Sparking Curiosity-Driven Exploration Through Narrative in 'Outer Wilds'

[Music] hello thanks for joining me uh welcome to sparking curiosity driven exploration through narrative and outer wilds i'm very obviously kelsey beacham i'm a writer and narrative designer and i actually started my games career with outer wilds uh specifically as a contractor for mobius digital these days i'm a narrative designer at obsidian entertainment uh just a quick mention before we get going here i don't represent either of those studios my thoughts are my own please do not steal them i only have so many um so today we're going to be talking specifically about outer wilds i don't know wilds uh is a weird little project that happened uh back in 2012 we began as my brother alex beechum's master's thesis at university of

southern california and in 2013 we were in the university showcase and then after that point we kind of just kept developing it for fun um and then in 2015 some very good stuff happened for us and we won seamus mcnally at the independent games festival as well as best in design and then later that year we were picked up by mobius digital uh to continue development and then eventually in 2019 we launched and they bring this up because outer wilds probably because of its origin as a thesis thesis project has some very specific design goals to it and some very particular things that we were trying to accomplish so what i'd like to do is break down narrative's role in supporting outer wild's unique design goals and bring up examples of what worked for us and why and uh we're gonna have fun before we do though uh this talk does

contain spoilers i'm very sorry our fans have a saying that talking about outer wilds is spoilers they are not wrong it is impossible to talk about this game without spoiling it at least a little so you've been warned um if you are thinking of playing this game i would recommend like pausing the video just coming back to it later after you've uh finished the game i'll be here for the rest of you uh outer wilds is an open world space exploration game adventure slash narrative mystery we're often described as alien nasa meets backpacking in space which is pretty fun uh and the fun bit about the solar system is that it is caught in a time loop and throughout that time loop of 22 minutes the planets and celestial bodies are changing over time which affects where you can explore um you start out as a harthian on the planet timber hearth and you're part of this space program and it's your first solo launch so it's launch day that's

all fun and exciting you have to get launch codes from ground control but that's it that's the only thing we really make you do and then from there you're sent off into space to freely explore the world as you see fit um one thing you are encountering up there is you are discovering ruins and writing left behind by this ancient alien species called the nomi and you're using that to piece together the world's mysteries after 22 minutes the sun explodes killing the player and resetting everything to the beginning of that time loop but at its simplest outer wilds is a game about finding answers to questions about the world around you to that end let's talk about major design goals really quickly so from my brother's thesis paper outer wilds is a space exploration game designed to inspire and reward player curiosity pretty straightforward allegedly the goal here being create a game that

rewards curiosity-driven exploration easy enough so here for us that means the player is they have questions about the world around them and they want those questions answered so they're taking action to find those answers aka exploring uh basically it starts with a question usually what's there what is it what is it like up close and it drives the player toward discovering an answer hopefully an answer they like curiosity is outer wild's driving force and it is outer wild's sole driving force there are no missions of signed objectives any kind of prescriptive guidelines that you have to follow we're not telling the player what to do it's entirely self-guided well almost entirely knowledge is also kind of the only gameplay reward we don't have those other feedback loops

of point scoring or uh you know completing something at a set time or anything competitive multiplayer so we really needed our players to like knowledge an awful lot um also knowledge is how you progress in the game so obviously this is really important for us um here's a summary of that if you needed it but point being uh we're very serious about knowledge being the big reward here um and we did realize going in yeah that's gonna alienate certain player types uh specifically these ones but that's okay uh giving everything we had for this very particular type of player actually let us create this really really compelling experience for them and i don't know i think that was worth worth embracing uh okay okay so said a lot of good things let's let's talk about what this actually looks like

so if our gameplay loop is at its core inspiring curiosity and then rewarding the player for acting on that curiosity this is what we're kind of looking at here and for narrative um my role in that can be either one of those things so the player will become curious about something say you know the anglerfish at the museum and then hopefully the player acts on their curiosity and in this case they're going to walk up see the angler fish read the plaque all that good stuff and be rewarded with knowledge which is hey it's an anglerfish um and from there our player is going to hopefully be curious and explore and remember oh like dark bramble i saw a baby anglerfish at the museum well you saw an anglerfish at the museum i'm sorry about this um this i want to bring up doesn't just apply to narrative uh because knowledge does not only come in this game in written form um if you're investigating a cave uh the

