For me, the most important thing an RPG can do is make its setting feel like a real world inhabited by real people. Having recently played Star Ocean: The Divine Force and Star Ocean: The Second Story R back to back has provided me with a couple nicely illustrative examples to share. Minor/vague spoilers follow for both games.
At our recent GI Academy Live event, Sam Barlow of Her Story, Telling Lies and Immortality fame laid out his thoughts o…
Sam Barlow (of Her Story fame) discusses his approach to building stories for narrative-based games. I found it refreshing to see discussion of how the medium affects what’s possible and how to get the most out of it, by incorporating challenge, opportunity for expression, a space to explore, and simulation of a richer reality. (I couldn’t help but look for parallels to my own, far-less-qualified, take on the subject.)
So there’s a pattern in fiction that I haven’t seen discussed or found a name for. It is, in short, when a framing device becomes a plot tumor.
There’s a specific kind of framing device I have in mind - more than the simple in medias res of, say, a tale told in flashback, this is when the frame story has an unusual premise which exists to enable and string together certain kinds of inner stories. For example, the Assassin’s Creed games (at least the first several - I fell off the franchise after Ezio and maybe this has changed since then) are technically near-future sci-fi where technology enables people to relive their ancestors' memories and secret societies use this to hunt down powerful artifacts from a precursor civilization. This allows each individual game to focus mainly on adventures taking place centuries in the past, connected by the common thread of the present-day hidden power struggle over the artifacts.
I think there’s a conflict with this sort of setup that is really hard to escape. There’s a very real sense in which the frame story only exists for the benefit of the inner stories - yet the stakes of the frame story are almost always going to be higher and more unusual than those of the inner stories. For the storyteller (and for some portion of the audience) this can cause the frame story to be more intriguing, which can easily create a trend where early installments have just enough frame story to carry the inner story and later installments spend more and more time and focus on the frame story.
The Event System
Game designer kiva’s blog has some fascinating war stories. This particular write-up, part of a series about her work on Battletech, discusses her somewhat-failed attempt to create an event system that would create a bond between the player and their characters - what it tried to do, and why it didn’t achieve those goals.
If you find it interesting, I do recommend her other posts - she has fascinating thoughts on a game designer’s role (in a nutshell: empathizing with the players) and skill set (another nutshell: internalized understanding and intuition from deeply examining many games).
Games stories are getting increasingly intricate, and are often a core selling point of a game. Yet games don't usually provide players with tools needed to follow a story. What problems get in the way of narrative accessibility and how do we solve them?
Most games are bizarrely bad at making their stories accessible. All too often it’s easy to miss lines of dialog or parts of cutscenes with little ability to rewind or replay them. Alex Driml discusses several examples of clever ways particular games have solved these problems.
Kate Edwards gives developers advice and tools to build fully realised game worlds
Kate Edwards gives several tips on how to build well-realized game worlds that feel like part of a larger universe.
This is a post about why I stopped playing Lost Sphear. It contains plot spoilers for the first few hours of the game. They are behind the cut. You have been warned.
I wanted to like Lost Sphear. I considered I Am Setsuna to be underrated, with much of the criticism levied against it unfair, so I had plenty of benefit of the doubt to give Lost Sphear. And at first, I really did enjoy it! Like I Am Setsuna, Lost Sphear has beautiful visuals and music. I immediately found its world comforting, its characters likable, and its storytelling compelling. The initial group of characters, their relationships, and their role in their town are well established and feel real enough to invest in.
But after a few hours, the story started going in strange directions that felt less grounded and less plausible.
Narrative design in modern open-world games is lacking due to developers' propensity to avoid the painful task of content curation and a failure of designers to create meaningful changes in their game environments.
Letting the player have an effect on the environment is a great way to make a game’s world feel alive. Here, Damon Reece examines how Metroid Prime’s world can seem much more real than that of Dragon Age: Inquisition due to the former allowing the player’s actions to change that world.
Shamus Young coins the term “domino worldbuilding” to refer to storytelling in which events are (sometimes surprising) consequences to each other, rather than just a bunch of things that happen to serve the needs of the plot. He provides the first Mass Effect’s backstory as a particularly good example and discusses the value of this approach in games.
For much more on the Mass Effect example in particular, see his Mass Effect Retrospective.
I’ve been thinking about boss fights in platformers. Mostly because I just played Effie, a 3D platformer whose boss fights… kinda aren’t boss fights.
In Effie, you play as young warrior Galand cursed by evil witch Melira. Melira is the villain for the whole game and shows up for a boss fight at the end of every chapter. But you never fight her directly.
Instead, she hovers menacingly nearby while you deal with waves of normal enemies that she’s apparently summoning and/or traverse a hazardous platforming course. Melira’s only direct contribution to the fight is a telegraphed area-of-effect attack you need to avoid periodically. She does get a health bar, though - sometimes you deplete it just by defeating her summoned minions, other times by reaching and activating levers that trigger hazards she just happens to be in range of - and once her health bar is empty you win and (except in the final fight) she retreats. (The most perplexing encounter has you damage her by pouring wine on her and then when she’s had enough she escapes by diving into the vat of wine.)
So, okay. Is this a boss fight? It’s narratively framed as one. It’s a climactic chapter-capping encounter with the game’s antagonist in which she tries to kill you and you fight back until there is a clear winner and loser. And it’s also mechanically framed as one, challenging you to use your accumulated combat and platforming skills in a high-pressure gauntlet. The only thing I can point to that makes it not a boss fight is that you never really fight the boss - the encounter still serves every other purpose of boss fights I can think of.
But I think the fact that she doesn’t engage you directly undercuts her as a villain. She’s much less threatening if all she can throw at you is an easily-avoidable area attack and things you’ve defeated many times before. She’s much less impressive if you can compel her to retreat just by defeating a bunch of other enemies or if she repeatedly positions herself exactly where she needs to be in order to be vulnerable to triggerable hazards.
It’s normal for bosses in platformers to test you on combat and platforming skills that you’ve learned and practiced earlier, and thus in a sense not actually provide anything new and unique. Especially if the boss is supposed to be much more powerful than you and it would be silly to let you attack them directly. But I think it’s a lot more satisfying if the game finds a way to frame the conflict as a direct battle, even if you can’t use brute force.
I find myself thinking, for example, of Klaww, a boss in Jak and Daxter: The Precursor Legacy. Klaww is gigantic and you can’t just, like, walk up and punch him. So the fight is mechanically a series of platforming challenges in which you avoid Klaww’s thrown boulders and navigate platforms suspended over lava to reach him, where you don’t damage him directly so much as cause him to stumble and drop a boulder on his own head. It’s not especially cathartic because Klaww himself hadn’t been built up as an emotionally-significant antagonist - he’s just a gate you have to get through to proceed to the next area. But he still scared me the first time I played and the fight is clearly framed as you outmaneuvering a much stronger foe. I wish fighting Melira in Effie had felt that way.
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