PC Authority had the opportunity to interview Feargus Urquhart, CEO of Obsidian Entertainment on the occasion of his latest AAA roleplaying game release.
PC Authority had the opportunity to interview Feargus Urquhart, CEO of Obsidian Entertainment on the occasion of his latest AAA roleplaying game release.
1. What is the secret to a great game narrative? How is it that you people keep producing such entertaining material over and over?
I've always seen the secret being thinking about how a player would want to play a certain part of the game, figuring out how to let them do it and then making sure that you are tying the actions they choose into the grander scheme of the story and the theme of the game. After that, it's all about being brutally critical of the dialog that gets written and that we are not just telling the player things, but making sure they feel them.
2. How much control should the player have over story events? If you can kill a character who might have offered you a quest, is that good or bad?
That's a tough one and I believe it really depends on how in-depth a story you are trying to tell. The more in-depth a story becomes, the more critical the chain of events and the narrative become as well. If you allow a player to work outside the story, like killing someone who offers you a critical quest, then the whole chain can be broken. On the flip side, if you don't give the player a certain amount of free will, then all the choices they have will not really seem to matter. They will then start feeling like the game is going to end up in the same place no matter what they do. The trick here in the end is to often provide a broad overall story that only requires the player to do certain things and then having side plots that can be completed in a number of different ways where some of them tie into the overall story and some don't.