Roads Not Taken: Building Better Narratives for Games, Part Two

When you curl up with a good novel, you expect the writer to take you on a journey. 

If the author’s any good, you won’t anticipate every plot beat. You’ll be surprised by the twists and turns of the story, and characters will do and say things you couldn’t have anticipated on page 1. The implicit author’s promise that they’ll deliver a satisfying story keeps readers turning pages.

The goal is no different for developers of interactive narratives. Game designers are looking to keep players engaged from session to session. 

But unlike a novel, a game’s narrative is just one of the many tools in a designer’s toolbox. The hook that keeps players coming back to an interactive experience is more often the gameplay, with narrative playing a supporting role. 

As I wrote about a few weeks ago, some games are more successful at weaving narrative and gameplay than others.

It’s common for developers to shove narrative elements off to the side. You get a slice of gameplay, then see a cutscene that moves the story forward, all while you mash the space bar impatiently to skip it and get back to gameplay.

Sometimes – for instance, Blizzard’s work at the peak of the studio’s talent – the cutscenes are a reward in themselves. The best are visually stunning, dramatic, and powerful – great for E3 trailers, though still eventually playing second fiddle to the gameplay.

Compared to a decade ago, developers have a much better understanding of the power of strong narrative as a driver of player engagement. At the same time, too many triple-A studios fall into the old trap of relying on the traditional gameplay-cutscene-gameplay-cutscene flow.

At the same time, narrative designers often struggle to reconcile their desire to tell specific stories with player expectations of flexibility and agency.

In today’s world of innovative open-world designs and procedural systems – especially given the forthcoming revolution that AI technology is bound to bring to the industry – I believe teams will find more success incorporating narrative elements directly into gameplay.

Fortunately, the last few years have seen the rollout of genuinely compelling designs worthy of emulation.

Going Big: Deliver Narrative Shock and Awe

Last year’s big hit Baldur’s Gate 3 is a textbook example of a development process that implemented an overwhelming quantity of good content – a straightforward but expensive technique for crafting a good game narrative.

If you break down its core structure, Baldur’s Gate 3 isn’t doing anything innovative. The game follows the traditional model – gameplay, then a cutscene (often with interactive dialogue, but this is nothing new), and then more gameplay. 

But Larian’s development team took choice and consequence to the extreme. The sheer number of variants in the cutscenes based on player actions and reactions is staggering. Fans are still finding secrets in the game months after its release.

As discussions last year suggested, it’s dangerous for a project with a lower budget and a less flexible timeframe to chase after the excellent presentation and massive content load of Baldur’s Gate 3. Not every studio should try to emulate Larian’s mastery of narrative design. Not every studio can afford for players to only see a fraction of their work on every playthrough. 

Still, doubling down on the quantity and quality of content is a tried-and-true path (albeit an expensive one) for successfully crafting a great interactive narrative. It gives me hope for what tentpole games from big studios – like Grand Theft Auto 6 and Elder Scrolls 6 – will look like in the post-Baldur’s Gate 3 world.

Going Small: Tell More Intimate Stories

But you’re at a studio with five or 50 people, not 500. You’re trying to figure out how to craft a compelling game narrative. And you don’t want to fall back on the traditional model of separate cutscenes and gameplay. What are your options?

One solid approach, as I focused on in the previous article, is to emphasize narrative elements that reinforce core gameplay. In general, it’s best to let game mechanics drive your narrative elements, rather than the other way around.

A great example is Papers, Please – a game that places you in the role of a passport checker at the border of a totalitarian country. Every aspect of both gameplay and narrative helps make you feel the weight of your decisions. It’s a clever experience where it’s hard to know which came first – the story or the systems.

But what if the core vision of the game is focused squarely on the narrative, rather than game mechanics? What if you’ve got a story to tell that’s best served by an interactive experience, but the narrative itself is what’s important to you?

In those cases, there are plenty of great models for making games with smaller scopes, emphasizing narrative over gameplay. 

Undertale wraps its simple RPG structure and bullet-hell combat inside a character-driven story about overcoming negative emotions. Gone Home relies on audio recordings and environmental props instead of cinematics to convey its compelling and brief tale. And visual novels with lightweight mechanics, built with low-tech engines, can still find indie success.

What these smaller games have in common is the scale of the storytelling. They’re not delivering a hundred-hour roleplaying campaign with a huge cast of characters and a million twists and turns like Baldur’s Gate 3. 

Instead, they’re tight and comparatively focused, with an emphasis on clearly expressed themes.

The Prop Department: Item Descriptions and Environments

Another common narrative-delivery technique is the excellent world-building in FromSoftware’s games like Dark Souls and Elden Ring. The backstories of FromSoftware’s games are abstract mysteries, slowly unraveled by the player community in bits and pieces from text descriptions of items in the game and snippets of dialogue.

On the negative side, this approach means engagement with the game’s narrative is secondary and optional. I know plenty of Elden Ring players who have no idea what happened in the story, yet still loved the game. 

For small teams, text descriptions that add to the depth of a game’s narrative are an easy and cheap way to add optional lore and backstory. I don’t mean to trivialize the written word, but hiring a writer to craft interesting item descriptions is a cheap production solution compared to most other options.

I also don’t mean to imply item descriptions are the only trick a team needs. Certainly, the excellent environments and creative character designs – none of which came cheaply – are also a big part of expressing the narrative in FromSoftware games.

