Designing Over the Top - Saints Row: The Third Postmortem

[Music] to designing over-the-top Saints for the third post-mortem thank you a couple reminders fill out your surveys they probably got sent to your spam folder like they did to mine so you know take a look at them please fill them out some that send that feedback in that's helpful for us speakers all right so we'll start off with me my name is Scott Phillips I've been with volition for 10 years worked on several titles I was the design director on saints row the third basically what that meant was I was in charge of the the high level concept on the design side the tone and the feeling of the game the overall experience and basically the quality bar of that game play I also did staffing and scheduling so I spent a lot of time in Excel and a hand soft and all those you know joyous design tools I did some minor camera

work stuff like that but in general I tried to stay out of that work because I would generally break something and you know nobody wants their their director in there messing up with stuff they just finished now saints row the third we started in 2008 just after Saints Row two had finished the directors of Saints Row two moved directly on to saints row the third we had about a hundred and twenty-five people peak at the end of the project plus QA and outsourcers so needless to say this was volition and th Q's largest project to date so there was a lot riding on it for both us and for THQ now what does this talk about the post-mortem is looking at what went right what went wrong I'm gonna talk about some of the really great moments that we had on the project some of the really painful ones that we had on the project I'm gonna cover what

we tried to do what things worked what didn't work and my hope is that you'll learn something from our pain and be able to use that on your future projects as well you may have already known a lot of the stuff that I'm going to talk about you may know some of the ideas that we're going to do that we're going to talk about but you'll at least see how we implemented them and you know where things went right and where they went horribly wrong so I'm going to cover three main areas in this post-mortem the first one is why was the franchise successful Saints Row one in Saints Row two had both sold about four to five million units Saints Row two was was just coming out when we started Saints Row three it went on to sell four to five million units both received relatively good review scores in the 80s but success wasn't certain it's not certain with any sequel and I think some of the talks I saw yesterday put a nice point on this I

think the portal two guys said you know a new franchise is is much easier because you're breaking new ground and people don't know what to expect with a sequel there is a built in set of expectations of you know what is that game going to be and what is the sequel gonna be how are you gonna change it how are you going to keep it the same so for us one of the biggest elements of that was the over-the-top feeling the tone of the game as I'm gonna go and to talk about there's a great quote from Walt Disney about sequels he said you can't top pigs with pigs basically he was talking about they had done a three blind pig short that had won an Oscar it was a huge success and they were convinced to continue making more of them so they made several more and each was less and less successful basically what he was saying is you can't give people the same thing and it's it's not really a problem that's new but it's also not a problem that has been solved or can be solved really the second thing

I'm going to talk about is raising the quality bar visual and quality issues were the number one cited issues and reviews for Saints Row two we got hit on things like inconsistent or repetitive missions and lack of creativity on the other side we were praised for their fun factor no-holds-barred action and the over-the-top crazy game play so we knew in three years when when saints row the third was going to come out that we were gonna have to raise that bar to compete so we I'm gonna touch on three things here there's holy [ __ ] moments our pacing and our playtesting I'll get into those more a little later the third one is scope control now this is a really difficult issue to deal with it's really hard to define you know what's the right amount of stuff to have in the game we had just come off of Saints Row 2 where the mentality was you know let's put every single feature we can possibly think of in the game you know if that game had it well we need to put it in our game and we'll do it this slightly

different way what ended up is that we wasted a lot of time near the end of the project adding in features that we shouldn't have and because of this we shipped with more bugs than we wanted and we shipped with the lower quality across the board than we wanted so with saints row the third we wanted to focus on fewer better features so setting the tone tone is a pretty nebulous term I think if you if you look at different mediums how they describe tone how they talk about it is not very specific it's tough to define what that feeling is I think one of the best ways to talk about it is this quote tone can be as important as text basically what you're saying what you're saying how you're going to say something is more important or can be more important than what you're saying now I'm not really gonna try and define what tone is but I'm gonna use some descriptions and then walk into how we use tone and how we

define it let's look at an example of tone Batman now Batman's been around for seventy years spent through numerous incarnations there's been that but there's always you know the Batsuit there's always Gotham City there's always the Joker now when I said Batman which one did you picture did you picture the 1960s Batman Michael Keaton Val Kilmer George Clooney I always forget his name Christian Bale that's it or one of these many many other types or incarnations of Batman now if you look at it the 1960s Batman versus the dark night they're incredibly different emotional experiences but why they cover the same characters same content same general storylines they're different and the emotional impact that they have on the viewer you know the 1960s Batman was goofy was ridiculous you shark repellent and all

