Had to share this article about designing gameplay and story to work together. So many great points, the most important of which (for me) is dropping the idea of doing a cutscenes as a narrative tool and focusing on making the player perform the story.
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For those too lazy to read the article there’s a video by Extra credits saying pretty much the same as that article.
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I was struggling for quite some time as whether or not I should put in story in my game when eventually came to the same conclusion as discovered in the article — games are a different medium than movies and should be treated like such. When playing a game, I honestly rarely even hear the story as I am so focused on the game scene itself. And when I think about the experiences I had playing games, I never remember or care much about the stories themselves. Or I do, but not in a way that is at all connected to what I actually did in the game itself.
Honestly, the idea that there are experiences that can be produced by games which we cannot even imagine at the moment is what makes me so excited about game development. Where else but with games can you experience something so drastically different than everything you’ve experienced in your life so far?
Yup, I had to read it in Dan’s voice in my head.
Well Bioware have done extremely well out of the whole interactive “story” thing, it just needs to be a happy medium. If the game doesn’t require user input, then it’s not a game.
Just to add some of the highest rated games have an interactive plot like, Fallout, Baldur’s gate etc.
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Yeah and I don’t think it is even as difficult as people think. For example with interactive dialogue with other characters, you might have only one thread of conversation, and a few branching out fillers that loop back to the main thread after a couple of back-and-forths. These fillers are not hard to write since their defining feature is that they are just blah blah and don’t really help you move forward (although maybe help you understand a bit about the attitude of your character or the other character). But if they add a bit of drama before seamlessly looping back then the player feels that the conversation took an entirely different character and went down a completely different path.
As a very simple example, let’s say you are looking for somebody and you go up to an npc and you have the choice of saying:
- Hi, how are you today? Response: Great, what’s up?
- Hey, you, I want to talk to you! Response: Who the hell are you?
Now let’s say that your next response is:
3.Have you seen any strange goblins go through here today?
The first choice of greetings completely changes the tone of the conversation, even though your follow-up question is totally ambiguous tone-wise and doesn’t really depend on the first choice. It could sound like a friendly question or an interrogation. Most importantly, it gives the player the feeling that they can express themselves in different ways even though the conversation is a relatively simple one.
And this is almost certainly much better than having the player sit back while a cutscene comes up and shows their character interacting outside of their control.
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I think it’s important to separate out Story from Plot. These two things can be entirely different.
For many players, the ‘story’ of a game is really about them. When I think of Fallout, I honestly don’t remember the plot at all. I remember sneaking around in a bombed out apartment building running from fire breathing ants while sifting through trash. What makes Fallout 3 (for me, at least) was the environment. The plot, the missions, the background all just helped bring that environment to life. They were important parts, sure, but it was the fantasy of the world and my place in the world that really got me involved and kept me playing.
It’s these self driven stories that really separate games from movies, tv or books.
That’s not to say that plot isn’t important, but I think that for many gamers, plot serves as a mechanism for exploring the world they’re presented with and their role in it more than anything else. The plot is sort of an excuse to delve deeper into the fiction of the world (if that makes sense).
That said, I really think that the point made in the video about context is really important. Being able to use cut scenes to explain a transition, or an event, some kind of change in the flow or presentation of a game is extremely useful and important.
Is it better to make every transition entirely interactive? To make things that are traditionally cut scene driven dynamic, immersive and interactive? Sure. But back in reality, we’re trying to make games that already push us to the limits of our capabilities (from basement indie to AAA, everyone is trying to push their projects to the limit of what they’re capable of). Making everything interactive and immersive can require so much more work and be so much more difficult to do (and do well) that it’s often just impractical.
This especially applies to things where the context of the game is significantly larger than the player. Perhaps the player is a soldier in a war. In this case, you’re trying to ground the player in the context of a much larger set of events than you can probably represent entirely contextually in game play.
You may have situations where you’re transitioning to a dramatically different tile set, or perhaps fighting a different kind of enemy. The reasons for these sometimes sudden changes need to be explained to the player, and the cost of doing it in an interactive, immersive fashion might just not be remotely realistic or in budget.
It’s way easier, and often just better to pop a ‘news broadcast’ that talks about the events unfolding and explains why the player is suddenly fighting zombies in siberia.
