'We're running at a f**king wall, and we're gonna crash'—CD Projekt's lead quest designer on big budget RPGs
Recent PC Gamer editorial "The cinematic BioWare-style RPG is dead, it just doesn't know it yet" caused quite «a commotion» between the lead designers at developer CD Projekt Red, Cyberpunk 2077 quest director Paweł Sasko said in a recent PC Gamer roundtable interview(opens in new tab). «Everyone actually, after reading this article, said: we mostly agree, actually, with the thesis. At least when it comes to triple-A, we are just running at a fucking wall, I think, and we're gonna crash on that wall really soon.»
Sasko's comments above kicked off a discussion on the technology behind today's big-budget games and the expectations players have for them. The «wall» Sasko referred to is the ballooning complexity and expense of making games like Cyberpunk 2077. Before it released, I think it's safe to say many RPG players assumed that if CD Projekt had done such a fantastic job with The Witcher 3, it should be able to do the same with Cyberpunk.
But Cyberpunk's more immersive first-person presentation ended up making it a vastly more difficult game to build in ways that aren't obvious to most players.
«Witcher 3 has so many fucking tricks,» Sasko said, explaining one in particular—the way it would often cut to black to stage scenes or transition between bits of a quest, letting the developers spawn or despawn objects, and change the weather or time of day. «Sometimes there's a scene of a guy behind a bar, and he's like, submerged waist-up to the terrain because we didn't have animation. So he's just sitting there. But he looks perfectly fine in that scene, and it looks like he actually matches and everything works.
»Then you look at Cyberpunk. No cuts, no black screens, you're 'in' V all the time. Staging is in-person. It got
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