There has been a movement in recent years that has increasingly lambasted the extent to which video game budgets have soared relative to their output. Just as all newer forms of art have aped the generational evolution of those that came before at an accelerated pace, so has gaming managed to do the Hollywood jump to painful exorbitant budgets supporting ungainly huge production teams in but a fraction of the time it took Hollywood to do the very same. And you wanna hear the most insane part? It hasn't helped the quality of these games. At least not unilaterally. We have received a smattering of some of the most ambitious and high concept games ever received, but also total trainwreck abominations on the other side! How it that possible with so many more profressionals on board with bigger budgets and better technology? What has gotten lost along the way?
More budget has been the name of the game in the industry since time began. Every game was squeezed out in as finished a state as possible back in the waking morning hours of game design and there isn't a developer out there from those ages that didn't wish they had a bigger team or an extra six months or a little bit more to add to the recipe. Oftentimes game design from this era is more a dialogue of compromise than of 'unfettered exploration into the fundamentals of gaming'. I would say it was around about the time of LA Noire and Destiny when that really began to shift. (Of course it was a gradual rise, but those two stand out as tent pole productions) LA Noire cost a, staggering at the time, 50 million dollars to put together, such a price point ultimately led to the death of the talented team who put it together. And years later- 140 million to make Destiny. Since then it seems like prices have only risen.
And of course with bigger budgets means bigger teams. Because if a solid team of closely working developers can slap together a great game then twice as many developers can make twice as good of a game, right? Of course that's not how it works, there's so many little nuances that go into the team dynamics and collaborations and communication- sometimes bigger teams end up being a nuisance when trying to make a dedicated and focused game. Just look at Telltale and their huge swelling size for what should have been intimate story-based games, which led to clashing ideas, breakdown in hierarchy and ultimately a flooding of costs that the team couldn't possible pay off as they singlehandedly oversaturated a market they were pretty much solely feeding. As I said, shades of nuance.
But even when things don't fall apart to such a spectacular degree that entire companies are being folded, sometimes there's a lack of heart in the finished product that is tangible in all these little ways. One franchise which has become a poster child of this is Ubisoft's golden boy Assassin's Creed, which has managed to squeeze itself into a nearly bi-yearly franchise at this point with seven games in development at the same time. Yet ask anyone and they'll point to the many cracks in the machine that makes modern Assassin's Creed feel less advanced than even Assassin's Creed 2 used to. Just take a look at those cutscenes! Narrative set pieces, character dialogues, key aspects of the story- they seem so stiff and wooden the longer these games go on, and compared to the lively and energetic cutscenes of ages past- one has to wonder what went wrong.
And that is only a symptom of a general degradation of quality towards a steadily less engaging series. Stories stop being as provocative and winding, strange design ideas that try different things you don't see in other games fail to make it off the cutting roof floor- all the neat little quirks that make games so passion fuelled and individual are squeezed out in order to make a product as mathematically inclined to be as 'successful' as possible. And naturally that is a terrible way to get to gripes with what it is people love about gaming to begin with. Ubisoft titles are bigger and more expensive then ever before, but regarded less and less as genuine quality products within the industry as years go by. The more money that gets involved the less risky people are inclined to be.
So is that it then? Is that the secret formula? As budgets soar that money has to come from investors, and those investors maintain a tight grip on their gamble to try and ensure as definite profits as they can in an industry that yearns for risky gambles. The best game of this year was not one of those 'try to cater to everyone' style mash-up mess pots of a game, it was a game that was bold and so supremely insanely risky that pretty much everyone's job would have been on the line had it bombed. There was no coming back for Baldur's Gate 3 when it shipped, and the overwhelming success was so anomalous that the industry rushed forth to beg people not to impressed with it's quality- because passion is the outlier in the design-recipe these days.
Hideo Kojima once said something very interesting about game design, namely that one of the hardest parts of the entire process is getting started and explaining your ideas to everyone else. Creating an image of something that doesn't exist in the mind of someone else is a real challenge of communication and mutual understanding, and the more rungs in the ladder between the creative mind of the creative hand- the more that vision becomes difficult to translate. Giant teams lack the focus of small teams for that very reason, the more heads you throw in the kitchen the more egos and individual ideas creep up- that which might be a boon in a small project become unmanageable in a giant project with half a thousand employees. You can't really effectively brainstorm with 500 people on zoom.
Finally I think something we tend to forget as the world becomes more convenient and opportunity more abundant, is that some of the greatest innovations are borne through tribulation. The formula for Sonic's immaculate running had to be wrangled out of uncooperative software in order to feel just right- and it became a compromise between the dream and possibility. Compromise can engender refinement, it's like Hegelian Dialectics. (That was a joke- disturbed amateurish psychologists, no need to mount a crusade.) Which I guess is just my long winded-ass way of saying: throwing money at a problem does not automatically resolve. At least, not in the world of game design. Much as companies like EA and Ubisoft desperately wish it would.
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