Choice Architecture, Player Expression, and Narrative Design in Fallout: New Vegas

[Music] hello can i want to hear me everyone hear me some portion of people oh wow hi hi welcome welcome hi Steve hmm excuse me are you guys ready to rock out about choice architecture wow it's a very exciting topic um welcome the name of this talk is really Donnelly I apologize if do say the right thing choice architecture player expression and narrative design in Fallout New Vegas I'm going to be talking a lot about Fallout New Vegas but also a lot of other things my name is Josh Slayer I'm a project director with obsidian entertainment before we start there are a few things that GDC would like me to go over for you all one please turn off your cell phones or something to vibrate or telepathic link or whatever you know sort of cool features are coming out these days basically just trying to ringer off also you should be receiving an evaluation form by email please fill it out because it helps GDC evaluate things and do cool awesome stuff awesome let us start so just a little bit of background I'm a project director at obscenity entertainment and a lead designer my background is in design I started design at Black Isle Studios back in the late 90s on the I Swindell series I am primarily a system designer and adapter of systems I've worked on a lot of Dungeons & Dragons games so I've had to do a lot of work adapting rule systems even though I do writing my job is not primarily doing writing I work a lot on the mechanics surrounding writing which is why I wanted to give this talk I'll get a little bit into the sort of difference between the prose and the choice architecture but I focus primarily on system mechanics my role on Fallout New Vegas was as a lead designer assistant designer and project director just to sort of let it be known there were actually a number of people that contributed to the dialogue on Paul new Vegas John Gonzalez was actually our creative director he wrote the story we had a lot of great writers on the project that all contributed to making it a very open narrative experience I am a tabletop RPG player I have been a tabletop RPG player for a very very long time I love playing computer role-playing games but I can serve myself to be a fairly broad spectrum gamer now I used to be very focused on PC RPGs but now I play lots of console games action games racing games all sorts of stuff so that's my background all right hold on I've already screwed up this presentation this is awesome yes okay so this talk is really about branching dialogue and the sort of challenges that come up with branching dialogue branching dialogue is not necessary it kind of goes without saying but I thought it needed to be addressed it's not necessary or even desirable for lots of games there there are a lot of different styles of dialogue that you can approach in a game these are the three sort of broad categories that I identified when I was preparing this talk the first is linear or cinematic this is arguably the most common that you'll see in games especially nowadays sort of exemplified by games like on the Uncharted series the story is written the characters are established you aren't really the player doesn't really have agency and how those characters interact with each other or how the story unfolds it's a cinematic experience writings gray it looks awesome and the focus is really on the gameplay and you're just the cinematic storytelling in the dialogue is there to serve a narrative function it's not about player agency totally valid cool thing to do another way of approaching dialogue is what I call keyword or subject dialogue this is also not really about player agency this isn't about saying to the player you get to shape the story it's about saying to the player hey do you want to learn more about the settings you want to learn more about this world do you want to trigger this quest now and so a game like Diablo the Diablo series uses this where you have a list of things to talk about and the player is really just saying like tell me about this thing tell me about this thing tell me about this thing so again it's not about granting player agency it's really about allowing the player to make a choice as to when they want to receive any bit of narrative content what this talk is about though is about branching trees this is dialog where you have menus of options presented in a variety of ways where the dialogue can flow branch out bran even more circle back on itself ideally its producing gameplay changes its producing story changes it's not a whole lot of companies necessarily do this I'm glad so many of you came I wasn't sure how broad the appeal would be but obviously companies like Bioware excel it at Black Isle we did it back at Black Isle we continued to do at at obsidian Bethesda also does it I'm sure there are other companies that do it as well but it's it's a tricky thing and that's why I'm having this talk so someone might ask why why even use branching trees what's the advantage you know you can get all sorts of cool cinematic stuff and cool character development with a good voice acting and everything and a purely cinematic to you why even use branching trees there are a few very good reasons for this first is you get to grant story agency to the player you get to say to the player hey you know what you have some role in defining where the story goes and how it unfolds it's very important for a lot of people especially in role-playing games for a lot of people who came from a tabletop or pen-and-paper background they really really enjoy the ability to screw the story in some ways and make it their own you also grant character agency and I want to differentiate that from story agency you're not just changing the story but you have the ability to express what type of person your character is so if you're a jackass or your really cool guy or you want to smooch some girl or some whatever that's that's why we build that in there to allow you to express the type of character you are not just how the story goes but how you make it unfold also it forces you to make tactical and strategic choices again this is sort of ideally this is what I'm going towards in the talk but good dialogue is game play and the player should look at it as a series of choices that they're making short term choices and long term choices and when it's done very well the player feels very engaged they're paying attention they pause to think about what they want to do they feel satisfaction and the sting of of making sacrifices along the way and that produces great gameplay through dialogue and also it produces reactive narrative content this can take place outside of the dialogue itself this can be people giving what we call bark strings in the world someone say like hey man thanks for you know blowing up our town you or whatever you know like it's that all that sort of rich world reactivity that doesn't really need to be deep it just needs to be actually more widespread and shallow but it makes the player feel that the world pays attention to the things that he or she does so this talk is not about writing prose there are writers round tables actually what's going on right now strangely enough um they're great writers round table that are going on obviously Austin GDC has a bunch of cool writer stuff going on this isn't really about prose and writing good dialogue from the perspective of aesthetics it's about choices the reason why I want to start with choice architecture is because it's under its it should come under and before prose choices inform the prose that you write but choices present problems on their own a lot of problems and they need to be thought through and choice is the reason to have branching dialogue in the first place so it should be the place where we start to