This is the third week of Blaugust, and the topic of discussion for the week is creator appreciation. Who, either individuals or corporations, do we look to and respect for certain qualities of the items they produce? Saying thanks to these entities is what this week is all about.
I am focusing here on game developers who repeatedly produce games that keep drawing me back in. These are companies that create products that, flawed or not, I find compelling. I’ll buy their games even if I know the experience will be imperfect because what is between the flaws stirs my heart in a way that other developers do not.
For me, the two developers that fall into this category are Bethesda and CD Project RED.
Bethesda
Bethesda has been around in various forms since the 1990s but became known for deep RPGs starting with Morrowind in 2002. Their games are full of backstory with recordings and books telling detailed stories of the characters in the world and of the world itself. Their NPCs are memorable and include voice acting of various levels of quality. There is a sense of a real world existing behind the game mechanics, a world worth interacting with.
Where Bethesda often fails is in those same mechanics mentioned above. The world may be more complex than the development team size and skills can keep up with. Game systems interact in unpredictable ways at times and bugs, both in terms of the mechanics of the world and its visual representation, are a common feature of Bethesda games.
It is my opinion that the Bethesda team works hard and closely together to realize their complex worlds. They seem resistant to the sorts of rapid growth in team size or toolset complexity that other developers embrace. This may be at the root of the problems their games exhibit. Perhaps if they gave up on their own custom game engine and embraced a customized version of Unreal 5 they could reduce some of the mechanical problems their games are plagued with. But this might also undo the nature of their team in a way that could impact what is more important to me: the complex stories and backgrounds their game worlds possess.
Despite the various problems that Bethesda’s titles generally exhibit I am still drawn to them. The worlds they allow me to play in are complex and intriguing despite the bugs.
- Fallout series- Fallout 3, Fallout 4: Expanding into 3D from the 2D isometric beginning that was Fallout 1 and 2, this series recounts stories of a post-apocalyptic world and the survivors of that place
- Elder Scrolls- Morrowind, Oblivion, Skyrim: A classic yet unique fantasy world with player skills and spells. Some of the best three or four page books I’ve ever read in a game appear in these titles
- Starfield: My least favourite of Bethesda’s titles, I still spent around 100 hours playing Starfield. Clearly Bethesda stumbled here, forgetting their strength is in stories and background and focusing instead on excessive exploration area size. The goal cannot be to have 1,000 hours of pointless wandering in empty zones: the areas need to be filled with rich content, and smaller in this context is better
CD Project RED
CD Project RED is a polish company that formed at the start of the 2000s. They began producing games based on the novels of Andrzej Sapkowski starting in 2007.
The Witcher series of games started out rather rough in terms of quality and in all honestly I don’t count the first two games in the series as part of the package. CD Project RED was learning their craft at the time, probably dealing with things like language translation on a scale that they never had faced before. So I consider Witcher 3 to be their first “real” Witcher game, and I respect the heck out of them for its quality.
Some of the stories in Witcher 3 were heart wrenching and told with a degree of sensitivity that one does not expect to find in the game industry. There were moments like with the Bloody Baron quest line that caused me to set down the controller and ponder life for a moment. This was true art in the form of a game, the kind of gameplay event that would be studied in a gaming ‘literature’ course if there was such a thing.
- Witcher: The first Witcher game I played was Witcher 2, and I never completed it: I found it a bit hard to enjoy. But Witcher 3 was close to perfect. It possessed many of the same attributes of deep background stories and complex gameplay mechanics that Bethesda games did, but without the mechanical flaws of those games.
- Cyberpunk 2077: Cyberpunk 2077 is, after some rework in the form of updates and patches, an excellent game that is the equal of the Witcher titles. Its initial release, however, was plagued with bugs on the lower-powered consoles they chose to support. My feeling is that CD Project RED would have been better served by launching on fewer, higher powered platforms instead of trying to support the previous generation of consoles