Blockbuster games are in the grip of a ‘death cult of loyalty,’ says former Dragon Age producer

Dragon Age: Veilguard consultant and former Dragon Age executive producer Mark Darrah has released a YouTube video addressing the question, “Why do AAA games take so long?” It’s about 25 minutes long and goes pretty deep into a number of topics, from the current enthusiasm for live service “forever games” versus “finite,” narrative-driven affairs to the “misleading” announcement of hotly-wanted sequels years before full production begins in order to pump up a publisher’s brand during a dry spell.

One thing I wanted to pull out and put on your plate is Darrah’s discussion of what he calls the “death cult of allegiance” – that is, the desire for ever greater lifelike visual detail and “complexity.”

“We’re also in a phase of something I’ve called the fidelity death cult,” Darrah explains about eight minutes into the video, “where a lot of games are going for hyper-realistic art styles, hyper-high fidelity, hyper-customization, hyper-complexity. These things don’t contribute to greater scale, they don’t help you make a game to last, but they still take a lot more time. If you’re worrying about how people’s hair moves on their back, that’s going to take time that you wouldn’t have spent before. You would have just sprayed their hairstyle on them or given them a hair cap or something fairly static. Now you’re introducing new avenues of complexity.”

He expands this point to include players’ aversion to things in games they consider “recycled,” from parts of recurring environments to animation systems. “Similarly, we’re currently experiencing quite a bit of resistance from players to reusing systems and assets. So even if I’m making a sequel to a game that came out just a few years ago, I might feel within the development team that we can’t reuse any of our assets because we’d face resistance from players. And while I might be able to reuse some of those animations, some of those models, or some of those areas, I might feel the need to recreate them to avoid that resistance. So I add extra time into the development process that would have otherwise allowed the game to come out sooner.”

Interestingly, Darrah notes that while the emphasis on giving players endless things to do, access and consume in “forever games” reflects audience research showing that this makes the game more compelling, the “death cult of fidelity” and avoidance of asset reuse “comes from fear of backlash rather than more concrete research saying it’s necessary.” He suggests that prioritizing the creation of original assets and fidelity is “a trap that dev teams sort of set themselves up for,” pointing to Baldur’s Gate 3 as a “perfect example” of a game that got away with downplaying “minor things of visual fidelity that often don’t matter that much at the end of the day.”

That the credo of ever-quantifiably higher fidelity consumes a lot of time and energy without actually adding anything to the games is a well-known argument, but it’s always worth repeating. To drift a little into journalistic navel-gazing, I’d like to add that writing about games that value fidelity for its own sake can be boring, even if that’s partly because avid readers tend to want us to write about them in a certain way.

The associated traditions of realism and photorealism are complex, exciting, and evolving in their own right, but in video game culture these traditions are usually reduced to numbers and buzzwords—higher polygon counts, more animated objects per scene, more lens flares per NPC tear, with a corresponding need for more powerful, dirtier hardware to run games on. But if there’s a penchant for interpreting realism and photorealism in this way, it reflects the audience tastes that both “AAA” developers and journalists alike have cultivated over the decades by pandering to the whims of the marketing machine. I’ve written my share of articles about higher resolutions and fancy new shader types. One thing I’d like to ask Darrah is: How exactly should blockbuster game developers untangle the “death cult of allegiance”? How should they convince more tech-savvy gamers to get over the sight of spray-on hair?