Empires to Ages: Storytelling Lessons Learned in 14 Years at BioWare
By Former BioWare creative director Mike Laidlaw at GDC 2018
Speaker intro:
Worked at Bioware for 14 years, worked on:
Jade Empire,
Mass Effect: write all the subspecies
Dragon Ages
How to build a high-functioning team?
The team doesn’t have to be multiple people, it could be just you as the writer involved in a specific set of exercises.
The key thing to do is to establish trust with your team. The reason is people have a misconception, the simple truth is that putting sentences together is not the same as screen-writing. It does not evoke emotion, it does not tell a story and make you feel, your job is to either feel or help people whose job is to make people feel work. So how do the writers earn the trust of the team?
Three critical jobs to win team members’ hearts and minds:
- A schedule that can understand and survive the rigors of development. Be realistic about your time limit and workloads.
- A story with clearly articulated goals. How can you communicate that if your team does not understand your genius?
- A process that ensures quality while being open to feedback. Writing can be weirdly non-transparent, not everybody can truly understand how it works.
Scheduling Givens:
- You know how to track the velocity of your team
- You know roughly, the volume of work
- You know how long you have in production
The problem is that the real schedule exists in service to the downstream team.
The Real Schedule — Downstream
- Downstream teams have a dependency on writing
- Directly impacts the completion time available to the team
The simple truth is that’s never the case in fact what you’ll find is that there is any number of downstream departments who have this kind of stack dependency.
Your job is to understand how many factors live downstream of the work that you do, cus the real-time you have compared to this wonderful magical blue polygon is significantly shortened by the amount of dependency.
Mitigating Time Loss
- Target cinematic and performance capture content locks first
- All major characters need one piece of significant content early to ensure casting sticks
- Onboard translators. 30% of sales will do localization if you can sit down with the translators and help them to understand the why of your game and the purpose of your character, and understand intuitively why they sound the way they sound. E.g. Iron Bull is using humor to cover his deep dissatisfaction with his current state, which makes every translation easier because understand the core fundamentals and principles we would have our writers get onto phone calls on ridiculously hours if the translators are in a different timezone.
- Engineer a data framework that reveals the state of any text asset:(Clear, recorded, translated)
Crumple Plans
-Divide content into critical and important
- Assume 25% of ideal staff days lost to rewrites/illness/inexplicable horrors from beyond
Options:
All Critical
-Reduce target scope an additional 25%
-Content will tend to grow to fill the space, but will have padding for disaster
E.g. Tightly scripted narrative
Mixed
-Critical content should be 25% of the total maximum
- Important content makes up remainder
- Not all important content will make it
A game could survive a collapse of scope, finding the awareness of what could go will actually catalyze a team and make them not lose it.
Clear Goal
Story Development Givens
-Your documentation is deliciously detailed and excruciatingly precise about motivation & Pacing
-No one outside the writing team seems to read it?
Condense and Present
— Target 30 minutes at most
— Make a story presentation part of onboarding
Themes
— What is this game about? What thread binds it together.
— Focus the team on the moments that are spectacular, emblematic, or evocative
Mass Effect 2: Closure before certain death
Dragon Age Origins: Sacrifice
Dragon Age 2: Rebellion against the status quo
Character Motivations
— Why do your major players care?
— With whom do they disagree?
Elevator Pitches
— A rapid way to convey the inspiration and themes of an individual piece of content
— A vision touchstone
Example: DAI’s temple of Mythal =Dragon Age’s take on Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade’s Grail Temple
QUALITY & FEEDBACK
Quality Givens:
— Your plots are well-documented
- Your QA team feels empowered to give notes on narrative
- The writers QA their own work to find what’s missing
Peer Review:
Peers: All writers, Level designers, cinematic, QA, VoiceOver director
-Public commitment to feedback,
- Follow a precise set of rules
- Invite other stakeholders to be involved
- Removes “ivory tower” stigma from writing
— First implemented in Dragon Age: Origins
— Widely used to this day
Peer Review Wins:
— Other teams involved allow finding complex multi-disciplines solutions
— Plan broadcast keeps everyone informed
— Junior writers able to hear and give feedback to peers and leads
Writers can be magical wondrous unicorns who can make people feel things that you want them to feel, it’s a rare superpower to use simple words to make people cry.
The thing you can do is to make their lives better, the thing is not just to earn the team’s trust, but the audience, but be transparent and vulnerable, put your cards on the table, and tell them what you are trying to do. The feedback you get from your peers can be used to change, improve, and hone the blade until you can drive into the hearts of the players where they are on Tumblr, and Reddit when they are writing about how these fucked them up.
Being vulnerable is the single best thing I’ve ever done for my career, or for the games that have my name on them.
