Do, Don’t Show: Narrative Design in Far Cry 2

Patrick Redding, Ubisoft Montreal

Far Cry 1: Invigorated setting of beauty and menace.  First third had a lot of lushness and realism, menace of armies of mercenaries.  Ubisoft decided to buy the brand, take it in other directions as well. 

Freedom to explore all the spaces:  systems / spatiality / humanity? 

Realism with focus.  Build on that notion of realism, but not for realism’s sake.  Use it in a way to let the player parse the game and its systems not just from the game but because they are human.  Wind blowing in a particular way they can make reasonable and intuitive choices based on that.

Immersion with Consequences.  First person can be harder for immersion because you are surrounded by this bubble.  How to selectively overcome that barrier?  Remind the player of their physical presence in the world. 

Meaning backed up by mechanics.  About something the player could actually experience.

Vision:  Themes > Intentional Play.  What does it mean to be a social animal?    A lot of far cry is around this dangerous setting.  So take other elements associated with those environments, how do they translate into a fast action shooter environment?  For humans… betrayal and subversion are your teeth and claws.  Ultimately you will run around with guns, sure, but this other element could create a human space.  Player input: every bullet counts.  Firing in the real world doesn’t just do health damage – fear, pain, uncertainty.  Causing a disruption of the social order.

Island of Dr. Moreau (FC1) > Heart of Darkness (FC2).  Colonial ambitions lost, failed adventures in Africa.  Any human being, no matter how civilized, when staring into the abyss will find it staring back.  Choice between false veneer of civility and the savage truth.  A journey up a river into the mind of a madman.   Modern version: Apocalypse Now.  Brings in a lot of modern shooter elements which are useful.  An irregular battle.  But making just a boat simulator wouldn’t be all that fun:  really just an allegory.  Player is in a fictional African wartorn country to track an arms dealer and terminate them.

Theme branches to game mechanics and story.  Red Harvest (Dashiel Hammett).  Yojimbo / Fist Full of Dollars.  Solitary gunslinger, anti-hero, strides into town corrupt and bereft of pity.  Disgusted by the pettiness of the warring bosses he doles out hard justice by manipulating the factions to take it to the guys in the charge.  Perfect model for FC2, could be broken down into great symmetry of gameplay.

Surviving in a social wilderness.  By the end of the game if you are piled in bodies you can lose the sense of the stakes.  The sting of betrayal is hard to ever get over.  Augment the stakes of a first person shooter by getting that sense of social survival.

Selective awareness of one’s physical presence in the world.  Player not aware of his avatar 100% of the time, focus on times when you DO have to do that, getting into a car, stubbing your toe.  Very scalable, could keep cutting away until we get to the core. 

World is not just an Africa-shaped arena.  Savannah, jungle, desert.  Don’t really all exist in one place so invent a fictional place.  All the real African conflicts are loaded with history that we don’t actually want to be tied up with.  Space where it makes a difference that it is In an African setting.  50 square km space with all these different biomes.   

How do you present a story when you don’t have any idea where or when the player will be?  Player controls the order + scope of missions.  Player has the hand on the throttle – either directly and consciously or just indirectly through his actions.

So what does this say about our story?  Premise: distinct from story.  It’s the thing we do have control over, the formal constraint we are imposing on the game.  The player is going to go to wartorn Africa and set these factions against each other.  Premise as distinct from the story, which emerges from the player’s actual gameplay.  Many ways to experience the story.

Enacted, embedded, emergent.  Jenkins: Game design as narrative architecture.  Enacted: as player picks up the box, the traditional story structure.  Embedded:  environmental narrative, dialogue and exploratory narrative.  Emergent:  player has a story that unfolds in their head that is profoundly personal and has everything to do with their gameplay choices and personal interpretations.

Illusion of continuity > anything else.  Open world with a lot of stuff, so what is primary function of the narrative?  To maintain that illusion of continuity.  Doing a lot of moving around (in space and systems), lots of chance to trip over discontinuities, so help guide the player away from those.

Be stochastic.  Game world that is large and filled with people and activity is a noisy place.  High fidelity environments but struck by how “quiet” everything is – verisimilitude, a dead world.  We want a live world with activity, characterized by chaos.  Not randomness – unpredictability that we still as human beings can parse.  Deliver story content using mechanisms that feel natural.

