So What's Your Story?: BioWare's Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk
4/21/2009 9:33 PM | 2 Comments | Page 4 of 7
Muzyka: Yeah, you're the actor and director at the center of the experience.
Mastrapa: How do you think about that, working with players as a co-author and approaching their contribution and empowering them to contribute to that?
Zeschuk: Some of the considerations are technical. One of the things we have on
Dragon Age internally is this telemetry that shows exactly what players are doing everywhere. So, part of it's observational. When you structure an area, you want certain events to fire at certain times. These tools allow us to know the path that people naturally take through an environment. If we see that people always go this way, why don't we put something there that they're going to notice. It's a function of knowing what the player's going to do -- at least, the majority of players -- and then populating the environment accordingly. One interesting example of that happens in
Fallout 3. You know how you'd find these little shops? What was unusual was when I found this entire room under a bridge filled with toilet seats, piled in these intricate pillars. If you put yourself into the game world, you go "Well, what's the story behind this?" That's an example of how you can create these little scenarios that make people's minds start racing.
The battles in
Dragon Age have 100-percent more mystical canines than the fights in
Mass Effect.
That's the iceberg underneath the surface. That's the player fiction that they might reference. Given that they've got user-generated content tools now, maybe players can make additional dialogue plug-ins to explain that room or generate a quest based on it.
Zeschuk: "Your job is to collect the toilet seats."
Muzyka: You can manifest the co-authorship, not just behind the scenes or one player at a time, but you can show it and share it because you have tools that allow players to make new content, and then talk about the content in forums where even more new ideas could come up. I think that's kind of cool, because the players always surprise us.
Zeschuk: Also, on some level, that is considered "fun." Quantifying fun is very difficult, in terms of teasing out the pieces. But there may be certain activities that work particularly well. Ray's been talking about tactical combat, and how winning at that may make you feel smart. Discovering something really amazing is fun because it's personal. In this case, imagining a little story or triggering a sequence of events is fun because you've influenced the world. The concept of fun is interestingly dispersed amongst these worlds and maybe that's one of them.
Muzyka: The neat thing about
Dragon Age is that, depending on your origin and the party you travel with, you won't be able to do certain things like, say, open a chest without a thief in your party.
Narcisse: So, you're really poking at players' OCD, then?
Muzyka: [Laughs] It's a real world. It's just like you can't go in every area in the real world in a set amount of time. You do want to allow players to explore most of the content because it's an art form; but it's also commercial, so you don't want to have content that's wasted. On the other hand, having the water-cooler talk where players compare very different experiences through the same narrative framework is cool: "Do you remember that moment where...?" "No, that didn't happen to me!" Increasingly, our games will be geared to those kinds of experiences.
