Destiny as an Episodic Narrative

by Leviathan , Hotel Zanzibar, Thursday, April 04, 2013, 14:20 (4040 days ago) @ breitzen

Just because it works in television, doesn't mean it will work in a game.

It does make me a little nervous but I'm a sucker for campaign so if they can pull off an awesome 25+ hour campaign (with side quests and exploration) ill be all over it. I

The emotional connection does worry me, it's hard to get the kind of emotional tug that movies/tv/very scripted games do in an "open world". But bungie's one of the best for a reason, so yeah.

I think the best way to create emotional connections in an open world is to design your sandbox to allow the player himself to create his own powerful experiences, then allow the designed stories to support and resonate with those unique tales.

For example, I love the Elder Scrolls games not so much for their individual stories, but the appeal of the world and history they created. Sure, sometimes the quests tell a great yarn, but in an open world, I care more about the richness that's all around me - the factions and their thousand years of history, the prejiduces of one species for the other, the political tensions that are brewing. It's less about what actually happens, and more about what could happen in a game like this.

Once upon a time... I had one horse for the longest time - he wasn't a character but it was something I had grown used to. One day in the fields of Whiterun I kind of got a pack of Mammoths and Giants angry at me while I was trying to gather some of my shot arrows. I look back and see my dead horse flying into the hills. In anger, I charged the giants and mammoths!

Quickly, I realized that was a terrible mistake and started tactically retreating (i.e. running away) and followed a river north. Eventually, I felt I had lost them, and just then an arrow whizzes past. I had apparently found myself on the outskirts of bandit camp, fortified with a tall fence, gates, and watchtowers. Great!

Now I was running south again, away from a troop of shirtless crazies and then I had an idea - the mammoths and giants were still following me from afar! So I led the two groups to each other and BAM an epic battle started. 10 minutes later, there was a mammoth inside of a fort throwing bandits into the air, and I felt I had avenged my horse's death.

So I think the key with open-world design is to create factions, npcs, and stories that resonates with your freedom of choices. If you know something like the above is possible, you don't necessarily force it on the player, you just set it up so that it can happen, and if it does, it will be even more powerful when the game's characters are responsible or reactive to these events occurring. I'm not saying the Elder Scrolls games are perfect at this, but that it hits a few of these elements every once in a while.