Austerity Thinking
Dragon Age doesn’t need to respect your choices to tell a good story - Inverse
With apologies because this is from December last year and I’ve only just read it due to an aside in this week’s Critical Distance round up. The headline here doesn’t really, adequately, describe the main thrust of the piece which rather than argue that it’s okay, you can tell a good enough story without honouring a player’s saves, instead brings austerity thinking to the table. It would cost too much to do so, source:I have made that up.
Obviously, it’s a milder concern than actually enacting austerity but still, arguing for it is pretty rubbish and a depressingly inevitable full stop to the “games cost too much to make” argument that’s taken hold recently. Rather than look at - and address - the problems that get us in a bind, austerity invites us all to just shrug our shoulders and say “nope, can’t do anything, can’t afford it” whilst someone else fucks off with all the money and the problems not only persist but invariably get worse. My source for this? Living in England, under actual austerity, for a very, very long time now.
It’s really shit. I’m not going to beat around the bush here, that’s the thing about austerity thinking, it leads to things being really shit and staying really shit. It improves nothing but the bank balances of the already rich whilst everyone else gets to ‘tighten their belts’. I am not a fan. Very much not a fan. I’m also not a fan of the line of thinking that follows in its wake, people can justify not doing anything at all, whatever it may be, because Austerity.
Like this.
It’s become more and more apparent in recent years that game development budgets and timelines are at an untenable point. The cost of making a game — in dollars, work hours, and the health of developers themselves — has grown beyond what’s sustainable. That’s evident in The Veilguard’s ten-year development time, which included restarting the project altogether, and it’s why games like Concord end up costing so much only to fail on launch. Imagine if The Veilguard had also included every choice that players find significant from previous games. That means not just writing dialogue, crafting cutscenes, or building environments that reference those choices, but creating multiple versions of each to reflect all the options players could have chosen. Including even a handful of those choices could have tacked untold expenses onto what was already a seemingly difficult development.
Nobody is going to attempt to make ‘every choice matter’ from past games because that’s fundamentally impossible for a game at that sort of scale. There is an incalculable amount of choices from the player’s perspective, so we’re just pulling out the most extreme, unlikely to ever be a real concern ever, thing to eventually just argue sorry, we can’t afford it.
It is obviously true that every thing you add to a game will cost something, whether that’s in time, money, effort or what. Making anything tends to involve juggling finite resources against your own ambitions. For this article’s argument against honouring a couple of choice choices from previous games to work, we have to assume not that it’s outside the budget or permitted scope of the game to honour them (something we tend to have no idea about unless someone tells you flat out that was the case), which is perfectly reasonable, but that in doing so the team would necessarily only be adding to the budget with more and more money for every single choice honoured.
That’s not how making things tends to work because whilst you invariably will have a cap on what you can achieve, there isn’t a fully formed game at the start to just be adding costs to. Every step along the way to completion can change the course of a project and what is and isn’t able to be included. Things make the cut, things don’t make the cut, things are tried, things work or don’t work, break and can be fixed or break and can’t be fixed.
The project is not conceived perfect. It’s collaborative, it’s hopefully responsive. It evolves.
And you can add things by not doing another thing, or stopping doing another thing. You can go a long way to ensure you get to keep something by planning for its inclusion from the start. It can still go to shit but things can go to shit for lots of reasons. You can prioritise, financially, certain things over another. You can make the creative choice to include one thing over another because that’s what you want to be doing. Sometimes this is out of your hands but it is not as simple as just adding costs and nothing else. Austerity thinking has no place here. And yet.
It’s the inevitable consequence of the current discourse that it ends up here. Games are too expensive to make so just don’t fix anything, don’t find ways to build or repair structures, just don’t do a thing, that’ll have to do. And you can apply this to absolutely anything you fancy because everything costs something. It has no limit, it has no end, it just is. It impoverishes all of us bar a select few, it has no room for hope, no room for ambition, no room for humans. It just is.
And no. No thank you.