Empires to Ages: Storytelling Lessons Learned in 14 Years at BioWare

[Music] little humbled by the turnout it's nice to see everyone I did want to take a moment and just say thank you to everybody who you know has come it's I know it's late I know you're probably looking forward to beer and or dinner and or both so I will try to keep it tight and keep it fresh and then I anticipate based on the length of my talk and probably not have a ton of time for questions so I will commit to being out in one of the kind of follow-up rooms if you do want to talk or I have a standing rule I had I've already had one if people have anything they need signed anything at all you just let me know I did get excited copy of Inquisition today which is really cool so I do want to say thank you as well to the nerve summit I really appreciate the invite it was amazing to come here of course GGC in general it's a pleasure I haven't been in a few years I had kind of a

standing policy that I would tend to send more junior members of my team because it felt like they could learn a lot by coming here so now that I don't have a team I thought well I guess I'm sending me so I want to talk about trust that's gonna be the kind of theme that ties my talk together and for those of you who don't know who I am because you know Tom's that was that was a pretty weak introduction by demand so I used to work with Bioware I bet I was there for 14 years I you say I'd been there but I I was there for 14 years I worked on Jade Empire I had the distinct honor of writing all the subspecies for Mass Effect I got to read the first vollis the first Elcor in the first nr that was pretty cool and then I worked on all of the dragon ages I took over his lead design in the last couple years of origins and worked on awakenings and - and Inquisition so I have a bit of a history and what I want to talk to you

about today is not kind of the basics I want to talk to you about what I see you know speaking of someone who's been a creative director in terms of high-functioning writing teams and that team doesn't have to be multiple people it could be just you as the writer involved in a specific set of exercises and the key thing you need to do is to establish trust with the team and my job was of course to help the writers get there and the reason for that is because people have a misconception this may be a slide specifically designed to appeal to writers but the simple truth is that putting sentences together is not the same as writing it does not evoke emotion it does not tell a story it does not make you feel and your job if you here at the narrative summit I imagine is either to feel or to figure out how people whose job it is to make people feel work so I'm here to help you with that I think that these are distinct

skills and ones that the team may think they already have and you as writers are possessing of some sort of secret mystery that unfortunately does not have the mystique of sculpting in 3d or coding really tight arrays or that kind of thing so then how do you earn the trust of a team it's interesting and the thing is your job is to win their hearts and minds right and I think there's three critical things that will help you do that the first is a schedule that understands and can survive the rigors of development you need to be realistic about how much time you have and what work you can do okay cool a schedule that's I understand rig is about here we go boom a story with clearly articulated goals right what you may find is that your team does not immediately understand your genius so how do you communicate that and thirdly you need to have processes in place if

you want to be truly successful to help the team understand that you are committed to quality because writing can be weirdly weirdly non-transparent about this because again everybody kind of thinks they understand how it works but they don't so my job as I see it is to come here and say okay I've led writing teams I've been on writing teams can I help you take one step further and we're going to start with the oh so exciting subject of jewel properly pronounced asphalt so the thing about about dueling is that I'm gonna take some Givens I think that either you are already highly competent or you've attended enough of the well-paced and carefully curated narrative summit that you will be exceptionally competent by the time you finish your time here and so you know how to track the velocity of your team you know how much work you have to do you know okay we're gonna write you know

400,000 words or some business like that and you know how long you have and as soon as you know all those things in theory you can make a schedule but the problem is is that the real schedule exists in service to downstream teams and this I find especially when you're starting out is something you don't think about a writer can casually write and then the universe explodes and it turns out that's very hard to render downstream teams have to figure out how to take the work that you're doing and turn them into actuality unless it is a hundred percent reliant on words if you are working in a text parser and are making an infocomm style interactive fiction game you may leave because none of my stuff will apply you are actually golden you may do whatever you like but the thing is is the downstream teams in anything beyond that do have an impact on the amount of time you have and you look at your schedule and go well we start production then we finished production I'm great things are amazing and

