So What's Your Story?: BioWare's Ray Muzyka and Greg Zeschuk

4/21/2009 9:33 PM | 2 Comments | Page 5 of 7

Narcisse: What would you like other developers to rethink in terms of emotion or narrative or story?

Zeschuk: I'd say, "Think of it earlier in the process." For us, we really do think of it right at the beginning.

Muzyka: Some [other developers] do.

Zeschuk: Yeah, but the analogy you always have is, "Hey, we made this awesome shooter. Okay, now what's the story? Why are we shooting these creatures that we made that are also cool?" I mean, we did that, too. I remember, years and years ago with Shattered Steel... [To Muzyka] Do you remember this?

Muzyka: Oh, yeah.

Zeschuk: Literally, it was the weekend the game was getting finished, and me and Ray were like, "What's the backstory on this? Why are the players doing this stuff?" It's the night before the game's shipping and we're banging out stuff like, "Hey, that sounds pretty good!" That's the tradition of game story. And that's the last time we did that.

Muzyka: We learned something there. On Baldur's Gate, we took a different approach, spending a lot of time up front building that iceberg, so the part that surfaces on top felt that much more real.

Mastrapa: Last year at GDC, during the Portal talk, Eric Wolpaw talked up the difference between story and action. Action is, you're killing a bunch of people and there are ghosts everywhere, and you go and run and talk to a guy and he's just disconnected -- like, "Hey, how's it going?"

Muzyka: You ever hear of someone named Richard Bartle, who did the two-by-two matrix of players acting on a world and acting on themselves?

Mastrapa: Yeah, I have.

Muzyka: So, there, story is social interaction. It's a form of action where you're making choices. It can be active; it doesn't have to be passive.

Mastrapa: The example Wolpaw gave -- where an NPC standing in a haunted house was having a normal conversation with you -- was about the action and the narrative not intersecting.

Muzyka: That's also the Uncanny Valley problem, too. It's not just about the characters looking real; it's about them feeling real, too. That's why story adds so much complexity to the game development process.

Zeschuk: Yeah. Is that NPC hiding in a closet with a bunch of crosses and garlic?

Muzyka: Then, your animation, AI, QA, programming and production processes all have to be different. Your environment has to be different to account for that closet door. It all changes. Again, that's the kind of thing [the designers of] BioShock did really well with their voiceovers, and you could see the evolution of their craft over the years as well. I'm a big fan of their stuff.

Zeschuk: No one wants the hole poked into their reality, like "Hello, I'm having tea here in the vampire haunted house."

Mastrapa: The thing that's interesting to me is that there's this kind of base-level story that's told by the action of a game, and there's this overarching action...

Muzyka: And that's often implied. You have to infer things and that's cool. You make the player feel smart.