Character Development in Non-Linear Spaces: Uncharted: The Lost Legacy

[Music] hello my name is Josh share and I am a writer at Naughty Dog I have been there for about 17 years now and I have worn many hats most recently I was the co-writer on uncharted the Lost legacy and that is our topic of discussion today specifically character development in nonlinear spaces meaning that we created a first open-world section for the Lost legacy which is a large exploratory section in the Western got serene region of India and it required that we rethink our tried and true narrative techniques now one low caveat is that I did the outline for this talk and I realized I had about 70 minutes worth of material and this is a 30 minute talk so I turned this into kind of a high-level case study a look at our thought process or if you prefer our making it up as we go a long process but I'm just curious how many of you have played an uncharted game in here okay

cool how many of you have played Lost Legacy also cool very cool all right well just so everybody knows it's very difficult to talk about the story without giving away a little bits and pieces nothing on the order of Darth Vader's Luke's father everybody knows that right okay but so apologies in advance for those of you not familiar with the franchise Uncharted is a modern-day pulp action adventure starring one Nathan Drake treasure hunter thrill seeker purveyor of fine quips but after the fourth game we had this opportunity to do a spin-off title bigger still a opportunity to break away from Nathan Drake and applied that Uncharted template to some new protagonists and we decided to go with Chloe Fraser she is a fan of favorite from uncharted 2 and she's kind of a Dark Mirror version of Drake she's also a skilled treasure hunter and thief but whereas Drake's got a heroes complex she's a lot more about self-preservation

even at the expense of her friends and allies so with that we decided to form the basis of our story around a moment where she had to make a conscious decision to risk her life for the sake of others for the greater good now once we've established the foundation of her Ark we next considered who her companion would be see we like having companion characters in our games apart from helping out in the fight they bring out different facets of our character that you might not see otherwise and companions are also great for building character through common conversations and shared moments in fact when you see an uncharted protagonist on their own it's usually because they screwed up big-time so to recap you know we want someone who provides contrast and conflict someone who draws out the inner aspects of your main character and can be a catalyst for change we considered many possibilities but we kept circling back to Nadine Ross she was our one of our antagonists from a chart of four she is the only

antagonist to actually survive an uncharted game you know very small club she's at a Interest kind of an interesting place in her life at the end of a chart of four she has lost control of shoreline or a private military company she is somebody who's used to commanding an army and now she's been reduced to asking Chloe Frasier this lowlife treasure hunter for help and a job equally important she also provided some interesting contrast for Chloe lots of good copper tuna tease for growth and conflict for the both of them and there are similarities and differences along with Chloe's arc from selfish to selfless would form the basis for their relationship for the game so we have our characters and next we need a story so here is a very brief rundown of the Naughty Dog process with our games the goal is to seamlessly combine story and gameplay and as such the story and design teams are in constant communication the writers and directors develop the story outline and the beats most days that was some combination of myself creative director and co-writer

Shana Skye game director Kurt Marga now and lead designer James Cooper now while we're breaking down the story the designers are busy prototyping gameplay mechanics and levels but the team's often meet to share progress and make suggestions and in the early days the story can be adjusted to accommodate design and vice versa so we try to get as much that done early as we can and ultimately we create what we call the story of macro it's kind of a road map for a story and design it gets the whole team on the same page we never write the entire script and it's handed to designers and say here go make this because we want to keep things nice and fluid to allow for changes and improvements now not to say that anything set in stone it's still a living document and we continue to fill in these story details now to quickly summarize lost legacy for those who haven't played it treasure Angie Laurie Fraser has hired ex-mercenary kneading Ross to help her explore India and to recover the priceless and fictional tusks of Ganesh before a solve a cunning

insurgent commander uses it for his own nefarious purposes and we're off to the races now we design our games around a paradigm that we call the active cinematic experience active being the key we like to keep things on the stick because we feel that moments conveyed through gameplay have a bigger impact and we aim to sell a single cohesive story no branching narratives we do allow a lot of player agency within the confines of a level and the gameplay mechanics but we cannot let them affect the out time at the outcome of the story and we call this the wide linear approach but since we know where the character and the player are going to be at all times we can plot the character relationship and write accordingly and we can tailor the visuals and narrative for the maximum impact and that's kind of why we've avoided open-world design pacing is paramount in our games and with open world the player sets the pace and if the player doesn't feel the same urgency that your characters do it kind of throws things off and also quite

