Storytelling in games feels like it’s at a high tide. After playing Naughty Dog’s masterful Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End, I felt like I was finally able to bring closure to a story that stretched across many years of my life.
And at the Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3), Sony started out its press event with a beautiful scene from its God of War reimagining. The God of War games were hack-and-slash titles with plenty of violent action. The violence was still there in the new God of War trailer, but the developers at Sony Santa Monica added a touching father-son relationship. That story was very powerful, and it justified God of War’s new beginning.
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Above: Connor confronts a rogue android in Detroit: Become Human.
Everywhere you look, you can now find stories in video games. Quantic Dream also showed the power of story in the demo of its Detroit: Become Human game for the PlayStation 4. At E3, Quantic Dream’s David Cage revealed a scene from the game world where androids serve humans in the future. One android goes rogue, takes a little girl hostage, and threatens to jump off the ledge of a high-rise with her. Another android is sent in to negotiate. The gripping scene offers the player choices, which steadily improve or worsens the odds that the player and the girl will escape the scene alive. Combined with Quantic Dream’s extremely realistic 3D renderings of human faces, the interactive story immerses the player in the world and fully puts them in the shoes of the character.
Dan Connors, the cofounder of Telltale Games, told GamesBeat at the Gamelab event in Barcelona that interactivity is the key to making stories more powerful. Telltale made that discovery many years ago, and it became much more serious about it with high-emotion games such as The Walking Dead.
“Gamers are asking for it, in the right balance, in the right expectation,” Connors said. “There have always been gamers who are more interested in the campaign. Those gamers now have a few things to go to, like Telltale or Naughty Dog. Uncharted is an action game, but it’s still very much about the cinematics and the story. You know you’ll get a big story in those games.”
He added, “No matter what, context around the characters makes a big difference. That’s the reason why Madden NFL works and made-up names on the back doesn’t. You don’t have the same context. … I’m a big believer in taking serial content right now, some of the most popular content in the world, and making it interactive.”
Above: First person is the best person.
Stories keep players who enjoy single-player experiences going. Hugo Martin, creative director of id Software’s Doom, had a harder problem. Many Doom players simply want first-person shooter action and no cinematic story scenes to get in the way of the gameplay. In this year’s remake of the 23-year-old original game, Martin’s team chose to layer in a storyline for the players who wanted to linger longer in the levels and uncover more of the backstory.
The action players could skip these story elements, just as they could skip the collectible items in every level. Some of the story was passed along in cinematic scenes with a new narrator in the form of a giant robot named Samuel. More was passed along in the form of “echoes,” or brief recorded moments that played back when the player reached a particular place in the level. These scenes weren’t skippable.
But still more of the backstory was delivered in the form of tablets that the player found. A demon read the words of these tablets aloud, and they told more about the Doom Slayer, the player’s own character. Action players can skip these tablets, and they can even skip the single-player campaign altogether and go online for multiplayer.
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Above: Elena and Nathan lead a boring life at the outset of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End.
“[The Doom marine] has a bit of a story, but we felt like there was an opportunity there to do some more cool stuff with him,” Martin said. “But we didn’t want to spell it all out. We wanted to go with more of that approach that involved a lot of audience participation, to fill out what the story was for themselves.”
The list of great stories goes on, with titles like Until Dawn in 2015 and The Last of Us and BioShock Infinite in 2013. Bruce Straley, the co-creator of Uncharted 4, said in an interview earlier this spring, “I don’t think you could do what we’ve done with this game in a film. I don’t think that we could draw out the emotions that we do, that conflict.”
All of these games show that there are infinite ways to integrate story into games, where the storyteller balances the need to tell the story with the player’s need to be interactive — and to create the story themselves.
Disclosure: The organizers of Gamelab paid my way to Barcelona. Our coverage remains objective.