these you know running around with bombs over his head the Dark Knight is a very serious very realistic movie now tone for me has two primary elements there's the creative boundaries and then there's the emotional experience or what you could also call the player experience for us in games and what you want is you want the team to be like Goldilocks you want everyone to be able to say you know no that's too crazy or now that's too tame you know let's find something right in the middle that's just right for for what we're trying to do with this game now we had just come off of Saints Row 2 and Saints Row 2 we had very difficult time coming up with what is that creative box what are we gonna fit into in a game where you go from running around nude vehicle surfing on top of a car to the next minute you're chasing a

lieutenant who's being dragged behind a car mercilessly bloodied and then you mercy kill him in order to put him out of his misery now those are very very different emotions the tone was not well defined in Saints Row 2 we refined it through trial and error we tried a bunch of different things we would throw out ideas we would see what stuck the problem was that inconsistencies were all over the place just as I mentioned there with those examples now the Saints for the third we wanted to have a cohesive experience that was one of our main goals was the whole experience should feel like it's one note it's the same feeling you get throughout the entire throughout the entire game but that's difficult especially when you you want to have these crazy experiences so we had fart in a jar was one of our weapons initially you know I thought weapon was was ridiculous I thought there was nothing you know it didn't make sense in the game it didn't really make sense as a combat effective tool

but in the end we put it in because well partially because fans asked for it and partially because it's it's just a pretty funny weapon it's it's enjoyable as a player you're gonna have fun with it now if the tone is salad everybody's going in the same direction you you're all working towards the same goal if the tone is confused you're constantly fighting each other you're going nowhere so our question was what should sr3 be should it be over the top should it be serious but silly or should it be self self-aware and unrepentant just there to have fun should it be gangsta should it be gangster very different experiences for the player what should it feel like to be a 3rd Street Saint now our major problems as I mentioned was that the tone was ill-defined from the past games Saints Row 1 had a relatively said they wanted to make I think the the

description of it was like an MTV music video but they also had insurance fraud you could jump in front of cut you got money to jump in front of cars didn't really make a whole lot of sense with an MTV music video Saints Row 2 we kind of pushed that a little further where you're driving around in a truck spraying [ __ ] on people you know and then we also had that dark narrative you know where you put Mario's girlfriend into the trunk of a car and then put her into the monster truck race and then Meryl smashes her to death you know that's pretty very different things now since we didn't have much to start from we were kind of coming at it fresh and we were also coming at it fresh with our team because by the time saints row the third shift we had only 20% of the team had shipped a past Saints Row title that's a pretty huge amount of of difference between the past game and saints row the third this meant that you know people didn't have that automatic

knowledge of you know what is Saints Row oh well we did it this last time I think I have a good idea you know it's not too bad we were getting people from different teams within volition we were getting people from outside of outside of our studio the problem was we had a lack of buy-in and what the game was people didn't know what they were making and they were constantly confused about you know is is fart in a jar is that too far well you know what about this other thing that I'm working on I'm trying to write a spec for this I don't really know what what I'm trying to make now this this led to you know what I use the description of soft versus hard power there's you know you can guide someone you can direct them which is what you know a director as as myself should have been doing and then you can mandate things you can say alright you bring me your problem this is your answer bring them your problem this is your answer the problem with something like that is that you don't have people

you have people that are renting those ideas they don't really own what they're working on and if they don't own what they're working on they don't really care as much there they're not as invested in the final product or even in that initial idea and since designers are advocates for the player for the entire experience if they're not buying into what the game is going to be who is who will now our second problem was that for the first six months or so Saints for the third went a very different direction we started off with the idea that the player was an undercover agent infiltrating the Saints you were you know an FBI agent something along those lines you were doing this in order to allow the player to make choices we want a choice to be a much bigger part of the game so you were making these choices of you know Oh at the end of the mission we go and we find there's a big bale of cocaine should I turn it in to the FBI should I give it to the Saints you know each of those had different paths and so

we were making the game that I think it would have been I would have been fun but the question was is this a saint's row game and the very clear answer was no this is not a saint's row game so this caused about six months in we reset we reset the story we've reset the idea of a lot of the top level design that was good we were back on a better track we're back on the track that we would eventually ship on the problem was that was even more confusion we were asking the team that had just wasn't buying into the initial vision we were asking them to now reset and look at another vision and figure out how to make that game the result was confusion confusion people didn't know what to do they weren't sure about what they were making they had lack of confidence in the vision we had to explained and re-explained well myself I had to reacquaint on stantly answer questions about you know well I'm doing this I

