A look at how much work goes is required to create a compelling story for a video game

STORYTELLING is an extremely important part of most major video games nowadays, and has been for many years.

STORYTELLING is an extremely important part of most major video games nowadays, and has been for many years.

Stories in video games can range from the “Mooninites are invading Earth and you must stop them!” of Space Invaders to the merry adventure through objectivist philosophy that was Bioshock, or the sprawling intertwined narratives of Grand Theft Auto V, or the epic and rich worlds comprising the Witcher, Fallout or Elder Scrolls games.

Games companies such as Bethesda, Rockstar and CD Projekt Red often receive praise for their storytelling and worldbuilding, but there is another games company with fans so passionate there’s been an annual convention for them in Los Angeles for the past decade — Blizzard Entertainment.

Best known as the publishers of massive multiplayer online RPG World of Warcraft (WoW) and team first-person shooter Overwatch, Blizzard’s games are hugely popular. World of Warcraft has been going since 2004 and has several million active subscribers; Blizzard themselves report more than 100 million accounts have been created since the game was launched.

Speaking with news.com.au at the recent BlizzCon event in Los Angeles, senior producer Michael Bybee and lead PvP (Player vs. Player) designer Brian Holinka said a lot of work went into the game’s lore and story.

“We have a number of designers on the team who are responsible for story content, almost explicitly, as well as sort of lead narrative designers and various other folks,” Mr Bybee said.

“Broadly speaking everyone has involvement in that. We’re all big fans of the lore that comes out of the game, we all play the game, everyone has that really good sense of where things are at. It’s a big community effort with the team to keep that straight.”

Mr Holinka made the analogy of it being like the Star Wars universe, saying the Star Wars movies were about the Skywalker family but the Star Wars universe itself was massive and it wasn’t necessarily required to touch all of it all the time.

The sixth expansion for the massively multiplayer game World of Warcraft is possibly its best.

“With World of Warcraft we have this main story we’re following and that has to be palatable for everyone but for those who really want a lot more depth, there’s a lot of different quests, side areas and hidden areas … we can tell the story to those folks who are really invested in the lore,” he said.

With the World of Warcraft story running for more than 10 years, there were some concerns it might be difficult for new players to get involved, so the designers introduced a mechanism with each expansion, giving the player the ability to boost one character straight to level 100.

“We have kind of an experience for new players when they do that, where we kind of run them through the basics of their capped class, how their abilities work, just to get them started in a general way. Then we can direct them towards the main questline story,” Mr Holinka said.

“The boost has been a great way for us to allow to people to get into the game quickly and play with their friends right away.”

One of the other games set in the World of Warcraft universe is card combat game Hearthstone, which deliberately cultivates a “tavern-like” atmosphere.

Game designer Peter Whalen and senior software engineer Rachelle Davis said it took several months to develop an expansion for Hearthstone, with the latest one — Mean Streets of Gadgetzan — taking players to the seedy underbelly of one of Azeroth’s port cities.

“We work on them for months, actually, it does take some time and for good reason — there’s a lot to consider ... that story, that lore, that content; and then we have this pain of design where these great ideas happen but we then have to make sure they’re balanced,” Ms Davis said.

Card combat game Hearthstone deliberately cultivates a “tavern-like” atmosphere.

Mr Whelan said Hearthstone was somewhere between a canonical part of World of Warcraft and its own separate milieu.

“We always like to imagine that Hearthstone is taking place in the tavern,” he said.

“You come into this warm, friendly tavern, you’re greeted by the bubbling innkeeper, he sits you down, he’s going to spin you a story — (in this expansion’s case) a story about the mean streets of Gadgetzan.

“Some of that it might be real, it might come true in the world of Warcraft, it might be canon. Other things, maybe not so much. It’s a little bit hard to tell ... You can’t believe everything you hear.

“It’s fun for us to explore things that could happen, that are plausible in the World of Warcraft space.”

Ms Davis said although Hearthstone didn’t have a mission-driven narrative style, there were still plenty of ways to lean into the game’s story.

“There are several different avenues — one is the gameboard paints the picture of all three families. We’ve got a corner for each of the three families as well as corner for the docks, which is kind of pivotal for a city which turns into this big metropolis,” she said.

“On top of that, and perhaps some of my favourite, is the flavour of the cards and also the flavour of their VO (Voice Over). Sometimes I know the VO better than I know the names of the cards when I play, which I think is just a testament to how well it paints a picture of these characters.”

Surprisingly to many people, team first-person shooter Overwatch also has story to it, with assistant game director Aaron Keller and game producer Skye Chandler saying they were thrilled with the title’s reception by fans.

“It’s been so amazing. Even at our first BlizzCon when we announced in 2014, the very next day people showed up in cosplay. They put them together overnight,” Mr Keller said.

“I think a lot of it has to do with the heroes in the game and their personalities. We always wanted the world to be hopeful and inspiring. I think a lot of modern games kind of veer away from that to a darker vision of the future.”

Overwatch producer Skye Chandler said she was thrilled with the title’s reception by fans.

Most of Overwatch’s story is told e via videos and information released online by Blizzard, or through snippets of in-game conversations between characters and environmental storytelling.

Ms Chandler said the characters were one of the key elements of the game’s story and success, with Reddit and online forum posters regularly saying there was a character in the game for everyone to relate to.

“There’s something that is them in the world of Overwatch, there’s something that makes them feel they are that hero fighting for that hopeful future,” she said.

“That really is everything we build it towards — it’s an awesome place that you want to be.”

Ms Chandler acknowledged putting together and telling the story for Overwatch had challenging elements, with some aspects planned and some, like the character Ana, evolving organically.

“There’s a general outline of major events that happened in the universe,” she said.

“That started with working out where the world was, and as you discover that, where do people fit in the timeline, and then it all keeps progressing forward. There are pieces of story that we know the public doesn’t know yet, there are pieces of story that just haven’t happened yet as far as our team getting to that point.

“We know there’s a place we want to go, but until we go there, how is that going to evolve? Because if anything is defined in stone too early, when you get there, it’s like there’s no room for breathing. Creating a universe that can continue to live and breathe and evolve is kind of the point of how the story is coming together right now.

“I think that gives our team a lot of opportunities for some really amazing future endeavours.”

Royce Wilson travelled to BlizzCon as a guest of Activision Blizzard

Originally published as A look at how much work goes is required to create a compelling story for a video game