How a Time Loop Influenced 'Deathloop's' Narrative Design

Hello, and welcome to my presentation about how a time loop influence Deathloop's narrative design. And before we begin, be aware that there are some pretty massive unavoidable story spoilers for the game. Um so you have been warned. And my name is as you heard Pavel Kremenkov. And I used to do some translation and interpreting and then I switched to game development in 2013 and I started out as a game designer. I did a little production and then I specialized in narrative and I'm currently lead narrative designer at Arkane Lyon. And some of the games I worked on include Hard West, which is a turn-based tactical. Phantom Doctrine, which is the same genre but a different setting.

And most recently Deathloop, which we're going to cover in more detail today. So Deathloop is a next-gen first-person shooter from Arkane Lyon. And in Deathloop there are two rival assassins who are trapped in a mysterious time loop on the island of Blackreef and are doomed to repeat the same day for eternity. You play as Colt, a soldier without memory, who can only break the cycle by killing eight key targets before the day ends. And we need to learn from train new paths, gather intel, find new weapons and abilities, and do whatever it takes to break the loop. But beware. Julianna, who is the other assassin, is out on the prowl and she's doing her best to stop you. And she can be another player. So if first you don't succeed, die and die again. This is more or less the back of the box description of the game. And here's how it looked a little bit more under the hood. So we have four

distinct areas on the island. There's Updaam, there's Karl's Bay, the Complex, and Fristad Rock. And you can visit those areas each of those areas four times during during one of the four times of the day. So there's morning, noon, the afternoon, and the evening. So basically if you multiply areas by the times of day, you get Updaam morning, which is the area of Updaam in the morning and it has some quests and some, you know, content. Then there's Updaam noon, which is more or less the same area. The layout looks similar, but there are some new paths that open up or close in this time period and there's new content completely different from the morning. And the same is true for the afternoon. So you get a third set of content on the vaguely the same layout, but still there are some changes that apply. And in the evening again, the content is different. Um it's the same area, but it evolves

over over time. And the same is true for Karl's Bay and for the remaining two areas. And if you want to be really nitpicky in the game, those two periods that just disappeared are not actually available. And if you want to learn more about this, you may have seen the presentation of my colleague Sébastien Bénard and you who talked about the level design of those areas and over time. And if you haven't seen them, maybe you will be able to see it in replay or on the vault. So in terms of narrative structure, we first start with a prologue mission, which is on a special map and this is basically the tutorial where we introduce stuff like, you know, movement and the main characters and the main conflict. And then we proceed into the guided tour, which is happens on those main core maps that I've mentioned before, so Updaam and and the rest of those areas. But they're arranged in a linear fashion. We are

forcing the player to go to a specific map at a specific time period and we are using this progression to teach them how the time loop works, to introduce the main characters, to introduce the main quest, so how do you break the loop? What is necessary to break it? And you may you might learn more about the guided tour and how it was conceived of from the talk of Dana Nightingale that happened on Monday and you should be able to see it in replay by now. So at any rate, by the time you end the guided tour, two things can happen. You can either die or if you survive, then you go to an evening mission. And after that, the loop is over and the day starts over in the morning and the player the game opens up. The player is now able to pick any of the four available maps from the morning period. So we as narrative designers have no idea what the player is going to pick beyond the the end of the guided tour.

And within any of those maps, there a whole bunch of stuff that the player can do. So for instance, if one of the visionaries, so if one of those key targets is present in the map, the player might try to take them out. Or they might go and do a side mission of some sort, which is not directly connected to any of those main targets. And there are vignettes, which are just smaller pieces of content. And there are leads, which are effectively well the leads that lead you to breaking the loop, the your clues in that direction. You can also go and explore freely, just, you know, play around with the systems and and just don't engage in anything specific. If you are invaded by another player, then you engage in multiplayer. Or you can just as soon as you enter the map, you can leave and that will advance the time to the next time period. So again, as narrative designers, we have no guarantee that the player is going to do any of this stuff because all of it is completely optional. And when you leave the map and you

advance into the noon period, then again you can pick from the available maps or you could skip directly to the afternoon and pick one of the available maps in the afternoon. Or if you skip to the evening, then you can pick one of the four maps in the evening or you can even skip over and start another loop iteration from the morning. So again, as narrative designers, we have no idea where the player is going to go. And this level of choice is available to the player on each loop iteration. So if they do one, two, three, four, or more loops, however long it takes them to complete the game, each time they have the choice of those all of those maps and time periods as they please. They can skip time as they please, etc. So summarizing Deathloop is an FPS Arkane style, so it has a strong component of immersive sim DNA. It is not a roguelike or roguelite. And it has the central time loop mechanic, which influences basically

everything in the game and is gloriously nonlinear. So our big question as narrative designers was how do we design the narrative of that game to support this core mechanic of a time loop, to support all of this player choice and reward it and how do we tell a relevant story in those conditions? So there were a lot of things that we need to think about and we tried to narrow down and ultimately we came up with a couple of basic design goals for this project. And right now it looks very top-down, but this this is not what it looked like when we were designing. It kind of you know, evolved organically. So our main our first design goal was that players must feel that they are in a time loop as opposed to a game where if you die, you respawn or you, you know, load up an earlier save game or something like that. It needed to feel like a time loop story. In other words, we need to pay off the core fantasy.

