The cut quest

On Thursday a quest I loved was cut.

I can't tell you much about it. It was a side quest, mine from the first draft, about two sisters and a house that wasn't where they'd left it. It had the best scene I've written at the studio, a conversation on a staircase at night. It had a dog. It had been in the game, playable, for about four months, and people on the team would stop me in the kitchen to say they'd played it, which happens less often than you'd think.

It was cut for the reason most things are cut: time. The game has a date, the date doesn't move, and somewhere around now every project discovers it has more game than it has days. So there's a meeting. There's a spreadsheet with a row for every quest and columns for how finished it is, how much it will cost to finish, how many bugs it has and how many other things depend on it. Mine was nearly done and expensive to finish, because a house that moves is hard to build, and nothing else depended on it. That last column is the one that does it. A quest nothing depends on can be lifted out like a drawer.

Everyone was kind. The lead who told me had clearly been dreading it. He brought coffee, and he said all the true things: that it was good, that it wasn't about me, that he'd argued for it. I believe him. I've been on the other side of that meeting, for smaller things, and it's terrible from there too.

What cutting feels like, for me, isn't anger. It's a kind of quiet. I went back to my desk and opened the quest one more time and played it all the way through. I talked to the dog. I climbed the staircase. Then I closed it. It still exists, in a folder on a server, and in version control forever, which is a sort of afterlife. A few lines from it may turn up elsewhere. The staircase conversation would fit in a couple of places if I sand it down. That's what usually happens. Cut things become spare parts.

But the whole of it, the sisters and the house and the dog, nobody outside the building will ever play. About a dozen people did. I'm one of them.

I don't think writers in other forms have quite this. A novelist cuts a chapter, but she cuts it herself. Here the decision is made by the shape of the calendar. You knew going in, and it still lands like weather.

On Friday I started on the quest that will fill its slot. It's fine. It will be good, eventually. I wrote the best line from the staircase on an index card and pinned it above my monitor, which a friend at work says is morbid. I say it's a headstone, and headstones are allowed to be nice.

Have you ever had to let go of something good because there wasn't room for it?