frankly we want you to actually see all that beautiful and expensive content that we've produced so the thing is that approach hasn't always dived with the exploratory spirit of the Uncharted series so and for uncharted 4 we decided to dip our toe in the water a little bit so there was the Madagascar level which was massive with some wide exploratory loops but ultimately we funneled you along this linear path and then there was also the at sea chapter you know massive lots of places to wander but we signposted you to a trigger point that unlocked a linear path to the level now our takeaway from this is that even though these levels weren't open per se the pacing of these levels had to allow for the player taking their time it couldn't be too urgent or dire the whole don't worry I'll save you do what's that's not anything over there problem it's kind of hard to keep the player immersed when they're distracted but we knew that the Lost Legacy might be the last Uncharted game so we kind of decided to go for it and create a true open space our chapter set and the

Western gods region of India and we soon discover that creating a narrative in an open space required that we rethink our usual working methods and the Western gods was the largest explorable space that we've ever made so in this level Chloe and Nadine climb a tower conveniently placed as a vantage point they find three ancient high Silla empire fortresses each a mini level into itself and inside you climb cliffs you solve puzzles and you fight dudes and once inside you also find and activate these old valves to open the secret gate to the city of halebidu and if you feeling so inclined you also find eleven optional doodads scattered in various places and bring them back to a shrine overrun with monkeys so with all the different places that you can visit and in any order it all kinda adds up to a lot of different ways to play through the level impossible to account for all of them let alone right for all of them so given that how do we give the player

freedom to choose their path while one developing chloe and maidens relationship in a consistent way and to not completely blowing our budget and our time constraints so we started doing what we do with every level which is to determine which moments need to occur and what info needs to be conveyed to the player so we created this ever-evolving list which gradually got narrowed down to yes narrowed down to this that's kind of a lot and you certainly don't want to do it all in the cutscenes now it's important to remember also that this is just one chapter in the game a big one but still we're not going from her as a high five more like professional to tentatively friendly so all the dialogue had to be calibrated accordingly so next we needed to do to determine where we were going to be doling all that information out so we started by considering the player's main goals for the level meaning the actions required in order to progress any story progression needed to be tied to one of those key elements

now moving along to the next phase of Chloe and they did can I just say clothing now okay moving on to the next phase of Claudine's relationship was less tied to players activating one of the three vowels and thus completing one of the three-fourths for everything else in the level whether it was the monkey shrine the tower of the collectible tokens we couldn't cut tie the key character moments to those because there is no guarantee the player would ever see it for the same reason nothing outside those key events could be vital to the players understanding of the story and what's more we realized that all the dialogue in the level had to be written with a neutral tone as a baseline not too friendly not too cold because otherwise depending on where you heard it it could feel a lot of order but more on that in a little bit so having determined where we would advance the story and the characters next step was question determining how so which of our narrative tools do we use to deliver which story beats we use several tools for developing characters all along the spectrum of interactivity and player

agency so at the top in the non-active cinematic experience zone we have cutscenes and at the bottom the dialogue of the players during the moment-to-moment gameplay each of these tools have their strengths and weaknesses when it comes to telling an interactive story so I'm going to break it all down like an ancient city first we usually use the tools and then we first time tell you how we use the tools and then I'm going to tell you how we adapted them to work in the Western gods chapter starting with the cutscenes this is obviously the least interactive way to tell a story in a game but it grants you a captive audience so we usually start writing these before anything else because they're independent enough from the gameplay that they can be written even before levels or in block mesh form and it helps us explore and define our characters and because they're not interactive we try to only employ them when absolutely necessary and to space them out as widely as possible we save them for the key moments where the character beats we really want to see the emotion on the characters faces or we don't want the player to potentially interrupt it I won't say it's impossible