Exploit the urge to anthropomorphize.  Projecting intent on simple / stylized characters.  That weird “Mii” moment of projecting your soul.  Looking at a baby seal.  Very effective tool to offload some of the processing burden onto the player – not their console, but their head.  Cues to suggest a level of depth and intelligence but let them fill in the blanks.

Game ingredients > story inputs.  Take as much information as we could from the player based on their use of the game ingredients.  Normal FPS = moving around the world in a Teflon bubble.  Thin pipe / fat pipe bubble.  Awesome output in rendering and effects, but player only has a tiny trickle of input.  We weren’t making a conversation game.  How do we take those core mechanics of running around and blowing stuff up, doing missions, and use that as our story input?  Track what the player is doing, assign some value to it, and then use that to dynamically assemble to the story.

Set the game flow – then break it.  Act  > Mission > Objective >Sequence.  Devise this gameflow and critical path, and then figure out how to break that into pieces.  Find smallest pieces, then link those pieces together. 

Pull, don’t push.  Set beacons up that would draw the player voluntarily to places where interesting story moments could take place.  Can’t happen uniformly over 50 sq. km.  Let the player build that intuition and learn to trust it.

Player character belongs to this moral universe.  Giant cast of NPCs?  How to understand what they do, and how the player fits into that.  First-person game, we’re not providing them with a lengthy dossier of their background but give them an empty vessel that they can pour their own ideas into.   This is my vehicle for entering this dangerous world and drawing my own conclusion.  The Gordon Freeman route.  Leave the character a bit of a cipher – this is about universal concepts.  Show that belonging by making this family of surrogate NPCs you can encounter and interact with.  NPCs aren’t just talking heads.  Connection to friendly NPCs: buddies.  Player is picking his avatar out of a set of characters that already belong in the world, this became very important to the game.

Reputation is a gate.  Are we making a hybrid RPG / shooter?  Well, there are some RPG elements.  Rather than using player action in a blunt way to gate content, instead we built out a notion of reputation into “infamy”, something mechanical that the player can build through low level game mechanics.  By building that up the player can fundamentally alter how the AI in the world interacts with him.  Situations where you walk into a cease fire area, there is a fundamental attitude shift.  A source of the players power: to be infamous, and apply their creativity to being cruel and bastard-like.

Cultivate AI ecosystems.   How to have these scores of characters moving around and not being completely robotic?  Solution had implications for the story and the level design.  Giving player 360 degrees of freedom, can approach key locations from any direction.  Can’t create levels like in Rainbow 6.  Needed a more stochastic way to deploying enemy AI in the game world.  One approach: Sims like method, primitive set of needs and desires that the AI can address through affordances scattered in the game world.  I need to go on patrol > there’s a patrol route.  I need a rest > there’s a break spot to smoke a cigarette.  Creating a social wilderness via AI, creating social needs.  Anthropomorphize.  Dialogue between AI are about the events going on in the world, the player’s AI.  Manage challenge but also manage story.

The challenges:  Getting the player’s attention (continuity design).  Generating tons of content to listen to and explore.  Huge branching tree of combinatoric mess?  Dynamic drama management – buckets of parameterized micro-content.  When we do a “call” on the story, we can take a snapshot of the world and based on that state select the correct pieces of micro content.  Affords us a level of flexibility – those buckets of content aren’t wasted.  Reputation is relevant on the next mission as well, mission history continues relevance, etc.  Conserve a large quantity of content (anim and dialogue) so that we are literally not wasting it and only hearing 10%. 

Locations of narrative significance.  Player can express themselves stylistically in a lot of different ways.  Rambo-ing in vs tactical approach vs stealth.   Need to be prepared for the fact that the midlevel gameplay loop might be radically different so the story presentation needs to be different too.

Don’t show the seams:  Systemic vs Choreographed.  Need an overlap between the two extremes:  blurting out tactics vs staged theatrics.  How to avoid the empty space between the two poles?  Beautiful scenes vs random profanity.  Rely on depth of behavior.  Not about baked, scripted events that play out exactly one way but have a lot of generic content that we can use in lots of places, in lots of ways.  Tradeoffs, for sure.  But the world becomes a lot more interactive.  Bricks of micronarrative that are the smallest pieces of content:  has to be voice recorded, animated, etc. 