don't I don't know what you want it was it was my problem it was something that I needed to fix and the good news was that we could actually fix it we needed to resolve this as soon as possible because if if the team wasn't clear on what the game was that we were making we were never going to be able to make that game so how do we try to get everyone on the same page the first thing we did was we had a lot of brainstorming meetings we got the team the design team together we would sit down and we would talk about what is over-the-top mean - you know over-the-top had been used on Saints Row 1 in Saints Row 2 is a very general description of you know this is what the game is it's over the top when we started saints row the third people started asking a lot more questions and it especially with the initial different direction they're asking the question of you know what does over-the-top mean is it you know really vicious murder is it is it fart in the jar and the problem was it's somewhere in there and we can't

put our finger on you know this is exactly what we're making so what we started to do was come up with a mantra we wanted people to be thinking about something as they were working on systems we came to embrace the crazy fun Trump's all that kind of codified what we wanted designers to be thinking about it was helpful to be sure and over-the-top you know as luck would have it was still kind of the the buzzword for the team for the rest of the project and probably for you know any future projects and that franchise I think over the top will be a key element of what game is the next thing we did was we did team presentations we would myself the producer we would sit up in front of the entire team asked them to come to lunch meetings or asked them to come to at the team meeting we would just talk about you know here's what we're here's what our plan is for the crazy missions that we're gonna do in the game and then we would talk about it and this this started to help getting people to ask

those difficult questions of like I don't understand why this fits and getting that out in the open helped greatly movie outings was a big help as well just getting people I think the best one I think we saw was the a-team I mean that that's a movie you could call over the top it was pretty ridiculous it was funny it was a summer blockbuster the tone video is is something something I'm gonna show in a minute here basically we ripped up a bunch of movies we put it to a music track and we wanted to capture the feeling of saints row and then finally there's ah ha moments or what I'm calling out how mom's basically there are points in the game where something happened and we realized yes that's it we've I think we've found something that is exactly what we want it to be what we want this game to be and I can see it you know everyone on the team could say okay I I know where we're going now the tone video this might be a little loud just as a warning we ripped up a bunch of movies into

including shoot-'em-up bad boys too we looked for myself in the producer looked for what should the player feel like as they're playing saints row the third we also put it to a music track which our producer picked and I think you know initially I fought him on it I didn't think it I thought it was too out of date now I know that I was totally wrong so here we go [Applause] [Music]

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so personally I think that helped

greatly like that ID that still gets me psyched I love hearing that seeing all that crazy [ __ ] going on it's it's good stuff that that is what we wanted the game to feel like now aha moments the dildo bat I think people probably read about this you know marketing definitely ran with it they went nuts with this initially it was just one bullet pointed weapon on one mission spec out of 30 to 50 mission specs it was not a big part of the game now when the weapon artist took it and and you know I think the line item description was just dildo weapon so he took that and he made a giant six-foot long enormous tilde you know push things beyond there's games that have have done dildo bats before we knew this everyone else you know that that made games knew this as well so we wanted something that was even even crazier so he took that brought it to the the technical rigor

who rigged it up got it all floppy and brought it to the audio guys who added in some some wet floppy you know slapping sounds and then we put this in game and and you know the team just loved it it really felt like awesome I feel like I'm playing something that I'm not gonna get anywhere else this is a really enjoyable game now you know interestingly we showed this to our producer who was incredibly scared he was kind of like oh my god there's no way you know th keys not gonna buy this ESRB he's not gonna buy this so he sent it off to our marketing guys and I think their response back was we loved it they they absolutely loved it and you know I think you can tell through our marketing campaign that they really loved it it was it was a big differentiator I totally get why they used it and this was a this was just a nice moment for I think the team to really gel and feel like yes this is we know what saints row is now now the lessons learned the team

must own the tone and the vision this was something you know that that I learned the hard way on say sure third I think there's a lot of other post-mortems will they'll talk about the things they did to set this up I saw the Deus Ex talk yesterday morning and I thought it was great they did a lot of really smart stuff and we did some stupid stuff but we learned from our mistakes and and we've done a much better job you know tone is very tough especially for a game like Saints Row where we still do have some discrepancies looking back on it you know we have the we have insurance fraud we have the dildo bat but we also have a moment where one of the enemies viciously cracks the neck of you know one of the other enemies I think it's not as bad like one of my main uh things coming out of Saints Row 2 was I didn't want the player to be a dick I felt in Saints Row 2 that a lot of times especially in the the Brotherhood Ark