So the player must feel that they are in a time loop and they're looking for a way out of it. So in that to achieve this, we tried to create a new normal for the player. We tried to make the time loop feel normal. So the time loop is actually mentioned absolutely everywhere. It's on graffiti, people talk about it, it's in advertisements. It's in virtually everywhere you go, there's a mention of the time loop. So obviously the NPCs are aware of the existence of the time loop. They know that they're in it. They are just unaware how long it has been going. They still think it's the first day and the next morning they wake up and they still think it's the first day. Um so unlike Groundhog Day, for instance, where people are unaware that they're stuck in this repeating, you know, cycle. Um here the NPCs are aware that they're in a time loop, but they don't know how long it's been going. And so we are enforcing several that are

typical of a time loop story and we are just executing them differently. Um to So for instance, everything is replenished the next day. So there is no money, no, you know, really possessions because everything you take, everything you use, everything you destroy is going to be there the next day just unchanged un unharmed completely back to its original state. And this is also true for people. So anybody who dies, you know, wakes up the next morning and they're right as rain. So that's why actually Colt, in order to break the loop, he needs to kill all of those visionaries within a single day because if he only kills like, I don't know, three or four of them during a day, they will be revived the next morning. So he needs to accomplish this task with while the day is on. And so by doing those things in multiple places, we are establishing the rules of the time loop. And now that we have the rules, we can stick to them to create a

feeling on of consistency of the setting that, you know, there are rules of the time loop and the world operates according to those rules. So, any choices that the player does makes during the day, uh they persist and then they are reset on the on the next morning. And it's uh boosts intentionality. So, intentionality is something that is extremely important in our Arcane game uh because we want the player to be able to formulate a plan and then execute it based on the information that they have. And in a time loop, this works really well because you repeat the same environments all the time. You see the same things happen all the time in the same way. So, that gives you mastery over uh the environment. You can anticipate what's going to happen because you've already seen it. Everybody else has done it before, but they don't remember. And actually made things cheaper in production overall because um you know, fewer speech variations and less reactivity because

uh even though you revisit the same location over and over again, those are always the same people and they always do the same thing. And it's important that they always do the same thing to maintain the solution of a time loop. Um so, we actually need to write fewer variations than we would have if for instance, we were making a linear game uh you know, with a linear passage of time. And you would revisit a certain area and people would need to remember that you've been there already. So, our second goal was that players must progress despite the time loop. So, we have this time loop that repeats infallibly each time, but we still in this environment, we need to give the player a sense that they're progressing in the story. And towards the most important thing here was to have a unity of player and the player character in terms of their memory. So, the player starts uh playing the game. They have never seen it before. So, they start taking this world in and so must

the hero. They must be aligned at any point because if the hero knows more than the player does, then the player feels like they maybe did a bad job following the story and that creates a disconnect and we didn't want that absolutely. So, we need to make sure each time that the the the hero knows exactly the same things as the player. Uh so, the hero in our game is an amnesiac. He is an amnesiac and um but that created problem. Why would our hero suddenly start remembering now that you start playing him although this loop has been going on for God knows how long. So, we actually wrote it into backstory of Colt, our hero. Um a cycle of amnesia where he forgets everything and then then he goes back into a period where he starts remembering things. And this is where we introduced um what we call the pre-intro scene. And that's a scene where Julianna uh picture here is murdering Colt with a

machete. And that is the very first thing that you see in the game. Then Colt wakes up on the beach and maybe at first he thinks it's it was just a nightmare, but then the woman, you know, contacts him and uh he realizes that it actually happened. So, the player has seen that. The player now remembers it and when Colt makes reference to this, then the player knows what Colt is talking about. So, they are united. And the player does a lot of exploration obviously to learn about the world, but we needed a source of information that would bring them up to speed more rapidly. And this is also Julianna actually, your nemesis, your antagonist of the game. She is the guide and the sounding board. And that is all thanks to the fact that she also has a persistent memory. She can remember from loop to loop. So, we introduced a couple of characters who um who have this kind of persistent memory, but we found out that anybody who is not the hero uh or the antagonist creates actually a

danger to the setting consistency. Um because in most time loop stories, characters don't generally remember that they're in a time loop unless they're the hero and sometimes if they are the antagonist. Because when so, when there is anybody else who who remembers, it uh create that's an anomaly and and the audience starts looking for a pattern. And if they don't find anything, uh it's confusing. Like why don't doesn't anybody remember except this guy and even though he is not the hero. Uh and that was confirmed by um our user research team where we found out after, you know, in the report that people considered um anybody who was not Colt or Julianna and who had persistent memory that it was an anomaly. That there was something wrong. That the the the rules of the time loop were broken. So, our solution to this was to make a big reveal out of the fact that somebody remembers.

