says, “but you could also point at box-set
culture and the likes of Game Of Thrones
which is at the pinnacle of that – in the mass
media, deep and complex storylines have
never been more prevalent.”Quantity vs quality
There is, however, one problem afflicting
modern developers – and indeed modern
game development as a whole – that
Pratchett, Porter and Hennig all cite as
problematic for games writers: an obsession
with quantity over quality. In her Develop
Reboot Blue address, Hennig said, “Across
the board, we’ve doubled everything in size;
we’ve also doubled our development time,
and doubled our team sizes and yet our price
point hasn’t changed.”
Pratchett also picks up on that. “I definitely
agree that games are becoming quite bloated
for the sake of delivering quantity over quality.When I started in the industry as a journalist
over 20 years ago, there was a relative healthy
middle ground in games, which had some
of the freedom of indie, but some of the
production values of triple-A,” she explains.
“The Overlord games were a good example of
that. Over the years we’ve seen that middle
ground slowly disintegrate, until we’re left
with indie on one side and huge triple-A on
the other, with very little in between.”
That’s a crucial point: nobody would
dispute that indie developers remain loyal
to narrative-led design – all the more
conspicuously so when triple-A publishers
are chasing loot box-style cashflow. Pratchett
has experience of working on both triple-A
and indie games. “Broadly speaking, with
indies you have a little more freedom to
be creative and innovative,” she explains.
“There can be more of a sense of trust and
integration with other team members, and itwhich, because they offer little beyond doing
the same objective over and over, must
keep players hooked by employing dubious
practices like loot boxes that are founded on
gambling principles.
Are the big publishers giving storylines the
cold shoulder because modern audiences
don’t have the attention spans to cope
with them? “They probably do reduce the
amount of deep storytelling that can be
done,” explains Pratchett. “However, it does
mean that you have to embed the story
more firmly in the characters, which can be
quite fun. When I worked on Rival Kingdoms
for Space Ape Games, I was kept on a rolling
contract just helping to create characters and
backstories for them.”
Porter, though, feels blaming the decline
of narrative in games on the perception that
modern attention spans are shortening is too
glib. “You can look at Battle Royale, sure,” he
“I definitely agree that games are
becoming quite bloated for the sake
of delivering quantity over quality”
ABOVE Single-
player title
Sekiro.
MID RIGHT
Cyberpunk 2077
will hopefully
show that
stories in games
aren’t dead yet.066 THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE
OXM INVESTIGATES