I couldn't have paid for a more beautifully time laugh because the simple truth is that's never the case in fact what you'll find is that there are any number of downstream departments who have this kind of stack dependency editing was something that we had a separate department for it bio where maybe you don't have that but you should look at editors or do you have to do the work yourself that's going to eat some of your time there will be if you choose to pursue voice there will be voice over recording that will be a significant drag on the amount of time that you have cinematics of course usually have a dependency on voice over if you're going to record stuff or do performance capture or anything like that the same acts team cannot begin until they have the text written and then they tweak the cameras and other movement like that and so and then for us we would localize into 12 to 15 languages so we'd have to translate it then we'd have to record that and then all of that has to go through QA because we would simchah p-- now there may be things that you're able

to move there may be things you're able to shift around but my point is more than anything else is that your job is to understand how many factors live downstream of the work that you do because the real time that you have as compared to this wonderful magical blue polygon is significantly shortened by the amount of dependency because even if you can paralyze which again we managed to do this represents a Bioware schedule but to do that require numerous producers coordinating the elements moving through if you can paralyze even then there is a final piece of writing that you do that must still go through a pipeline where it touches vo and editing now there are ways to mitigate the amount of time that you lose in the course of this process which is good that's absolutely good news and again I want to kind of share the stuff that we did to accelerate our writers to give them more time a little more leeway the first thing is cinematics and performance capture anything that had

that level of dependency had to be written first or as early as was practical sometimes you need to get the character voice sometimes you need core plot in place but as soon as you could do this the sooner you had it because you want it to be early in the story for parallelization major characters should have at minimum one significant piece of content written as early as you can if you are doing voiceover EE so if you're doing performance capture and the reason I bring that up is because they may not actually be the right actors and if you don't have the right actors they simply can't hit the notes you need for a specific character you need to recast them which is time that you will lose the sooner you can collapse that waveform into a particle and turn it into reality the better your production will go if you can and if you are localizing your game which I understand not everyone will do but you know 30% of dragontagious sales were due to localization that's significant millions

of copies if you can sit down with your translation team and help them to understand the why of your game and the purpose of your character and understand intuitively why they sound the way they sound iron bull is using humor to cover his deep dissatisfaction with his current state oh well that makes every translation easier because they understand the core fundamentals and principles we would have our writers get onto phone calls and ridiculously early hours because their translation teams were in Madrid and they would sit them down and go okay cool let me talk to you about what Sarah means she doesn't make any sense and you're going to have to translate a bunch of dick jokes good luck and if you can if you want to reduce the amount of rework you can do a thing that we invested in very early was having engineers create alive and aware set of data compliments that said if this thing has been translated or

recorded change its state if I looked in the dialogue tool set the bio were used dialogue lines that were yellow or red were ones that had already gone down the pipe they money had been spent to translate them or record them if I were to change those I was aware that that had additional cost it didn't mean I couldn't but it meant that I should do so only when it was absolutely necessary and we had a whole process in which change requests would be put through this line at slowly breaks the game it's not being translated properly that kind of thing yes we would do changes but each time we would have to bring potentially an actor back in and pay their scale wage for one line that is expensive and something you want to avoid so again making the writers aware and being aware of the costs of that kind of thing is a huge gain to the efficiency of your production the other big thing I think that affects schedules is crumpled plans crumpled plans to my mind are the worst case scenario that you plan for Slee you

never ever have to use them and I think again if we go back to the idea that you want the team to trust you what you want to do is go and assume that you will lose say one quarter of your production to some degree of rewrites someone getting sick staff loss writer's block or any number of other things in swickle Horrors from beyond depending on if you're working on some sort of Cthulhu thing like Alexis Kennedy if that's the case then you then want to go and crumple further in my opinion and yes this is profoundly pessimistic but I've shipped a lot of frigging video games and after a while it gets to you the thing I think is that if you choose to build a game that is almost fundamentally built out of critical path like core everything is deeply tightly enmeshed I would call this like a naughty dog game a game where like every moment has absolute significance I think you should crumple even further and assume that another 25% half of your production time will be stuff that you're reworking and retooling if that's

the case then you should scope according to I have half the amount of time I think I have because you will want to polish and refine and make that absolutely precise that does not match what we do it by where though I buy where we tend to do a mix and again Bioware and it's best I was not always the most responsible but the simple truth is that if you had 25% of your plan possible to be crumpled and you had well sorry 20 percent replay impossible to be critical that means it is absolutely important if you don't get these parts you will not understand exactly what's happening then you should have the remaining let's say 50% of the game 25% is lost 50% is crumpled that stuff should be important it should be thematically appropriate it should be things that lead into your overall structure but it could go the best example I can think of of a game that crumpled like this would be Mass Effect 2 Mass Effect 2 had several beats that were necessary you had to go to the demand and Reaper you had to see the