So, for instance, we have this semi-sentient computer called 2-Bit in the game and uh this computer can remember from one loop iteration to another. And before that was just like a gameplay gimmick, you know, well, not gimmick, but like a gameplay mechanic. So, you would revisit this area and because this computer remembered thing, he would change things around just to make life more difficult for you. And then it kind of became a part of uh you know, of the bigger story and uh we decided to make a big reveal out of the fact that 2-Bit can remember. So, when you first meet this computer, when you first talk to it, um he makes it a big deal that oh you know, to tell you that he can remember. And this is made in a in a scene where we take all the control away from the player and this is not something that we do lightly uh Arcane. Uh so, it suddenly it becomes, you know, like a big reveal that there's this important character called 2-Bit who can remember from loop to loop. And because of making it a big deal, it becomes part

of the story and the players are reassured that this is not just an omission on your part. And that kind of solved the problem. Uh there was also the question why um 2-Bit remembers or anybody else remembers. So, this is we consider this part of the magic of the island. And we know within, you know, the dev team why people remember, but we never explain it explicitly. In fact, in Deathloop, we leave a lot of hints that kind of you know, um allow players to make some assumptions about that. But we ultimately left it entirely to players' imagination and interpretation. And of course, uh there were people who complained about that. They felt like we were, you know, um just um we had no idea what we're maybe doing and and we didn't want to explain that, but we actually didn't want to explain the magic because if you explain the magic, it will not be as magical as people imagine it will be.

And uh we thought it would be better to just leave it to players. Um so, to summarize, we had two main design goals. Uh the players must feel they're in a time loop and players must have a sense of progression. And you will see that it informs everything else that we've done more or less. So, for instance, themes. Um somewhere over time or in between time or it's it's difficult to say. The goals that I just presented became aligned with the themes of our story. Or maybe it was the Well, anyway, um yeah, they they kind of reflected one another and you will see um that it's true in a moment because for instance, our theme number one is people are stuck in vicious cycles because they aren't mature enough to break out of them. And that's a big theme. It's a very relatable image. If you have, I know, bad habit or you maybe gone through a bad relationship or you had writer's block or anything like that, you you

know that you can relate to an image of being stuck in a rut and having difficulty, you know, getting out of it. So, in Deathloop, this is presented literally and figuratively as well because the time loop itself is a very explicit illustration of a vicious cycle. You are stuck on the island. The same day repeats over and over again. Everybody is trying to kill you. That's um uh that's a you know, sick cycle if uh if I ever heard about one. And there's Colt and Julianna and they have very flawed relationship where they're basically killing one another over and over again and they cannot seem to find a way out of it. And the same is true for the visionaries, so the main targets and the eternalists which are just the any all the other inhabitants of the island who are not visionaries or Colt or Julianna. And after a while, we realized that by illustrating this theme, we are getting awfully close to realizing also the goal number one, which is the players must feel they are in a time loop because if

we can show that you're in a time loop, then we are making very this very explicit illustration of a vicious cycle uh being felt by the player and vice versa. And so, uh our second theme was that memory can be a treasure, but also a curse. And uh this is basically an exploration of memory in a time loop. So, some characters have persistent memory and how does that affect them? How does living in a time loop affect their memory and their personality? And there are other characters who don't have persistent memory. So, how do they function in a time loop? And Colt is in between those two worlds because sometimes he is uh facing the challenges of having persistent memory and sometimes he faces the challenges of not having persistent memory. And that again connects to our second goal, which is to give players a sense of progression despite everything repeating because if you can remember what happens from loop to loop then you have a chance of progressing in

it. So basically the player's real life memory becomes Colt's memory. And we needed systems that would illustrate this divergence between people who can remember and people who cannot remember. Because that creates opportunities for the player to exploit the lack of memory in the other characters to form a plan of getting out of the loop manipulating the events that you know in their in their service. And it also creates conflict and as you know conflict drives the story and the world and everything that you do in in the narrative. So Deathloop is a game in its most general sense the story of Deathloop is about being stuck in a rut. And by the end of the game Colt manages to break his own vicious cycle and therefore you know the big loop and by doing so he gives everyone else on the island a chance to re-evaluate their their lives and do

something with them. So let's talk about Colt and Julianna who are our hero and antagonist and they're inextricably linked not just because they have both persistent memory. They're also father and daughter and they're best frenemies on the island. They kind of really like and really hate each other at the same time. And they are locked in this vicious cycle because when Colt is trying to break the loop he starts remembering again. So he has this persistent memory and that is very exciting for Julianna because now he is you know an equal they can like talk and and have some sort of rapport. But Colt is really good at trying to break the loop. So Julianna and Julianna loves the loop. She doesn't want it to be broken. So she needs to stop Colt from breaking the loop but still keep him motivated to try to break it so he keeps being interested because if Colt you know quits gives up and and doesn't want to break the loop anymore he slides back into amnesia and becomes boring

again and then Julianna needs to murder him to kind of you know shake him up and and and make him want to break the loop again. So as a result they really have no hope for a healthy family relationship. And Colt realizes that at some point and he decides that okay I need really need to break this loop but this time I I really need to break it. Because Colt has been doing this many many times. He has arrived many times at a point where he was just an inch away from breaking the loop and he always failed for some reason and we don't know why. And the reason why is that he needs to kill all of the visionaries and Julianna is one of them. And she stages it so that Colt needs to shoot her at point blank range in the face where she is basically defenseless. I mean she also holds a gun but she doesn't fire it. So that is not an easy choice to make for the player actually and this is by design. Because we needed to illustrate why Colt has

