Player-Driven Stories: How Do We Get There?
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- čas přidán 26. 12. 2018
- In this 2011 GDC talk, LucasArts' Kent Hudson describes methods and techniques to help you put the player in charge of their own narrative.
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I know it's an 8 year old talk by now, but the speaker is incorrect when he says you can't beat Morrowind after killing Cosades. In fact the only win condition essentially is to smack the Heart of Lorkhan with Sunder and Keening without dying, how you get to that point is up to you. There are three ways:
1. The Story way. You follow the story, become the Nerevarine, and receive the broken Wraithguard gauntlet from Vivec, take it to the last living Dwarf to get it fixed, wield Sunder and Keening against the Heart and kill Dagoth-Ur.
2. The God-Killer way. Ignore the story (or not), kill Vivec when you meet him, take the broken Wraithguard gauntlet off his corpse (it's there regardless of if you've followed the story or not), take it to the last Dwarf to fix it, wield Sunder and Keening, you know the rest.
3. The Self-Made way. Ignore the story. Heck kill all the quest givers in the story. In fact kill everyone, or do what you want. Become the baddest person in the world. Rank your enchanting up as high as possible or acquire a massive fortune. Take the Grand Soul Gem you filled by murdering Vivec and use it to craft your own Wraithguard which instead of preventing you from taking damage from Sunder and Keening heals you constantly at the same rate and then go tap the Heart/Kill Dagoth.
nerd!
awesome! thanks man
Omg this was a good talk. I'll be watching this again and again.
very cool!! thanks. really interesting stuff.
Wow the big sisters are some of my favorite bosses and now I know why
IMO the great example of bringing Gameplay and Narreative to the single system often can be even things like: ability to Trade with the NPCs - or even the role of gold in your world if you use it for storytelling and not as simple rigid reward structure.
Having wealthy NPCs quests pay you more is IMO great way to tell story through gameplay.
Mount & Blade had a friendship system between Factions, towns' villagers, nobles and companions. They'd have some impact on your relationships. It was an interesting facet to the game. I wish other games would take some of that, and from CK2.
Sometimes he says stuff like "separate VO so you can make more of it and cheaper", which is great. And other times he says things like "reading e-mails in videogames is fun". He-he...
VO during treaveling (two in car etc) can save you on animations.
Well said. The closest thing I've experienced of this in a AAA game is the orcs in Shadow of Mordor. Eventually you could see the cracks, but it was still a step in the right direction.
Such a cool system (Nemesis) I loved it.
Shame that they ruined it by loot box greed in the sequel. I played until it got grindy and horrible defending the forts and have never gone back. Heard they took out the loot boxes, too late.
I feel bad for Monolith, they clearly didn’t want to put it them in and the published just rammed it. I mean, the whole point of dominating an orc was that he was somehow meaningful to you, and they lost that when they added pay for power.
The year after this, Crusader Kings 2 came out. That's the ultimate narrative creation game.
Well done on the ps2 port of Deus ex. The machine was NOT up to running it and it had to suffer but still excellent. We wont mention you being involved in the invisible war though, for yout soul. Xxxx
The only way I see to let players construct their own narratives is to give players multiple options to interact with the game world, npcs, enemies, environment, etc. and let them make their own interaction. Also have each of those different objects/elements in the world interact with each other in the same way. In terms of coherence you could come close to achieving this by having an overall direction or goal in the game. For example, let's say the direction is for an npcs to compete to achieve domination over others. You can then have a list of prioritiy actions npcs will take, which will be actions that will enable npcs to achieve the overall direction. Something like that. You need to forget about trying to make a story as in the traditional main quest style we have had in games. You need to give directions and probabilities and let players and npc AIs make random or procedural decicions within the limits of the overall direction.
@Darren Munsell Yeap. You would need a very large team. Or just not implement some animations and have interactions be more menu based. Depends on the kind of experience you would want the player to have. As for me I am making a 2d game which is more like a simulation and an rpg. There are no scripted events. The player will have multiple possible interactions with npcs, enemies, objects in the game world and other systems. So will enemies and npcs. Npcs will have goals of their own. The player will have procedurally generated goals or goals that they choose that will allow them to finish the game if they complete them or keep playing. Events will be created through npcs actions and player interactions. So more like a simulation type experience.