reward here is of course not that death it's it's that knowledge that the cave fills up with sand you're learning something about how the cave works and that's progress because it's helping us learn how to navigate that cave space now we can travel further inside safely we can learn what's what's in there uh where we're also we're going to discover new things to be curious about um for example the sunless city and all the ruins in there so it's also worth pointing out that the knowledge that we're giving players as a reward is not always the knowledge they were looking for because presumably you did not run into that cave looking for death um it's just it's enough to kind of progress along that path and help us get in the right direction even if it's not the answer right away so i bring all of this up because our main overall design goals have a huge impact on story it determines story

type and structure and it also determines what our narrative goals are [Music] so if we want a maximally non-linear gameplay experience that inspires curiosity in the player enables free exploration and rewards them for exploring we're looking at a mystery first off right complex enough to motivate the player for the entire game because we don't want that to fall apart and we want them to be invested in the world and what's happening to it because without that player investment why are they playing the game uh free exploration means no gating it means nothing is off limits and it means that we don't want a story that is impossible to keep track of even though it needs to be complex we also want mysteries that pay off regularly with satisfying answers we want the overall story itself to be very rewarding and we want that story to kind of push players forward get them to you know ask oh what happens next and what to learn that um

it's a lot so we're going to simplify it a little bit generally any narrative design choices we made on the project ultimately falls under one of these kind of three broad goals uh inspire curiosity facilitate exploration or reward exploration um often a narrative designer story choice is accomplishing more than one of those goals at the same time which made structuring this talk a little tricky let me tell you but let's start with this first one so step one how do we make the player curious write a really good story um that's it that's the talk no i'm sorry uh i i'm just like this uh basically outer wild story is a sprawling mystery um or it's kind of made up of a ton of little

mysteries that all kind of add together to make this sprawling mystery but we'll talk about structure a little more later um there's the mystery of what's happening in the solar system you have planets that are changing you have the sun exploding you're caught in a time loop and we don't know why that's all going on and then we also have the mystery of nomi who were they where'd they come from what were they doing here what happened to them um another way to think of how we make the player curious is just how do we get the player to ask questions because we need them to be doing that and that itself means we need to look at what specific questions we want the player to ask because that's what's going to guide our players journey we started with four initial major questions when we were developing story and i keep saying we and that would be the creative director alex beecham and the lead designer lone verneau so we looked at these four major questions and each one of them is a major storyline or mystery thread in the

game um and a cool thing about this is that early on in the game you'll find content that connects to those mysteries in some way even if you don't necessarily as the player know that right off the bat and what you're going to find with each one of these examples is they're big exciting events and we're showing them to you rather than telling you about them [Music] for example the uh the alien statue the no my statue in the museum uh when you come out to head off into space uh actually you get frozen in place temporarily and it turns toward you and its eyes glow and it activates and it starts syncing up with your memories that's huge and that is a really good way for us to pull the player into the know my story rather than just saying uh hey here's some text you can read huh um quick pop quiz on that one

which of these is more exciting as a player experience uh me telling you that there are cyclones on giant's d pretty cool or or this um yeah basically it's these physical processes and locations that grab the player's attention and it's leading them to investigate whatever it is that has grabbed their attention um and usually what happens is for example with the cyclones uh you get sucked in quite literally uh boys didn't think i was gonna make that joke but you get pulled in and then you're on giants deep and you're interacting with the ruins there and the found text and that sort of gets you to investigate what's happening on that planet um some of the story is in fact i'd say a lot of that story is told through context but uh it generally doesn't deliver our biggest initial hooks it's meant to be interesting it's designed that way for

sure but it's not going to be as exciting as getting sucked up by a cyclone um and when text does deliver a hook it can only do so when the player chooses to interact with it i can't push that information onto the player for the most part we tend not to do that uh and i'll tell you why here is my okay well not a technical term but let me talk you through this because it's a thing i think about a lot and it's the idea of pushing information on the player versus having the player pull it uh i made you a diagram it's this thing of imagine that you've gotten out of your car and your arms are full of groceries and they're heavy and your neighbor has come up and wants to tell you all about their day and they're pushing this information about their day on you you didn't ask you don't want it you're busy in fact there's ice cream in one of those bags and it's melting probably and now that's all you can think about so you're not really in the ideal headspace to