for those you know who remember it the player did some pretty vicious things and I found myself saying you know that's not my player I've been playing this game to have fun like I don't I don't want to be a jerk but we still ended up with some of these things so I tone is is very tough for us it might not be as tough for other games you know there's let's see what is it Uncharted I think they have something on their tone is something along the lines of play Indiana Jones you know that that's that's got it you don't need to do too much more than that that explains the game the final element was use multiple methods do a lot of different things you can't just have one thing that you know this word is the tone you need to do a lot of things there is no one-size-fit-all there were people on our team who felt you know the video was didn't make any sense they didn't they didn't understand it they didn't understand embrace the crazy there were individuals who they like that but they didn't like this element so you got to find something that can kind of hit

everybody you gotta find multiple things that can hit the entire team now design briefs are something we're using sorry going forward to kind of the goal is before you've written what something is going to be write down the problem you're using that you're going to solve and I think I haven't used this personally very much but I'm looking forward to seeing what we're gonna do with it and I think probably in one of these coming gbc's we'll talk about it a little bit and then vision trailers are fantastic I think probably everybody in here I would imagine we're all design professionals saw the Splinter Cell I don't remember that no not Splinter Cell Rainbow six Patriots vision trailer that that came out maybe four or five months ago you know that that was a obviously fantastic tool something they felt so proud of that they wanted to put out to the public you know years before the game is gonna hit the shelves so the these vision trailers are it's tough to find the time to make them but it's

absolutely worth every second of your time so now that we know what the game is gonna feel like how are we going to make sure that the gameplay we create is crazy we want Wow we want more than Wow we want holy [ __ ] now Saints Row 2 we had kind of you know we had sections in our Docs where we would write wow moments we wanted something that was cool that was players would remember with saints row the third we wanted to uh power up our ante you know up our hyperbole and and call them holy [ __ ] moments they were things that you were gonna remember forever they were water cooler moments in addition to that we wanted every mission to contain some over-the-top element we didn't want any FedEx missions you know FedEx would be okay I have to start here and then I have to drive drive there pick up something and then deliver it to somebody else those sorts of missions were not something we wanted any of we wanted even the smaller missions even mini missions we wanted to have some

crazy element that players were gonna be impressed by the major problem is that paper specs don't guarantee fun we found this on Saints Row 2 and I'm sure everybody else is founded at some point you know you have this amazing idea you think it's gonna be the best thing ever you write it down you feel really proud of the spec and that it gets in game and you're like oh my god this is awful sometimes you won't admit it for awhile I know I'm guilty of that but just writing it down doesn't make it the best thing ever we had a couple of these elements in Saints Row 2 where the Johnny Gat gurney mission there is a mission where you go to the hospital Johnny get one of your main lieutenants is injured you have to get him on the gurney and then you have to fight your way out as you're pushing him shooting your machine gun at enemies who are rushing in you're you know running through the hospital at top speed it sounds like it could be pretty cool but

it wasn't it wasn't very fun and then we had this sword battle a big sword battle at the end of the ronan arc or a middle-of-the-road arc where the player was avenging the people who attacked Johnny Gat you were going to go and murder this I think was genichi and you were gonna do it using his own weapon you're gonna you know you were gonna stab him you were gonna slice up all the ronan but we did it really late and it then it also did not end up being very fun now everything we do on a big game like this you know Saints Row was like I said over a hundred people takes a lot of time and costs a lot of money so we can't just set out a course lightly we need to know as much as possible that what we're gonna do is going to work so our solution was pre-visualization you know this is avatar here I think

everyone is has seen what they've done they've seen you know Hollywood uses this to great effect and I think video games need to start using it more I'm a former animator so I kind of I really like that sort of visual seeing things move as they're really going to move now previz is fantastic because it convinces skeptical groups it convinces programmers who often are very not eager shall we say to take on very very difficult things or things that you know they don't think are gonna be possible this all it all leads into buy-in you want something that people can look at and say that's cool I you know I think if we change this we could make it even better showing them something makes it a lot easier to get someone behind your idea the other element was that we wanted to prototype as early as possible you never know what's gonna work and you want to figure out you know fail early fail often

that's that sort of mantra and nothing almost nothing we ever do is final the first time I always fall into that trap where I think yes I've got it the spec is great we're not going to need to change anything everything's gonna work out perfectly and then we get it in game and invariably either I've left out something or something didn't get implemented or oh my god this other system because we're an open-world game is screwing with this thing I wrote and so now it doesn't work I wanted to mention that there was a talk I saw I think three years ago by Mass Effect 2 level designers which I really learned a lot from about how they break down the phases of development for their missions this was something that I took back to volition and we kind of worked through you know how do we set different stages of you know is this is this ready is this fun how can we make it more fun and one is it really finished it was it was a great help we didn't use exactly what

