The art of the cut

 I may have gone a bit far in a few places.

Once upon a time it was said that Video games are a medium defined by narcissism, but I would argue they're also defined by the very soul of excess to boot. You see, practically every other type of media exists to some degree of limit, be it movie, book or music, such that they perform what they mean to perform and then end. You may repeat and indulge in them again and again, but you'll be doing so in the order presented, or combing through that order pointedly ignoring it if you're trying to create a super-cut of the actor you're thirsting over. (Youtube Shorts has introduced me to a much-larger sub culture of entertainment than I'm happy with.) Video games, largely, try to offer themselves as endless mediums of excess, bottomless wells of content that the user drinks from on and on until they just can't take it anymore. Like some who visits the same art museum day after day until they know every portrait so well they dream about them in their sleep. (Which may have been me at one point.)

I pick out the word 'excess', because it defines itself as more than is needed. Gluttonous, corpulent and greedy- we want it all and we want everything. Drunk on the allure of fantastical worlds we want to abscond into the other forever and for ever, unless it's an RPG Assassin's Creed game, in which case the sooner that terror is over the better for everyone. (I will never forgive those who lionise the Ubisoft team by fooling themselves into lauding those games. Active saboteurs of good taste, all.) In such a hedonistic orgy of indulgence, it can be easy to forget and lose sight of the subtle beauty of the gracious cut. The purloined pocket of content. The withdrawn morsel of code. That which lays sundered and sullied on the cold cutting room floor.

Because we see this sort of stuff everywhere, in every game. Hogwarts Legacy recently launched with tons of cut content in regards to systems which were once toyed about with before the scope and direction of the game was changed. (Including, allegedly, a morality system.) Fallout games are renowned for their removed content, one such in the most recent single player game being an entire in-game arena which ended up being whittled down into a single bar-room shootout. (Which was kind of lame, but less lame than launching an arena which bugged out when you walked in with power armour.) And recently Baldur's Gate 3 has been datamined for a decent chunk of content which has been removed, (as well as some which is just bugged so badly it might as well be removed, but we're focusing on the latter for now.)

Now of course, cutting is hardly a phenom brand new to the world of gaming. You'd have to be insane to think such. It's an aspect of editing present in all works of art everywhere, born on the knowledge that the message and purpose of any work is as much about what you choose to leave out as it is about the things you choose to put on the page. Meaning, emphasis, pace, all can be shifted with the removal of a scene or a trimming of a track or a change of a line here or there, and it's the eye of the successful editor which works in spotting how to bring the best out of a creator's work. And sometimes, largely in gaming but it exists elsewhere, you just need to cut something because it plain doesn't work. It sounded like a good idea at the time, but the engine just didn't want to play ball and the content wasn't shaping up as nicely as you wanted and the entire thing just ended up getting tossed out the portcullis. Can you see where I'm going with this? 

Baldur's Gate 3's range of cut content pretty much encapsulates the entirety of the Upper City of Baldur's Gate, for which mentions exist but there's no presence in the game. All quests that would have taken place there have instead been relocated to the lower city, which it has been suspected might be the reason for the lower city being such a lag-fest on weaker computers. And even more powerful computers if you leave the game on for too long. In the manner of gamers who always want their adventures to travel on forever in scope, I understand that feeling of 'lacking' whenever there's a chunk of a game that you don't get to experience, but in a title as lean and neat as Baldur's Gate 3, I can understand the choices.

Afterall, no developer is removing chunks of their game because they really want to mess with their audience; there's no satisfaction or money in that. Some might cut things out in order to sell them later as DLC, but this isn't the case here; it's a matter of having a high bar for game content that doesn't always get reached by what the team was milling about with during the planning period. Everyone is as free as their imagination can carry them in the planning stage, only to be ripped back down to earth in the actual execution moments when suddenly the complex dog system with dynamic scent based hunting just isn't going to come together in time for the release of Phantom Pain- as much as Kojima might have wanted it to.

At the end of the day, trimming the fat is all about ensuring that the experience the player enjoys delivers the excitement and fantasy that was intended. A world that feels genuine, actions that feel empowering, a narrative that feels complete- leave every half finished or just plain sloppy idea dangling on the side of the project just for the sake of 'including everything' as the chaffe can really get in the way of that experience and sometimes even ruin it. There's a really solid 20 hour game somewhere in the heart of Assassin's Creed Odyssey, but Ubisoft choose to balloon that game out into 100+ hours by throwing everything and the kitchen sink, whittling down a potentially great game into a terrible slog of pained endurance tests. That's the object to avoid.

Editing can be some of the most painful work in the world for a creator, who loathes to leave any single word out of a draft, every second of the footage in the final reel, and every conceptualised location out of the finished product. It takes a real talent to recognise the gem and draw it out of the muddle, and a stout heart to commit to shortening for the greater good. I have a lot of respect for the cutters out there, and were I at all capable of anything similar myself perhaps even I'd have a nice to read slate of blogs to boast about. (Alas, I'm a tacit waffler.) That being said, it always sucks to imagine the game that could have existed in the theoretical realisation of aborted ideas, because the imagination is the world's best storyteller, afterall.