receive that information from your neighbor not great um [Music] however once you've put the ice cream inside and it's safely not melting and you've got the rest of the grocery squared away it's not on your mind anymore and you go out and then you ask your neighbor for this information um for some reason then you are in a much better space to receive it and you're going to remember it and be more engaged with it to that end because there is a ton of information in outer wilds um we need to be really careful to not overwhelm the player with it and so to try to mitigate that what we did was we minimized how often you are forced to receive information and how much information you are forced to receive that way um a good example of kind of forced information being pushed on a player uh cut scenes cutscenes do that they push

up you know that info to you um for us it's limited to the very start and very end of the game the very end of the game because it's kind of linear and we're wrapping things up it kind of has to at some point be that uh and the very beginning of the game because you do have to talk to the first i think the first no gosh is it just one i should know this um you do have to talk to at least the curator because you have to go get the launch codes and that does have to happen so that we can then do that brief cinematic of the statute turning toward you and activating but it's pretty minimal um so what we do instead here because we do need the player to know that information is available when they're ready for it when they want to seek it out so you have to signal its availability um so pixing obviously is determined by player actions uh it you know as you're going through finding no my text for example that's that's completely down to the player almost entirely

um key information is kept infinitely revisitable because we are in a time loop even gabbro the uh traveler that is in like aware of the time loop with you um even gabra you can still revisit all of those points so you're never in a position where you think oh boy there's information being pushed on me i have to remember all of this because if i you know if i forget it's going to be a huge problem um we're also kind of coding how to find or where to find certain types of information through narrative delivery so really obvious example know my text will always contain information about the nomia and their story and it's always going to provide clues about unraveling the solar system's mysteries unvisited know my text is coded such that if you haven't read it before in that time loop it's a different color found text about specific mystery threads are largely grouped kind of by physical location so you know if it's a small arc at least you know kind of to check out the immediate

surrounding area for more information about that so we're trying to kind of guide the player to know where certain information is so that if they want to pull that information they know where to do it the travelers are a great example of this there's one on every planet you can easily locate them through the signal scope because they all play an instrument so you can pick up their sound and that makes them very easy to find uh and also kind of delightful andrew probably did an amazing job with the music um and the menu is what i want to point out here because it's set up and it functions the same way for a lot of our travelers where you can pull that information about hey you know i don't know where to go works where to explore on this planet um help me out here that's really useful for us for players that maybe need a little more guidance especially initially because this is very surface level stuff that they talk about uh here's an example of where i do this in text initially we kind of

what's the word cut the player loose uh without too much information about why they were going into space uh we tried a couple iterations of this um and it turns out that not everyone is super comfortable with the idea of there not being a specific mission that you're meant to accomplish um so eventually what we did is we landed on with hornfels the curator at the museum this is the character that you do have to speak with before you can go into space and you are given the option to these are all on your left arrow the player choices and if you indicate that maybe you're nervous about starting out or that you're not sure where you should go we direct you someplace particular not because we especially want to tell you what to do there either there's quite a lot you can do at the moon but it's gentle and kind it's a great place for players

to get their bearings if that's something they feel they need to do first um it's got a few more tutorials that are again entirely optional because all of our tutorials are uh you can examine nose by ruins while you're stationary and they're not in zero g which is a thing we do to people um you're not actively being flung into space that's nice so uh the noir ruins here are also actually a really good entry point for something called the eye of the universe which is a huge thing in our game um so like that's a good a good place to guide players to in general but again we're not guiding them there unless they indicate that that's what they want um i don't have an official metric for this but i would say for me watching playtesting the average time players take to really interact with know my text probably is anywhere from 20 30 minutes to a few hours um which is kind of wild but i get it because you know there are all these cool things going on all these visually interesting things in space that you want to check

out first so we don't force the players to care about the story the story can wait until the player is good and ready you're essentially playing an archaeologist it's not going anywhere it's all in the past but i do want players to care about the story eventually and that's where getting the player invested and it comes in there's a lot of found texts in outer wilds and we needed players to read it because again that's how progression works and since you're doing so much reading of it it should also be fun uh so i want it to be an enjoyable experience and i want it to be something that they're willing to get invested in and care about um to that end we'll talk about the nomad for a minute here um if you're not familiar with them there are these super curious highly advanced science nerds who used to live in the solar system uh and they vanished a long time ago so that you can only find their ruins in their writing now and the challenge of the nomad for storytelling