think about what we're doing and how we want to do it so I couldn't quite pinpoint the exact time and place we're sort of branching narrative became a thing but one of the common things that came up was with an author Jorge Luis Borgess and he wrote a book called the Garden of forking paths and this was a pretty radical at the time because this story could be read in a lot of different ways and the reader would arrive at different conclusions about what the narrative was and where it went and someone writing a few years ago about this had this cool quote that actually when I can see it on my screen I'll read out to you bore has confronts us with the pole awaiting moment when we become aware of all the possible choices we might make all the ways in which we might intersect one another for good or evil his imagined Garden of forking paths is both a book and a landscape a book that has the shape of a labyrinth that folds back upon itself in infinite regression this is the definition of sort of the possibility space for the player when we empower the player to make choices and then reward them for making choices they become aware of the power they have in the story and they start to embrace it if we consistently reward that they feel like they have a very strong role as a player in determining the outcome and they engage with the story much more than if they're just watching it because they realize they're an active participant in it jeanny look Weez this is what I actually started caring about it I was strangely enough I was not reading Voorhis when I was five years old um I was reading the cape of time which is my favorite of the choose-your-own-adventure series how deeply I'm what curious how many people have read choose your own adventure books yeah there's a great series of books awesome yes yes so choose your own adventure books are there great um fantastic stuff every book is a different sort of style book or genre book but they all have that idea of branching narrative however if you were even remotely smart kid what you started to do after you read a few of these books was you start to put your finger in the page before you made a choice and just to draw a parallel this is not really that different from abusing a save/load mechanic which is actually a big point of some of the things I come to later so choose your own adventure books at the start of this but even they had underlying problems that still persist now in branching dialogue and role-playing games then later on I really got into role-playing games tabletop role-playing games and I played with a lot of different teams and I was the Deana and a lot of different players and the stuff that I enjoyed the most and stuff my players seem to enjoy the most is when the story was constructive in such a way that the players could it up basically they could they could screw with it and they could push it they could pull it and they could snack the quest giver and like thrown down a well and and the story could keep working and then it rolled with it and that was so satisfying to them and often there are consequences for doing that sort of stuff but they felt very empowered in that environment especially because that was just it's up to the people there in their imagination so that feeling can be hard to emulate in a computer environment but that's what ideally we try to do and so this does had a lasting effect on me I played tons of these games and the most satisfying times are the ones where I was able to do that a dialogue trees and RPGs my first experience with it was with the original Fallout Tim Cain gave a great horse modem the post mortem this morning on fallout I was in college and fallout came out and I was just enthralled with it I thought it was great I loved how you could make choices you could be an evil character you could be a sort of neutral character you could do all sorts of different stuff in the game didn't it wasn't like a grand karmic wheel was there to smash it in the face after you made a bad choice people reacted to the bad things that you did but the game itself did not punish you the designer did not punish you for playing a certain way also when I first came to black Isle I have my first job there was as a webmaster on the web team and I made the Planescape torment website and I was working with the development team and obviously torment is very very widely regarded as a great game with amazing choice and consequence a huge amount of dialogue lots of reactivity and so that had an impression on me because when I came into that environment I saw these guys that were just busting ass to give them you know all this choice and consequence to the player so that was the environment that I came into when I came to blackout so dialogue trees today I had to get that ass shot in there had to haven't seen enough of Mass Effect 3 there might be a more up-to-date a shot that I could have put in there but enough time so dialogue trees in sea RPGs today they're not really that different in a lot of ways they're presented different the aesthetics are a lot different but kind of fundamentally on the under-the-hood how they work they haven't changed a whole lot so the changes have been primarily aesthetic not really structural but there are persistent flaws and to me in my mind that sort of suggests a lack of analysis to this point in time I've been thinking about this a lot over the past few games I've been working on and it's been difficult because I've been writing in this mode and the style for so long but I've made this talk because I wanted to figure out like what the hell are we still doing wrong like this is the way I want to write dialogues but there's got to be some under some underlying flaws here that I need to dig out and get out we did it all so it's just it's a yeah it's not it's not just you know other other companies that are doing it and hopefully I will provide more examples of us screwing up in this talk than other companies although I will give examples of other companies screwing up on new Vegas our writers did a great job Jonna Gonzalez did a great job all the writers did a great job worked very fast using an engine we weren't familiar with but there were certain structural flaws to it mechanical things that I saw and other people saw they're kind of like this still kind of feel stinky there's got to be a better way to handle this so the core problem for me is about choice conflict what I mean by choice conflict is when the player's goals and there's the the goals of the player as a game wise conflict with the goals of the character as you know an expression of the player so the player has a character who's like a sassy jackass or whatever the player wants to get a thing if they play their character as a sassy jackass they can't get the thing so when we do that as designers we're saying your character concept is invalid for this game um that's an extreme example but that's really the root of the issue is that doing or saying the right thing meaning the thing that is actually going to progress the game in the most favorable way conflicts with the idea of a right character the two examples I've listed here are Deus Ex is social boss battles which no offense I actually thought the ASEC scene revolution was a fantastic game I liked how they presented their conversations but the conversations felt like puzzles they didn't feel like things that grant player agency because if you choose to play a character in a certain way in that conversation you will lose the conversation however similarly in Fallout New Vegas we have dialogue skills like speech and barter we also have dialogue perks and they become you in the conversation choices in the choice here talking with a camera that guy's name Santiago I think when you're fighting the Santiago if you pick anything other than the