Storytelling across genres: BioWare's perspective

Funny, heartwarming presentation where everything went wrong, and Greg Zeschuk spent a chunk of it on-stage live to his tech support department, trying to get the Xbox set up right. Poor boy - he was so apologetic, guess he had no idea how entertaining it all was. The audience was muttering suggestions under its breath and having happy little pockets of debate about how to fix it - and it's not every conf that you have an actual xbox engineer from Microsoft in the audience, too. 

Storytelling across genres: BioWare’s perspective
Dr Greg Zeschuk

 Story’s a really big topic. So this is who we are, what we do: we make AAA roleplaying games, we focus on story and character development. We have 230 people working at Bioware and a 2.4 million registered fans community.

Lots of RPGs! Martial arts, fantasy roleplaying (TWO in development)…  Thinking about episodic content, every week a little more story, is an exciting concept we're playing with at the moment.

Story process: how we create a story. Our staff writers are published in other media, but have become experts in non-linear storytelling. Having permanent staff is a conscious choice as working with non-linear stores is a relatively unique skill. Non-linear storytelling is hard to learn! It’s not something taught in school..

 World development is really relevant to story. As you create IP you have to create worlds. We’ve spent probably a year on Jade Empire building the world, the history, the culture, the political systems.. we need to do that in order to create a credible RPG with all the details and information. So in the world development stuff … [chaos ensues on stage as they tinker with the demo Xbox] .. so uh.. there are a lot of tradeoffs. We have total control over the world but this is also like a double-edged sword. If you work with an IP like star wars, it’s established. There are rules. With your own IP you can do whatever you want – you don’t have any boundaries. Both good and bad thing, this.

We have a small group of individuals who build the stories. They have a lot of advantages: lots of creative people around to bounce ideas off, and lots of tough critics to help polish chars and plots. Our writers face lots of challenges. Tough critics and great responsibility for eventual content output. It’s hard to have your work critiqued. You guys are so mean to your own games!, people say, but we think this has to be done. The writers have significant technical constraints: they need to be aware of the work being done alongside by other team members. Other writers in the large games, etc. We deal with this with a lot of communication. Lots of stakeholders.

 We have a blueprint. It’s the first time we’ve revealed it.. it’s five main pieces of a story in our games:

o Introduction,

o Prelude,

o The Linear Start,

o The Wide-open World,

o The Linear Finale.

 We follow this most of the time but sometimes specifically diverge.

Intro:
That’s like less than 1%. An opening movie. Establishing and setting the mood. Half Life’s train ride. That’s an intro. You don’t do anything, but you feel it, you soak it in. We diverged in Jade Empire: no specific intro, but we sort of into it with characters you meet and books to read…

 Prelude:
About 5% of the game. Tells the player who he or she is. Introduces the mechanics, and introduces the motivation to complete the story. Half Life’s train station and the city is again a good example. There's the issue of divergence here too – some games diverge, MMOs often don’t introduce you to the world. WoW is excluded here: one of the reasons I think they’re  so successful is that they introduce you to the world, what Horde and Alliance means, they teach you what your race means, they lead you by the nose through basic gameplay and history.

 Linear start: 10%.
Eases the player into the game. Rolling out more game features, and clearer short-term goal. “get out of the dungeon”, for instance. Hand-holding. The player learns whatever the designers want them to learn at this point. GTA diverges from this ..

The wide-open world, which is about 70% of the game.
The player is faced with clear but non-immediate goals. Opportunities to explore and search for answers. Explorations is one of the foundations of RPGs… and there are multiple options to pursue at any one time. This is where you start enriching yourself into the world as it were, digging yourself in. There’s divergence here too, Doom 3 has a very direct path. Dark oppressive corridor, and the game just pushes you forward in one direction. That was their intention. I think it’s very effective.

The linear finale: 15%
The main plot goal is completed, and it triggers the “drop of doom” to the end game. Whoooosh. Divergence from that is games like Morrowind.. it’s amazing how much freedom you have in that game, ditto with GTA.

 So the other thing we have is lots and lots of characters. Jade Empire has 300 characters and 340,000 NPC words. We have classified the chars:

• the information giver
• the quest giver
• the storekeeper
• the ambient character      (someone just hanging out who are just entertaining to talk to),
• the one-liner (we like our npc’s to say something funny at some point in the game); the plot advancer (if you’re stuck. “hey there’s something going on over there”);
• the villain’s henchmen;     
• the comedian;
• the villain/big boss;
• the ignoramus (why? We sometimes put chars in games just to irritate the player. But this actually makes the experience different. The game’s not predictable. It pulls you in a bit more..).

 So what’s the point of all this. These characters need to be believable. Virtual actors. There’s a lot of guys pursuing this .. story is ineffective without good actors. We used to be limited to good voices with bad ‘vessels’ , and we’ve been working on solving this problem since. 24 pixel high characters are terrible vessels. We’ve been integrating lots of tech into our characters: lip synching. Autonomous facial animation and gestures. Emotional responses.. if you’re mean to a character they get offended. They get angry or upset. We have games with character choices, different dialogue choices that you can make. When you choose a mean choice your character’s face changes. A lot of the factors in virtual actors goes to the subconscious.. we’re trying to work on NPC intelligence; looking good and being smart at the same time.

