Telling Tales With BioWare

GameSpot and IGN have each provided us with some coverage of a storytelling discussion panel hosted by BioWare senior writer Mac Walters and senior cinematic designer Paul Marino during this year’s Austin Game Developers Conference. A snip from GameSpot’s article:

Breaking down BioWare’s process of cinematic design, Walters noted that it is built on six fundamentals. The first is writing, which provides the dialogue as well as narrative in general. Audio–which encompasses voice work and music–then provides another immersive layer, followed by setting, or key locations in a game. Camera, which provides a filter for the scene, is an integral tool in conveying emotion, and digital actors provide yet one more layer of cinematic design, thanks to their ability to express emotion through their faces. A hallmark of BioWare storytelling, player choice rounds out the design philosophy, as it allows players to choose the parts of the narrative they want to pursue as well as how it will unfold.

Walters and Marino then delved into the history of cinematic design. In what they called The Dark Ages, this design style had its roots in writing, primarily with text-based adventures. Here, game designers relied upon the player to set the cinematic stage, filling in the blanks due to technology constraints. The highlight of The Dark Ages, for Marino and Walters at least, was an early 1990s Amiga game titled Another World (aka Out of this World). With this game, designers were just beginning to meld writing with a filmic visual style, they said.

And a snip from IGN’s article:

The talk then gravitated to the Renaissance, where it was slowly demonstrated that you don’t have to put all the narrative cues into text to get players to pick up on them. The start of the period in the early to mid nineties is characterized by an “explosion of games that started taking advantage of new technologies,” said Walters. “PCs were becoming popular, CD-ROMs and processors were becoming much more affordable, and all of a sudden there were all these games that were coming out,” he said. “In hindsight we can look back and compare them to today’s games and, obviously, not a great cinematic experience, but this is where it really started to take shape.”

In several ways, at this point in history, the video game industry started to imitate much of the presentation of something like television or movies, but at the same time moved in its own direction with audio cues and player choice. Examples cited were System Shock in 1994, Blade Runner in 1997, Half-Life in 1998, Anachronox in 2002, and Knights of the Old Republic in 2003 where player choice was heavily emphasized. Titles like this paved the way for today’s Golden Age, Marino said.