I don’t quite agree with separating story from plot, although I understand your point. Overall, in a game, the story (which as you say is the player experience more than any larger contextual setting) is more important than anything else. But I think it is not as hard as it seems to create a plot that supports the story without halting the gameplay, and the big plus is that even if you do it pretty badly it still ADDS to the interactive experience rather than taking away from it.
The crime that is being committed in gaming right now is that the plot is generalised to fit the gameplay and loses character and importance, the gameplay is generalised to fit the plot and loses depth, the two of them rarely ‘speak’ to one another, and just in case the player is ready to dismiss the plot and just focus on the gameplay, cutscenes pop up to ram the sorry plot down the players throat. In other words, everything about the game drags everything else down in some way.
But it isn’t all that hard to set the plot of a game (bearing in mind that it should take a clear back seat to the player experience).
Let’s say you are playing a survival game and you have a radio that picks up a broadcast every now and then. The player doesn’t have to stop what they are doing, but the gameplay setting (lonely and relatively empty) makes them drawn toward this source of novelty and interest, which might be used to set the larger context.
Let’s say you are in a war game. Lots of aircraft flying across the sky toward some unseen targets, bombs in the distance, some random comments from your fellow soldiers (e.g., “I heard they’re making an assault on XXX beach today, they say the enemy is really gaining ground up north, maybe HQ will move us up there soon.” Suddenly you feel like your trench is only one in a thousand, and there is a current that is dragging you along plot-wise.
I think that what a lot of games fail to take into account is how easily they can guide player perception with minimal manipulation of the environment. The example given in the article regarding Portal is a great one. All over the course of the game, you become accustomed to searching out those white tiles where you can open a portal, and, being aware of this, the developers use the opportunity to make you feel like YOU thought up the escape plan and didn’t add some cutscene where you are informed multiple times of the way out and positioned in front of it before control being reluctantly relinquished to you.
They can also be mutually beneficial, so I wouldn’t get deep into semantics. But you’re right on the money, it’s about context… Like in the game I’m trying to achieve, I have to address matters like why should you care if this race lives or not? Why do I care if anything happens to said character, what’s the point in the game really?
Addressing these matters is one thing, removing tactics and interesting pieces of a game just so it rolls more like a Hollywood blockbuster movie serves no purpose. It’s a common theme in AAA, stuff for the sake of stuff then dumb it down… Every room needs 50,000 meshes worth of clutter, everything has to roll out like a cinematic experience where you mash buttons for whatever reason. Bioware got it right…
You’ll be walking along and your characters will joke about, talk about the context of the situation. You’ll have the odd cutscene but mainly everything is interactive from a player standpoint.
P.S I was actually referring to the original fallout, the Bethesda one was fun to play… But yeah, Bethesda plots aren’t really the aim of the game…
Ok, so the guys says that… then what? How does the actual transition to XXX beach happen? Do you show the airplane carrying you and your guys to the new front followed by paradropping behind enemy line? IIRC I played a game that did just that. It was definitely cool.
But if you’re on a limited budget, with limited time, is it really worth you investing almost all your time on a single transition sequence with a single dramatic set piece? What if executing that single sequence ends up taking an equal amount of time to five new missions or making new kinds of weapon systems or upgrades?
For games that are trying to be immersive, the extra effort on immersion can be worth it. But if you’re faced with really examining the opportunity cost - is it worth it for you and your project? Maybe, but maybe not.
For me and my game, having anything that could really be called a cut scene alone is probably prohibitively labor intensive. I simply could not do a good job on one given my time constraints and other requirements. If I can’t do a cut scene, having a fully immersive, interactive cut scene is just out of the question.
In my case, I’m constantly trying to evaluate the opportunity costs… is it worth putting the time and money into feature x? Can I do a good job? What are the risks when dealing with freelancers? If I put those resources toward Y would it be a better investment?
I am still not certain if I can have a single character within about 10 feet of camera at any point in the game, because realistically I doubt I can arrange the model and animations to be adequate. Since I can’t show characters in detail, and since I don’t have access to many models, I probably can’t invest the time in making really ‘personal’ dialog. I try to write dialog in the abstract, “You come across a …” instead of “hey how’s it going”, because I don’t think that I can realistically do a good job on detail or present enough different looking character models to populate the world.
For me, cutting to an image of a map that slowly fades and pans with some subtitles is a way that I can realistically introduce new stuff to the player, or help segment different phases of gameplay. This simple pan and fade animation can help ground the player in some kind of context, explain to them why something might be changing or introduce them to some new element. That the scene can be put together in half a day instead of a week or a month is just a huge, huge deal.