failed so many times to break the loop and if we can make the player have qualms about shooting Julianna in the face then it explains why Colt did not do it before. The player feels what those all those Colts felt before you know it's a it's kind of meta. And why you would have trouble shooting her in the face is because maybe you like Julianna. Julianna is pretty cool character and there's the trade-off that breaking the loop will also break Julianna's heart. She makes it very clear. So actually if you kill Julianna and break the loop she will disappear from Colt's life. So again they have no way of having a healthy relationship. But this is up to you to decide. And because you don't have to shoot obviously you can stay in the loop. And that was this choice that you know you will finish the game you can only break the loop and finish the game by shooting Julianna in the face

and at point blank range was very controversial within and without of the narrative team and that is understandable. But because it was controversial it made it clear that people really cared about it and if there's one moment where I would like you to care about you know in Deathloop it's this moment. So my takeaway here is that you always need to take into account what your team has to say and the reservations etc. but sometimes it will not be maybe what's what you think is best for the story and you also need to listen to your story. So my reason for keeping this difficult moment in is that shooting is the core action of this game. It's a shooter. You spend 20 plus hours shooting people. So ending the game with something else than a shot suggests that there is a third

option that you can do it you can break the loop without harming everybody without killing those people. And that makes it a very different game if it's the case. That would also be a very cool game but it's not the game that we were making. And you know Colt has gone on the shooting spree to kill everybody and he you needed to kill all those visionaries not because Colt likes doing it necessarily but because it is the only way out. And if it's the only way out then it's the only way out until the end. And one important note is that actually very few players appreciate the ending of Deathloop. And if you look online people say like dude this ending is garbage. But I think it's mostly due well reading the comments yes people had a hard time pulling the trigger facing Julianna but what they were most you know disappointed with was that there is not enough payoff.

So after you shoot Julianna and break the loop the game ends really quickly. There is very little of this you know the new all so you don't really have the time to I don't know explore the island talk to the people and see how they react to the breakage of the loop. And my takeaway here would be to if you make people make a difficult choice make sure that you are paying off that choice by taking your time to show the consequences. Another group of characters are other Colts. So while we in production we started asking ourselves the question why did Colt fail to break the loop before and why would he succeed this time? In other words we realized that we needed a character arc for Colt. But the problem was that it's really difficult to execute in a game like Deathloop because um if Colt was supposed to you know go through changes and and kind of start

having a different opinion of things during the game we had no guarantee that the player would feel the same way as Colt and would evolve with Colt in the same direction. So that would create a rift between the player and the the character which we didn't want. So our solution to this was to give Colt a retroactive character arc meaning that Colt is already fully evolved as a character. He already has you know all the capacity to break the loop but he just needs to realize it. He needs to remember that he has arrived at all those conclusions and that they are right. So as Colt discovers his past he grows more confident about the views that he held of of Blackreef you know and and this this whole thing that he needs to break the loop. And we also needed a source of information that was not Julianna because Julianna has too much of an agenda. It needed to be somebody who the player could trust unconditionally. So he could trust himself right?

That's where we have the visitor Colts. So in the lore of the game these are Colts from different timelines of the same time loop. So as time loop goes on it creates bunch of parallel timelines and those Colts come from those other timelines. And they reflect what Colt was in his previous cycles of memory and amnesia that you know what kind of opinions he he had and how long he's come in his evolution as a character. So this actually hearkens back to both main themes that I've mentioned which is memory because it shows a progression of Colt. So now he kind of can catch a glimpse of what he was before. And also being stuck in a cycle because those Colts through their you know faulty opinions or I don't know undeveloped oh sorry. They could not break out of this cycle. And it was realized in the game with

again blocking cut scenes where we take control away from the player and they're pretty difficult to set up. They have a lot of overheads for LD and animation etc. So they're pretty expensive but we wanted something that would grab the player's attention 100% and my takeaway here is that it was I feel it was pretty successful because we gave the player the information they needed in a way that they could not skip. And my takeaway here is that sometimes you need to go expensive with those things. So the visionaries which are the main the key targets that you need to kill they're all the embodiment of the theme that you're being stuck in a cycle due to immaturity. And some examples include like Charlie and Fia who are a couple and they break up every day and then they get back together next day and they break up again and go back together and break up again and go back together. This is really horrible to watch. Uh we have Egor who has this childish dream of being a respected scientist, but he never puts in the work to gain either respect or scientific expertise.

