![]() ![]() Without a doubt, at the core of the discussion would have to be lightsaber combat as the most significant piece of the puzzle. The long, hard road of creating Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic So what happened along the way to ensure that Jedi: Fallen Order turned into a game about exploration and discovery? How does a game like this feel so much more like Tomb Raider than Knights of the Old Republic, or Star Wars Jedi Knight? It means that some elements of the game are already fixed - such as lightsaber combat and the use of the Force. Getting the tone right for a Star Wars game is very challenging despite lots of material to draw from. Working on a game for one of the longest-standing franchises across multiple media is incredibly exciting, as well as intimidating. Think of it this way: If I’m making a flying game, and the fantasy is “fly and travel like a bird,” after a few years of work it would be very possible to adjust the story, and maybe even the economy, but changing the fantasy to “become the best race car driver in the world” would be all but impossible. And while teams sometimes have a general idea of the story they want to tell, mechanics and interaction come first. The reason why story is the least rigid element is because it can be written around mechanics and economy. This may surprise some readers, given that story is what usually stands out most to players. Who doesn’t want to feel like a Jedi? Respawn Entertainment/Electronic Arts Going up the chain, the elements become less rigid, with story as the most fluid element. Once decided and defined, it can’t be changed without significant discussion. The fantasy at the very bottom is at the center of everything. Story: What’s the story we want to tell within this world? It must reinforce the fantasy, actions, and economy within the world. World: What’s the world our economy, actions, and fantasy can exist within? This is a flexible parameter. Who or what does the player get to be? It’s the emotional contract we make with the player it’s why they play our game.Īction: What does the player get to do? These actions reinforce the fantasy.Įconomy: What larger systems facilitate actions and fantasy? This goes for currencies, progression, items, and even skill points and resource economies. ![]() This is roughly what we mean by each term:įantasy: The feel of the game. The most common system to figure out a fantasy that I’ve seen used, and used myself, is a waterfall technique: going from bottom to top, with the bottom being the least flexible element to the top being the most flexible one. ![]() How are you supposed to know what to make if you don’t know how you want the player to feel, and what you want them to do? Some places might have different names for this, as well as the process of getting there, but just about every studio goes through something like this as standard practice. There’s no wrong way to do it, and I might have gotten Respawn’s process incredibly wrong - this is meant to illustrate what might have happened, not to share what did happen - but hopefully you’ll learn something about what goes into the early stages of game development as I try to figure out how something this strange and unexpected was planned at all.Įvery game you play delivers on something we call a core fantasy. It’s a process that rarely sees the light of day once a game ships. ![]() You can use core fantasies to describe the overall flavor of the game, or you can go as granular as describing the fantasy behind a single combat encounter. Warframe may be the fantasy of space ninjas, God of War’s fantasy is being a god among men, and so on. The fantasy of a video game is the core statement, the core idea behind the experience and what players are supposed to feel like while playing. Jedi: Fallen Order is an intriguing tincture of genres, borrowing from a number of influences.īut how did it get there? I thought it might be fun to try to reverse-engineer the fantasy of the game for you, as a game designer. When Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order finally fell into our hands, nobody expected to play a lightsaber-Crash Bandicoot-Tomb Raider-style game, but here we are. ![]()
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