Sometimes I think about Red Dead Redemption 2’s development where the devs were begging people to not boycott the game to protest the news about their absurd working conditions because their bonuses were dependent on copies sold. I remember one of them made a statement around the lines of “We worked ourselves to the bone on this and we want to at least see people experience the fruits of that labor”, which makes me think about how we talk about blockbuster games developed under crunch.
I was given a copy of RDR2 to review it, and I couldn’t help but think about how I kept seeing so much that was technically impressive and yet just not necessary. Did some poor guy really work overtime for weeks just so Arthur’s horse had realistically shrinking testicles in cold water?
I honestly did not know how to properly articulate my thoughts on this at the time. I still don’t. Red Dead Redemption 2 was polished - I couldn’t deny that - but it didn’t have to be that polished. I could have connected every bit as strongly to Arthur if every horse in the game had no realistically shrinking horse balls, or even no balls at all. I would much rather have never had it and known the hardworking people who made the game enjoyed their lives more.
Still, I was impressed by the technical proficiency on display. Do I acknowledge that when I talk about RDR2?
I haven’t read any of the reviews for Cyberpunk yet (I want to form my own thoughts and I promised to play through it for a trans friend worried about whether or not she would have a good experience with the game) but I’m betting there’s going to be plenty of praise from people rating specific features as very good. Of course they’re very good; too many people have spent too much time on those features for it to not at least be good. The question is if it even needed to be that good. Could we just have not had this very good part in exchange for the developers living better lives?
The answer should be yes, but all people will really see is “this part was good” and sing its praises and demand more of it. Upper management watches these reactions and concludes that their methods are working splendidly. The company executives laugh all the way to the bank, tickling themselves with the dollars stuffing their pockets as more talented developers vow to never work in the industry again.
It sucks.
I don’t know if I properly expressed this in the original post but there is a specific pain I’m probably failing to capture here. There is a special hurt, an anguish, for when you work in games as a smalltimer and you see the fucking magic that the veterans at AAA studios are pulling off and knowing that it was accomplished through crunch.
These developers are accomplishing feats that can only be described as insane when you understand what they need to do to make that shit happen. The thing they made is incredible, and it must have no less than to have its praises be sung in every corner. That it was made under abuse and that your words of admiration that the devs so rightfully deserve to hear will only ensure their continued abuse is heartbreaking.
Adding onto this… I think we’re hitting a real wall. Not in what’s technically possible, but what’s technically feasible.
Because I get it. I get it. We started in a place where video games looked like this:
and then this:
And the desire was: How can we make this more like real life? The landscape, the models, the dialogue, the ability to simply interact in the world.
And you know what? We’ve made it pretty damn far. More than once I’ve seen a clip from a video game and literally not been able to tell at first that it wasn’t live footage.
But
How viable is that really? To have giant, sprawling open-world games where every character, no matter how minor, is fully voice acted? Where you can see every pore on peoples’ skin and the subtle shift of the hairs on their heads?
Cyperpunk 77 was in production for seven years. It was delayed what- twice, three times? CDProjectRed forced its employees into grueling 100+ hour work weeks to get it all together. And by most accounts, it still came out a buggy mess with entire missing systems.
To me, that’s evidence that this style triple AAA hyper-realistic game is getting so out of control that this scale is simply not tenable.
And do we even.. need all this? Really? Because I have had plenty of fun with smaller, less-realistic video game titles like Hyperlight Drifter, Slime Rancher, and Abzu. Near-perfect emulation of reality isn’t the be all and end all of gaming. Maybe it’s time the industry stopped chasing it so desperately.
I had this really weird dream that was Twilight and it literally boiled down to “The Cullens are actually a group of vampires that are as known and feared/revered as the Voltori. But they’re Vegan and they’re like THOSE KINDS of Vegan so no one likes them.”
one absolutely incredible fact about me was that since wacoms brand new tablet instructions pad never explicitly said when to change a pen nib i just assumed as long as the thing kept working i didnt need to change it. this resulted in me taking a good look at my tablet pen 2 YEARS after i started using it and discovering the pen itself was chiseled to hell and back
