WHY IS THERE SUCH A FOCUS ON PROMOTING NARRATIVE BEFORE GAMEPLAY? Alexander Zoll: At Gunzilla, we’re creating the next evolution of multiplayer shooters. We want to expand the genre and make it attractive for players even if they don’t consider themselves being shooter players, as we think there is a lot of potential for it that hasn’t been explored in the past. Shooters offer many elements that are attractive for a wide range of gamers – be it their settings, design, experiences, or content that players find and love in other genres as well. At the same time, current multiplayer shooters often aren’t accessible for players as long as they aren’t die hard-genre fans. That’s something where we want to give more players the opportunity to enjoy our game. One of the key approaches to do so is to emphasise narrative elements, which opens a lot of additional opportunities for the whole development team.
“If you’re creating some kind of entertainment experience for your audience and you’re NOT thinking about story, then you’re not doing your job properly.”
i.e., but the places you sink your time into rarely evolve, not to mention that they never acknowledge your actions. You have no impact beyond your personal result in a given session and truth be told, you don’t really care about whatever context the game is happening into, which leaves a lot of players on the fence while they would happily join if they had
a sense of progression and impact on the world. This is what we’re aiming for.
Olivier Henriot: It’s not so much about promoting narrative over gameplay rather than matching the two into the perfect marriage. Integrating a meaningful narrative into a multiplayer shooter is always tricky, but we’re convinced we’ve found the right formula, by relying on a strong fantasy (the overall proposition to the player). We want to offer the players more than just a series of disconnected play sessions and to give them a sense of persistence and belonging, in order to make them the heroes of their own story, in a rather competitive environment. Also, beyond the game, we’re building an IP from the ground up so whenever we come up with an idea we can’t execute in the game, it’s not lost, simply folded for future use on a different format.
WHY DOES IT MATTER THAT A MULTIPLAYER SHOOTER HAS SUCH A FOCUS? Olivier Henriot: In most of the current multiplayer shooters, what you get is a series of moments disconnected from one another. Sure, you get to unlock items and complete a battlepass
Richard Morgan: Well, it’s the old question isn’t it – why have story in games? And what I find fascinating is the way the industry has been dragging this issue with it since forever! Go back to the early Doom days and you have people saying story in video games is like story in porn; it’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important. And then you get the rise of games like Max Payne and Half-Life and, to be honest, even Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and that quote’s proven to be crock of shit. Then we end up fighting the same battle all over again with the rise of open world games – there’s this idea that you don’t need a story, players will just wander about and do stuff. And then Far Cry 3 comes along and kicks the argument into touch all over again. And now I think we’re refighting the same boring old battle over again with multiplayer shooters. But if you look at every multiplayer shooter developer in the industry right now, they are all, once again, chasing story! The truth is that story is how we make sense of the universe, not just in our fiction but in real life as well. Telling stories is innately human, it’s a huge part of who we are as a species and how we got to where we are, and that’s never going to go away. Story colours everything that we do, it’s how we make things matter, whether in our real lives or in our entertainment. And that means that if you’re creating some kind of entertainment experience for your audience and you’re NOT thinking about story, then you’re not doing your job properly. It’d be like trying to paint a picture but refusing to use half of the paint spectrum! I mean, you COULD do that – but why would you?
“Integrating a meaningful narrative into a multiplayer shooter is always tricky, but we’re convinced we’ve found the right formula, by relying on a strong fantasy”
22 | MCV/DEVELOP March 2022
WHAT GAMES AND GAMEPLAY EXPERIENCES DO YOU LOOK TO AS INSPIRATION IN YOUR ROLE? Neill Blomkamp: Interestingly I am not pulling from games, the whole project for me is about tone, and design, and creating the world. Talented people like Scott Probin figure out how to make that into gameplay.
Richard Morgan: For me, it’s anything that has engendered in me a strong emotional reaction, an investment in the gameworld beyond the simple urge to execute the core mechanics and stay alive. That could be anything from The Last of Us – for its intense depth of character and backstory –
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