collectors attack people on horizon your ship had to be attacked in your crew had to be taken away those things had to happen for the rebirth or sorry the collector I guess threat to escalate they worked for the reverse so you know transient property but essentially transitive anyway so essentially those parts had to happen but the followers each had an acquisition plot and they had a loyalty plot and any follower could have been removed from that game you can't remove all the followers from the game because it's not a suicide mission with a squad that you've built up if you have no one but you could move X number of them and it would be successful that's crumbling that's where you have the opportunity to remove things and prioritize things and say the game could survive a collapse of scope you don't want that to happen but what I would argue is that by presenting a crumpled plan and having one on hand is that it becomes less likely to happen gives what you will find is that you have a team that registers that if I

slip if I spend three hours on Twitter I'm at risk of cutting Morden and I want to collect those [ __ ] seashells Mass Effect jokes but that's that's the kind of thing you find you will find that an awareness of what could go will actually catalyze a team and make them not want to lose it but still as a writer you've said I'm not precious I have built a thing that can survive an impact in the same way that cars have crumple zones they keep the passenger safe even if they mess up the engine clear goals these were absolutely critical and this is something that I had to learn over my years because I moved up through lead writer into creative director and what I what I quickly learned is that I would spend hours building this delicious detailed story summer of 60 70 pages and weirdly no one would

read them and that will happen that will happen and the simple truth is because your entire team does not have the narrative priority that you do I'm again saying you insofar as I assume many of you are at least interested in narrative due to the summit you're attending and that's okay that's okay I think that the simple truth is that your job to earn that trust and have the team to oh I get it I get it I get it is to condense and present you need to be able to articulate what this game is about in less than 30 minutes and that's challenging but I will tell you that every time I have tackled that challenge I have felt better about the game because when I couldn't do it I made changes I absolutely shifted the tone of the game because it was too hard to understand and that is a really really powerful exercise for you to go through you want as well to make a quick high-level onboarding presentation you want to be able to bring a new member into your team and again I'm speaking for the context of Dragon Age was 240 at

the end of Inquisition but you want someone new to come in and be able to go okay here's what we are about maybe you won't have a team in that size but imagine bringing someone new in and being able to take a half an hour and have them go cool I get it it's valuable the things that you would want to put into that presentation are fundamentally the themes right you want to know what this game is about you won't know what thread binds it together Mass Effect 2 was about closure before everyone went to die the whole game even the marketing campaign was pitched as a suicide mission everybody wanted to go find their dad mostly or figure out other stuff that happened in their life and they wanted to say goodbye they wanted closure similarly Dragon Age Origins was about sacrifice it was about the nobility of putting the world ahead of yourself right Dragon Age 2 was about rebellion the status quo did not have to stand you could fight back in a lot of ways the fact that your story was already being

told by Varrick meant that while things were Pro scripted you still as a player had the opportunity to fight that was a big part of it Dragon Age Inquisition I don't even have listed on here because I'm scared to talk about it cuz people get angry at me but let's be honest it was about faith and what happens when your faith is challenged the iron bull believed in the Qun what happens when that contradicts his friendships everybody in Dragon Age Inquisition was challenged in their faith and that's what the game was about it was a theme that ran through the whole damn thing and he want to know what your tent poles are you want to understand what moment stand out what moments could marketing when they inevitably do come to you and say what are we going to show on the trailer but you need an answer you need to know in fact we got to the point where I would have the writing team find good quotes as they wrote them and throw them

into a file because eventually marketing would come and look for moments and those quotes had to be thematically appropriate if we could find them we would have them and our trailers were that much easier to build and you want to make sure that your moments are a range of things you sometimes need spectacle hey we exploded this castle they had another castle inside of it Wow sometimes you want them to be emblematic this is the moment when the Inquisition is first founded and they unfurl the banner while everyone looks really proud later their home gets destroyed and Dragon Age or you want them to be evocative such as the choral singing right as everybody sings the dawn will come just before you find sky hold those are moments those are moments that stand up they're moments that help cement the flow of the game that you are presenting and you want those moments to be available and you want to be able to articulate them clearly because when someone new is joining your team or a member of your team who isn't part of your narrative is listening you want some things to stick and high emotions