is that uh they're in the past they're they're long gone meaning we never see them it is hard to get a player to care about a character that they never see sometimes they might as well not exist um the player also can't change or or impact the past they can't affect the know my story or change what happened to them so that's it's it could be a bit tricky then to get players to understand why they even should care and yet they do need to uh so one thing that took a lot of iteration here um was the know my voice but this was huge because this is what you're with for so much of the game um honestly i spent probably multiple years getting it right um and in fairness this was back when i was either moonlighting as a game writer or was very part-time on it so

maybe it's not years of full-time work but still this was a lot of iteration um and it was really worth getting right a couple of things that i want to note about it because they do you know i fall into a little bit of the ancient alien trope and we did not want them to feel i'm not going to name drop the chozo but i'm actually exactly going to name dioptroso um as much as much as i love metroid prime and all and the we thing the high of mind the the those pronouns are so difficult to connect with it is hard to connect with the group in that way um i is just inherently more interesting it feels less like a summary it's also a little clearer that they're talking to other characters versus with wii it's like well who are you leaving this for did you know i was coming to it to explore later because that'd be weird um another thing is we wanted it to be unique from the hearthian voice because the harthians sound a little bit more

like your average humans and we wanted the nomi to feel a bit alien but still be somebody or somebody's that you can empathize with and connect with um so that meant watching out for it feeling stilted or overly formal which is very easy to run into with that um the use of humor ended up being huge for us and that was another thing that took some time to get the right feel for it eventually i said uh they're nerds they make nerd jokes um they're they're they're making bad jokes in space as they're dealing with all of these complex problems and it humanizes them in a really nice way because even if you're not understanding maybe like what they do about quantum macroscopic quantum mechanics or or the intricacies of time travel um you're able to identify them with them in these other ways so that was extremely useful um it's emotional invested

characters again um because i talked about this a bit but the whole eye versus wii thing uh because the the player does spend so much time with the nomin um through reading their text and reading their stories that really they should be you know characters that the player wants to spend time with um humanizing them to feel more relatable and more interesting uh just makes them so much more alive and again we're doing this and and you're not seeing them so they have to be alive as much as possible um it's also it's it's a lot easier to connect to individuals than a big group um because a big group is kind of nebulous and a little harder to define and an individual i can describe you know a know my personality and like what they want specifically or don't want um what their their hopes or fears are harder to do with the group because it's just that much broader individuals are also nice because they

give us greater variance in in terms of content and in terms of voice they have different you know senses of humor they have different personalities um that ended up being really useful for keeping content consistently interesting and different but basically characters get us invested and we want to see what happens to them and that's exactly the thing that i need to have happen for the player there's another way that we persuade players to take an interest in the know my story and that is how the player learns that story uh specifically it's the translator tool which is a thing i freaking love uh it's this really nice example of gameplay and narrative design just integrating really well together uh and it's it happened because uh alex wanted to know hey uh what if you could physically interact with the text kelsey do you think that would do you think that would change it for you yes

uh and i'll show you how but it's a little easier to do with the video so purple text hasn't been translated yet you're holding a button to translate it and you'll notice that it's branching off in two directions here because it's non-linear this gives the player just a little bit more control over the text than they would have if it were written linearly which is kind of nice in a game like this

so obviously no my texts exist physically in the world the translator tool is so fun because it is allowing the player to engage with the text uh in a way that's maybe a little more exciting than you know walking up to it pressing a and it turns text delivery into a game mechanic which i'm a huge nerd about uh so i also got to play with language a bit as a result because we're presenting text differently than we maybe normally would um say like with the way we do with the harthians and so um language as a result is structured non-linearly it comes from actually the way that i take notes usually which is just they branch off consistently and loop back around other points um typically with this text because we've talked a little bit about coding for particular information we want the longest branch to contain the most important info it's not always the case it's just kind of a loose rule of thumb and then usually it's branch endings or occasionally beginnings those are often

