A senior member ofCyberpunk 2077’s development team worries that cinematic AAA RPGs may be reaching the limits of what is sustainable. In a recent conversation, he talked about how the increasing scope and complexity of AAA games aremaking them steadily more expensiveand harder to make.
CD Projekt Red launchedCyberpunk 2077in December 2020, and it would be an understatement to say that it had problems. The game suffered numerous bugs and performance issues, particularly on the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. While PC and next-gen versions ran better, they were still not entirely free of bugs. CDPR also faced criticism for overworking its employees, with team members reportedly working 100-hour weeks to hitCyberpunk 2077’s release window.
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Paweł Sasko worked as the quest director on bothThe Witcher 3andCyberpunk 2077. During the Game Developer’s Conference last month, he sat down for a roundtable discussion about the future of RPGs alongside other industry veterans. There, he offered up a grim prediction for the near future, warning that big-budget games are “running at a wall” and that it’s only a matter of time before a crash. Specifically, he expressed his opinion that AAA games are getting too big, complex, and expensive to be sustainable.
Sasko’s comments were part of a discussion withState of Decay 2’s Strix Beltran,Obsidian Entertainment’s Josh Sawyerand Lis Moberly, and former BioWare developer Mike Laidlaw. The topic of discussion was a recent article arguing that cinematic RPGs of the kind these developers are known for may not be long for the world. Sasko jumped in quickly to agree with that claim.
He explained how CD Projekt Red used various tricks to hide shortcuts inThe Witcher 3. For example, developers would cut to black to hide objects loading in or use camera angles to conceal things that hadn’t been fully modeled or animated. However, that wasn’tpossible withCyberpunk 2077, which did not feature any cuts or points when the player was removed from V’s head. Sasko says this made it much more expensive to create the branching narratives that players expect.
The CDPR quest director ultimately put it down to a question of scalability. Modern AAA RPGs must be wide and deep while also achieving the AAA production values that fans expect from companies like CDPR, BioWare, and Obsidian. However, this requires an amount of money and labor that simply isn’t practical or sustainable long term. “At least when it comes to AAA,” said Sasko, “we are just running at a wall, I think, and we’re gonna crash on that wall really soon.”
Cyberpunk 2077is available on PC, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.
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