speech option you're basically intentionally handicapping yourself so if you want to role play a certain way we're essentially saying okay thanks for being a dummy ah you are going to lose out in this situation so to repeat this this is the main subject of this talk that I screwed up yet again that doing or saying the right thing to get a gameplay advantage that I'll gameplay managed to move it forward the way you want to conflicts with being the right character and you may be saying will sassy man what's the right character that's your voice in my head by the way um the answer is any character that falls within our supported range of expression for the player that's a right character if we allow you to play out a certain fantasy that's a right character some of this has to do with consistency if we consistently reinforce something for the player and then pull the rug out from under human heard bad news so when we look at what's a valid character we define that expression range and we have to support it if we don't we're letting the player down we're saying yeah we kind of while you to play this but not really it's mostly cosmetic and you know sometimes you'll get something out of it but most the time you're going to get screwed that's the problem it's a game it's not a puzzle puzzles are not really games there are white answers and wrong answers it is not a movie it's not something you try to sit back and watch and it is not a book it is not just for reading you're making choices to go through it um at the game and if we embrace dialogue as gameplay and not things that are sort of ancillary to the game and treat it as like well yeah there's the game and then there's the story if you're doing branching dialogue I think it's important that and again you don't have to do branching dialogue it's not important for all games but if you're going to do that then you should do it as well as you can and you should incorporate it into the gameplay so my assertion here is that if you plan well you can avoid choice conflict when all the ways that you can go through the game are considered validated ways and you give a clear response and reactivity spectrum to the player meaning you make a choice you get this feedback you make this choice you get this feedback when that happens the player benefits and the character roles align there is not a conflict because you've already planned out hey if a player wants to be a crazy jackass they're gonna make these sacrifices but they're going to get this out of it and they're going to feel good about it but it takes planning it you can't just like decide to do it it doesn't happen spontaneously you have to look at three things when you're when you're planning this stuff out the types of choices you want to allow the player to make the range of player and character expression this is sort of like well what sort of characters are actually valid within this game as an example in Fallout 1 you could would kill kids wowie and fallout 2 you could marry somebody and then basically sell them as a you know into like porn them so that's like a range of expression that says like okay the goal posts are really far apart here so once you sort of establish that that's what you're going for and then finally your narrative goals you as designers you also have to accomplish certain things you have to communicate certain things to the players and those can be in conflict with what the player wants to do if you say hey player you can be a sassy jackass but if you do that you're going to miss all this critical information for playing the game that's that's kind of sucks so here's here's my systemic approach to doing this consider the types of choices that you're going to make define the range of player and character expression establish the narrative goals that you have for the game that you need to communicate then get some perspective on how these three things work together then you write your prose and again this is not about prose that's a separate sort of subject that can be a rich tapestry of interesting things not here though and then everyone goes my god your game is so amazing thank you I got to play exactly the character I wanted you're the best so step one is considering the types of choices you can make so you want to provide tactical choices to the player tactical choices are what I would call node by node choices in the conversation every node where you're allowed to make a choice there should be some sort of tactical decision there those are immediate reactions strategic choices this is long-term planning this is not necessarily about I'm going to say this and those guys going to get mad at me and then this girl is going to give me a kiss it's about you're sort of like building reputations with people indirect reputation mechanics things like that you want to forecast consequences there's actually a pretty cool anecdote that Tim Kaine brought up in the Q&A so I should have fallout one which is about the ending of junk town and fallout one so junk town initially the endings were if you put Killian Darkwater who's like the good guy in power then junk town gets screwed and if you put gizmo who's the scumbag in charge jontron actually does very well about the consequences that weren't really forecast it was kind of just it was a reversal it just said like I actually Killian sucks and because of those those consequences weren't forecast it felt weird to a lot of people even though it was arguably more interesting and then finally you have to validate all options to avoid the perception of win or loss the perception of well I guess I just made the wrong choice I'm playing the wrong sort of character I should go back and try to get something else out of it so some words on choice architecture hopefully I won't screw this up yet another time as I go to look at it so I've been reading an interesting book by two professors from University of Chicago called nudge and it's about choice architecture and a lot of other things and there's this interesting quote that one of the authors gave at a convention about choice architecture so choice architects must choose something you have to meddle for example you can't design a neutral building there is no such thing a building must have doors elevators restrooms all of these details influence choices people make there is nothing neutral about putting an attack reply at the top of a dialog tree structure there is nothing neutral about putting a goodbye reply at the end of the dialogue tree structure these are consistent choices that you make how you lay these things out how you present them to the player that has a huge impact on how they perceive them and how they make choices in Obsidian games forever in black aisle games usually the default option for everything is always at the top one because we find that people tend to just gravitate there if you put an attack node there ooh people get mad because they start going 1 1 1 god dammit why am i in combat so it matters that goes back to the study you really do have to think about how you lay these things out oh my god how do I use PowerPoint so node by node choices just to go back to this nobody no choices are again you get to a plain dialogue the guy says yeah what are you going to do about a buddy and then you have three options here you can say well I'm sorry let's work it out I'm a diplomatic guy or I hate votes and that's not be on the face that's the tactical choice there's going to be immediate reactivity and feedback to that so that's tactical choice at short term these are things ideally that happen quite a bit in conversation ah they usually require a lot of scripting so maybe they can't have an all over the place but these are the things that people really react to where you know was the conversation in Mass Effect one where the reporters