both kind of roguelike in structure, but they’re linear in narrative. Hades starts on your first loop and ends on your hundredth, but it’s a single story told across those loops. It’s not the same story retold in a different way. Even Outer Wilds isn’t about a time loop, it is actually a linear story that happens to reuse the same period of time over and over again as the character’s knowledge deepens and learns. Not every replayable
“That aspect of writing is something that we don’t think about very much in games, mostly because we’re so busy trying to make the damn things work.”
narrative needs to be a time loop. 80 Days is not a time loop. Heaven’s Vault isn’t… well, it sort-of is but isn’t. A Highland Song definitely isn’t. I’m increasingly interested in what the gameplay
structures are that help players to accept this idea of repeat replayability, but also the narrative structures that reward people. There’s a lot of space for discussion there, but I do think it’s strange that no one in games talks about this particularly as a feature. We talk a lot about New Game Plus for mechanics, but very little about New Game Plus for narrative.
But what about a game where someone is satisfied with its conclusion and doesn’t want to have that changed as an experience or in their memory? I think that goes to what you were saying about expectations. People have this model of ‘There’s a game, I make my choices, I get my result and then I’m done.’ Like it was some kind of storytelling machine. Like it was some kind of personality quiz. You never do them again to see what other answers you can get. Well, okay, but how does that stack up against the films that we watch again and again,
20 | MCV/DEVELOP April/May 2023
because we love being in that world, or we understand a little bit more about the characters when we rewatch it? I grew up watching a TV series called Babylon 5 and
one of its core things was that if you watched it again, you’d see things; little moments between characters, which made sense in the context of what you knew from the end of the story, because you knew how these characters were going to develop and the writers knew that in advance when they set everything up beautifully. It’s full of hints and signs and reflections and things that tie the world together in interesting ways when you rewatch it. Were they designing this thing to be rewatched? That doesn’t make sense in the network TV era, particularly because it was very rare to have things on video at home to watch them again. But they were; they were constructing a narrative that made sense within and of itself in interesting ways.
So less about choice and consequence and having more callbacks, perhaps? We’re not limited to one strategy or another. The question really is, as writers and narrative designers, what tools have we got in our toolbox? Well, we’ve got choice and branching, definitely. Something like 80 Days, says ‘let’s just write so much content that you can’t possibly see it, and then you’ll want to come back and see some more.’ In Heaven’s Vault we had a limited number of 3D locations you can explore, but the order in which you explore them substantially changes your understanding of each one. So the context is the thing that changes even if the assets don’t, and you can have very different experiences as a result of that. Okay, why don’t we do both of those things then, if you make something with a mystery in it as well, those mysteries
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