 Why bother with virtual actors? We’re trained from birth to evaluate people as normal or abnormal. The thing about abnormal characters, if they’re wrong they’re not believable. How can you have characters you don’t believe are there or true.. to progress a story? So there’s another concept out there: the UncannyValley. A more coherent way of trying to explain this concept, a concept pioneered by a Japanese roboticist. It’s a place where you don‘t want to be as a storyteller, where your characters unsettle your players due to their approximation of humanity. It’s better to create them as a little less human so we as players don’t try to evaluate them as human. The rest of the uncanny valley is it requires us to consider more than you might expect. Polygons is not it. the visual appearance is not the most important thing. It’s movement. Shifting weight. Turning circles. How characters interact with an environment. Leaning against a wall. Game characters don’t do this yet. Stimuli .. you hear a gunshot, you want the character to react appropriately, not woodenly. This uncanny valley is compounded by us as an industry as we’re not really tackling the AI yet. We’re getting better at it though.

 Tools for story delivery:
What we’re doing to create the story on the fly in the game. Stuff in our toolbox. How to introduce a character. Fully voiced and lip-synched sequences of Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire. We also use a variety of ingame and pre-rendered scenes to further our stories.

We’ve done ingame engine movies, captured, pulled out, scored some audio and put them back in. We do a dialogue and a transition into a cut scene then back out again. Our guys are programmers who like film and storytelling, it’s a rare combination.

A cool new story delivery technique is the world’s reaction to the player. In HL2 people reacted to the player – hey you’re Gordon! – and in Fable, you were it, the centre of the universe! The power of this technique is that this can be much more subtle ..

Our special ingredients. Player influence, personalisation and non-linearity.

Player influence:
The player is the centre of the universe. I can’t be a kung fu master, I’m too lazy. The concept of Jade was a group concept – wouldn’t it be cool to be a martial arts master? These games fulfil players fantasies. What’s your fantasy? We want to look cool, be special. Some of our most successful characters had our players being special individuals surrounded by normals. You’re a Jedi in KotOR. Who is Gordon Freeman? He’s special and you’re special when you play him.

 Some games, notably MMOs, by their very nature don’t easily allow true individual influence. When someone sidles up in front of you, you wish you could pose a bit because you know they’re inspecting you.

Personalisation:
This is a really neat concept. We balance our experience of tightly crafted vs. my story.. personalisation is driven by moral choices. You define your character by the good or evil you perform in the world. this is really powerful! I dunno how many of you played Knights of the Old Republic on the evil side.. the first time I did something evil, I felt bad and I didn’t’ like it! Then I liked it by the end but that’s a whole other story… Jade’s two ‘ways’ lead to a vastly different game experience, as did the two sides of the force in KotOR. Story personalisation can be the strength of MMOs: I really, really love playing with my friends because we can recount our similar experiences.

 Non-linearity:
We strive for balance between determinism and non-linearity in our games. Events have to unfold in a certain way otherwise the experience is nonsensical. Some games are very good at allowing tremendous freedom, like GTA, but there are huge tradeoffs in giving the player a lot of freedom – like 100,000 things can happen in The Matrix, you just have to develop systems you hope work nicely as a unit together.

We believe in nonlinearity with guidance. We use a hub and pinch point technique (I have no clue what that is – alice). There are alternatives to this. GTA missions happen in a continuous world. WoW’s quests are story arcs. These arcs within a living world are very powerful. A lot of people love that it’s not just “go get me ten of these”. You spend your evening doing something really cool.

Story isn’t genre specific. Deus Ex is an amazing story. Jade Empire is martial arts mayhem action merged with story. Story is something you do at the start of development, not at the end! If you want to deliver a solid story you need specific game features to support it: e.g. ingame cinematics, dialogue systems. Actors. Story is a conscious choice. Don’t forget it.

Comments

[Ranieri Argentini]

Hub and pinch point:

Areas where your characters are relatively free to move around (hubs) connected by a single path in story-space that they are forced to go through (pinch point) to keep the story (and therefore the storytelling) consistent.

[James Wallis]

Hub and pinch -- is, I believe, a design technique derived from writing solo gamebooks. The narrative path is non-linear but chunky -- within each chunk of the story the character can do more or less what they want but there are intermittent plot-hubs that the character must pass through to progress to the next chunk of story. If you trigger a long cut-scene, you've probably reached a hub. The 'pinch' is the clever-clever bit where you shoehorn the player towards the hub without them noticing that they're being led by the nose.

I could be completely wrong.

[David Gaider]

No, both those definitions work very well, in fact.

[Mea Culpa]

Excellent interview, well done and Greg, well laid out man I understand a H*ll of a lot more about "How Bioware Works"
Thanks and regards
Mea Culpa