going to contain kind of your actionable clue of what's going on where to go next that sort of thing not always just ish this is a very very basic example of it because i didn't want to pull anything too crazy but you can see the way it branches off based off of topic there so that brings us to our second narrative design goal which is facilitating exploration uh here's a weird thing i wrote outer wilds in game text to fulfill highly specific design needs and obviously to support non-linear progression um every piece of text in the game well every piece of know my text in the game either communicates a clue uh sets up a piece of world lore or builds on themes and characterization usually it's all three at once and it's always this one except for like a handful of flavor text that i wrote

we really didn't have a lot of space for that so almost no text in the game is like purely for fun here's how this is going to work so we have to advance story right we have to advance you know plot uh character story arcs uh mysteries that sort of thing and we also need to direct the player forward uh to where to go to continue following that story thread or get more information about it but since we don't know when the player is hitting this piece of information we need to also direct them to previously in the story thread or sometimes it's just to kind of the previous story arc that would have tied into this one again everything's really interconnected so if we take that piece of text that i had up earlier and we break it down by this kind of system this is what we end up getting uh it's a fairly again a fairly basic example not my favorite bit of writing

but it does do a good job of explaining it what i am getting at um however because i don't want my colorblind friends to hate me we're gonna break this down by section so that you can tell what's bolded uh so here is just everything in bold and color um is a story thread being advanced uh in this particular case you know the story of what eventually leads to the creation of the time loop device which is a major mystery in the game um there are those individual personalities coming into play a bit with pie and raymie who have kind of a friendly rivalry going on there's also some humor in that hint where they're talking about the door needing to be closed for some time do you get it um i did this to people um so again the and also with the rivalry um the idea is that it's supposed to be a little bit more fun than just like hey we ran an experiment because that is kind of dry in fairness um

and it's connecting us to kind of we're connecting this research that they were running the experiment on to uh the ash twin project which is kind of the name for the construction of the time loop device that sort of thing um here's where you would go previously if you wanted to go back and figure out what led up to this point there are those extraordinary findings and you'll note that we're specifically calling out where you would find those in the world so you know to go to the white hole station which is a very specific location in the game uh and then we have where you would go next to continue advancing this plot um currently it can only be accessed from the path from the sunless city and we are kind of an exception here to um the longest branch being the one where it kind of has the most important information so to kind of mitigate that i've just gone ahead and put this information in both branches in this particular case progression in outer wilds admittedly is

challenging it's not impossible but it is challenging um that last example perhaps notwithstanding since it was very clear about where to go we rely a lot on inference um once the player has gathered this information it's up to them to kind of piece it together and understand what it means in the greater context of the world we're really not big believers in spelling it out for players but at the same time we do need it to be clear enough that the player is able to progress um and it kind of boils down to uh keeping track of what they've learned should not be the challenging part of piecing the story together to that end that's why we have the ship computer work the way it does that was almost entirely alex and loan so i can't speak too much about it but um what it's doing actually is when i wrote whenever i wrote a piece of know my text i was working from what we had decided that piece of text needed to convey that absolute most basic piece of information

and that's what we've actually essentially put in the ship log each time entries are only ever [Music] what we're 100 certain the player knows from reading that text and that can be really tricky because it's easy to slip into assuming what the player knows um it helps when i helped when i was writing it to remember that for all i know this is the first piece of text the player has ever found so you can't make any leaps of logic with it no inferences it's just if i look at this piece of text i 100 know the player knows this at bare minimum and that's what we're putting in the ship log um so for narrative uh you've probably heard of the whole string of pearls thing um or or the idea that you know you're kind of getting x amount of information and then we're hitting a point where we're saying okay like we funneled down and now we can definitively say the player knows this much by this point in the story we cannot do that for outer wilds oh we are

a very tangled story structure my friends um and we had to assume that the player knows any amount and any combination of information at any given time zero gating means no funnel points so i can't check to make sure you know x y z because again you have free reign in the world we're not you know unlocking locations later on it's all there from the get-go and it would not be practical to account for every possible path that you could take through the know my found text and then tailor all of those paths accordingly to make sure that they're a good player experience that is the path to madness uh i don't want to go there basically the minimum amount of information the player has at any given time when encountering that piece of know my text could be as little as just what they've encountered on the path to get up into space which is