saying something to Shepherd is just like you know punches are in the face you know people go a man and million YouTube videos and the first guy to post this uh it's a tactical choice very cool there are also strategic choices to make though one thing identified in here that that works generally very well for this or what I just made up this term indirect or reaction systems these would be things like karma or reputation or loyalty or whatever you don't get necessarily an immediate feedback out of it but you're putting you're putting pennies in the the rainy day event reactivity fund so you know you kind of staff someone and you know NCR gets a little grumpy with you and that you know you get points in the negative pool and then you do some sort for caesar's legion and that you get points in the happy pool and then eventually you know some NCR ranger comes up to you and says you're going to die bro and choose you so it's a long-term outcome it's a strategic decision it's not about having a big scripted reaction it's about a little reaction that builds up over time forecasting consequences so you know i give that example of the choice with from fallout 1 so the idea is that you want to intrigue the player you don't you don't need to spell everything out but you kind of have to forecast what's going to happen in a writers roundtable yesterday one of the guys gave an example of i don't actually know what game he's talking about but he said he picked a line that seemed like kind of aggressive and then he want up just like gunning a bunch of people down he was like whoa whoa whoa I didn't I didn't quite want to be that aggressive so intrigued the player but inform them of generally what's going to happen you can surprise them but don't make them so if you surprise them in a pleasant way also I'm great that's that's the joy the joy of story as it unfolds but don't make them mad because then then they just feel like they were sort of tricked into picking something they didn't want to take differentiate the consequences this is super duper important uh false choices not all players pick up on them but players are simultaneously smarter and dumber than we think they are and a lot of them do pick up on fake choices they've sent it very quickly especially if a game uses them a lot so I would say let's just stop doing it everybody let's stop doing it thank you lace consequences with sacrificing so I'll get into some differences between choice agony but when a person makes a choice they should feel like they're making a trade-off the idea was sacrifice is always that you get something more out of it than you lose because that's why you made the sacrifice but you could feel like you did make a trade-off there and ideally if the bunch of different options where there's some pros and cons and they're not easy choices but they don't have to be horribly in tons and that push-pull conflict produces agony and that generally speaking is good when it doesn't go too far validating the options of choice and consequence again this goes back to when you make a choice you want to validate it say yes player this is a correct way to play the game you're the character you chose to play we support that you can keep rolling with this if you make a similar choice down the road it's also going to be supported keep on truckin good job this is in contrast to choice of no consequence I'll pick a little bit on Dragon Age here very natured a lot of cool stuff in it this isn't one of them sorry you have a bunch of options that people talk about and it doesn't produce anything there's absolutely no different ending result from you picking any of these options you can circle through it over and over again and it's the same outcome it's kind of a waste of the players time and it's a waste of the writers time so we've done this in the path of sorry oh jeez we've done this in the past a lot of companies done this in the past um I think we do it because we feel that we want to give the player options but again players pick up on this stuff they get irritated with it if you do it a lot they get really bored of your dialogue because they feel like the choices they make don't mean versus when I'm lost so again Fallout New Vegas we did this all over the place this is all so bad when you come into the situation unless you just want to fight which is you know you can still fight even after taking this option but this option makes it incredibly easy you can come in here you have a high speech and you can just say hey Manny I'm here to drop off some drugs see ya and then you just walk around and steal everything and then come back and see for everyone or whatever you want to do um if you have a high speech you're kind of like shooting yourself in the foot if you don't pick this option so we're kind of saying like if you don't take this you're playing at a disadvantage not really that great or satisfying so I want to talk about choice extremes so [Laughter] that that's how to spell extremes by the way um officially so they're kind of two ends of the spectrum here neither of which I feel are particularly great one is the sort of Jesus Hitler option again a lot of our games have had these hopefully we've moved mostly away from these because we like moral ambiguity a lot Jesus Hitler is kind of like hey there's a baby do you want to give it a baby a little smooch on the forehead or do you want to throw it into an oven and and those I mean and we see those options and they're not they're not really compelling like if you've decided you want to play a crazy dude then there's no struggle to figure out what you want to do there's no sacrifice just like well yeah I'm a crazy David Killer there you go or no like I'm a super nice guy why would I ever do that so if there's no real interesting choice to be made there it's very flat it is an option and it does it is differentiated hopefully and how it works out it's not that compelling and then also then the other end of the extreme is Sophie's Choice spoilers for a 30 son year old book um so yeah Meryl Streep's character she has to choose between which of her children will die no one wants to make that sort of a choice in a game there's no sighs it's not like wow I'm so glad I made that choice instead of that one it's just too shitty choices so a player should feel like there's something good and bad out of what they pick not just like well which do I lose or like which child did I sacrifice those choices they're interesting in since they produce a struggle but a player really doesn't feel good about having to make those choices so ideally the agony and in in the conflict is somewhere between these two spectrums it's not as simple as Jesus Hitler and it's not heart wrenching total loss like Sophie's Choice just some examples for actually these are kind of nasty too um but they're differentiated an important way so choice agony is a Greek Greek plays do this really really well and very consistently Greek plays will spoilers for thousand-year-old plays um so in this case the agony is not between two things that are to borrow an economics turn that I learned yesterday fun durable um they're not between like a child or this child or this arm or this arm in the case of arrestees and Antigone it's a it's a choice between two kind of equally bad and equally good options but the sort of value arithmetic that goes into it is not equal arrestees father was killed by his mother and I think it's Apollo is saying yo you have to avenge your dad kill your mom and the Furies are saying dude you cannot kill your mom that is bad news he's like oh man he kills his mom in the Furies chasin and oh my god how agonizing Antigone wants to honor her brother bury her brother I think it's her dad says you can't do that I forbid it and she's like wow this is agonizing and then she goes over