Developers who reduce their storytelling to cutscenes and linear dialogue are severely limiting themselves in the way they tell stories – and are likely to drive players away.
That’s the opinion of Kelsey Beachum – best known for her narrative work on Mobius Digital’s groundbreaking 2019 title Outer Wilds, but who has also written for Dying Light 2, The Outer Worlds, and Groundless, among others – as she delivered the opening keynote at Devcom in Cologne today.
Her first example was the classic Super Mario Bros., where the story boils down to Toad telling Mario that the princess is in another castle. She illustrated this as a timeline and marked these moments in red, as they break the game completely: the player is no longer involved.
And Beachum says that’s still true of many modern titles today. She pointed to the cutscenes in Kingdom Hearts, Uncharted, and most AAA blockbusters or “anything that’s meant to feel like a movie.” Even Nintendo still does that, and in Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, gameplay is interrupted to deliver the memory cutscenes that Link unlocks.
Behind-the-scenes cutscenes are often referred to as “story wrappers,” but Beachum asked studios to stop using that terminology.
“‘Story wrapper’ implies that the story can be discarded,” she explained. “Wrappers are garbage, garbage belongs in the garbage. Please stop calling my job garbage.”
“As much as I joke, that’s a very flippant attitude toward narrative that pushes the importance of story to the background. That’s a problem because we end up thinking things like, ‘Well, our game doesn’t really have much story,’ or ‘We can just add the story later.’ But story and narrative matter a lot in a video game, regardless of how big your story is.”
Beachum explained to attendees that the story can help define the structure of the game and build relationships between the player and the characters, as well as provide much-needed context and motivation that drives players to keep playing.
While she acknowledged that cutscenes are still useful tools, she stressed that they are just one of many. Developers should also use dialogue between characters, voiceovers, verifiable and interactive objectives, environmental storytelling, art, music, sound effects, and virtually every element of game design to tell the story.
Beachum cited visual effects as an example, such as a column of smoke on the horizon that entices the player to explore. Objectives can provide context and frame the player’s goals and actions. Level design can provide space for conversations that would otherwise be crammed into cutscenes, such as when characters talk during an elevator ride.
Even the interface can present the story in a more digestible and engaging way. Beachum pointed to Outer Wilds’ screen that records your discoveries and the connections between them. “If players had to take notes, it would be a terrible experience,” she said.
Beachum wanted to point out that despite the many narrative devices available (and the many she didn’t list), some games still rely exclusively on cutscenes and linear dialogue to tell the story.
“This is pure insanity. Why are we limiting ourselves? We don’t need to do this. And the reason it limits us so much is because the rest of our department – gameplay and everyone else – isn’t helping us tell the story. And we need those people so badly to share the heavy lifting. None of what I just showed works without you guys. That’s why it’s so important for us to connect with everyone else in every department, because if that doesn’t happen, we have to convey things in a much less interesting way – and that sucks. We want this to be the best experience possible.
“Always ask yourself how you can best convey each piece of information”
“Imagine this problem in another medium, for example in a film… if I asked you now to make a film, but you couldn’t zoom in or out, couldn’t do tracking shots or dolly shots, couldn’t do any moving shots at all, fixed images and let’s make it in black and white. You may “Sure, you can write a story like that, but it won’t be as good as it could have been if you had the full range of tools at your disposal.”
This, she believes, is a key reason why writers and narrative design must work together with all other teams when developing a video game.
“I know we’re like weird little gremlins, shut away in our own homes and hunched over our little typewriters, but we really want to build a connection. It’s so satisfying to be able to work on games with everyone, because if we didn’t want to do that, we’d all be writing novels on our own or something.”
Beachum added that working with a limited number of ways to convey everything players need to know by cramming it into small chunks between gameplay sections can lead to an information dump, which she described as “the worst possible outcome in this case.”
She cited the classic example of Kaepora Gaebora, the owl from Zelda: Ocarina of Time, who first appears after you emerge in Hyrule Field and interrupts you before you can begin exploring. In this inevitable monologue, the owl interrupts the player’s adventure by introducing himself, repeating information about where you currently are in the story, reiterating your game objectives, telling you what will happen (e.g. you will meet the princess), and even telling you how to use the map.
“I hate that owl so much – it represents everything I hate,” Beachum said. “I’m not interested in the map subscreen right now, I want to run around Hyrule Field and hit things with my sword.”
“Info dumps are really ineffective ways of communicating things to the player, even though they’re things we absolutely need to communicate. They tend to lead to a worse player experience because everyone remembers a time when they were playing a game and just spamming the A button and thinking, ‘My God, when is it going to be over?’ They suck because they take control away from the player – suddenly we’re not playing a game anymore, we’re just getting through it.”
Beachum concluded with a number of solutions, including scheduling fewer cutscenes and shorter dialogue. She also recommended that story climaxes be aligned with key gameplay moments—one previous example she cited was the knife fight against Krauser in Resident Evil 4, where a crucial conversation is presented in a more memorable way that compels players to watch a cutscene.
“Keep asking yourself how best to convey each piece of information,” she concluded.
“Avoid the trap of thinking you can write a great story if you don’t back it up with gameplay elements. There will be writers who say they can – I was one of them once – but God bless them, they can’t. It just doesn’t work that way. We need the team’s buy-in.
“The less your story is separated from the rest of the game, the better both the story and the game will be overall.”
GamesIndustry.biz is a media partner of Devcom. The organizers provided travel and accommodation.