Is showing a panning/fading image an inferior player experience than building out an immersive interactive transition set piece sequence? Maybe. But realistically, my time is better devoted to other parts of the game, and a panning/fading image with subtitles will do the job that it needs to.
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I think that’s really the hard part.
“Why does the player care”
Every time you add an element to the plot of a game, or some detail to the stories background - I think you really need to ask is “how much work will it take to properly communicate this idea to the player in a way that they’ll care about”?
Your game (from the description) has a few elements. I’d sort of break it out like this:
GAME PLAY
You have 30 days (so there’s a time limit) - each day has some quantifiable goal. Or you have certain time triggered events. (You may want to cut this time down to 3 days or something for demo).
MAIN PLOT DEVICE
You have human abduction (super easy to understand, plays on commonly known alien tropes)
YOUR ROLE
Scavenger. You need to collect supplies or something. Maybe the water purifier broke 
Just keep it simple. Human abduction is nice and clear, you can do awesome atmospheric stuff with that. You can sort of hint at some of the underlying fiction while exploring the more tangible “human abduction” aspect.
Or whatever, thats just my rambling advice from a guy who hasn’t ever finished a game
I think there’s some sort of misunderstanding here. As you pointed out, a cutscene is hard to design and hard to animate. So why wouldn’t you want to try to do it by some easier means? I think we agree on this and the question here is how to do it in such a way as to increase the player interaction.
In all of my examples, I wasn’t really paying attention to the details of the means used to interactively tell the player something important. That really depends on the type of game you are making. What I will say, is that this means should be essentially within the gameplay context and therefore will use basically the same range of features that your gameplay already employs. If your game has no dialogue animation in the gameplay, then it wouldn’t be a great idea to do some high quality facial animation just for a particular scene.
Let’s go back to the example. Let’s say that war game is a first person shooter. You might have you and your soldiers in the trench doing whatever idle animation you have come up with as you wait for orders.
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The airplanes fly over head and bombs go off in the distance. Still within indie budget.
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One of your soldiers says “I heard blah blah blah…” well you could either do full motion capture in a big studio or maybe you could just make the mouth move up and down while the guy turns his head to face you? The point is that it fits the range of behaviours that your game already employs. You might even just put a message bar in the top of your screen if you have no voice actors. The point is that a) it isn’t changing the quality of what people expect in your game, such that they don’t become disappointed later on when other interactions are more ‘cheap’, and b) it doesn’t break the player’s control of their character.
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At this point if you’re a millionaire you can switch to cutscene of some generals plotting the Normandy landing, pan over to it and show an aerial shot of thousands of animated characters fighting, and then show a cutscene of you guys doing some complicated helicopter landing etc…
or if you’re on a budget you could just have a truck or boat or whatever roll up and you enter the vehicle, at which point you can look around but you can’t move, while you hear someone call out “We’re off to Normandy folks!” and then you bump along for a while, explosions gradually increasing in volume, and then maybe your truck is hit and tips over and you go and find a rock to hide behind while all hell breaks loose around you.
Regardless of whether or not one does a better job of informing the player of the plot, the ‘cheaper’ one is preferable because as a player you feel like everything that is introduced to the game in service of the plot can happen around you at any time and you have to be alert.
One thing I like a lot about COD is that during a lot of insertions into a level, rather than some big cutscene, they put you in a boat or manning a machine gun in a plane or something and the gameplay has essentially begun before your feet hit the ground. They do a great job of doing massive effects like bridges collapsing, oil tankers that you’re in sinking, aircraft that you’re in crashing, etc without actually switching to a cutscene, it really creates a lot of immersion and attention to your surroundings.
Let’s say that, for whatever reason your game needs to actually transition to something dramatically different. Let’s say that you’re switching theatres from pacific to european.
Having a boat pull up and going “we’re off to europe” fade to blade, fade in from black “we’re in europe!” might not really be a very good transition. It might work great for a silly arcade treatment, but it might be pretty terrible, or completely immersion breaking if you’re trying for something more serious. In the case where you’re trying to do something potentially more serious:
It may be more practical to achieve a far better result using a simple cut scene.
You may also want to emphasize the change more, or segment the game more. An example of this would be Diablo’s end of act sequences. These serve as really important demarcations for new phases and large transitions in the game.