And we have uh Alexis. If you play the game, uh you know that this is a man who never left puberty, basically. He is immature in the most literal sense of the world uh word. And the challenge with visionaries was to make them likable and hateable at the same time. And it was a pretty difficult balance because we want the players to like them and be interested in them, so they would want to know more about them. But we also wanted players to think they suck as people and not feel very sorry about having to kill them because the player cannot finish the game without killing all those visionaries. And the likability part was actually turned out to be pretty easy. Uh so we gave every one of those visionaries like a big personality. They're all larger than life. And you know, pretty bombastic and everything. And that doesn't necessarily make them likable. Uh but it creates interest. And over time, interest creates attachment. And

I'm saying over time and that is the unique benefit of having a time loop story is that you see those characters over and over again. And so they can, you know, um you can get to know them better. And our our saving grace was the humor. The the game is has a pretty light tone. It's very humorous. So we made those characters very entertaining. And um if somebody makes you laugh, you cannot like fully hate them. And the the testability part was pretty uh difficult on the other hand. So we had the original sin of the visionaries in that they are they escaped the world to create this isolated party island that goes on for eternity and and they used all of their resources and talents to escape rather than to help, uh you know, make the world a better place. So the very foundation of what they were doing was wrong morally and that makes them acceptable targets. But that didn't really land for we need

something more immediate, more practical. So we made them pretty depraved, every single one of them. So for instance, Frank, who is the singer and a mobster, uh he shot a man in cold blood uh for allegedly beating up his pianist and he claimed it was self-defense afterwards. And that was before the time loop started, so uh that person would not wake up the next day. And there's Harriet, who is leader of this uh cult. And uh she dips people in vats of corrosive gas just to, you know, get off. And there's obviously Alexis. So um in conclusion, I think we were pretty successful here. Uh when you read the discussions online, people are saying that the the each of everybody has their favorite visionary. One of the uh eight visionaries is somebody's favorite and somebody felt sorry for killing one of them, but not too sorry. So we feel that we we managed to strike a good

balance there. And if you look at the eternalists, who are our regular mostly unnamed people who you kill by the hundreds and it's really difficult to follow their stories because they die so easily and and frequently. Uh so we only were able to explore some of the stuck in a rut ideas with those characters, often literally. So, you know, they stuck doing some uh some something really pointless and they say like, "Oh, I'm doing this thing today, but tomorrow it's going to be better. I'm just going to make it better tomorrow." And tomorrow never comes, obviously. There's only one exception, which is Pick Craxly. And that's one of the eternalists uh one eternalist who remembers. This is what she looks like. You meet her in the game uh in a side quest. And she is the only non-hostile eternalist in the whole game. She is the only one person who is not wearing a mask. And she is sort of the voice of the eternalists. So when you meet her uh and you talk to her, it's kind of a save the cat moment for Colt because um Colt the players understand that the

Colt's quest is no longer for the sake of Colt or for the sake of Julianna, but for the sake of everybody on the island. Uh Pick Craxly makes it clear that oh, you know, those people, those eternalists who want to kill you, um they maybe made a mistake. They were used by this by those visionaries and they certainly don't deserve being stuck on an island for eternity without any memory to boot. So uh for to summarize, Deathloop story is about being stuck in a rut, as I've mentioned. And we have two main themes, one being stuck in a vicious cycle due to immaturity. And this is explored um with virtually all of the characters in the game on different levels, more implicitly, more explicitly. Uh we have the other theme of memory. And these this theme is mostly explored with characters who have persistent memory like Colt, Julianna, or Pick. And um we don't really have character arcs. In fact, the actions that the characters take illustrate their personalities, but

those characters don't evolve over time because it's a time loop and they have no memory. So they're, you know, back to their regular selves on the next morning. There's um so yeah. So let's talk about the the features. Uh so our narrative systems and we have radio calls, which are called in Julianna banter. We have floating messages, which is just floating text. And uh hammer lines, which are called one-liners who are made for the benefit of the player. And we have all sorts of systems that are staples of the genre and that provide background background lore and gameplay hints. So the radio calls, they sound something like this. I hope you have the audio. Frank know you're coming. No need to thank me. do that in a million years. Huh. So you're going to kill your friend. How does that feel? What can I say that will make you shut up? Oh, so grumpy. What are you, hung over or something? No. I know for a fact that you are, like every morning since we've met.

Yeah. Um so this is what it sounds like. They are conversation between Colt between Colt and Julianna over the radio. And um the intention behind the system was to have a vehicle for the narrative that would be unlikely to be ignored or skipped by the player. There is nothing else interesting happening when those conversations are happening. And the originally the idea was that we would Frankenstein those conversations from a collection of openings, middles, and ends. But that proved to be pretty difficult to execute from the technical standpoint and in writing as well. And we were only allowed those conversations at mission start. So we had at maximum 20 seconds before the player would engage it with some other content. And we couldn't uh play those uh conversations in combat because we couldn't swap out, you know, the reads of lines for like a higher projection ones or something like that. Um and we really really wanted to make

those conversations feel as natural and as fun as possible. And we need to remember as well that both Julianna and Colt have persistent memory. So Julianna uh should remember everything that she is saying and everything that Colt is saying. And uh they should not repeat anything without acknowledging that they have already said that. So this links back to the theme of memory, obviously. And uh in our final design, there were pretty short pieces of dialogue, uh like 15 seconds a piece. It was mostly style over substance to make those conversations really fun and free-flowing. And we only would sell you one piece of information per conversation. So there were they were easier to parse and we wouldn't have to, you know, do some kind of acrobatics to to put in a lot of information in it. And each of those conversations only happens once. If it plays, it's gone and you need to reset the play-through to hear it again. So ultimately we hit a tone that we liked, which is this snarky uh banter, you know, between the two characters.