over and does it so again the the value arithmetic there is now oh yeah well it's just six of one half dozen to the other it's two different things and when a person reads that one person might say well I value this more than that I value this more than that and that's what makes our individual choices more interesting as opposed to hey what color do you dislike more it's not to be confused with spice agony just so you know choice eigen 'is not splice agony arguably spice agony is even cooler because it's from dune so but it's not the same sorry this uh so the second step I guess I'm doing okay and time even though I'm screwing around all the time um the second step is to define the range of character and player expression this is really about hey what sort of characters do you want to allow people to play and are you going to support through those choices that you give so you want to define a response reactivity scope this means what can the player say and how are people going to react to it it's very important to figure out what sort of character prototypes I'm just using that I've made up that term because I don't want to use archetype I'll get into that later what sort of character prototypes do you want to use support for character ideas and then create a range of impacts that you can have these can be little impacts big impacts they can be physical impacts and motional impacts all over the place so figuring out the scope of responses and reactivity is very important on if you are making a game with very split morality good and evil that's your range is it about shades of grey where there's a lot of moral ambiguity or are the responses aligned along things like stamps so for example Alpha Protocol head stances there are number of games that have things like stances where they're more like attitudes they're not really aligned along morality and then what sort of reactivity are you going to have what sort of scripted or direct reactivity are you going to have and then also what sort of indirect reputation mechanics are you going to have reputation influenced things like that so the player can get more frequent inputs into that system as an example Fallout New Vegas is scope and range it was really big one of the cool things about the Fallout setting is that there's so much crazy stuff in it and designers have a lot of fun with that players usually have a lot of fun with it it doesn't always result in a consistent experience though so there's a huge scope of responses anything goes at any scale so Fallout New Vegas you couldn't kill children um because I don't think any games allow you to do that anymore but um you can kill everyone else like everyone what I told the designers is that you have to imagine that the player has a like fan atoh skill field around them everywhere they go and they just can't help it they just everyone drops dead so so the whole game was structured so that you could kill everyone even you're one sort of fall-through guy you could kill him and he died but he would then uh transfer his consciousness into a different robot and come up to you so it was very important that we allowed that also you can do all those crazy reverse triple betrayal stuff because of our reputation mechanics and the way that they worked you could start out working for NCR and then kind of drift over to caesar's legion and then get on their good side and then oh we're actually going to help out mr. house and we're going to betray him and go independent so there's a lot of things in ways that you could weave through the story there's a lot of scripted reactivity like a crazy amount scripted reactivity and all the credit for that goes to the the writing team in the area designers that made that stuff happen and reputation we had a reputation system for factions and for locations and that service our indirect system where players would either perform actions or do dialogue things and resolve quests to feed into that system so now I want to talk about prototypes again I use those words of archetypes because I think that sometimes archetypes get that word kind of turnaround archetype is higher level than these guys archetypes are more abstracted than these individual characters prototypes to me in an are in a role-playing game are starting points for character concepts they can be sold character sometimes they're combinations of characters I you know I want to play I want to play Aragorn I want to play Snake Plissken I want to play Clint Eastwood's racist character from Gran Torino by the way I want to I really want to make an RPG a where you someone's like yes I'm playing Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino um so the idea is that is that players really they like they gravitate towards these characters and players are creative but we all start somewhere and so some players will be like yeah I want to be the man with no name I would be Lisbeth Salander from you know girls Dragon Tattoo I want to be blade whatever there's a starting point and then over time they usually expand from there but understanding what your game in your genre supports and where that's going to start is very helpful it's not just useful for defining dialogue but other things like dress and appearance and costuming and things like that in fact i new vegas i mean the number of clothing mods you see for people that are supporting the man like everyone's I am the math no name grade and Clint Eastwood and new Vegas great there's like a zillion too clothing packs and support that so understanding what people are going to want to play is very important what are the Fallout New Vegas prototypes who knows because we didn't define method fortunately we knew we are going to have a huge range of influences and responses but we didn't really sit down and think of this ahead of time unfortunately so you know there's some stuff where you kind of you kind of feel like the man with no name or you also kind of think about you feel like Mad Max surprise these are the same character um one is in Australia one's in the United States they're kind of the same dude though and like there's some stuff where you feel kind of like this weird SpecOps guy that's that beard guy you know who I'm talking about that beard guy and I know he has a real name but everyone knows him as that beard guy um but you know but we don't really fully support it and there's other things that we could have supported a post-apocalyptic characters um like the call the crazy tribal tribal people from doomsday or even the like the tribal kids from yon Thunderdome and stuff like that but we didn't really think about it also there are other examples of like strong female characters like Alice from the Resident Evil series could be considered a post-apocalyptic character but we didn't really think through like what what are we trying to support unfortunately so the range of responses was granted in the fall at Universal are already all over the place but they didn't really feel like you're playing consistent character necessarily you want to create a range of impacts choices should have impact again this goes back to don't don't just kind of make fluff or meaningless choices you want to ground them and make the player feel like well I'm cool like that that actually did something that wasn't just serve an aesthetic change you can also make that happen through indirect reaction systems when the player sees and some people complain about this tough when I say like +12 reputation you know I know it's not it's my immersion gets broken but you see hey that actually fed into the system great that's good feedback so as game designers even though some people get all worked up about it it's very good to reward people that way and then the important thing I think to remember is that narrative or emotional impact is the important scale