his thoughts lead to such flashy headlines already as the eyebrow arousing "The Cinematic Bioware Style RPG is dead, it just doesn't know it yet." Provocative, isn't it? But the point raised is a poignant one which has been bumping around the industry for a while: namely that the trajectory of AAA gaming is constant expansion far past a sustainable degree where the only companies who can really compete with one another at the topmost level are taking on unreasonable workloads to create games of an unreasonable size that burn out their development talent at an unreasonable rate. Well, actually burning out talent at any rate is pretty unreasonable in of itself, but AAA gaming is starting to get there regularly. Crunch time, overstuffed teams, high turnover, ballooning development costs. Gaming is growing too much too fast.

If we take a look at Hollywood again, as an cogent paradigm, we can see the manifestation of this same sort of problem. Marvel movies all require a heavy amount of CG work in order to create the world visions of their writers, but as Marvel has stumbled to catch up with it's schedule post covid, many of it's development deadlines have collapsed into one another meaning CG teams have had to overlap work to get all of these projects out. This has led to rush job CGI effects that have sparked ridicule and condemnation, and one holographical child that had to be re-animated completely post the release of the film. And even more blatantly, it's meant that films are being rewritten at ridiculous deadlines, with the latest Antman movie getting a rewrite just weeks before opening day in cinemas resulting in one of the most embarrassing rush-job 'obviously done in post' ending sequences in modern movies. Now just take those same principles and add it to gaming.

We've already starting to see the effects of AAA games that have grown to that unsustainable level- with the new God of War games being only two titles long instead of three. Now maybe the team only had enough material for two games- but that really doesn't feel like the right length of a complete multi-story narrative as that traditionally exists, now does it? (Do the words 'Three act structure' hold any meaning to you?) And aptly to the conversation, Cyberpunk 2077 famously suffered from trying to be more than what the team could feasibly handle in the pursuit of being 'competitive with the best of AAA'. CDPR was a big team by an indie standard, but they're still a fraction of the size of a mega studio like Rockstar. And yet CDPR thought they could go around and make an openworld Cyberpunk game to rival GTA and bragged about it in their marketing. "The next generation of open world game"? Yeah, not quite!

Now Cyberpunk is a rough example of bloated AAA games for a good many reasons; one of which being the fact that CDPR's marketing arm did go rouge and just mis-present the product to the audience. There was no feasible way that Cyberpunk could have replicated the complexity of choice presented in their famous prologue Malestrom mission and bloat that out to fit the entire length of the game- but the reveal trailer gameplay literally presented all of the options possible in that mission and then said "And that's only one mission!" Now you could play the giant benefit of the doubt card here and pretend that this was the marketing team just, mask-off, informing us that only one of their missions had that level of complexity, but I think we all know the truth of the matter. Having actually played Cyberpunk now I can confirm that most side quests have only one meaningful choice in them, and it's whether to end the quest chain prematurely or continue it. Nothing else manifests further into the narrative at all.

To proclaim that 'cinematic RPGs' in the vein of Bioware are 'dead', however, feels vain. RPGs existed in some evolving form for a long time before Bioware's 'Dragon Age' but that game, along with the others in that golden age of Bioware, rewrote the perception of what RPGs could be. It was no longer a static isometric game with flavour existing in text and voice acting; now there were rendered cinematics and high quality models and combat animations. You could feel like a major player in a movie that you were actively starring in and directing, with action and consequence and romance and drama; washed away by the indepth narrative of an RPG and the visual grace of an action adventure game. Of course, as games become more complex and detailed, the prospect of high quality animations meeting vast branching paths of possibility becomes ever more taxing on a development team. RPG games today look whole worlds better than those of Bioware's golden age, yet those sometimes feel like better realised RPGs simply because the team had more freedom and space and develop out those RPG roots.

But I would hold off calling the coroner's office just yet; because there is as of yet one title that wants to try it's hand at succeeding the Bioware-style RPG on it's own. Baldur's Gate 3, by Larian, looks to be everything that Bioware would have been if that company didn't veer itself off a cliff called 'bad direction and management'. Baldur's Gate 3 is cinematic, is practically sings of it's complex branching narrative, and it could very well be one of the biggest AAA RPGs ever launched once it lands. But as much of a believer as I am, I do wonder about the size of the game and how much it can provide in the way of meaningful narrative whilst allowing players to do literally anything, including ignore as much as possible, and still be satisfying. Larian seem confident, I'm still bashful.

Facts cannot be denied however; game development is an expensive medium in monetary, manpower and time investments; and some of those roadblocks have hard limits that cannot be circumvented. More money is a given, there's dozens of overly rich idiots who will happily give away all their funds and call it an 'investment'; but time? Unless you've got a time machine there's no making any of that back. And at a certain size taking on new employees only hampers the development of a game rather than contributes towards it. The cracks are already set in the dam and I have to agree that I do think the higher echelons of the games industry is hurtling towards it's next big bubble burst moment- we'll just have to see whether or not the eruption will be big enough to end entire empires this time around like it was the last time. (It would be fitting if this it what it took to finally deep-six Ubisoft.)