A recent PC Gamer op-ed, "The cinematic BioWare-style RPG is dead, we just don't know it yet," caused quite a "stir" among lead designers at developer CD Projekt Red, Cyberpunk 2077's Quest director Paweł Sasko said in a recent PC Gamer roundtable interview (opens in new tab)." After reading this article, people are actually saying this. At least as far as Triple-A is concerned, we're just running into a fucking wall, and I think we're going to hit that wall really soon."

Sasko's above comment started a discussion about the technology behind today's big-budget games and the expectations players have of them. The "barrier" Sasco refers to is the growing complexity and expense of creating a game like Cyberpunk 2077. I think it's safe to say that prior to its release, many RPG players assumed that if CD Projekt had done such a great job with The Witcher 3, they should be able to do the same with cyberpunk.

However, cyberpunk is presented in a more immersive first-person perspective, making it an overwhelmingly difficult game to build on, in ways that are not obvious to most players. [Witcher 3] has a lot of shitty tricks," Sasko said, explaining that, among other things, he often switches to black to direct a scene or transition pieces of a quest, spawns and despawns objects, changes the weather or time of day He explained that he often switches to black to transition quest fragments, spawns and despawns objects, and changes the weather and time. He said, "Sometimes there's a scene of a guy behind a bar, and he's waist-deep in the terrain. So he just sits there. But in that scene he looks perfectly fine, he actually looks like a match, and everything works.

"Now look at cyberpunk. There are no cuts, no black screens. The production is face-to-face. It is incredibly costly to generate a branch. Compared to cyberpunk, it was very easy to add branching to The Witcher 3. This article sparked that discussion.

CD Projekt's designers felt strongly that an "uncut" first-person perspective was important for the game, but Pawel's solution for "narrative scalability: you want the story to be long but also wide, so you try to provide all the branches and choices and consequences" He stated that a solution needed to be found. To do that with the current tools would require a huge budget. In Disco Elysium, the text-heavy, top-down presentation made it possible to add narrative branching at a surprisingly low cost.

Mike Laidlaw, former creative director of Dragon Age, said the biggest challenge for him is controlling player expectations. He said, "As soon as you start offering something cinematic, you invite comparisons to what is essentially the most cinematic. In other words, it's like keeping pace with Naughty Dog and cyberpunk. laidlaw witnessed the rise of cinematic RPGs at BioWare, where he worked on games like "Jade Empire" and "Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. While there, he said, he had a simple tool for creating most conversations quickly.

"We dragged the stage into the level, where there were basically lights, cameras, a series of animations, and so on. That became a tool for us to put symbols on the conversation. We called it a "bronze" conversation, and a "gold" conversation is where you attach art to that conversation. Get someone to do all the slow zooms, rotates, dutch angles, and everything else. We needed a budget for that, so we consciously looked at our scene and thought, "How many gold medals can we get out of this?""

"I think what you guys did with Cyberpunk was so phenomenally aggressive, it was like branching out from every title with the seamless perspective of Half-Life2. I think it was a phenomenal accomplishment, but I think it was also expensive, not only financially, but on a personal level. "

Laidlaw cited Wildermyth as an example of a game that used procedural narrative effectively, noting that it should be possible to build tools that allow for more effective (and cheaper) procedural narrative. [Strix Beltran, scenario director for Hidden Path Entertainment's upcoming D&D RPG, said, "I think we are on the precipice of really figuring out procedural storytelling. We haven't done it yet." But a lot of people are working on it. And I think it's going to be a game changer.

Beltran predicted that procedural narrative tools, while not a panacea, will help "crack the code" of expensive triple-A game development by making it easier to tell larger-scale stories.

"I love story-forward, story-first content. That's where I live." I think that's why a lot of people like BioWare's style. And we have to figure out how to make it cheaper in the future."

"There's a trap of thought here that it's easy to inadvertently fall into. Cinematics is quality. Cinematics are the best. Good cinematics make for the best game. I think this is something we've carried over from when prestige stories first became popular on TV. We said, 'Oh, we're going to incorporate all of that into our game. We're prestige narratives, too. Look at us, we're the best.'"

"Even as developers, sometimes we need to take a step back and think, 'No, actually, prestige narrative "gold" cinematics is a tool we can use, not something that makes us better. If we have the best cinematics, then it's a top-quality game, he said. There are many factors that make a game good or bad. What I want to focus on is emotionality, what actually reaches people and grabs their attention and reminds them of Morte 20 years later, as opposed to, for example, "I saw the sunlight shining through that water surface in the misty cutscene at the waterfall."

The RPG roundtable also included Obsidian Entertainment's Josh Sawyer and Lis Moberly, who covered a variety of topics, including tabletop systems for video games to steal, favorite NPC companions, and more The 80-minute conversation For more information, click here (opens in new tab).