they did because our game is different but it was great help and that's one of the reasons why I love GDC and why I want to you know hopefully give you something back now we did I'm gonna show I think three previous movies here this first one is for the first mission in the game this is essentially at the the end of the first mission the player is robbing a bank at the very beginning of the game wearing a costume so that you wouldn't have to customize as the very first thing in the game because I felt it was very important that the player get right into the action not that you're thrown you know you watch a cutscene and then you have to go through this giant UI system that's not the feeling I wanted for the game so the player starts off wearing a costume he gets on top of the vault which is pulled out by a helicopter and then it goes smashing around the building smashing through things destroying stuff while the player is fighting off waves and waves of squad so here's the previz that we did interspersed with in the

background is the actual game the the final shipping product I think you'll see a lot of sim ladies and I'm gonna stop it at one point here alright we've cut it up [ __ ]

now initially in the in the previous here we had a we had a boss and we ended it with the player throwing a grenade at a helicopter and then in slow-mo you would shoot the grenade and the grenade would blow up and the helicopter would would lose its stabilization and would come crashing into you because of co-op we weren't gonna really be able to do any sort of slow-mo and so also through development we figured out like okay this is all cool-looking but for two minutes the player is just shooting random people and doesn't feel any sort of progress doesn't feel like they've you know who is their enemy why are they still here and so in the final product I think you'll notice that there's a single helicopter that seems to keep

coming back it's got this we put a red marker over the top of it to make it clear like this is your boss so as we essentially added a boss once we got to the grenade [Music] well so that was about two years before we got to that final product there that we had that previous it was enormous ly helpful to say this is this is what we're trying to hit it took as a long

long time to get there but because we knew this is what we want to do it was much much easier to convince the team and to make sure that that happened now our second mission we wanted to start off with some big moments so we got the bank fault we got this there's a skydiving I wanted the entrance to the city to kind of be this you know what is the coolest most over-the-top way to come to a city and it felt like skydiving out of a plane that you had just jumped out of while shooting enemies and then you land in the city seemed like a pretty cool way to do it all right so let's hit this

so we had just very brief snippets of you know this is what general idea what the camera is gonna be this is the enemies you're gonna be shooting we got that in game and we pretty much realized like you're not gonna want to do this for three five six minutes and so in one of the gameplay reviews where we got you know all the different disciplines to sit together and play through the mission somebody I don't know where where it came from but the idea was we needed to get something in the middle of the mission to break it up and kind of reset and up the stakes so I thought bat back to the movie eraser I'm a big Arnold Schwarzenegger movie fan so if you remember that movie at all there was a point where James Caan is the bad guy Swartz and Edgar has just jumped out of this plane that James Caan took over James Caan convinces the pilot to turn the plane around and then for the next couple minutes you see that plane coming right at Swartz and Egger as he's freaking out and so he shoots at

the plane the plane dodges him that moment was felt pretty over-the-top it felt like something that would fit right in Saints Row and so we built this moment that was even more ridiculous as you'll see so yeah we we made it just a tad more unrealistic than what Arnold did now the

last one here went through a lot of iteration this was this is a moment at the end of the first act of the game where you finally get to reach your your ultimate villain Phillippe Lauren who's been who you know convinced you that he killed Johnny Gat and now you're breaking into his tower and this is the culmination of many hours of work and you're gonna kill him and so the idea was you're going to drop one of these giant 600 ton skyscraper counterweights on top of him this moment it ended up that there was a technical difficulty with animating the way we the way we animate stuff the further it moves away from the origin point of where the animation started the less accuracy it gets and so this tower wasn't actually big enough for us to create the gameplay we wanted to and so we had to send you down to the bottom and then we send you up to the top again and then you fall again and the animators were pulling their hair out

that it just wasn't working so we ended up compromising near the end of the end of the project to get something cool in there just to even have this moment [Music] not this thing looks gonna crush that son of a [ __ ] leave it to me hurry it up he's getting away initially you had to shoot the ball free but in the final game your buddies Oh [Music]

so halfway through the video there he saw what we call the brute which was a giant 8-foot tall character come and run him jump up jump up on the ball this was another case of where we didn't have a boss like this was a sequence that you know for a very short period of time it looks very cool but then when you actually want to play it or want to do any sort of extended gameplay on it it gets kind of tired and so we introduced a boss character that up the ante made it much more interesting so lessons learned previz is great I love it as a former animator I love doing this stuff I didn't work on any of these this was a cinematic artists and the animators who did all these and then the gameplay programmers made this made this stuff happen which was phenomenal those guys spent long long time and a lot hours invested a lot of their selves and