very very little uh all the way up until they might have seen literally everything in the game by now except the very end and there is a lot of space in between those areas that's actually why having those smaller chunked um storylines or character arcs that sort of thing that's why that's so important um especially the more contained ones like those localized to a very specific location on say a planet those one tell a specific story in an area you're getting kind of that payoff that structure happening so you're getting a satisfying little mini experience there but also what you're learning overall from that particular arc that can build on other separate arcs in the game so that regardless of the order in which they're encountered it's still going to produce a reliably satisfying player experience and it's tricky to do part of it is that

we're not repeating a lot of information and we can get away with that because of the time loop because essentially you will never ever only be able to receive a specific piece of information just the once um [Music] so for example if we're looking at the escape pods there are three escape pods that launched when the the nominee vessel crashed um in the solar system and each of them is their own self-contained arc um self-contained is maybe not the quite the right word to use here for how interconnected everything is but there is a story from when it crashes to kind of when they either uh find their long-term their found their long-term settlement or else die in dark bramble um but they're they're related to one another but they're all their own arc they're related to one another because they're all part of the vessel's arrival arc uh and then there's syntax there in the vessel itself for example um where

the vessel warped into dark bramble uh accidentally because it's an inter-dimensional nightmare um and then from that you can also look at uh escape pods one and two because those are the the know my that survived in the long run those are the first no my settlers in our solar system that are there long term and they do eventually unite and that's its own separate arc that those smaller arcs are part of um and then on top of that they all relate because they're all how the memoir arrived in the solar system and this is just a very small piece of the mystery that we're talking about here um it's all arcs all the way down and you're looking at these very small pieces that you kind of then build up into these bigger things and as you can see some things are are part of one arc but not part of another um it gets complicated in there which is again a hell of a lot of fun if you're a narrative designer um

genuinely it was a blast to make however in spite of all of my best efforts there are still some paths throughout our wilds that do produce a more satisfying experience than others and we want to design for that because we want as many people to get that better experience as possible so we have these levels of content that exist um they're roughly divided into three levels it's not a hard and fast rule but essentially any piece of found text in the game falls into one of these three categories more or less and i'd like to break those levels down because they have a lot to do with physical placement of text um service level text is going to be the easiest to encounter it's often literally on the surface of your planets your celestial bodies that sort of thing they're usually great for helping a player pick up a story thread and following it with fairly minimal effort it's not necessarily the beginning of a

mystery it's usually in media res but you don't need a ton of specialized information to really understand what's happening it's not necessarily introducing crazy new terms that sort of thing um it can be and often is ignored by the player and uh in favor of literally any piece of surface level text that they find more interesting uh and that is something we want to have happen if they bounce off of it that's fine we just we want some of these surface level pieces of text to make the player curious enough that they want to pursue that at least initially if we're looking at examples specifically on the hourglass twins that piece of text that i broke down earlier about getting into the high energy lab that's a really good example of surface level text it's not super hard to parse um it's pretty clear what it's talking about it's very clear how to kind of get to that point from earlier um and it's it's interesting because we're talking about you know some really exciting findings and then it's led to

this project being developed so it's it's a pretty good entry point for a lot of that uh time loop related content um mid-level text you're going to largely find by following clues you're a lot less likely to stumble across it that doesn't mean it's impossible and it's actually totally fine if players do come across that without following clues to get to that point um this is the stuff that's it's developing our story further we're getting into some of the more complex details or maybe connecting to other mysteries as well um but the the big thing here is that we're furthering it we're telling the player kind of where to go to learn more were really rewarding exploration at this point um the sunless city has some content like this even though maybe that's a little lighter the mid-level text range is pretty broad in fairness so it's not too hard to get into the sunless city and so the level of payoff that you're getting is not too too great just yet

and then we have hidden text now this is the text where you need to follow clues to get to this point and it is extremely unlikely to find hidden level text by accident um it's often in a difficult to reach location is why um if you think back to even say um the from the start of the talk that that example about going into caves and running into sand you have to learn a fair bit about the environment by this point and you also have to have put some different know my clues together to get here um you need specific info basically to be able to reach this stuff and that is because it reveals very valuable stuff about the game's mysteries answers to mysteries or big conclusions to stories are always at this level because we want players to hopefully encounter that after they've kind of built up to that moment and if you'd like to ask me how we knew