Don’t presume to know what is in the player’s heart.  We can do all this stuff but we can’t know how the player feels as a result.  Might react with antipathy or hatred towards a character we want to be sympathetic.  Don’t tell them about the human cost, make sure they can experience it first hand, something they have to deal with.  Whether they care about it or not is not our problem, we can just make sure they experience it.

Story is not just about the data: it is also about the systems.  Ratio of systemic vs scripted, 4:1 or 5:1. 

Roles?  Traditional structure:  CD > AD > LD > Writer, loops back for shoehorning in.  Not going to work for us.  Dedicated narrative designer in the center of the structure to work closely with writer as well as everyone else in that graph.  Keep the writer not doing book-keeping.  Focus on the parts you can make shine. 

Three act narrative structure is a trap!  Tempting to get sucked into, human beings instinctively know what this is.  Farther you carry this model harder to let go of parts you want the player to have control over.  What if the story ignores the players choice of ingredients?  Periodically abduct the player into the storyline? Not the best way.  Pinch-bottle story architecture.  Story guides the player away from the hard limits of the simulation space.  Story helps player intuit where he should be to understand the limits of his own agency.  So at those key moments the cushion pinches together and forces the player into one location.  A little jarring but not as much as being beaten on the head and abducted.

Authored story events.  If that island of story is just plopped in, player will move into it abruptly.  Instead we want “shallows” where the nature of their agency can shift slightly on the way in.  In general make the experience more analog, don’t want binary transitions between gameplay and narrative. 

Lessons from sports:  Snatch victory from the jaws of defeat > much better than some story we wrote. 

Decouple premise from story!

Exploit the narrative fallacy.  Humans interpret random noise as a storyline – focus on the exciting parts and ignore the other stuff.

What do the players actually do?  Playing the Red Harvest scenario – playing two factions off of each other.  Low level – shooting bullets.  But kill vs wound or putting damage in to disrupt the social order.  Subverting the faction’s goals.  Missions have simple objectives but take the suggestions from their buddies as a way to augment the outcome of the mission.  “Be careful what you wish for” – taking it further, boosting infamy, making the conflict worse.  At the high level they are altering the specific order of missions they are given through the act of betrayal.  Throw more uncertainly in the system by escalating on both sides.  Destroying the status quo.  This is how the player moves the story forward.

Player spends a lot of time in that space between choreographed and systemic. 

What do the systems do?  Infamy twists the power relationship of the survival game.  As you build infamy up your are altering your power.  Making you tougher, more terrible, more likely to be more terrible in combat – positive feedback loop to create more carnage and disarray. 

Infamy progression – three act structure but used in a way that is systemic.  Infamy as a stat clamped to where we want it to be in that structure.  Finish an act, suffer a defeat and reset the player’s infamy.  Lets the player compare where it is between the top of the heap and the bottom.  Survival is not just physical – status has been reduced. 

Malaria – a mechanical drawback.  Stricken with malaria, starts out sick.  Immediately has to find medicine and overcome the symptoms.  Helps to restrain the player’s range, but also limits the player’s maximum health.  Malaria medicine can only be gotten from civilians.  Show the player the human cost in those civilians.  Doing small tasks for them the player secures that medicine.  Whether he cares or not he is confronted by it at every opportunity.  MaxHealth progression different from infamy – when your infamy is maxed out civilians wont cooperate and then you can only rely on your infamy and you have to become a monster because you are too sick to do anything else.

Buddies > Objectives > Infamy.  Build history by doing those objectives for a specific buddy, increased chances of that buddy being implicated in gameplay later on.  Building social cohension – lowest level you have life and death power – you can choose to interact in a friendly or unfriendly way.  If they rescue the player in combat they are at risk and can be killed.  If you take the mission they offer that also exposes to risk.  That family is something you are forced to deal with, your social survival is tied up with the survival of these characters. 

Friendship isn’t an optimization problem.  Didn’t want them to be specialized, or be a burden where he was tempted to cull them out.  Develop authentic feelings, even if they are bad.  Antipathy is better than apathy. 

Social dynamics shaped the world.