example of two big impacts from fall new Vegas one is Archimedes - this big space laser that was in all the trailers I don't really think that choice big emotional impact on a lot of people the only person that has a strong emotional reaction to it is one of the Companions arcade and it's pretty unlikely that you actually have him at that point it doesn't really influence a lot of things around it so even though it's like a big event there's not a lot of emotional strength to it so it's like well the crazy space laser I don't care I'm just going to go on with my adventure on compare this to I think the DLC especially all the DS so I did wanted the DLCs honest hearts I'm only putting up here because this is the one that I did but Chris Avalon is the project director on all the other DLCs other than Governors Arsenal and they had great emotional content to them people really connected with the characters did a great job there in honest hearts you know the sort of resolution of it people seem to respond very strongly to because it was a very tense moment between really just three people in a very small space but that sort of stuff can go a long way so the scale is really about emotional impact when it comes to change when the player feels like they're producing something that's really tugs at them I keep doing this I shouldn't that it makes them feel good about the choices that they make something I think was much better to find in terms of scope and prototype characters was Alpha Protocol it was very clearly defined so they had the professional and suave and aggressive stances there were variants to that that would appear in dialogue but that's pretty much what was established for the spectrum of responses a lot of heavily scripted scripted reactivity they also had a reputation mechanic that was used very frequently and they had three prototypes it took a while to settle on this but it was the call the three JD's Jason Bourne James Bond Jack Bauer equipment choices um dialogue options all that sort of stuff kind of fed into that is like if I want to play like Jason Bourne I'm going to want to say this sort of thing if I want to play like Jack Bauer - man cos kind of face and like get all aggro on him and that that really helped drive a lot of the choices people like okay yeah yeah I get those guys that's this is the space that we're working in which is very important so step three is about establishing narrative goals ideally you should fuse information and emotional content not do info dumps you should separate your critical information from optional information this is very important when you remember hey players can go around smacking dudes and skipping over stuff and shortcutting all sorts of things in the aisle and you want to outline your narrative branching ahead of time you do a lot of people look at new vegas maybe not everyone but a lot of people look at a like wow how did you plan all that stuff out and it's actually I don't to say it's easy but when you do it from the beginning it is not especially hard if you try to do it six months down the road forget it any game that I've worked on where we've planned for the stuff ahead of time it's gone very very smoothly once you start developing the game and you try to back into a bunch of freedom of play and movement and choice it doesn't go so well so don't do this um dialogue branching is I think at its weakest when it comes down to essentially being no more than a keyword list where you're saying hey tell me about this tell me about this tell me about this um I think there are much better ways to do it I think that Mass Effect putting stuff in the Codex is a really good way to do it other than the XP gain which I think should be gotten rid of um also Bioshock does it really well they have like essentially three levels of interaction where there's the main storyline there's the stuff you can hear through all the tape recorders and things like that thank you for reminding me of that and then also the all the posters and things where you can infer and imply all sorts of other relationships by looking around so there are other ways to give information about the world what's going on in it than just info dumping onto the player if you can give information about the world the player try to sort of wrap it inside the emotional content of something else so a character is talking about something that's important to them and in the context of talking about that thing you're learning about the world if you just have someone sort of stand there and dryly tell you about the world they're just a narrator for an encyclopedia and that gets really boring you have to figure out what your critical and optional information is going to be in the game again very few players want information dumps and dialogue most players they do want to understand what's going on usually they're skipping through things because it goes on for too long and tries to tell them much more than they actually need to know if you write your story well the player should not need to know a huge amount of information to understand the meat of the plot and they really shouldn't need to know much about what they're doing in the next stage of their adventure by the way hints hints and hanging references those are also exposition position a person can reference something without defining it that's fine let it go like let it hang there person will be intrigued look it up later maybe another character references that group or organization or religion later maybe it's never defined and the player goes hi I wonder what that is I've gotten so many questions for Fallout New Vegas because Chief Hamlin Kris Kristofferson's character says yeah all the veteran Rangers are hunting ghosts down in Baja and it's like every week I get two or three people saying what is he talking about I am never going to tell you what that is never never never like something weirds going on down there there in Baja that sounds mysterious great just let it go that's the side thing cool that's intriguing narrative branching obviously you have to guarantee that all the critical information is communicated if you allow the player to do something that breaks their understanding of the game that is very bad you have to have ways to handle that you want to isolate reactivity so reactivity is awesome and players love reactivity I think a trap people fall into is they want to make the reactivity really like there's a you know huge ripple effect from any like a pebble hits the water and you know like thousands of people are changed forever and it's it's very messy players don't actually notice it or appreciated it causes a lot of bugs you can actually do a lot of more like very localized reactivity and players feel like the world is very rich with the reactivity but it's very light scripting and bug-fixing wise and then generally speaking more branching is better than bigger branches so it's it's more interesting to have like little little ways to alter the story and then feed into other things than to try to make one big massive narrative that branches out in a million different ways just recombinant lies it becomes very difficult to manage that stuff and a bug fix it so here's an example in Fallout New Vegas but I think worked pretty darn well they went thattaway was the first main quest that you go on so if all new vegas starts to be being shot in the head and dropped in a shallow grave and your first quest is to go find the people that did it so your first steps are completely informational and independent of each other it's really just where did this dude go it's it's Benny the guy in the crazy checkered suit where did he go and you go from step to step and each person tells you something more that you follow and follow and follow because they're just information and they're