The Game Developers Conference Online began yesterday, with prominent developers from around the world gathering to discuss anything and everything regarding online game development. Game narrative was the hot topic of the day and MyGaming takes a look at some of the interesting discussions that took place.
Fallout: New Vegas
Obsidian Entertainment’s creative lead on Fallout: New Vegas, John Gonzalez, veered from the online gaming discussions to talk about the creative writing process behind the game. Engaging in the kind of hyperbole only a true gamer could use when talking about the revered Fallout series, Gonzalez described his feelings when he learned he was in charge of the game’s story: “For me it was like God came down and threw the bible at me and said ‘hey, write another chapter.'”
Gonzalez described some of the research that took place, including playing all the previous Fallout titles again, reading numerous books and watching various movies which captured the post-apocalyptic theme, as well as the classic Vegas atmosphere. The writing themes developed for the game were ‘greed’ and ‘bad luck’ – the machine is rigged in New Vegas.
Bungie on Halo
Bungie’s Joe Staten was talking about the long journey the company took with the Halo franchise, saying: “Writing enduring original IP, creating a universe of stories is one of the most challenging things you’ll ever do as a writer, but it’s also the most rewarding.”
“Halo wasn’t perfect by any stretch, but [we had] laser-like focus on this one game, like it’d be the only game we’d ever make. This focus really paid off and enabled everything that came after it,” said Staten.
An important lesson Bungie learned from the original Halo, is that the environment and place setting for the story should come first, before plot is even considered. “It would have been madness for us to write a script up front, and in fact, the scripts we tried to write got blown apart,” said Staten. “[We] focused on building blocks, on interesting places, interesting characters. We tried to construct this context for all the stories we could tell.”
Wrapping up, Staten said that the most important lesson about writing for games, is that one is creating a world, not word-heavy exposition. Most of the descriptive writing that goes into a game comes out as a visual experience for the gamer.
Staten ended off a Q&A session by lamenting that gamers could only spend a handful of time in the worlds Bungie had created, such as the Halo universe: “Wouldn’t it be great if we could make a world that was always there for you? Wow. That would be great.” Could this be a subtle hint about Bungie’s next project?
Keep it concise
Comic book writer Anthony Johnston has worked on the comics Daredevil, Wolverine, and Wasteland, and he also has experience working on various computer games, including Dead Space. Johnston describes how comic book readers constantly have to fill in the gaps between panels, and trusting that the reader is capable of doing this is a key lesson for game narrative developers.
By way of example, he converted scenes from Alan Wake, and Mass Effect into comic panels, then removed redundant scenes and information, reducing the overall length of each story-telling event, without losing the importance contained in each scene.
Johnston would like to see video game writers involved at more critical stages of the game’s development – for him this is a key change that the industry has to make, in order to improve the overall quality of video game narrative.
GDC Online Awards
We’re looking forward to the GDC Online Awards, which will be taking place this evening. The awards are entering into their first year, honouring both excellence in new titles and the rich history of past titles in the online gaming space. Stay tuned to MyGaming as we’ll report on the results.
Source: Gamasutra
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