making sure that these things came together it but previous builds that buy-in that you need it's vital and you know as the old saying goes a picture is worth a thousand words so anytime you can show a picture to someone of what you're thinking versus sending them an email or writing a spec do that now here's a there's a terrible mock-up I did mash up for what ended up being our Johnny get I don't even know if it had a name Johnny Gat mobile which was a giant Johnny get head on the front of a van you know this sort of thing is really simple and people enjoy it it's you know you take five or ten minutes produce something that the team will will be able to look back on and will sell that idea really quickly you know this this seems obvious but when you're busy you don't always want to spend the time to do that but it is very worthwhile now something we're doing at the studio

moving forward with this is sketching our studio design director is is for all the projects to do sketches of basically instead of brainstorming you all get together you don't work together at first you all drought ideas you have a problem that you want to solve you draw ideas the idea is to get as many ideas out there as fast as possible and then work together to figure out what are the best ones the next step of previz obviously is then you want to you want to animate that but if you can start with something very simple just a drawing it's that's the next step versus versus trying to write a very detailed design spec getting everyone involved early is is vital we wanted to include the art code production we wanted to get everyone involved it can happen where

design kind of isolates itself and becomes like a black box to the rest of the team and that does not work well you want everyone on the team to be invested in the entire game and all the ideas that are there they might have something that's better than what you thought up and whenever whenever you can let the team that's working on it just just go don't don't try and drive things from above be realistic you can't do it all we can't do it all as I'll talk a little bit later about scope control it's it's really tough now now that we've got our big holy-shit gameplay moment let's let's go to how do we make it fun how do we make it paste well now the goal with pacing is very simple create better experiences that's you know you can't really define it's gonna change based on what your game is what your pacing is intended to be what I'm going to talk about is not the second a second pacing or you know putting an enemy in the players view but you know carrying their vision from left to right not that sort

of stuff ours was where we focused on pacing was the overall experience the emotion of playing the game the emotion of playing that mission the problem was that volition did not have a lot of experience doing this there wasn't a lot to draw on from other projects we always ended up we would put things in game and then we just we would play them until they felt fun and we ended up having to rely on you know just everybody hopefully having a good idea of what pacing meant additionally open-world makes this stuff very hard to pace because anything can happen and you always have to have tons and tons of little optional things that you need to turn off or oh well I don't want corresponding in this area or you know we don't need helicopters in this one it screws up this thing that I'm trying to do we write a lot of mission specs and those are those are good for asset identification they're good for getting the entire idea out there but they're not good for timing they're not good for knowing how things are gonna

feel the other problem was that we had no common vocabulary pacing is a very difficult term to define and there's not a lot of unity in terms of how people talk about pacing there's not a lot of you know tension and tempo and there's you can talk about it musically you can talk about it in all sorts of different ways and just throughout the industry we don't have a good vocabulary of these or what these terms mean and how they should be used just you know do a search on Gamasutra for pacing you're gonna find articles with all different sorts of things all different sorts of ideas and you're gonna have to figure out for yourself what you're gonna do so the way we went about it was I work with the studio design director Jason Scott to figure out what was available what could we draw on this was probably about two and a half years into the three year project that we that I really started pushing for we we need to solve this we don't

have our pacing is not good we need to improve it so what what we found or I think what he found was was the bass best example was this pacing visualization of pacing as a cycle as a circular cycle you know going from building action this is the basic gameplay to the crisis where something goes wrong and you need to react to the climax where things get even worse and you need to figure out how are you gonna how are you going to come back from that recipes and then the payoff where things go great and you figure out how to do it and then the reversal where oh my god you know this new thing happened that's gonna drive us back into that cycle all of these pieces flow together pretty well one issue is that you can't use this as a rulebook you can't always have all of these elements and you can't always use the same sort of reversals there's definitely times where you don't

want the player to feel like you know oh that carrot is right there I might be able to no you jerk you pulled it away you don't always want the player to feel like they just failed but sometimes you do so it's a very fine line this is what what I came up with this is using a program called mind manager this is a breakdown of the second mission in the game going from left to left to right top to bottom basically what I wanted to do was visualize what a mission look like so that we could figure out where we had holes where are we missing a reversal where are we missing a payoff what this helped us do was you can see you know this was where we shipped the mission so I think we had a pretty good idea of we had added in reversals we'd add that edit in that airplane flying right towards you that was a great reversal that we added in this is a

