This has to be the third or fourth time I’ve decided I want absolutely nothing to do with this game.
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If I weren’t a writer and could turn my experience with this game into #content, I would not bother at all with this thing.
I didn’t want to play GTA5, I really don’t want to play what looks like GTA6.
I feel like most of the hype is based around Witcher 3 memories. And it appears that 90% of the charm of the Witcher series was actually from Sapkowski’s ideas, not CD Projekt Red’s. But now I’m writing up a thesis statement for my eventual review and I shouldn’t do that before I play the game.
Still 
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It feels like one of those things you gotta see/play if you wanna be a part of the zeitgeist. I didn’t think Once Upon a Time in Hollywood looked very good (I was right), but I still went and saw it just so I could be a part of the conversation.
Anything to distract from the horror show of 2020 I guess…
God, all the games I’ve been wanting to play this year have so much baggage. This, Assassin’s Creed and Watch_Dogs with Ubisoft’s nonsense…
At least Mafia turned out ok.
Crunch is definitely a result of poor management, but more than that, it’s the result of the cost of poor management being put on the workers instead of the higher-ups and the company as a whole. If you want your game to come out on X date, but need more man hours to get it done than your current staff working 40 hours/week can accomplish, the solution is to hire more workers, or hire another group and outsource parts of the work. But it’s cheaper, even with overtime, just to make your current workers do more work.
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This is true, and absolutely why they’re not delaying again.
I think the takeaway is that there’s not a solution to this problem that doesn’t end with games like this not existing anymore. There are financial realities that can’t really be changed if we still want these huge, hyperdetailed RPGs every couple years. For these games to be made, they need to make SO much money, and the easiest and most effective way to do that is by reducing overhead by exploiting labor. Management is correct when they say that these games wouldn’t exist if developers unionized and had any recourse for their exploitation.
So, what is the solution here? I say, let it burn down. Unionize game dev, and make these games impossible to justify financially. Yeah, we wouldn’t have Cyberpunk, Elder Scrolls, or even Zelda and Mario, but there would still be games. People will still want to make and play them. Most importantly, fewer peoples lives would be ruined to make them.
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Of all the developers who bought enough goodwill to actually do this as well.
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I was already out because of the multiple instances of transphobia from CDPR and their corporate family both in this game and in their broader operations (oh how quickly so many in the world at large seem to have forgotten, or never cared, about those) and this news really isn’t making me regret that decision.
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There isn’t a single AAA game that isn’t already utilizing a ton of outsourcing from asset vendors in countries like China. They’re hugely reliant on it at this point because of the sheer volume of objects that need modeling, and characters that need animations.
The industry is built on the tautology that better tech and tools means more possibilities for visual fidelity, where the actual source is “more labor exploitation”. Until games like this can be made on reasonable timetables (2-4 years) without requiring constant overtime and tons of outsourcing to underpaid foreign laborers, the publishers should not get to reap the financial rewards of pushing for bigger and bigger graphics.
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If games like this cannot be made ethically then they should cease to exist.
How is this even in question. How is this still a thing people could knowingly support.
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I know they already outsource a lot of work (and most AAA studios already have hundreds of employees, too), but if they still rely on crunch, they still either need to downsize games to what their employees and contractors can do in 40 hrs/week in a few years, or hire more people. And also pay their workers more, abroad and in their home country.
I’m cool with either, it’d be great if there were more jobs in the industry and it’d be great if more games weren’t 200 hours of collecting cooking ingredients or clearing map markers. But neither is likely from AAA game development when the alternative is executives making a few more million dollars in bonuses.
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