it is very difficult to get any of these motions any other way in there now you don't have to play the game please play the game okay for the Western gods chapter we felt that these were the beats best suited for the cutscenes as they brought the characters closer and they moved Chloe along from her art from selfish to selfless also helping tie Chloe to her Indian heritage and helping set up Nadine Street chance for redemption also sending up Sam Drake's appearance later in the game for the benefit of people who didn't play uncharted 4 so these cutscenes played after Clawdeen activated a valve at each of the three forts it advanced their relationship in a nice simple linear progression that we could control for maximum narrative impact easy right not so much why because it's an open-world game and the player can visit the forts in any order if the scenes played out of order that'd be kind of a disaster and shooting the same cutscene to work in three different locations would be prohibitively expensive so the solution was that we made the footprint

of the three valve areas exactly the same so instead of shooting three different scenes per fort we just shot three scenes and they all played out exactly the same way in each location that way we can have the three scenes play in the correct order and allow Claudine's relationship to progress regardless of the order that you tackle the fort's next up scripted sequences in some ways these are kind of interactive cutscenes in that we sometimes control the camera or we limit the players moveset somehow so that we can control the moment but but the player is still in control it's all interactive our big action set places falls into this category though sometimes they are also used for more intimate moments such as the elephant ride this is our active cinematic experience like I said earlier emotional impact things will have a lot

more impact if you have it on the stick in control and more often than not we use them as a climax to a story beat now the thing is we didn't actually really have any of these in the western ghats chapter because in our open world scenario there's no controlling the pace of the order of the approach and we didn't want players to hit the high point too early so we save them for later next up one of the key components of this chapter driving dialogue given the scope of the level we didn't want to force players to hoof it all over the place and you know what better time to engage in some casual banter than on a cool road trip to the Western Goths so due to degree due to the - to the degree of interactivity driving dialogue has some caveats first of all there's no fixed camera so you can't get up close and personal the player could be hitting obstacles going off drops etcetera etcetera but the biggest thing was that these conversations can be interrupted by the player at any time when they get out of the car or entering an area of

interest or a combat zone now we developed an interrupt system for uncharted 4 which we carried over here and that enabled us to allow the player to exit the Jeep at any time and have the conversations resume naturally but still player controlled interruptions on top of all that all the dialogue has to be semi projected over the sound of the engine so it's probably not the best place for Nadine to ask Chloe why do you resent your father so much so however it was still incredibly useful for progressing Claude Dean's relationship even though all the driving took place out in the open world we didn't have to write the dialogue in a neutral tone because we could progress the connection between the characters we could break up the conversations into phases just like we did for the cutscenes the first conversation would play at the start of the level the second conversation would play after you got back into the Jeep when finishing the first fort and so on and so on so we were able to utilize topics and moments that would have made the cutscenes drag but sound perfectly

natural while driving around now before training these conversations we did have to determine how long the player would be in the Jeep and then write the conversations to fit in that time and since they knew the level better than anyone I asked our QA team to find the shortest time between key landmarks and turns out the answer was 15 to 20 seconds now obviously most players will take longer but it served as a good guide for how many seconds the players would definitely hear because once the player entered the next fort the current conversation would not be resumed later one because it would be too long a separation it could be as long like 20 minutes and to all the conversations would just end up bunching up at the end so when writing I broke the long conversations into three chunks each about 15 to 20 seconds long so the first chunk was a bit vital to clothings character arcs you know here we have Nadine assessing her current status and Chloe throwing in a bit of her personal philosophy and you would definitely hear this bit before getting to the next fort the second chunk built on the first with a bit of Chloe backstory and some nadine philosophy you would probably hear this

but if you didn't it wasn't the end of the world and then the last chunk after a pause from the previous ones would usually reserve for banter a chance to see the characters talk about things in the outside world fun but not essential and if you missed it no big deal now while this is tricky to plan out it was still relatively easy to control the tone and progression of Claudine's relationship because we knew when the player would be hearing each conversation however this was not the case for level dialogue now this is the stuff that's spoken by the characters while exploring the level 100% interactive so to account for all the branching and for all the character progression possibilities we wrote and recorded nearly three times as much dialogue for this level than we did for the largest level in uncharted 4 yeah on a base level level dialogue is useful for several things giving little nudges and hints supplementing environmental storytelling and filling in the historical backstory that would have bloated the length of the cutscenes so here's a example from that hey nope