independent of each other the player can actually go straight to new vegas from Goodsprings without ever going into any of the other steps they can do things in different orders they can go straight to novak through a pass they can go to Boulder City they can do things in all sorts different order because the story still makes sense the story is find out who shot me and where that person is if you just walk into Vegas the story still make sense you miss little side details actually you must quite a few site details along the way but the story is flexible and by the way we just totally ripped off fallout 1 for this just ripped it right off if you look at fall at one the first critical step you leave the vault find the water chip that is actually the first critical path thing that you need to do is find the water chip you can walk through vault 13 to the Necropolis you do not have to do anything else in between that's the way the story makes sense because you're pointed hey go check out vault 15 oh it's not there I'll go back to this town oh what's that Raiders okay I'll go to the Raider dunno we'll go to the here so it's unfold in a very logical fashion but the player is not required to do things that way because it's all about information the reactivity is very localized to those places so reactivity is in that space and then later on maybe we'll have we did this all over new Vegas you do a quest hours later some random dude out the middle know where it goes hey you a reaction to the quest that you did they're like oh my god this world is full of all this reactivity on but it's really just that one character doing that one thing and then it's completely forgotten about but if you do that for a ton of quests then people go like wow there is really a lot of stuff going on which people remember and do things in this world is alive critical information is always the next step that's a very important supplemental info is seasoned all over the place and the player freedom is huge you can seal everyone you can go to the first town where are these guys yeah dan dan amigos look I don't want to tell you BAM shoot him take a thing off his body go to the next time hey who are all you guys cool go to the next town and it's the story it makes sense because you all the information is there you go in the next town the guy in the dinosaur man he says well I know where those guys are but I need help and you're like yeah you need help you need a doctor blew up we say get and I mean you can just you can kill everyone you don't you don't have to like you can just keep going and the story totally make sense and you're just this whirlwind of death and it worked very well so the first step is to get some perspective on this stuff so this is your analysis where you've sort of looked at all these things and when you start to look at the choices you're giving are they satisfactory so outside of what you've defined when you say like if a player we're playing this are they going to like the choices that they're given and are they going to like how they play out look at the role playing versus the benefit if I'm playing a certain type of character do I get enough of a benefit that I don't feel like I'm being penalized for playing that sort of character and if there's a conflict you have to identify what that conflict is look at your critical and optional narratives that the player getting everything that he or she needs to actually understand what the story is again this is separate from the optional stuff or the optional stuff they can skip that's fine players that want to dig they're going to dig you don't need to like force it in their face you don't need to bribe them to look at it that's fine then you write your prose no problem in super easy well the point is that once you've identified the sort of range of this stuff it's not that necessarily writing prose is easy but that that spectrum has been codified much more so when you start to make your choices about how to write it it's in the perspective of what the player is going to appreciate so writing prose it's the own thing again but this is the setup for making branching dialogues so in conclusion in conclusion I screw this up one more time on you are choice architects when you're building this stuff there's nothing neutral about the choices you're making you have to plan it RPG players want good choices and that's very subjective but the idea is if you're supporting a type of character in a character range they want to feel like that's valid for them and the games that do this really well really make players love I mean they just love those games because they'll come up with create mana I see the craziest character concepts he will come up with for new Vegas and a lot of it is in their head a lot of it is sort of self narration about the sort of person they are where they came from some of the craziest stuff um but if the choice is supported then they feel really excited about it and they've really attached to it designer and player goals can be in conflict you're a narrative goals their desires as a player have to resolve those conflicts or at least accept the consequences of that conflict you can't resolve every single thing but you have to at least recognize it plan for it and accept it thank you very much [Music] I believe we have three microphones awesome hello so thank you so much for that great informative talk I had a lot of amazing techniques for for branching dialogues I'm wondering about your ear surgeon about players wanting good choices and I totally believe you about most players but it makes me think of players who look for hard choices because they're not validated right like players who want to play a pacifist front of a certain type of game because it's so hard because it's unrewarding I'm wondering would you would you ever make a game where there's a set of choices that would have no reward maybe until the very end and if you just like went without reward you get like a single flower or something like that you know I know I think I think that's valid because what you're talking about is sort of well there's a reward there but you have to identify what that reward is so people that play pass this runs because you can play Fallout New Vegas as a pacifist run and I don't think you have to actually kill anybody and people enjoy that and the reward is the fact that they didn't have to do that at all the thing is though inherently they know what's coming for them like they know that that's out there for example if we said hey you can do past this run of this and they got halfway through like psych you gotta kill this guy they would be livid and pissed because we betrayed their expectations we did not forecast what was going to happen there is actually an interesting thing where for example in Honest Hearts there's a part where you're trying to evacuate and you can play as a pacifist see if you go in there you say like I don't want to fight any of the white legs these tribals that are just butchering everyone and what Daniel says is if you don't kill these guys they're going to kill a ton of the sorrows this very innocent group of people and you can say like oh too bad I'm not going to fight and you can do it but but the choice of the but the consequence of that is forecast ahead of time to them and I think that the rule as long as you sort of communicate to them this is going to be the reward this is you know it's sort of self forecasting the case of pacifism because that is ahead of time they know I can do this the whole game supports it I can get through it I don't have to do it that's that's fine so you don't have to give them like a system reward like you get a you know a special bonus if you were a pacifist well I don't think you have to I mean I think if you want to that's fine again if you want to forecast