can be narratively threaded in that way that we were just talking about? There’s all these strategies we can employ,
which get beyond the idea of stories being some kind of delivery mechanism of instructions for telling your plot – which we sometimes think of in that way. That’s kind of what ‘lore’ is, but that’s got nothing to do with storytelling and the way that human beings tell stories to each other. We’re supposed to tantalise and surprise and delight and make things that are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside. I think it’s exciting to find ways to do that in an interactive medium where you also have the ability to change and use choices and use branching. That’s really exciting to me. Most people’s experience of playing The
Walking Dead was that they played it once and thought it was amazing. They played it a second time and they saw how the wires worked, and it kind of took away from the first playthrough experience. People maybe even got burned by that because it was such a famous example. That is interesting to me as well. Like, how do you make a version of that Telltale game where the second playthrough doesn’t make the game worse; it makes it better? Are we just throwing our hands in the air and saying that that’s impossible? I don’t think it is. So how do we go about solving that problem? How do we turn that from a bug into a feature? How do we make branching games where the desire to see the alternative option doesn’t take away from the first playthrough, but embellishes it? Again, I don’t think this is theoretical. I think this is something we did in 80 Days and we did in Heaven’s Vault and we’re doing in Highland Song. I want to talk about the ways that we’re doing that, but they’re quite specific, and also… I haven’t written the talk yet!
It wasn’t just subsequent playthroughs that hurt Telltale’s games, it was arguably that they weren’t seen to evolve significantly from one episodic title to the next. I think some of that came from the fact that the structure was fairly clear. Like when you played the game, you could kind of see how it was working almost all the time. I don’t think there was much about it that was mysterious and hidden. If you take a look at storytelling from a completely
other extreme; when you have people who get obsessed about the lore of Elden Ring, like they are embedded in this mystery the whole time and that have a sense that they’re never going to know everything and they’re always grasping at threads. It’s like the complete opposite of a Telltale game, because it’s not taking you
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through the narrative in a very steady way, but it’s interesting. That’s a kind of narrative through entirely player-driven exploration of the narrative space. Right, so can we do something in between? Can we do something that uses both in a clever way? Yes, I think we can.
So how could a studio approach this problem, assuming they saw it as a problem? Is it about creating more content, or better design? I think it’s everything. They’re all just strategies. But content is a weird word, though. Because, how do you box content? For a game like 80 Days, we made lots and lots of individual bits of story and they were all new. When you see a new one, you’ve opened a new packet. You go through a new set of cards, you go through a new book. But in something like Heaven’s Vault we don’t
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