stick and then he says this and then he says this does not stick ever ever and finally because there are so many people dependent on characters and again this may be a buyer thing because characters were my jam but the simple truth is that you want the motivations of the characters you know who do they agree with why do they care and who do they fight with you want those to be easily rapidly accessible right Sarah Dorian and iron bull got along because they were basically team Yolo vivianne and Cassandra and Blackwall got along because they were both they were all uptight right like you want to understand where people overlap and where they differ and that's the thing that again it helps the concept artists helps a character our team helps everybody to get a better sense of who's happening because again I fundamentally believe that the best stories are told through character so the other thing that I would recommend is that as a communicator and again we're going back

the idea of how do I get the team trust that I am going to this [ __ ] is essentially that you should get comfortable with speaking in elevator pitches because not everybody around you is going to be willing to listen to 15-minute explanation as to why something's cool in our case we would tend to find rapid ways to convey the feel that we were going for for any individual piece of content a vision touchstone is a really important thing to have because you want to know wait a minute wait man are we delivering this thing that we set out to do so as an example of that in the temple of myth all for anyone who's played Dragon Age Inquisition it was basically our Indiana Jones in the Last Crusade moment it was a moment in which you were finding a giant pool of water as opposed to a cup and it had an ancient Guardian as opposed to a knight and you had to go through a series of drops that was exactly what we were going for the feel like this was a place for you to respect or desecrate in the same way that the Germans desecrated and Indy respected

and he succeeded that was the note we were going for in the field and while yes that under sells exactly what's happening it also is an instantly graspable thing that you can evaluate the content you're building against and when teams aren't a hundred percent aligned on narrative this is a shorthand that helps them get back on track so consider it and then let's talk about quality and this is a big deal because the biggest thing that you will find and that I've found is that your team will sometimes worry about the writing quality and this was a buyer thing for sure because you know a lot of people came to buy or hoping that they would be involved in an epic story that would catch people's imaginations we had a notorious technical art lead who'd be like yeah oh just a worry it's kind of [ __ ]

and I'd be like Ben it's cool let me tell you what's going on Ben it's cool I don't know if you still hear with Alistair who was my former boss is in the audience and probably laughing his ass off right now but the thing is is that that that's that's a fair complaint tell me it isn't [ __ ] tell me it's good tell me it's going to be a thing that I can get behind and again I'm gonna take some Givens here you guys know how to document plots you guys know how to talk to QA you know how to make bugs happen right cool well those are the basics of quality but the thing that we did and again this is a thing that ties into a team and I know not everybody has the reality that they get to work in a writing team but still maybe there are people who have a narrative interest you can recruit to this is that the buyer process at its best involved peer review extensive peer review the flow as it stood was that everybody involved in the peer review and the people that would be

invited would be all of the writers if you had more than one the level designer the cinematix person QA especially if they were narrative focused QA and anyone else that was like oven and so a departments sometimes the voice-over director would be involved their job would be to play that content we always tried to get it an engine if we could if it was too early fair enough we'd do it by reading well playing is always stronger everybody commits at the time we booked it in their calendars we moved their scrum goals we move their can bands all that kind of stuff changed because we need to make sure that this happened and then we would bring them to a feedback session and the writer who had written said to content because we did try to give ownership over large scale plots like I'm doing the temple of myth all if that were mine my job would be to come with a notebook and to not talk and each person that had played that content would go through their notes some people had detailed some people had less and they would go through and say I felt this worked I felt this didn't I

felt this clunked this didn't match my vision for what I think we were doing those notes would be hard to hear feedback is always hard to hear why it's negative sometimes so there would be like this was hilarious never lose there to keep this changed that etc then we would go to the next person around the table and that person would say ditto X did oh why did of Zed or Z I suppose and we would go through and they would they would did Oh anything that had already been repeated so the the key was to keep everyone engaged because they could not repeat their notes and they would give the feedback that was fresh and the writer would write those down but anything that was ditto that would get a tick and then the next person and the next person and the next person and this resulted in what you found to be kind of a consensus level of feedback where people were like wow seven people agree that the scene clonked I didn't know what to do they didn't understand the flow this character seemed out of touch however all seven people also thought this bit was hilarious okay cool we know