And um of course there was the question of how much content we need to cover the entire game. So um in preparation for that, we listed listed all of the meaningful actions that the player could take within a map, anything that warranted some kind of reaction. And maybe uh you know, what are the things that happen in those maps that the player should react to and and would maybe want to discuss that with Julianna. Also we picked a list of interesting topics from the lore, the backstory of the characters and and the place. Um and we had some story choke points, so the critical information that the player needed to find out before they finished the game to understand what the story was about. And that list was obviously developed in close collaboration with our campaign designer, Dana, um to make sure that we are covering everything. And initially we had a list of about 60 of those conversations and then as the game evolved, uh we ended up with about 70-75 of them.

And only a couple of choke points have a fixed order. For instance, when Colt finds out that he is Julianna's father, um it triggers a conversation and there a couple of conversations that come after that that can only play after Colt has found out this information. Uh but everything else, like 90% of those conversations can happen at any time. So they need to be written in a way that there is no conflict, that they don't reference some other conversation that maybe happened or maybe didn't happen at this point. And we were testing this with a prototype that we called the Trash Talker 9000. And unfortunately, we don't have time to go into any any detail at all about it. But luckily, uh I already did a presentation about this and during uh the Digital Dragons conference 2 years ago and it's called don't believe everything you think and if you screen grab this uh uh slide then you can watch it on YouTube in its entirety. Um but we executed this system with a

massive linear visual script. It was the second biggest script of the whole game and it was maintained by our scripter Jean who was not very happy about it and uh so we had a whole list of very specific triggers and conditions and priorities for those conversations and it needed to be enforced like really tightly in the script and it was obviously revised multiple times as the game evolved and things were shifting etc. And I wish we had invested more resources and more efficient nodes for Jean to use and some more robust debugging options because that would have saved us a lot of time and stress. So yeah, invest in your main features. Uh floating messages are look like but look but something like this and this is glowing non-UI text that contains vague thoughts and an occasional bit of useful information.

Only Colt can see them but he talks to them and that makes it clear for the player that this is not UI. This is diegetic. And he also told Julianna that he's seeing those things so Julianna sometimes mentions it and that further confirms that this is not UI. And in the lore of the game these are Colt's thoughts that were through the magic of the cycle and preserved somehow across time and now they're popping back up for Colt. These are things that Colt had already thought some time ago. Not in this play-through in any case. And from the design perspective this is a really inexpensive system to provide mood and gameplay hints to the player because this is just text. We can put it anywhere in the game. It doesn't break save games and it's cheap in localization. And this is an expression of the memory theme because these are memories of past thoughts obviously and they also offer some reactivity to player's actions. And Sandra Duval who was the narrative

designer on Deathloop before I was in the company she originally came up with the system and she spoke briefly about it at the narrative innovation showcase. So if you've seen it good for you if not maybe you will be able to watch it again. So the funny thing with those messages is that initially they were not actually very reactive. I mean the system that runs those messages checks display conditions on map load so if you did something during the map it would not trigger a message. It will only trigger a message on the next map. So for instance if you did something in the morning you would get a some payoff for it in in the next time period at noon. And that was okay in the early stages of the game when you know missions had took like 5 to 10 minutes but as the game evolved and grew bigger people started spending in maps like 30-40 minutes and that was just um that was just too distant a payoff to work. So we had to circumvent it with scripting. We have some messages that

always pop up and they are provide mood and there are a couple of messages that provide reactivity. So when we first tested this with with players we got feedback that there were way too many messages. They obscured the scenery which was not appreciated by our colleagues in the level art department and they were not very useful uh and therefore they were pretty forgettable. So we made some changes to this design. We streamlined the lore a little bit and we identified four distinct moods that showcase the evolution of Colt's thoughts and actually those moods were consistent with uh those visitor Colts you know, the other Colts from the past they meet and um so for instance if there is a Colt there was a Colt who is like this very you know brooding kind of oh my god nothing is going to work that just doom and gloom Colt and we have such doom and gloom messages and there's another Colt who is like

crazy and he would just wants to kill everybody and he doesn't care because he doesn't remember and we also have messages that kind of reflect that berserk feeling. And each of those moods has is slightly visually different. Uh we include some gameplay information some you know pull this lever or watch out there enemies nearby or this is a good place to snipe uh this kind of thing and we made those messages a lot less frequent. So there were fewer of them so they would pop up more. And we added the time variant which was more visually pleasing because you had like one message that would pop up and there was a sequence of other messages that went after it. And we opted for more dramatic setups overall just to make them more memorable and this is one example of such dramatic setup where you have this giant billboard. Um and here's how the four different moods look like the the the difference in the visuals is pretty subtle. It's pretty subliminal

but it gives the eye something different you know to process so immediately it it creates it's a little bit um more memorable. Uh so let's talk about the hammer lines. Uh and hammer lines are just one-liners from Colts who comments on on stuff and here's an example and in this example Colt is dealing with a voice-activated door lock. So yeah, these are lines spoken by Colt and he comments on objectives discoveries that he makes and attracts the player's attention to some objects in the environment. And initially we wanted to avoid this kind of thing at all costs. We didn't want the player to you know the the the

character is just going around and say like hmm this door looks like it could be opened uh because we've seen it in in many games and we thought that it was really unimmersive and because no nobody talks to themselves like that. Uh but when we started testing the game with players it became clear that people had a really hard time following the story because it's plenty of discoveries plenty of realizations and the players were reading something that had this you know amazing reveal etc. And it it just wasn't landing. People were like okay whatever and suddenly they were asking themselves why why does the character know something that I don't why do I have those objectives that I don't understand? So we tested a couple of those hammer lines because you know you hammer the player on the head with it uh and they really worked well. People started grokking basically that oh uh something important happened here now I understand.