which areas were hidden or hard to find play testing we played the game ourselves some places are just inherently harder to get to and then we play tested the crap out of it um good example there's a big secret in the center of ash twin wink uh so if you know what that one is that's that's the level of you know intense we're talking about um this does mean that technically yes a first time player can beat the game in a single time loop i've never seen it happen but it's theoretically not impossible i'm not willing to say it's impossible because then someone will prove me wrong it's just extremely unlikely basically all of this design is in place to make sure that that doesn't happen and we did test a lot for it i'm not kidding when i said we did a lot of play testing we had to to make sure the game could be pieced together by the player as they go through it all that found textile putting all the

mysteries together um i think the player would honestly have to have some sort of advanced knowledge or context about the game because even if they did do the specific things you'd have to do on the first loop to end the game on that first loop i don't know that they would have the context necessary to apply that information but again willing to be proven wrong um however we do have this last design goal to go through so let's do that uh it's rewarding exploration as you can tell basically um because again our big reward in the game is knowledge hopefully the reward is also you know the experience and the journey and the satisfaction of a job well done but in the more classic sense perhaps it's it's knowledge and the problem is that if the player starts feeling like their efforts are wasted or they're not getting satisfying results or even if

just they're not getting the answers that they want um if they're pursuing a particular mystery thread and we're giving them answers about this other thing that loop breaks down and i don't have to tell you why that's a problem um so story becomes really useful for rewarding exploration in this way um the inclusion of smaller arcs are huge the um because the bigger mysteries and questions in the game they take a lot of time to answer literally up to the entire game so we have to reward progress as it happens um also those smaller arcs kind of building up to a point that helps us because uh if you you know if you if you play through the first escape pod arc and you you know all of that content and then you play the second it doesn't ruin the second arc and vice versa so those smaller arcs also help us in ensuring that there are still rewards to those

mysteries and we're not spoiling things by going out of order because again there's just not a set order um mixing in light-hearted or sillier or smaller stories with the massively devastating ones because there are some terrible things that happen to them know my um that was big managing that tone was really important in writing um because alex is just always has been super into science um he has the game always had this idea that failure perhaps isn't failure so to speak um and what i actually mean by that is the idea that say your hypothesis is wrong that's not failure it's just that you've now learned information that you can apply toward finding the correct hypothesis um so the nominees cultural attitudes very much reflect that it was just kind of a natural jumping off point and i think it

does help reinforce the idea for the player of failure in the game as progression um failure in this case being deaf uh when the player dies a lot of the time they might be doing that in the pursuit of knowledge or they're going to learn something from that death even if it's just put your spaceship on before you go on that side of the ship we've all been there um we also have those emotional hooks and payoffs we talked about earlier and this is where all of that character work really comes into play while the player reward for discovering new text is always new information you will always get new information as you get new know my text i was also at the same time trying to pay off some character arcs and some minor story arcs that maybe weren't related to the massive stakes of the of the grander solar system mysteries um some examples of that uh there's a character called poke that is afraid that she won't be able to successfully recreate this work core and you find that out even though she's been acting quite

confident about it the whole time and eventually it leads to her pulling it off and that's a really good moment for her and if i've done my job correctly it's a good moment for other for the for the player experiencing that alongside her um clarion nero are two characters that have an interest in each other initially and there's some teasing uh by i think poke in particular teases clary about this because they're siblings of course they do um they have an interest in each other and then clary and nero start dating and that's kind of uh you know it's a nice payoff it's sweet it's not earth shattering but it's nice to see you'll love to see it um solanum as a child you can kind of chart her growth um you can go all the way from her playing children's games in a cave in the sunless city um writing poetry there being afraid that the eye might be this malevolent force after all um and you can follow her through kind of overcoming some of those fears and eventually her pilgrimage to the quantum moon so showing these nomines lives as

meaningful as having accomplishments as having positive elements to them i basically because i knew the comment was going to be what it was uh we basically had to get rid of all of the know my because otherwise they weren't going to leave the solar system without having found the eye that pursuing they're they were going to stop pursuing their ultimate goal so um we had to kill him uh gosh please don't quote me on that one point being the the more we can reward these smaller things the better that's going to feel and it's also going to be this nice you know reward for following along with the know my story um this is your final warning if you haven't played the game yet you need to go you need to go do it because we can never come back from this point okay all right for the rest of you we're telling multiple stories in outer wilds we're telling the player story