what to keep we know what to change what was really intriguing about this to my mind is that it created a public commitment to feedback it allowed the cinematix team or the level design team other people from outside the writing team to understand what was happening because not only would we write all those notes we would then make up a plan and distribute it across the team to say this is what we're going to do to fix the concerns we identified so suddenly everybody's going wow cool look at the writers they are awfully mature in the way that they handle feedback they do not live in an ivory tower they are not precious they want to make a good game and that's how you build trust there's a precise set of rules there's a decorum and everyone follows this decorum because if they don't then you have the danger of someone becoming snarky or kind of an asshat and going a little stupid win and no one no one wants that because everybody is about to go through peer review it was universally applied even the leaves if I wrote something I'd

peer review it right and I was not immune to criticism nor should I be other stakeholders being involved was a huge win because they would often suggest ways to proceed a goal that writing could only fix by adding more words hold on I can make it clear that she is sad with tears and posture don't add more words than that you can pull it out multi-discipline fixes are always the best fixes because everybody plays to their strengths which is why we actively invited other disciplines into the reviews and like I said the ivory tower stigma is removed it is the best possible thing you can do to make people trust you and we implemented this all the way back to Dragon Age Origins we refined it through Mass Effect 1 & 2 we kept it up through Dragon Age 2 and Inquisition it is widely used to this day I highly highly recommend it your first peer review will hurt they always do because nothing's ever perfect on first draft but getting the feedback of your peers and knowing that later you

will get them back is possibly the greatest feeling because it means you're all committed to an amazing game right and that is why we're here so other teams led to multi discipline solutions broadcasting the plan meant that people who weren't at the peer review still felt like a bunch of cool stuff happened holy cow look at how good we're making this game it's cool that the writers are doing that and imagine imagine because I imagine some of you have run into those walls imagine the teams saying you're cool right sounds pretty neat but for me the thing that I thought was super cool is that it meant if you had a junior member of the team they would hear the feedback of your drew carpa shion's or your david Gators or Patrick Weekes and they gave feedback but someone new coming into the team would hear that and would be able to assimilate it and understand what was happening and understand why that feedback was being given which meant that when they wanted to tackle their stuff their stuff would be stronger

every single time and the most important part to me is that the leads had to go through this as well Patrick was usually the first one over the hill he'd be like I did some God to pieces but you know what he wasn't precious about it and his writing is amazing he's probably blushing right now so all of this all of this is me saying that as writers you are magical wondrous unicorns who can make people feel things that you want them to feel that's a hell of a thing it's a bit of a superpower and people don't necessarily understand just how rare that superpower is to use simple words to make people cry or smile or feel like maybe it's gonna be okay you know and when I go to paksas and I go to other events I love things like pax because their fan focused and people company tell me stories that make me

[ __ ] cry when I think about them the thing that you can do is make their lives better and I'm here to say that the best way to do that is not to just earn the trust of the team but to be transparent and open and then be vulnerable put your cards on the table tell them what you're trying to do even if there's a risk they'll tell you you didn't do it understand that the feedback you get from your team its feedback that you can use to change feedback you can use to improve feedback you can use to hone your blade until you can drive it into the hearts of your players to the point where they are on tumblr or reddit and writing about how this [ __ ] them up [Music]

because that's your power but that power gets better when you work as a team and when you look at those multidisciplinary solutions and the thing I discovered because this talk has talked about lessons learned over 14 years of Bioware is that I came into and almost staggered into leadership things were not great on Jade Empire and they said do you want to be lead and lead lead writer lead Empire huh and and I remember my boss Kevin Martin lovely guy lovely guy asking me this at Cod I think we were sitting on a beach where his kids were playing in the water and I was like um I guess and I thought that I had to be all-knowing I thought I had to be the guy who knew how this stuff worked if I was going to be lead and over the years what I found is that admitting that I don't know how it all works admitting that I need to learn and that the team can give me feedback and admitting that I want to hear where it is broken by being vulnerable is the

single best thing I've ever done for my career or for the games that have my name on them so what I would encourage you to do is make efforts to earn the trust of the team working around you tell them that what you do is not just put words into sentences but you write and then be open and vulnerable to the feedback that they want to give you when they say it's not working because at the end of the day you will have broken the conditioning of society that says leaders must be imperfect and never questioned and all of that toxic crap no get out there tell people you want to know where you did right and where you did wrong and you will find that your writing team and or your writing self will exceed because those are the missteps you want to catch and that is probably the lesson that I learned at Baier [Applause]