little more detail there's one mission that I wanted to mention or use as an example we had mission 11 was the player was fighting against Stagg which was this military force that we brought in that had these futuristic lasers and VTOL jets that could transform from helicopters or airplanes initially at the end of this mission you had you had been blowing up all these all these Stagg bases all these little pockets of their their troops and their their little base units and then at the very end you went to save your buddy named Oleg and you go to the park and you kill a couple tanks and you kill a couple of V tolls the problem was it was basically the same as everything you'd been doing the rest of the mission so we we didn't really pay it off you just kind of up missions over you save your friends which is great that was a great payoff but it you know players didn't care what we did was we ended up adding in we

moved that element earlier we added in a whole new element where you had to fly out over the sides of the city you were put on a timer told you know oh my god if you don't if you don't get to this giant AWACS plane and blow it up we're gonna we're gonna all lose and the whole mission could be a failure at this point so we put a timer on the player told them that they have to do this under time pressure made the stakes important and then you had this cool cool airplane that you had never seen before flying over the city being escorted by other VTOL so is it it was a pretty good sequence where we figured out you know this is not ending well and we only really figured it out once we had started doing these these pacing maps now the future of pacing is still a work in progress we're still figuring out what pacing means to us how do you pace open-world are we only pacing the missions we're still talking about it we have a group talking about it right now at the studio there's actually a GBC

talk that was given by Jason Scott our studio design director just an hour ago if you have the GBC vault I would suggest you go and watch it it's really interesting talk about the studio design groups that volition has where we basically get get all the designers together break them up into groups we figure out what topics we want to talk about as designers and then we work through them with with clear end goals on what we're gonna figure out what we're gonna deliver at the end of that now pacing was one of those where I felt it was really necessary for our for our project to figure out better ways to do it additionally this is I we've been as we went as we've been working on these these pacing I broke out the pacing cycle and I think I started to feel like we're not really in a cycle because the game is always moving for we're always kind of ramping things up

for the player and so I started to feel like it's more of a wave like that wave can start small it can get big the whole game I think will feel more like this you know we're this is still a work in progress I'm still figuring out you know how do we even visualize with this is this gonna be fun you know one of the other designers is not a big fan of how this works now playtesting I'm not gonna go into it too much lots of other talks have covered it we did I think cross projects critiques where groups of the designers got together from another project they would play our game they would give us feedback within certain sets that we wanted to get feedback on they were very helpful we ran those for about a year so looks like I'm getting short on time so I'm going to speed up here lesson learned GBC our GBC talk on jasa

Scott's talk go see that play testing is fantastic you know everybody should use it if they don't already and then additionally B which you're not at there's a volition talk right now by jordan Lin who runs our play testing lab that you can also see on the vault now scope control is very tough Saints Row 2 we added tons of stuff constantly now the problem is who can tell me what exact size the game should be how many features should it have how many missions should have you know how are we gonna sell 20 million units what what is the right number it's really difficult to define that so what we did was we dumped everything we wanted to do onto our schedule and then we started figuring out we need to start cutting stuff so every three to four months we would cut things we had 26 of these in total some were meetings where all the directors would get together and talk about you know I don't like this feature or I think this is going to be too tough sometimes the direct the producer would

come to us and say I don't think this feature is really gonna work or I don't think this is worthwhile let's let's just kill it we ended up killing about 4,000 man days of scheduled work throughout the project the project pillars helped us you know I think a lot of other projects do this this was a fun image of Johnny cat doing the howling at the moon or the three Wolf Moon playing keyboard but anyway the pillars are the important part they helped us to define what are the important elements of the game we also did custom and core mission definitions we had some missions where we said this is only going to use core features we're not going to add any new functionality for it we had missions like the skydiving where we said we're gonna do every awesome thing we're gonna make this the best mission we possibly can yes so here is one of the features that we ended up cutting we called it free gunning this kind of a combination of you know the Assassin's Creed sort of

parkour plus shooting with a gun it's pretty you know the name kind of define the dull it was a pretty cool feature it looked really neat it was it was fun to slide over cars you know to run against walls and all that sort of stuff but in an open world with tons of AI to the vehicles all kinds of crazy stuff going on this feature we spent about a year on it and and we probably could have spent way way longer we ended up cutting it just like we cut we had cover we cut cover because it didn't fit with what we wanted to do but free gunning really fit with our goals of fast fluid and fun combat now the outcomes to this I think we shipped with a lot of really cool stuff I think we had a lot of variety we had cyber space we had a stag Helicarrier we had professor Genki we had a mission on Mars we had a lot of really amazing

