So What's Your Story?: BioWare's Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk
4/21/2009 9:33 PM | 2 Comments | Page 2 of 7
Narcisse: So, you're kind of anticipating hitting the high point of
the Uncanny Valley graph, then? Where eventually, game characters are going to look just like us...?
Zeschuk: I think so. Another thing to relate it to is CGI in the theaters. No more is it the fact that "Wow, it's a CG movie." It's funny. When you look at "Coraline," it's celebrated that it wasn't CG. It's gotten to the point where CG is just the medium...
Muzyka: You know you've won when they stop talking about the medium and they talk about the result and the impact and the characters. More and more, you're having conversations about the art of it and the emotions, and less about whether they look real or not. Because if you don't even notice it anymore, then you've transcended that interface barrier, and you've broken through that to "it's an art form."
Narcisse: At a panel I went to at DICE, a THQ exec said that working on better story could be an easier way to earn better Metacritic scores because it gives writers something else to write about. His basic point was that it's cheaper than spending money on the other elements of developing a game.
Sometimes, instead of letting the talking do the talking,
Mass Effect's Commander Shepard let his gun speak for him.
That sounds like a comment from someone who hasn't actually done it, because story isn't cheaper. Story's actually more expensive, because it's not superficial. Every aspect of a game has to flow into creating emotional engagement. You have to invest in the world, in the history of the world that a player ever gets to see. It's like an iceberg; it's there and has weight, yet all the players see is this top part. But the top part feels real because of the other stuff under the water. You have to invest in a whole bunch of stuff to make that happen. You have to make sure the characters comment on the world, the exploration, the combat and interactions amongst themselves. You actually multiply the possibility space of what you have to manage and test exponentially, when you add a dimension like deeper story.
Zeschuk: We actually run across a lot of folks who say, "We're doing a ton of story in our game." And, it's like, "Okay, but how do you deliver it?" On the written page, a guy sits down at a typewriter and writes it. In a game, there are so many choices. Part of the brilliance of
BioShock, for example, was the environment telling so much of the story.
Muzyka: And that's an example of a game where the story is integrated at the deepest level.
Zeschuk: So, to change the
BioShock story means to change the environment. That's not cheap. It's in the story delivery tools and techniques. For us, who've been doing this for seven years, it's not been easy to get characters on the screen that you want to watch. Usually, they're kind of embarrassing. When they're discussing story, people forget that the trick to games is that it's not clear what the best way is to deliver story yet. We use the dialogue method a lot, but we use other subtle methods. Valve somehow magically gets story out of their stuff.