@Darren Munsell Yeah but that does not have to be in detail. For example, instead of having the npc fight offscreen as they would as if they were on screen, I could just have a procedure that randomly decides on the outcome of that fight in just a few lines of code. And also that outcome could be calculated during load times or I could use a second cpu core calculating outcomes offscreen.
@@ifstatementifstatement2704 How's your game going?
He should have mentioned Subnautica, that game is a prime example for player driven story telling imo.
It really is awesome when done right.
Its a 2011 talk.
good talk with some interesting points, but c'mon, getting a quest from a letter you loot from a body is literally the worst.
getting a quest from a body that you loot without a quest marker is good. The feeling of discovery of such quest is amazing, if done right. We got a whole game based on that formula that is the contender for the bet story telling game of the year (return of the obra dinn), it just execution not the idea of it.
i agree, obra dinn is something else. here the whole game mechanic centers around that way of story telling, and is masterfully crafted. when i think back, the first demo with all the mechanics in place was out years ago. the rest went into all the branches and conssequences and clues....big whoop that one. on the found footage thing in general, i am split. it is cool to discover the fate of one family through a series of audiologs, unravelling one after the other...picking up clues here and there (fallout 3). it is not cool to put all your narrative in audiologs, and shove responsibility for narrative onto player (fallout 76).
Its the worst because it is too generic and implemented very genericeqsue too.
Doing so in the more engaging manner (have your temp-follower die, or see someone dying before looting their corpse as a part of already existing plot).
@@MajkaSrajka Agreed. Quests from mob loots often feel too random. Often the problem is a lack of context in my opinion. If there's an appropriate context where you could actually believe that the letter contained something important, it could work out great.
I like to think of system soup as playing god and player driven stories as controlling an avatar. Both are great but appeal to different audiences. Will Wright games are brilliant examples of system soup, and Civilization appeals to a huge audience because it does both very effectively.
16:30 the game Passage is always 5 minutes. It doesn't matter if you meet the girl or not. You don't ever "die at half the age" you would have otherwise. The game really isn't that profound though lol. In fact, the most interesting part of the game you didn't even mention is that if you decide to go at it alone, you can explore much more of the map. You can fit through a lot more spaces than the two characters can fit through together. So is the game saying that a life partner will only hold you back? I don't think it's that deep, but in any case, no one wants to play games that look and sound and control as cheap as Passage feels. I agree with a lot of points in the talk, especially like how choosing to reduce fidelity rather than chasing reality can offer so much more to the player. But in my opinion, giving the player full autonomy doesn't lead to good narratives and lasting impressions of a meaningful experience. If the only meaning a game has is how it's played and interpreted by the player, then I think the game has no real meaning at all. That doesn't mean it's a bad game (just look at minecraft), but if your goal is to have rich, meaningful narrative, the solution is more about "tricking" the player into believing their choices matter with carefully crafted branches, not trying to generate an endless amount of content for them to explore on every playthrough. Just because games have interaction as their core defining element to distinguish them from movies and books doesn't mean that interaction is the answer to everything.
Fallout: New Vegas
The best part is there are no human verifications
Too bad Bloodborne isn’t mentioned here. While this was a few years before it’s release I still would love to see a behind the scenes documentary with it’s concepts in development.
Gamecrook is working, all other sites are spam.
“Here are some examples of games that give you this agency through gameplay…Check out the end of Red Dead Redemption” 😂😂 yeah suuuper branching through gameplay mechanics
Your little 5 minute game is traditionalism. It's surprising that more people haven't called you out on your narrative-driven propaganda "game."
it kinda bother me, but it still good example at expressing stories. You can use the same mechanic without saying the same thing. Use it for what ever you want to express. An example that is all.
Wait, you want him to be called out for what exactly? Why are you watching a talk about stories in games if you're going to be offended at political or social commentary? Especially one as innocuous as The Passage.
I don’t really understand your point here. Could you elaborate?