stuff in the game Mars was something that was interesting because it was constantly on the cutting board the it was a very difficult push for me I wanted to have two endings to the game and that was very hard to sell the producer cuz he's he's very much in you know you want every player to see every single thing that you did because we're spending a ton of time making all this stuff in the end I think it was the right thing to keep it and I think a lot of that went to because the mission designer who owned that mission really wanted it to be in the game and spent a lot of his own time to make sure that it got in the game he had that ownership of Mars the main problem was at the end of the project we didn't have enough people we grabbed most of the programmers a lot of the artists and designers from other parts of the studio other parts of volition we ended up with too much stuff we should have cut more it's a lesson that you know I need to learn I need to get better at personally but at least

you know like AAA admitting you have a problem is the first step it's really really hard to do this and scope control is really really difficult for me but we should have cut more going forward I find that I constantly have to reevaluate and constantly think about this that it's really hard now what I learned well end blend here we got the tone and the pillars are very very important you you want the entire team on board with what you're doing prototyping is fantastic previz is fantastic you want to know what you're making before you spend the time making it figure out what your weaknesses are you know whatever that whatever that is for your game look at it look at what's available in in the industry and start working on making it better for for us I would imagine for other people it's really easy to have the best ideas ever and want to get every single thing in

the game because it's awesome the thing is going to be an amazing you know every designer is going to envy me because this is the best thing ever but you can't do everything and you probably don't want to do everything because you'll your game won't ship until 2030 and for us specifically it was don't fear embrace your content you know we are an over-the-top polarizing game people you know some people love Saints Row some people hates a row but we wanted to make a saint's row game and we we ended up I in my opinion really building on what had been done in the past and so that's my talk thank you very much [Applause] if there are any questions I think we got a couple minutes so probably less than five oh yeah I've got one so you're talking about Joan earlier and especially in Saints Row two they had this conflict between over the top and

then very dramatic and now play Saints Row three loved it I thought was a amazing game and so based on your goals they certainly seemed to achieve them but thinking about that may think about say just for argument's sake your tone is goofy comedy and you're doing a two-hour movie you can pull that off and you'd be pretty consistent maybe need a 10 minutes of a little drama to set the scene but when we're now talking about an open-world game where you're going from you know 8 hours to 10 hours of 12 or even 20 or you know even more can you really stick to that tone like what do you feel about cuz I mean honestly you say these things about Saints are too and I played that but personally I liked a lot of that drama even though it was a counterpoint because it felt like that gave that really long experience some depth where you know if it's much more consistent or particular tone it sort of gets a little stale over time you have any feelings on balancing between those two especially without longer experience yeah so I mean the question is about Saints Row two had had that difference

and so maybe that helped with an 8 to 10 hour experience my opinion is that because it's an open world game there's so much stuff you can choose to do at any different points that in a lot of ways you set you set what you're going to experience I I can totally see that point and you know in the reviews the one that that I've really found interesting was was the zero punctuation Yahtzee review where he he absolutely loved sr2 but then he felt kind of disappointed by sr3 because it was well it was too cohesive like it was too much of the same thing so kind of to your point I don't know that there is a perfect way to do it I think it if you start to switch between one and the other or the player doesn't know what to expect like I think was Saints Row 2 it was kind of nice that the story was maybe a little more serious and then the activities were goofy so you kind of had your choice of what it was so I can see where that or that maybe not criticism but where

that opinion comes from you know there there's probably not a right answer for it our goal was to make it cohesive and I think we we did with the the art and the gameplay both kind of fitting with that over the top so you know maybe in the future it'll change back to something more akin to Saints Row 2 who knows thanks hi so I love the way that the you know fun at all costs thing works not only into the aesthetic but into like a lot of the individual systems designs and some of that stuff seemed like very like once you saw it it made perfect sense like being able to dive into the wind like through the windshield of a car and not have to wait for the opening animation but what were the decisions like for something like the upgrade system where you you know you can essentially become invincible to things and oftentimes that's something that's very hard to work with if the players and you worried about it basically being a cheat code that could make the experience stale or something did you did you guys wrestle with that at all and what was the process so the question is about making you know making the player invincible I guess I think

with the upgrades we wanted players who really put their time into it to get the kind of ultimate reward out of it I I do I do see the point about especially for us with DLC I think it was honestly it was a mistake it was a mistake it was an afterthought where we were like you know oh my god we didn't we didn't think about you know that player that played for 80 hours and is probably more likely to buy DLC and now DLC is not really balanced for them I think that was that was kind of a mistake well wrap up now or last question okay yeah I I think I wanted to reward the player for spending all their time and and just make them feel that their effort had really been worth it and they got everything they wanted out of that and I felt for me personally that you know if I'm invincible if I've spent that you know 40 50 hours whatever that I want to be invincible I want to

just run around and kick ass maybe it is kind of a cheat code yeah no I mean I I think it was cool you guys did it I was just it seemed like a departure yeah thanks thanks