Get Your Game Out of My Movie! — Narrative Design in Mass Effect 2

Armando Troisi- Lead Cinematic Designer (Bioware)

Bioware Games don’t really differentiate between game and story. We start the story and then we add gameplay, but they are really Symbian to each other. The topic sort of encapsulates what we will be discussing here, about how we solve the industry challenges and relative issues from Mass Effect 2.

What’s cinematic Design?

— Narrative designers first

— Cinematic artists second

— The ‘how’ of interactive narrative: The main way to communicate with the players. We get the story to players and let them understand what the intent of the writer and the rest of the narrative design is doing.

— Work with writers to create conversations: Provide writers with the tools and the processes to create the interactive conversations in the game.

Agenda

1. Story Perspective: Writers know that story perspective is a very powerful thing and it even gets more complicated once you add the player to the mix of protagonist and antagonist.
2. The Agreement: Agreement is really the rules in which we deal with interactivity in the cinematic space and how we apply those rules to what we are trying to achieve with the role-playing experience.
3. Quick Time Events: We add QuickTime events to conversations in Mass Effect, figure out the procedures and make sure the content fit into the narrative design structure.

Bioware Design Pillars:

Firstly a Bioware game is composed of what we call the pillars of design and really either story, exploration, progression and gameplay. We have this concept of activity chaining which happens between these four different quadrants of the player experience. Today we concentrate on the story quadrant, that’s not to mean the other parts don’t have story like they obviously do. But in terms of referencing and framing this discussion, we are talking more on the interactive cinematic space.

The conversation:

A narrative tool — — Primary method of narrative delivery

We use lots of narrative tools such as ambient dialogue, video screens, code access, myriad of techniques to communicate, but conversation is our primary narrative tool.

A game system — — Coordinates content from every discipline

Coordinate the content from disciplines like art, writing, animation and level design, and bring these together to make great interactions.

A design philosophy — — Always evolving

We we talk about conversation at Bioware, we are talking about this character interaction, this emotional storytelling that we are really trying to achieve. This is something we are always working on and always trying to evolve.

This is our conversation tree, we use it as a main way to do interactive narrative and dialogues, we spent years exploring this way of communicating with players, and we use this as the basic technology from Baldur’s Gate to the new MMO, use this technology and this design principle.

If you look deeply and closely into this crazy web, you will notice that there is one thing that’s inherent to what we are trying to achieve, it’s the idea of choice. We are trying to tell players that this is your story, the story doesn’t belong to the writers but to the players. We are really trying to imbue everything we do with that kind of sensibility. So in order to frame this discussion we are going to be talking about perspective.

What is perspective?

— Point of view from which the players interacts with the story

— BioWare’s stories fall into two categories:

1. Subjective 2. Objective

Subjective story:

— A traditional computer role playing experience

— You are the avatar

— Dialog responses are verbatim： there is no interpretation, what you say is what your player says.

— Uninterrupted agency: my character doesn’t act without me actually telling him what to do, he doesn’t act on his own, there is always a level of choice that happens moment to moment between me and my avatar.

— Quick empathize with avatar It’s great that it allows me to empathize with the avatar and in order to get into his head, and this is really the design of you.

— Side effects: There are some side effects happened from the subjective point of view and it’s

1. Temporal distortion 2 lots of dialogue

Temporal distortion happens when choices are being made or your player says something, we chopped out that time and went straight to whatever the response was. NPC has to hold a lot of the dialogue on their own, so there is a lot more exposition needs to happen. We are going to take a clip here from Knight to the Old Republic in which we use a subjective storytelling technique.

Objective story:

Some of our newer titles are adopting the objective story mode, especially for the Mass Effect franchise and it actually brings along a lot of new challenges. When we talk about objective story, it’s

— -Counter to the traditional role-playing model

— You are not the avatar

— — Avatar has own voice and motivations

— — Player is voyeuristic to the whole experience: we get into the interactive movie model where you are very objective to what’s happening, you are watching things and trying to control it through your choice.

— -Removes temporal distortion

1. Real-time narrative environment 2. This is our breakthrough in interactive story-telling

It feels cinematic and that point. The character Shepard act on his own without me telling him to do something,

Agreement:

It’s a set of rules we have with players and that binds us to the player and the players to the designer, to make sure that the role playing experience is always in line with their expectations.

— Agreement is the covenant the designer makes with players

— It’s a set of rules that govern choice and expectation

— Binds the player to the role playing experience

— Allows for players to access the avatar

It allows us to have this very fluid first person, very subjective role playing experience, while still maintaining this objective point of view in the story.

The Agreement:

— Interface for choice is predictable

— Choice produces results the player expects

— Give the player the choices they want

— It’s the player’s story

The conversation wheel is the interface we introduced to replace the list system that we see with a lot of the subjective narrative games. It response also to the high def era and the fact that we didn’t have the black bars, the letterboxing to put words in, so we need something very slick and very intuitive GUI.

Conversation Wheel

— Dialog navigation interface

— choice mapped to GUI positions

— Move the indicator to make a choice

Behavioral

-What are these categories?

Paragon: do the right thing in the right way E.g I will look into it.

Neutral: kind of bland usually ends the dialogue E.g Goodbye

Renegade: Do whatever you want to get things done E.g Doesn’t matter.

Friendly/Hostile E.g Let me help/ No time.

Investigate: give me more information E.g Using suspects?

— First layer of predictability

— Mapped emotional reaction

— Choice requires subtext

Cognitive

The cognitive player wants to make a careful choice and know what’s going on, be very exacting. So we add these things called paraphrases and paraphrases are small but a condensed version of what is going to be said next. Sometimes it can even be described as what’s in the player’s head right before he says it.

— Provides a clue through a paraphrase

— Second layer of predictability

— Combined with behavioral wheel position, predictability is achieved

Save Game Import

— It’s your continuing Mass Effect story

— 700 Plots hooks from ME1 to ME2

— It’s the small things that matter…

CONCLUSION

-Interactivity is a potent narrative device

-Perspective is powerful — Choose wisely

-Discover your agreement -and stick with it!