Similarly, Bethesda’s reputation for clever placement of environmental art props in games like Skyrim and Fallout 4 is another way to add slice-of-life narrative nuggets. When players stumble across two skeletons in an embrace, and their imagination fills in the story of what happened, it can create a surprisingly effective narrative moment that shows, rather than tells.

The Push and Pull: Independent Actors

If a novel’s events were entirely driven by the protagonist’s actions, you probably wouldn’t want to finish it. Star Wars needs Luke, Leia, and Han’s active heroism, but it also needs Darth Vader and his minions building the latest iteration of the Death Star – plausible motivations in opposition that, when they come into conflict, drive the plot.

Too often, game developers hyperfocus on the player character’s actions as the impetus for everything that happens in the narrative – understandable, given the value of player agency in interactive experiences. On the flip side, some games feature a dull, nearly faceless protagonist who spends the whole game reacting to a more interesting villain’s plan.

System-driven designs have a unique opportunity to deliver a type of narrative that novels can’t – one that ends up sometimes surprising the author as well as the players. One technique to achieve a more dynamic story is to include active nonplayer characters and elements that not only react to the player’s actions but act based on their own motivations.

Ages ago when I worked on Blade Runner at Westwood, this concept was a unique pillar of our design. The underlying systems were simple, but several characters performed actions affecting the game world even when the player wasn’t around.

For example, in the early part of the game, a rival Blade Runner started at the top of the leaderboard in the police station’s shooting range. If the player beat her score, she would come back later and reclaim her spot at the top of the list.

It was a scripted event – nothing that was hard to implement, a basic “beat player’s score by a couple of points” trigger – but it contributed to the feeling that the world was alive. As a side benefit, the moment reinforced the hard-bitten competitive personality of the rival character that was critical to the story.

Pathologic 2, one of the best narrative experiences I’ve had, is another example of this approach. I’ve mentioned the game in this space more than a few times; it’s a janky and unforgiving experience, and not for everyone. But anyone interested in narrative design should check it out.

In the game, the protagonist, Artemy Burakh, is under constant pressure. A time limit is a factor, and complex survival mechanics make every decision life or death. Enemies stalk the streets, out to kill or delay him. Meanwhile, a devastating plague hangs over the odd town where the game is set, indiscriminately infecting friend and foe alike.

The game’s nonplayer characters have agendas that bounce off the protagonist’s goals. Children in the town play a game, using hidden caches to swap junk and valuable items with each other. Politicians manipulate the plague for their purposes. Dogs are mysteriously poisoned. Residents, including the protagonist’s father, are turning up murdered. Every decrepit building hides some secret.

As in Blade Runner, much of the magic of Pathologic 2 is basic smoke-and-mirrors design work. Through clever scripting and a strict time element, the game builds an illusion of more going on systemically than there is. That said, it’s an elegant design, both narratively and mechanically.

While Artemy has plenty of agency, he is not the only driver of the plot. Like the main character in a compelling novel, he pushes but is also pulled, carried along the game’s inexorable timeline by events that he heavily influences but does not directly control, and survival mechanics that cannot be ignored.

As the story winds to its surprising and evocative climax, some players will be left satisfied, while others might be left perplexed at the esoteric oddness of it all. But I think most would agree that Pathologic 2 is a masterclass in fusing narrative, user interface, and mechanics in ways that are innovative and clever. 

The game is worth playing and analyzing despite its low-budget janky moments. There’s a lot to unpack in what it delivers. The narrative tricks and techniques Pathologic 2 leverages so well are not expensive or complex to build, especially compared to prerendered cinematics or complex webs of alternate dialogue trees.

Getting Creative

When narrative developers don’t have the budget of a Baldur’s Gate 3 or a Grand Theft Auto 6, they can’t afford hordes of talented staff to craft an hour-plus of amazing movie-quality prerendered cinematics.

Instead, they have to get clever. Fortunately, the wonderful narratives in smaller games like Gone Home, Doki Doki Literature Club, Pathologic 2, and Undertale demonstrate that great storytelling in games comes in all shapes and sizes.

The tricks that any writer in any medium uses to create compelling stories can be inexpensively leveraged in interactive experiences to surprise and delight players. Developing a good understanding of the techniques used in traditional fiction is a great place to start.

But game developers have additional opportunities to get creative with narrative approaches. Designers of interactive experiences can leverage a diverse bag of tricks that would make novelists and screenwriters jealous. 

Compared to a novel, games are inherently more immersive. Players have stronger agency than passive readers (barring narratives that use tricks to purposely undermine that agency, such as Bioshock). 

As a visual medium like movies, games have plenty of opportunities to “show, rather than tell” – something inexperienced writers of traditional fiction regularly struggle with. 

As Pathologic 2 repeatedly demonstrates, game mechanics can reinforce a narrative in powerful ways, increasing both immersion and engagement.

Finally, games can offer nonlinear experiences that drive toward personalized, bespoke conclusions, such as the effective and varied ending story slides of the original Fallout games.

Despite what traditional triple-A teams think, you don’t have to directly compete with the expensive jaw-dropping cinematics and perfectly acted voice lines that make up the highlight reel at the Game Awards to deliver compelling game narratives.

You just have to do what good writers have always done: get creative.

Pathologic 2 regularly goes on sale at a steep discount. The Steam description of Doki Doki Literature Club as psychological horror is extremely accurate despite what you see in the screenshots. See you next Tuesday.