armaments looks to be a mix of Persian and poisoner so nice and simple but sort of helps build things along but level dialog is equally important for creating a large number of little tiny character moments these little moments can really add up to a lot and this is where you can get the subtlety in not that the dialog has to be subtle and frankly it often isn't but over time you build that slow gradual relationship and like I said earlier when you can get these moments in the gameplay on the stick they have a lot more impact on the player so here's an example what we can do through a classic Uncharted valving mechanic pull ups yeah Emil had no matter what the player does Chloe will not take medians and in this clip I'm good actually yeah just

here though she doesn't have a choice come on only because we said please I didn't [Music] okay so that last clip was cheating a little bit because it was part of a small mini cutscene however I wanted to point out that up until this point in the game at that point in the game Nadine calls Chloe by her last name Frasier this is the first time that she ever calls her Chloe and this is something else that we build up to over the course of the game using that same mechanic that's very familiar now we also use level dialogue to give characters more character it took us a while to calibrate Nadine's personality at first we made her way too harsh in her early drafts and I really wanted to give her something that you wouldn't necessarily expect from a hardened mercenary and one night I was thinking of these old animal fact cards that they used to advertise on TV when I was a kid

and yeah one dollar one dollar and I thought what if Nadine grew up with a set of these and the answer is this they're just not flying rodents actually no they're not yeah they are they're closer to primates and wieners okay well I'll look it up Raisa over here look what what is it monkeys you seem excited I like monkeys that's Vasuki a king of the nagas entities that take the form of the king cobra it shows his control over fear and death hmm Cobras were always my favorite snake don't think I have a favorite snake so there are many more examples but this is kind of a way to sneak in some little quirks into Nadine's character without necessarily cluttering up the cutscenes with it now another tool sort of related to level dialog in our arsenal if there's something that we wanted to convey and the gameplay space is just a little too tight to fit it we

will sometimes drop in a optional dialogue prompt now if the player chooses to engage the dialog plays out and we put the player into a forced walk and they can't climb or otherwise interact it's not ideal but sometimes it's necessary now you can't guarantee that the player is going to hear the dialogue but you know most people have this Pavlovian reaction to seeing a button prompting so sometimes we put in a little exposition sometimes a little character moment and sometimes a little bit of both Wow yeah sure versions must have had a trebuchet [Music] rubbish a can't we just say catapult like a normal person but trebuchet is a type of catapult it can handle heavier projectiles like this one you fling them longer distances right you learn that new military training I looked it up on Wikipedia hey where's Sam don't think you so broke oh right forgot about that Higgins talk

start hey thanks for not murdering stand by the way you might prove useful later [Music] come on we're exposed up here you know I feel so much safer with her leg I never would have found you without her help ok ok he just wants to kill me no don't give her a reason to so so all that stuff all those different techniques for level dialogue worth beautifully and I need a little more time because we started late all the stuff works beautifully in linear design and the way that we designed our cutscenes in our driving dialogue we still had control over those but the dialogue and the forts themselves or anywhere else in the world no since the player could explore the Ford interiors and other places in

any order what we wrote couldn't have a linear progression it could wreck the flow of you hit it at the wrong time so again we wrote the dialogue with a neutral tone to reflect that but we could build on the neutral dialogue to better reflect the current state of Claudine's relationship depending on where you were and how many forts you completed we could add to or replace the neutral dialogue with something more friendly there are literally hundreds of places we did this in the level so here's an example how we build on neutral dialogue the neutral version the one that plays it this is the first fort you found come first then we build on it a little of the second and then more for the third you'll see a little fort icon in the lower left Wow we made it across at least see another way over here sit tight oh stand stand tight copy that wow you made it across at least sorry I'm sure you can find your way over here oh definitely

figured you'd want to take the easy way over sorry I'm sure you can find your way over here oh definitely figured you'd want to take the easy way over oh please show me how it's done watch and learn so through this we can build up the relationship depending on how far you've progressed when you make it to that point here's another example after successfully taking out some insurgents via stone saw it's clear I'll take a not bad from you thought clear not bad brother there's hope for you yet thank you that was intense and one more hey if he's here huh the gray languages thanks Jane Goodall Hey look who's here huh great language you're adorable

