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Giving players more credit for their creativity (devcom 2024) - Devcom interview with Kelsey Beachum, Super Evil Mega Corp
We chatted with the studio's senior writer to talk about new narratives in video games, the role of the player as the main driver of the story and how to give them the freedom to expand the game over and above the development itself. Also about her work on future releases such as Rebel Moon or Avowed.
Audio transcription
"Alright, we're here in Germany for the DEFCON on the eve of Gamescom and I'm here joined by Kelsey who was giving a keynote yesterday which was pretty much about narrative design, so thank you so much for joining us."
"Which would you say was the main takeaway from what you shared with the audience?
My biggest takeaway is probably that story and the rest of the game, they're not two separate things and the more that you can integrate them, the better it's going to be both for the story and for the game itself overall."
"I love the title, like you're begging people stop calling it a story wrapper.
That's common among the development community, right?
To say, hey, now we need a story wrapper.
Yeah, it is. We have a tendency to kind of almost make the game first and then think, oh, we'll throw the story on later and really there's so much that story can do to support gameplay and all other game elements that if you were approaching it from that perspective of keeping them as separate things we're leaving so much on the table, especially in terms of the tools we have available to tell story."
"So is it a matter of the timeline for the development for narrative designers to be on the table from the get-go?
Is it a matter of, I don't know, arranging the calendar differently or counting on a narrative designer together with game designers?
There's a lot that can help and there's a lot of reasons it happens."
"I think some of the best ways you can possibly align are to just make sure that you're aligned in terms of creatively what everyone's making, what the player fantasy is and make sure that we're all doing our part in our respective departments to kind of achieve that and flesh that out and build that out for the player experience."
"Beyond that, it's great if you can have narrative built directly into your pipeline.
We do love working with everybody, but it's hard as a department to have to talk to everybody at once and chase them all down.
So if you can build it directly into your pipeline then you just get used to kind of having that conversation, that back and forth."
"Also, it helps if you get narrative on board early for sure and make sure you've built out enough time for narrative and gameplay to have a conversation effectively.
What you do with narrative should impact gameplay a little bit and what gameplay is doing should absolutely impact narrative and it should be a conversation back and forth as long as you can."
"Most of the times, I guess, the premise comes from the game design itself so it's not that you can change that in terms of genres.
For example, you get open world narrative, which 10, 20 years ago was the way to innovate.
Then you got role-like narrative, procedural narrative, and then non-linear stories."
"So how do you deal with these innovations in terms of genres which you are acquainted with?
Sorry, how do I deal with the innovation?
For example, you are into non-linear narrative, right?
So sometimes these genre innovations also impact the way you have to work with narrative."
"Sure.
And non-linear is its own very specific wheelhouse for sure.
But I think there's kind of a flexibility stack ranking in a lot of ways where if you've kind of got your player fantasy down or your core message, that sort of thing, and then you can step to your world building and you can flesh that out."
"And then from there, you can kind of flesh out your story.
The story itself is going to have a little more flexibility than if you were to go back and change the core player fantasy.
So a lot of the same techniques still apply."
"I think a lot of it just depends on when we're innovating, we use a lot of different narrative tools in different interesting ways.
That's kind of our toolkit to create an interesting or an innovative narrative.
And I think the more we innovate on this stuff, the more we're moving away from just straight modal conversations that are functionally cut scenes or cut scenes themselves even."
"Not that I'm aligning cut scenes as a concept, just we do overuse them.
We've got to be honest with ourselves.
So the more I think we can tap into interesting narrative tools and the more we can kind of get story to mesh with gameplay, the more organically those stories will happen."
"And the more interesting a player experience it's going to be, regardless of what specific, whether it's non-linear or linear open world or what have you.
That's perhaps what happened with Outer Wilds.
So how do you remember that experience and how you approached this very specific, very special type of narrative?
It was definitely the case that narrative and design, I mean, our creative director really thinks of narrative as exactly just being design."