that's the player experience we're telling uh the story of the solar system and later we kind of realized it's the story of the full universe in fact um with all of that physical stuff that's happening and that's really entwined with player story to begin with because those are both happening in the present and then we have the know my story which is all happening in the past these stories are all profoundly related to one another and it becomes apparent as the player progresses through the game um [Music] and the whole thing here is and this is why it was so damn critical for me to get the player to empathize with the nomi and be invested in them is that the nominee have put in all of this work in the past and thought they failed and when the universe is ending when the sun dies that finally powers this timely device that they had made and it gives the player the time that they needed to finish the journey to the eye to reach the eye and the player's story occurs in the present but you're doing it in parallel with the nominees journey you're

reliving it you're making their discoveries with them you're experiencing their successes and failures and ultimately you are building on that and you are finally finishing that story and the more i have done my job the more i have been able to get the player invested in this emotionally the more satisfying the end of the game is going to be because it is that big payoff that you have been working this entire game toward and i want you to finish this game not just on behalf of you but on behalf of all of these characters in the world that helped you get there all right let's do takeaways y'all like takeaways let's do takeaways uh it is amazing to me when story and gameplay can be closely integrated i want to see us take advantage of that guys this is a medium where we're able to do that and no one else really can we're not books we're not cinema let's do it uh also we could not have pulled this off

without clear design goals um in that regard alex is an absolute wonder it allowed us to do some really cool stuff with storytelling and create this really unusually cohesive experience and andy's a great place to do that um not that you always can mind but and it's not a shot at triple a either it's just this is the sort of thing that's hard to pull off on a larger scale at least from what i've seen um the larger your team is the harder that gets and so andy's in a really good spot to be that level of cohesive um also we were in a great place to remain flexible and be able to iterate really rapidly and really really often and that did a lot for us again not every team can do it but if you can i mean it's a wonderful thing uh i'll also point out that um even though we have an official story team in the credits which is alex lone and me i would not have been able to do this level of writing to pull any of this off

uh without complete studio buy-in the team really believed in the story and they believed in getting us there and without them this could not have happened so i owe them a tremendous amount for pulling that off um it's so critical for me as a writer to have that for my team i had a lot of success with uh kind of approaching things mentally as pulling versus pushing information please stop telling me why i care please make me care i would love that um i love games that do that it's really wonderful it goes back to showing and not telling because again we're games for games you guys don't don't assign me an objective to care i won't do it um i also wanted to point out again it's surprisingly okay to uh to have the player maybe not always immediately know what they're doing as long as you're still guiding them a little bit don't you know throw them in deep water but i think honestly even if we were sweating it a little bit in development at times thinking oh boy like

hopefully players don't get frustrated and give up and all that um there's a whole community of outer wilds fans who i absolutely adore we have the best fans we really do who have proven that they're willing to put in the time to figure things out for themselves players are not dumb um they're gonna figure it out especially if they're having a good time figuring it out and if we're not penalizing them for dying in the game you know if they're not losing items and all that it's it really frees things up in a bizarre way um and i guess this is a little bit of my soapbox thing here but it's my talk deal with it uh the games industry is still relatively young and we are still in our infancy as a storytelling medium you guys that is so exciting oh my gosh i love that as somebody that works a narrative obviously i'm a bit biased um i'm really excited to see what we what we can do from here uh we're still trying all of this stuff and we're

still learning a tremendous amount from it as we go um so you know if there's anything you take away from this talk i really hope that you embrace story and narrative in your games and talk to your writers see what they can do with you because we're doing some really cool stuff already and it's only going to get cooler from here so to the future sorry maybe that one was a bit much hey um however thanks so much for for watching um i really appreciate it i hope you learned something fun or at least had a good time uh i've got some people to thank a lot of people in fairness but um iam jacobson is concept artist at mobius digital i have used some of his images here and i appreciate them immensely um everyone at mobius digital was a dream to work with uh phenomenal human beings as well uh especially alex and lowen because i worked a ton with them and they're amazing storytellers and frankly irritatingly brilliant designers

um [Music] what can you do uh obviously i should thank my family at this point uh my partner john and my friend dan for getting me through uh to this point on my talk because you know it was a little bit of a new thing for me and thank you so much to gdc for having me um i really appreciate it and it's been a genuine pleasure i hope you all enjoy the rest of gdc thanks again [Music] you