in the interest of time I'm gonna skip the last example of that and continue now you may have thought but Josh you left environmental storytelling off that list of narrative tools and you're right we don't have too much time to cover it but it's in there obviously all over the place but it's a little bit different and uncharted than something like say The Last of Us with The Last of Us it's set among sorry there we go but the Last of Us is sit among recognizable places and objects from our modern lives and it's much easier to player to sort of like take it all in and interpret without comment but with uncharted places are much more ancient so we depend on our characters to comment on it to understand the understanding leaves of the story we do that through other techniques especially level dialogue as you saw a little bit earlier so to recap when writing for our open world level we approached it the same way we would any other level then adjusted our tools level dialogue in particular to allow for player choice now I know this has been kind of an orderly some might say linear way to explain it but in actuality production

isn't linear we didn't figure all that stuff out in order our process looks a little bit more like this and that's okay because we start with a strong story outline and then through the organic process of collaborating with design we fleshed out the details in the implementation we try things out we take chances and sometimes you have setbacks and then you rallied and come up with better ideas and get back on track in a way we were kind of doing open-world design just in our design process and so not in the game itself up until now but our open design process comes with a cost we originally scheduled for a game with four hours of content and what we shipped for various and sundry reasons ended up being about double that and this obviously threw things into disarray so for starters this lifts evolved and changed a lot particularly which bits ended up we included in the cutscenes and this is no different than our usual process but in an open-world section where had this many moving parts it led to a lot of hurry-up-and-wait when it came to the recording and the implementation and on that subject we also found ourselves in a situation

with no really good options our short schedule meant that we'd only have time for one series of sessions in the recording booth with very little time for pickups and we didn't have time to do tests and game beforehand to properly assess what bits we actually needed so to cover our asses we wrote way more than we ended up using because if something didn't get in on that first pass it might not get in the game at all and this of course made a tight recording schedule even tighter whoops so if a conversation ended up not fitting into an intended space we either trim it or we cut it entirely and last we didn't use any special software to attract all these variations lots of that information was either in the script or in my head meaning that she had to know where to look in the script or know where I was hiding usually under my desk so lessons learned this whole open world business is really freaking difficult and obviously not it's always a little bit late to that party but we have newfound appreciation for teams who execute open-world games

and games with branching narratives but should we ever do anything like this again we do have some takeaway lessons from the experience well no to tie our character progression to the key goals because that grants us to create a degree of narrative control well plan to put key character beats in the areas that the players guarantee the C and if you can't tie progression into these specific events in a known order we need to build on it and track it with a level dialogue and then we'll leverage what we learn swapping lines in from the neutral dialogue to create a continuous flow for the character development and to avoid the whole recording cluster fudge one thing that we're already doing on the last of us two is writing temp dialogue for the levels way earlier than we ever have before so even though things are going to likely shift or change we have a better sense of what we need in advance of recording the hope being is that next time it'll feel a little bit more like this and a little bit less like this our goal we're the Western gods chapter was to make this open world environment while maintaining a consistent logical progression to Clodius relationship no matter how the player approached the level and to do all this without making

it a mad dash to the finish we got it half right we have to do it better next time to state the obvious reading is just one aspect of the writing but making the characters we couldn't have done it with all the out of our character designers and sculptors but a special shout-out goes to our audio team and the audio script in particular there were a lot of branches and such the track and a lot of dialogue to implement and it never would have come together without their efforts and obviously you know much thanks to claudia black and laura bailey austin performances none of it would have mattered because they bonded early and they knocked it out of the park my one regret with them is that they were often doing valley girl versions of their line reads and the recording booth and if we had had time we totally would have made it an unlockable language option but maybe next time so like I said it couldn't cover everything still very interested in more of our process I'll be doing the breakout session after this or you can ping me on Twitter but also Neil druckmann and Bruce Straley a while back he might talk about uncharted 2 it's 8 years old but it follows a lot of the same principles Ryan James our

editor and lost legacy he gave a good talk and they're both on YouTube for free that's all I got thank you for coming [Applause]