"So we were never really separate in that regard.
That helped immensely.
And then we also had really clear creative goals.
We wanted the player to be curious and ask questions about the world around them."
"And then we wanted to reward the player for acting on that curiosity.
And it sounds like a really simple premise.
In some ways it is.
But that was such a clear narrative directive for me to say, when I was working with the narrative team, to say, okay, so what we need here is we need to make enough about the world to make the player curious."
"We need to be rewarding that curiosity.
I can understand what we're trying to do.
And we're functionally doing the same thing that gameplay is doing.
And sometimes it's gameplay and narrative working in tandem."
"So narrative makes you curious about a thing.
Gameplay, you act on the thing.
You get rewarded with a bit of narrative that teaches you more about how to explore or navigate the world so you can get to different places."
"So the intersection of those two things was absolutely vital.
And then another really fun thing we did was the text translator tool.
I'm a big fan of that because otherwise we would have had to do just massive walls of text the whole time.
And you'd have to be pressing A and getting through it and getting bored."
"It doesn't give the player agency in the sense of it doesn't change what the text actually is.
But it gives you a little bit of, you get to control how you're interacting with it.
And I think that's satisfying for people.
I think that feels good in a way that a wall of text is just never going to feel."
"So experimenting with how we actually relayed the text and how the player interacted with it itself was fantastic for us.
Yeah, and I think that happened with this game.
So we've mentioned several innovative narrative designs in the past two decades.
Which would you say can be the next big thing or fresh, unique thing in terms of narrative design in the upcoming years?
That is a great question."
"I think, like you look at the success of Elden Ring and that's told in a very non-traditional way.
I think we're finally starting as an industry because we're a young industry to begin with.
And then story being taken seriously in games is newer still.
And I think we're finally starting to realize that when players get to control pulling the information rather than having it forced on them."
"And having to, you know, here's a big old lore dump.
We don't care about that.
But when we defeat a boss in Elden Ring and we pick up the loot drop and we look at the flavor text and we're like, oh, this was a whole story.
That's obviously a very specific style of storytelling."
"So I'm not trying to say that's going to be every game.
But I think that notion that we want the player to reach for it themselves and take it for themselves and kind of understand the meaning.
We're starting to give players a lot more credit for being intelligent.
And I really want to see that trend continue."
"I remember with The Witness, for example, having this sense of epiphany.
And no matter the point of the game you were, each player would have this revelation in a moment.
And it's something very, very tricky to achieve.
So I think it reminds me of that."
"What can you tell us about what you guys are working now on?
Rebel Moon, Super Evil Megacorp.
What can you share?
Not too much, unfortunately."
"But I can say that we are working on the Rebel Moon IP.
We're making a game for that.
And I am loving the team that I am with currently, which is fantastic.
It has been very refreshing in what can be a very difficult industry to find people that I'm just thrilled to go to work with."
"My boss in particular, I hope he never sees this now that I've said this, but he's been so good in crafting the narrative department to be what it is.
And I'm really excited about the attitudes of the studio and their openness toward where narrative could go from here.
Have you worked with licensed stories before? Or lore or universes?
That's a good question."
"I've jumped into existing IP before.
I worked on the two Outer Worlds DLCs.
So I had to kind of jump in and say like, I actually think almost everything I did at Obsidian.
I also worked on the Avowed game that's coming out."
"So I had to get into that IP and kind of get up to date quickly.
And I very quickly, it's funny how fast you go from knowing nothing about it to, oh, well, that happens on this planet because of this thing.
And, you know, the economy is this way."
"And you're like, where did that come from?
Why do I know that?
So it can be really fun, honestly, to play in other people's spaces like that.
As much as I love new IPs, obviously."
"Sun is coming up, it's blinding you.
Sorry about that.
I think that's enough.
Thank you so much for your time and enjoy the show."
Gamescom
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