Are AAA RPGs About To “Crash Into A Wall?”

How do you feel about AAA RPGs nowadays? Have you been wondering why EA won’t just jumpstart working on a new Mass Effect, or why it took a decade for Ken Levine to reveal Judas since releasing Bioshock Infinite?

In a panel discussion between RPG developers, CD Projekt RED’s Pawel Sasko gave a sobering assessment of where the industry is when it comes to this genre.

As reported by GameRant, this is what Pawel said:

“When it comes to AAA, we are just running at a wall, I think, and we’re gonna crash on that wall really soon.”

The wall that Pawel is referring to is technological. As we have seen with each console generation, video games in general have become increasingly more beautiful and complex. Gameplay systems have become increasingly more nuanced, capable of small subtleties, as Sony is eager to demonstrate with the bespoke features they add to their first party games in the Dualsense.

All that complexity has become progressively harder to make. In fact, costs for making these games have been escalating as each console generation passes.

Pawel can cite his own experience with his latest project, Cyberpunk 2077. It’s easy to criticize CD Projekt RED now for not having scoped their project properly, leading to failures in development, labor issues, and the studio having to fix their work in the years after to get it right.

As we now also know, CD Projekt RED could have delivered on their promises after all, or at least the bare minimum expected of them. But doing so would have required more delays, a decision they should have not hesitated to make in hindsight of course.

 But CD Projekt RED was not the only big company to fail to scope these new projects properly. I had brought up Mass Effect, and as we know, Mass Effect Andromeda’s failure to meet expectations also salted the Earth on the possibility of a sequel in the near future.

AAA RPGs are not particularly unique in having this dilemma, but they are particularly victim to this issue. It takes a lot of work to just make these RPGs on the gameplay level, to meet modern day expectations of what would keep players entertained.

When you add to that the higher expectations for game graphics and performance, the very difficult curve of delivering 60 FPS at 4K, and you create a formula for imminent failure.

It isn’t entirely a hopeless story for now. Many developers bring up the possibility that some level of random generation or procedural generation will help them bring their games to the scope expected in this roundtable. Diablo IV seems to be Blizzard’s experiment in that direction.

But for the immediate future not all AAA RPGs will be going there yet either. Star Wars Jedi Survivor, releasing this April 28, 2023, is expected to adopt the Metroidvania style design of its predecessor, Star Wars Fallen Order. There are other ideas that these game studios  can explore, and may prove successful among gamers.