that for a while we had challenges in New Vegas they're too hard to track but for what I camera the technical reason but we had pacifist like sort of rewards for people that got to level 10 or level 20 without killing anyone so you can build that in I think the important thing is one way or another you have to figure out what the player is actually going to enjoy because a lot of is very subjective um some people just like being a good person and like people responding to them very warmly in the world and so that can be a very good reward for them Thanks oh yeah thank you there's a great talk and fantastic game as well I think I was just wondering where you're presenting there with the example where you had the speech statistic and the notion that you can win a conversation and actually I found you know that was really effective in Fallout New Vegas because I could grow my character in that way because you know combat obviously is a gameplay system and you resolve it by winning and so you could have that ability to express yourself by growing in combat or express yourself by growing in conversation so if you remove the ability to win in a conversation or to have a sense of having varying degrees of success within that system how can you still enable players to feel like they're growing in that part of their character or that that role I think it's a difficult question because when we say that the player wins in there there's not actually a game there like the game if if anything the game is the strategic game to put your points in your speech skill but there's no real way there's no real way to forecast that stuff so if a player if a player has already put the points in it when they get to that point there is no gameplay there it's just combat you put your points in your skill but then you still have to like you know move around and actually choose when to shoot and when to take cover when to use your stems so if it is a very difficult problem and we see in games that have tried to tackle this Oblivion tried to game like sort of more make it more gamey and that I don't think a lot of people respondents were positively to that it's a difficult question I don't know what the exact right answer is I do feel that it doesn't have to be a skill that you put points into I think that dialogue can be a thing that you feel like you navigate your way through and you build reputation I think there's a lot more that we can do with indirect reactivity mechanics that make people feel like they're playing through that the important thing to me is that people stop and think and they make their choices and they're weighing the tactical and strategic things speech skill is not in conversation it's not a tactical choice nor a strategic choice and that's what it comes down to for me and I'm sorry I don't know where to go with that but I know that a lot of people commented on it and felt that it was about a place there's one more three to two great shrugging well can you talk a bit about the granularity of choices and where you figure out where to fall on that spectrum I think at the bottom of the spectrum of a game like Bioshock 2 where you had like four choices over the course of the game they were all incredibly memorable to me they felt they were very difficult choices to make and I remember every single one of them at the far end of the scale of course something like Fallout New Vegas were their constant choices and each one feels in a way a little less important because I mean that's a design choice in a way but then there's something in the middle like Alpha Protocol where fewer choices but they're more meaningful what do you do with that scale and how do you sort of decide where did it end up um I think I think a lot of it has to do with again the range that you want to support the range of reactivity you want to support and the range of expression that you want to support so I think early on in Bioshock you know I don't think the players on the under any illusions that they're going to be making a ton of choices and so there's limited numbers of choices limited amount of reactivity in Alpha Protocol it was I think actually in many ways Alpha Protocol is kind of the way to go as far as conversation mechanics ago because Alpha Protocol is is every conversation feels like a scene it has a beginning and an end and it like flows and people are talking about things and it doesn't sort of branch out into a big info dump or anything like that and you feel like you're making meaningful choices in there but I think ultimately it has to do with figuring out how much expression do you want to actually support in the game what do you think players are going to want to do if you think players are going to come up against these situations where they say I really wish that I could do something different in the situation then that's something you consider like well maybe we should have a choice here to determine how the player can go through it um but I think I think it's a stylistic thing on a game by game basis so I guess one more question at least um you made a point like about info dumping in dialog and also your reference to one of the characters making reference to something that actually wasn't in the game and I found my experience especially with Skyrim this didn't happen so much with fallout because I think maybe the writing was better but in Skyrim I felt the shallowness of kind of this big fleshed out world at points because there were characters that I wanted to interact with and know more about that didn't even have that kind of option to sort of engage further with them in a sense or that just that simple option like who are you to type a deal I was wondering like do you think there are better techniques within dialogue to sort of provide that kind of closure or bridge I do so I I think that the answers to things don't always lie in films but I think that we can take a lot of there's never a point well I shouldn't say never it's very rare there's a point of film where someone says hey I'm this guy like every character comes in I explained who I am in blah blah blah it's done in the context it's done in the context of the plot and so you learn about the character through the context of the struggle and that's one of the reasons again why that helper call was did a really great job because every scene was about all thing like two people or more in conflict they want something they're working towards it and in the course of that revelation you learn about the character of that person here's another thing um interesting conflict reveals tons about characters the sort of Jesus Hitler characters he finds his Kurtis enjoyable but when you like a character like Sophie and Sophie's Choice that wrecked her whole character or even if you look at um I was talking to my friend Terry yesterday about James Bond about Casino Royale so Casino Royale you kind of see young Daniel Craig um you see young James Bond as a sort of reckless dude who gets shaped through these difficult things that he has to deal with these difficult choices that yes to make and he seems I think a lot more interesting as a character because of those choices so when we when we instead of a character saying hey here's a quest if they become more emotionally engaged and involved in that and you become engaged with them I think that reveals a lot more interesting stuff about characters one more cool last nobody hooray we want everybody we won thank you so then thanks thank you all for coming and don't forget to fill out the evaluation thanks

Channel: GDC

Views: 214,041

Keywords: gdc, talk, panel, game, games, gaming, development, hd, design, fallout, fallout new vega, narrative games, Obsidian, black isle

Id: LR4OxNfzTvU

Length: 58min 26sec (3506 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 06 2017