And so in the end we added a whole bunch of those like plenty and this had a pretty interesting effect on Colt as a character because he it fleshed him out as a pretty chatty guy and it aligned very well with his persona in the radio calls where he was you know throwing those one-liners with Julianna. So my takeaway here is even if you think something is overused or doesn't really work well if it aligns with your character and if you really take your time to write it and and you know try to make it original and and funny and interesting then it can work and that is actually a confirmation of a very old you know lesson that any trope cliche or any overused tool can be effective if you use it well in the right context. So let's go through the the other systems. So things as notes tapes etc. They are known to any Arkane fan and they're pretty very widespread

in the other games. So notes are basically collectible piece of text provide that provide lore and gameplay information. Tapes are basically or audio logs they're basically notes but with voiceover. Overheard conversations is when two or more NPCs discuss something and their conversation reveals some sort of information or maybe leads you to some sort of side content. And speaker announcements are just you know a voice oozing from a speaker and providing some information about content that you may have missed. So all of those features in Deathloop are pretty similar in that they have very little to no dynamic or reactive content. They are in fact the embodiment of the infallible repetition of the loop. They always happen at the same time. They always provide the same information. They always happen in the same places. And so they reflect the theme of being stuck in a cycle or of being in a time loop. Um so it builds

familiarity of the player with the map and the lore of the game and it helps them make plans. So because those things always happen the same way and always provide the same information you can plan around them to exploit them for your own benefit. And we did really our best to make them as funny varied and original as we could so you would enjoy listening to them or reading them uh you know after 100 times etc. And there is one notable variation in this system which are the mini-coms. And mini-coms are those computers um and it's a chat system used by the visionaries that reacts to player actions. So, they're in fact notes, but they're linked with sort of a scripted tree. And they're reactive to some of the actions of the player. So, they're they're visionaries, they're just talking, you know, And sometimes if somebody dies, then it loads up a note where this visionary who is dead is no longer present. And maybe some of the other characters come and oh, have you

heard that this guy is dead? Oh, I didn't know who killed him. Well, Colt, obviously. And those convers- those minicoms provide very important progression information. They give you a lot of hints on how to break the loop. And they have this very unique in-game loop with with this computer, basically. So, my takeaway here is that if you give a different aspect to something that is already familiar, you effectively make it different in the eyes of the player. So, you can get more mileage out of the same, you know, gameplay system that you have. And minicoms reflect both main themes. It's stuck in a cycle because the visionaries always say the same thing. And also memory because if the player does something weird, then it will comment on that. So, it responds to player actions, but once as soon as the next day falls over, it's back to the same conversation again. If you do nothing, they will repeat a hundred times the same thing. So,

our main themes, which are also also realizations of our main design goals, are expressed across all of the narrative systems. And anything that has persistent or reactive content links to memory because it offers players progression. So, radio calls, floating messages, and minicoms are all part of this. And any non-reactive content links to being stuck in a cycle illustrates the repeatability of the loop. So, gives you an impression of being in the loop. So, those are notes, tapes, the overheard conversations, etc., etc. And so, in conclusion of this talk, each game offers challenges because of its setting and its gameplay loop. So, you as narrative designer needs to needs to embrace that. And identify what are your key design problems and maybe try to align them with your themes. And then you can use that to orient your work because anything you do to realize a theme also realizes one of our design goals. And anything each time you try to you know,

realize a design goal and make sure that you're really executing it, it also illustrates your themes. So, it gives very a very consistent experience to the player. And in Deathloop, this was an organic process that, you know, evolved through many iteration cycles and we were fortunate to have enough time to to make it work. And we couldn't have done that without testing with players and user research. It was an extremely valuable tool. And you know, when you have big moments, then make sure to pay them off correctly to the player. And if you have things that kind of go outside of the story, make sure to make them big moments and then then pay them off. And of course, we should never forget the rudiments. So, themes, consistency, characters, conflict, all of that is important in in a time loop story in any story. And I would like to thank the whole narrative team, Arkane, people who we worked with,

the people who worked on the narrative before I came and who were very kind and shared their insights on the early days of the project. So, Sashka and Sophie, thank you very much. And I'd like to thank everybody at GDC. It's my first time here. And particularly, I would like to thank Osama Dorias who invited me to do this talk and he who also helped me get into the industry to begin with. I'm sorry I can't be there this year in person, but you know, sometime we'll finally do it. And Gaëlle Marschall, without whom this presentation would be a complete mess. So, thank you very much for reading my stuff. And my fellow speakers from Arkane Lyon, Dana, Megan, and Gilles. And literally the whole team at Arkane. And anybody who I may have forgotten, thank you. And if you would like to be in the thank yous, we are actually hiring a whole bunch of for a bunch of whole bunch of positions. So, don't hesitate.

