Warhorse Studios founder Daniel Vavra has publicly expressed confusion about the practice of hiring third-party narrative consultants for big-budget AAA projects.
In his view, it seems strange to attract experts to make blockbusters with huge budgets, when their professional experience is limited to making small contributions to small independent games.
I’ve also looked into who these “narrative consultants” are, and I just can’t understand why anyone would hire someone whose only writing credit is “narration writing” on a pixelated mashup of tower defense and Techno Synthwave with a plot centered around “defending your city from the living embodiment of greed” as a “story consultant” for a game with a $300 million budget. Especially when this person also claims in their speech that “spaces where white people don’t have to exist are where some of the best stories are told,” or they mention that they are here to “burn the gaming industry to the ground,” and also believe that “Tarantino’s work should be criticized to the point of extinction.”
Another consultant has a degree in marketing, and another’s only original work consists of three amateur short stories. How is it possible that you don’t need the appropriate education, experience, or any noteworthy accomplishments to work for a company that advises people a thousand times more talented and experienced than you, on a AAA project with a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars? It’s like asking a janitor to perform brain surgery on someone. Needless to say, most of the games they consulted on proved to be commercial disasters. Why? What’s the logic behind this?