That sounds harsh, but that’s the reality: at least nine out of ten concepts end up in the trash, so you really only get the cream of the crop when it comes to missions.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt and Cyberpunk 2077 are two of CD Projekt RED’s (CDPR) biggest RPGs. In these games, the main quests are huge and most of the characters can keep players engaged, but often part of the discussion is what side quest related stories are created during the game. This is something that Pawel Sasko, Lead Mission Designer on Cyberpunk 2077, spoke to PCGamer at GDC, and he said that the reason the end result is good is because most of their concepts don’t get realized…

“A good designer has a 5 to 10% acceptance rate of their ideas. If someone has 10%, they are probably one of the best people we have on the team. So what I do with our designers is I say, okay, here’s the list of genres. Here’s the list of topics I want you to work on – list of topics. Write me pitches. And then they write, yeah, five, 10, 20 a day. Basically, an excellent pitch is like four sentences of, like, this is the pitch.

Nobody, no artist has only great ideas. We all have shitty ideas and tons of them, we just pick the top 5%. I was just looking for, like, articles about, you know, the best quests in Cyberpunk or Phantom Liberty, just to see. A lot of the articles on those lists are the quests that had one of the smallest budgets. You can do so many amazing things with clever ideas, with working within constraints,” Sasko said.

It’s hard to argue with that last sentence: sometimes pushing boundaries (whether technological, material…) can be a real thrill, and it can bring out the best in people. Of course, this requires good management that can inspire employees; if this is not there, then more than the minimum will not be achieved.

Source: PCGamer