Let’s say that for some reason, at some point in your game you want to ‘jump a month forward’ which is important because some scientists are building a prototype of a new ship, and you want the next mission to be flying this fancy new ship. Enter… the cut scene as a clean easy way to explain the change.
You could think of it like a montague in tv or movies. “I need this character to go from out of shape, to kick ass but I don’t want to spend an hour of the story dealing with all the details” - enter the montague. Cut scenes work extremely well in the same kind of situation.
There are also other times when interactivity is just… bad. These times can have a lot to do with the amount of information that needs to be conveyed. An example from your genre would be “the pre mission briefing”. Here you would have some quick canned sequence that conveys a fairly large amount of information to the player quickly. You could do these in an immersive fashion … but … would it really produce a better result? Often times, no.
EDIT: I actually think your jeep example is a pretty good one, and some of these things can be rigged on a budget. But I just think that all of these things are tools, and just because a screwdriver might be great for screws, sometimes you might really want a hammer.
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I agree with you that you can’t just roll off in a jeep to some other part of the world, and I’m not saying that cutscenes are per se a bad idea. What I’m trying to say is that many of the instances where player control is broken in order to convey small-scale information, or simply to ‘give players a rest’ (why?) it can be done without cutscenes.
And for me the most important instance is where the player is supposed to understand something about their environment (escape route, where to go next, where to find something). The environment must always be speaking to the player, conveying information, mood etc but I think many times the studio is afraid that the player will miss the info, get frustrated and quit. The problem is that the more you take control away from the player, the more you feed them, the less invested they become and the easier they find it to quit or take a break.
And I would also argue that, as I said before, even if the medium of conveying information is imperfect, the simple fact that you haven’t broken control reinforces the weakness of the medium and gives it strength. You don’t break the player’s immersion or let their attention wander because they are always in control, and in that psychological state, it is easier to do more with less, and very importantly it is easier to be suggestive and make them feel like they noticed something themselves, which makes them feel good.
If you plan ahead in the gaming industry, lets say that VR makes a big leap forward and becomes the norm. How are you going to do a cutscene in VR? At the very least, you would have to do it like the jeep scene where the player can’t move but can look around, and that already means that the player is continuously in control at some level.
Edit: Funnily enough, I think COD are another great example of switching theaters. At least in (I think) Black Ops, there was a bit of narration and then you would wake up in a boat/plane/truck etc, and able to move and look around. I think that narration, a message (i.e., “6 months later…” on a black screen) is better than a cutscene in many ways because the thing you are trying to avoid is showing the player’s character, or even worse showing the first-person perspective, while they are not in control, and causing them to feel disconnected.
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For the record, plenty of people like cut scenes. There is a reason why big budget games use them so often, they sell.
Cut scenes can provide
- Natural breaks in intensity
- Rewards for the player completing a difficult task
- Context
- Introductions to new mechanics
- Warning of some new challenge or boss
Cut scenes get annoying when they break the game rules. Say your mentor dies in a cut scene when you character is loaded with healing spells and potions that have kept him alive so far.
Cut scenes are also annoying if you have to repeat them every time you fail a task. A cut scene looses 90% of it’s value after the first time the player has seen it.
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I could be wrong but I’m not really sure that cutscenes are what sell big budget games. And I think it is easier for a big budget studio to make a cutscene than it is for them to think about how to place information in the gameplay flow in such a way as to ensure that players (of all abilities) will find it and use it. During gameplay, the flow of the game is in the player’s hands, and it is difficult to control that, but cutscenes are entirely in the developers hands. Design wise, a cutscene is a no-brainer if you are trying to increase probability of success (i.e., attract investors), and as I’m sure many people are aware, big budget studios have been peddling the same formula for many years for that very reason.
Also, I’m not saying cutscenes are not enjoyable, but in the context of a game, as the article says, they just don’t fit.
That said, the way that you implement them, of course, is very important. Having a cutscene come in suddenly so that an enemy can knock you out to serve the plot (like I heard Far Cry 3 has done) is really bad, while having a cut scene in between missions/locations/theaters is not bad at all. In essence I’m saying it is bad when info could have been conveyed much better by placing sensory cues, or including it in interactive dialogue. It is bad when it sort of breaks up a sequence of gameplay that could otherwise have been continuous and much more enjoyable for it.