Video game graphics probably aren’t going to get much better than they are now. They’ll improve little by little as time goes by, and some particularly janky animations devs don’t show these days (you ever seen a video game character eat?) might become more achievable, but the big change we’ll see is that looking this good will get a whole lot cheaper, and that will leave more money on the table for other things. That,Dragon Age: The Veilguardcreative director John Elper says, will be “freedom”. And he’s the first person I’ve heard understand what that really means.
Speaking toEurogamer while speculating about gaming 25 years in the future, Elper said “Ultimately, it’s going to be about finding that balance between player freedom and authored content,” and brought a balance to the conversation that few others have been armed with. When people speculate about freedom in gaming, they tend to take it to far-flung extremes that nobody really wants.Ubisoft’s AI demowhere players could talk in real life to NPCs who respond in real time is the latest example - I don’tactually want to talk to my TV.
Game Devs Will Always Drive Games More Than Players
It’s the same as when Joe Russo, one half of the directorial brothers behind Avengers: Endgame, speculated about AI being used in movies. Rather than imagining the sorts of new genres, shooting styles, or themes we’d see emerge in future cinema, Russo feels the next step is making a photorealistic avatar of yourself andcasting it in an AI generated romcom with Marilyn Monroe because you’ve “had a rough day”. This is not a movie. This is one (extremely dark and exploitative) step up from a wet dream.
The thing is, most people don’t want to go anywhere and do anything. If they did they would spend their free time standing around in a random field. They want their choices to matter, and in order for that to happen, there has to be a reason for them to make them. That means there needs to be constraints on those decisions. If the future of gaming is doing whatever you want, what is to stop you from playingRed Dead Redemption 2and using the power of AI to make a Tuberculosis Go Away Potion? We need limits on our freedom for our freedom to truly matter. We need to be directed through a narrative that exists without our meddling, we need a voice, a purpose, a guiding hand through a narrative for it to be a narrative at all.
Elper will have wrestled with this more than most.BioWaremade its mark on gaming through choice-based gameplay where each decision you made impacted your character, how the world reacted to them, and where the story went. Though perhaps a little unfairly remembered because of the three-way binary choice ofMass Effect 3’sending, in general BioWare made several immersive universes come to life off the back of this style of choice system, supported by fantastic writing down whichever path you choose to tread. Now it has to do it again, a decade later.
Has Dragon Age: The Veilguard Modernised Itself Enough
Dragon Age has already courted some negative headlines fromthe return of the outdated dialogue wheel, and there was a tendency to focus less on the words being said or even the consequences they would lead to, and instead lock in your hero’s personality early on and mindlessly choose that option each time. A wheel can also take away nuance, leaning on the same amount of responses each time, rather than offering scope for narrow binary choices and more open-ended discussions.
Elper and the team will have struggled with the idea of how much freedom modern players want and need, versushow much can the BioWare game design cater to while still being effective. Fans tend to be more demanding these days, and expect more changes on the fly -further trainedbyBaldur’s Gate 3’s unending patches- while still expecting every decision to matter. The “balance” he describes is not an issue he expects to face in a quarter of a decade, but likely one he faces right now, and hopes will get easier.
It’s tempting to think of the future of gaming as endless possibilities where you can do whatever you want in your own story as your own character with every last detail of every imaginable thing customisable, but that already exists - it’s called a blank sheet of paper. Grab a pen, and you’re gaming baby! If you want a video game made by someone who knows how to make video games, there needs to be something immovable of them in there. I’m glad Elper gets that, and his answer has done more to soothe my worry of The Veilguard overly catering to fans more than any actual promo for Dragon Age itself has done.