And in case you missed, we had a whole bunch of talks this year. They're all already done, but maybe you can see them in replay or on the vault. So, thank you very much. I'll take questions now. Hello. Thanks for giving such a great talk. I wanted to ask about one key shift that happens in the game that you mentioned, the revelation of Julianna being Colt's daughter. This is a giant tonal shift from sort of how the game was both advertised and how you first experienced it. There's a line early in the game where Colt wonders a lot of these data Julianna. There is a narrative reason why they're close to the same age. What was the consideration for that point because for me and some other people who played the game, that was a very big shock to suddenly go have this character who you're in kind of a flirty spy versus spy thing going and then suddenly it's like, oh, she's your daughter. That's a very That was just suddenly like a big like tonal shift. Thank you.

Yeah. So, um We It was you know, the wish of well, basically it it was supposed from the beginning that Colt and Julianna are actually related. This was a thing that we had to make sure was revealed fairly late in the game. So, this whole let's say red herring with them being flirty was basically to conceal to prevent people from guessing too early that they are related. And because of how fiction works and how you know, relationships between main characters are shaped in in storytelling overall, there was actually not many things that we could use to conceal that. And

so, we opted to go in the direction of you know, them having because Colt is completely unaware that Julianna could be his daughter. Like you said, there's a narrative reason why they appear to be the same age. And so, there basically two conclusions that you can draw based on the stereotypical, you know, storytelling is that either they are related or they have been a couple or they are a couple or love interests of some sort. So, we leaned into that one thing to kind of distract players from thinking that the other was possible. And that made it possible to make this revelation that Julianna is actually Colt's daughter a big reveal later on. Very good. Thank you. Hi. Thanks so much for the talk. I recently finished Deathloop and I I really adored it. I had a question about like the visionary missions and stuff. So, like how you can you know, they they span through the entire game and you can work on one mission in the morning, working on like Alexis, and then like handle

another one in the afternoon. How did you guys handle kind of making it so the player could jump from mission to mission and kind of like, you know, work on them all in tandem without it feeling like disjointed? There were some missions I started in like the beginning of the game and then I it was one of the like last ones that I finished. So, like how did you guys tackle that again, non-linear approach? Yeah. So, that's actually that's one of the biggest issues that we were facing with the game. So, initially, the missions were a lot simpler than they ended up being. And we realized in testing that you could actually beat the game in like one hour if you optimized your actions. So, that's where the leads came from. We basically shifted away from focusing on missions that featured the visionaries, you know, where you need to kill them as the main attraction. And that was only

that started being only the thing that appears on the outside that this is what you need to focus on, but what you actually need to focus on is to getting the visionaries to move from their usual routines to put them to align them, you know, in a way that you could take them out at the same time. And that took an enormous amount of iteration and testing and and brainstorming and you know, redoing the missions over and over again to make sure that we gave you we gave players enough steps in those missions to for them to feel, you know, sufficiently complex so they couldn't complete them very quickly. But also to be simple enough so you could follow what is even going on. What what are the What is the idea behind those, you know, those leads, those stratagems to to put them in different places. So, actually, the the idea is always very simple. Like

Prevent Egor from going to the party by sabotaging his experiment. So, you sabotage Egor's experiment and then he goes to the party. And this in itself is like a very simple idea, but it's built around several actions that you need to undertake to to make it happen. And I guess that Well, the reply is really a lot of time and iteration. Got you. Cool. Thank you. Thank you. Uh All right, I have a question then if there's some time for one. So, there's this moment in the game that a character goes on a rant and it's called the runt. I think it's Alexus. And I used to be a management consultant, I used to be a business person, and I literally sent that sequence to all of my friends that I used to work with because it reflects the psyche of high ambition business people extremely well. What gave you the

insight of who on the team had insight to write a sequence like this? Um, I believe this sequence was originally written by Joe Fielder, who is um, one of our contract writers on Deathloop. And yeah, we asked him to can you do like a, you know, like a rant of Alexus where he kind of talks about his business prowess and etc. And he he sent us this and it was amazing. But, yeah, Joe Fielder, I believe he is actually in person on at the GDC. So, if you manage to find him, you can ask him the question directly. Awesome, thank you. Thank you. Hello, my name is Kim. Thank you so much for the talk. I'm a huge fan of Arcane and especially Deathloop. I wanted to ask if during the building of Deathloop if there was any inspiration to either add more visionaries or reduce the amount of

visionaries. And if there was any thought about like why there's seven, seven and a half if you count two two-bit or Juliana. Yeah, so no, as far as I can tell there was it was always meant to be this number of visionaries and not any other number. Of course, it's it's an odd number because odd numbers are objectively better in storytelling than anything else. So, you always get three acts, five chapters, seven evil exes, and nine visionaries or eight or seven. Well, in any case, no, there was never any plan to have fewer visionaries than this because it needed to be difficult. The idea that you have four time periods of day, so only four missions per day, but eight people to kill is it sounds impossible. And that's what was needed for Deathloop to, you know, how do you break this loop if if there's this impossible task to achieve. Thank you so much. Thank you.

And that's all the time I have. Thank you very much.