“So much of design today has to do with data management. Situations where literally — I’m not making these kinds of stories up — literally, the creative director will say, let’s put the entrance to the secret lair here. And the lead programmer will say, ‘It won’t fit in memory,’ or ‘okay, we’ll need a 30 second load screen that’ll kill the momentum of the gameplay,’ or ‘How do you feel about a long elevator ride down to the lair?’” says Cerny.
If you’ve played a modern video game, you’ve likely been bamboozled by a game developer, if for your own good. In “Destiny,” for example, long corridors and winding canyons across nominally open worlds are functionally loading screens, separating distinct arenas which load in based on which direction you’re traveling. If you’ve taken an interminable elevator ride in a game, you’ve experienced a game trying to cleverly hide what it’s doing under the hood: loading you into a new stage. Cerny himself has called out “euphemistically named ’fast travel.’” These are often clever and technically impressive tricks. But they also take time to implement, and require developers to puzzle over how to bend restrictive hardware into a shape that approximates the game maker’s ambition. That’s time and brainpower not spent thinking about the game itself.
“When we tell the world we put an SSD in the hardware, that’s interesting, but that’s interesting for about a month. What makes it work is that the games are picking up the SSD and using it in various ways,” said Cerny. “Ultimately, it isn’t the hardware that you put in the console. It’s what the games are doing.”