At a recent event we got the chance to sit down and have a chat with one of Arkane Studios' creative directors Raphael Colantonio to talk about upcoming game Prey, and he revealed a little bit about the approach the studio takes to narrative.
When we asked how they go about achieving a balance between gameplay and story, Colantonio said: "It's one of the hardest parts, and I think the way you do it... I think there are several ways you can tell a story in a game. You could see it as, there's a piece of narration that's a blocking cinematic or something, and then you give the controls to the player, he plays for a while, shoots monsters, whatever [...] then we block [them] again, tell [them] a bit more of the story."
"In our case we never do that, the blocking part. It's all gameplay and in the middle we put all those bits of story and the stories are either people talking or it's more like environmental storytelling, it's more about we give you the objective [...] so the objective is telling the story, which is a good technique as opposed to tell you 'oh the objective is to go there but [you] don't know why but then we're going to tell you a piece of story once you're there.' It's more like what you do is the actual story."
Colantonio went on to describe more ways of environmental storytelling, such as notes, and gave the example of potentially coming across a dead person with a gun pointed to their head, which doesn't directly tell you story or events but uses the surroundings to tell you what happened.
Which forms of storytelling do you prefer in games?