Narrative Sorcery: Coherent Storytelling in an Open World

And the Game-I-didn't-know-I-need-to-play Award goes to...

Literally the best GDC I have ever seen about non-linear narrative design. Only took me like 3 watches to understand what he was talking about but now I'm gonna scrap the current quest design in my prototype.

It is amazing how a game from a small German developer studio in 2002 does a lot of this stuff he talks about and does open world so well that it is still unrivalled to this day. One of your very first task in Gothic 2 is to enter a city to acquire a certain item. Now, because you look like a beaten bandit the city guard won't let you through because the country suffered from a big wave of escaped convicts, so they won't let everyone in freely. Now there are several ways to enter the city: you can bribe the guards, but this requires a good amount of gold coins that is hard to come by at the beginning. You can buy or work for proper farming clothes, so you can pretend you're a farmer; or you can steal the clothes from the landlords chest (you shouldn't be seen in those clothes, though, because he will attack you for thievery). You can also get a permit from a travelling merchant who gives it out for free but will ask for a favour in return later in the city. If you talked to the right guy you get the information that you could disguise yourself as herbalist merchant but to be convincing you'll need at least ten of the same plant or herbs. Or you could just venture off the safer beginner's path, sneak past hostile NPCs that are way too strong for you, jump down to the coast and swim around the city walls into the harbour and get into the city that way. If you do it that way, the game even acknowledges that you didn't enter by any of those other methods, grants you bonus XP and a NPC comments on your "Didn't see you get in by the city gates. Did you swim all the way?". So what happens is that the game feels much more like a simulation, simulating a living world that reacts to your actions. But you don't need to necessarily trigger a certain quest to open up options. Of course, to act like a herbalist, someone needs to give you that idea. But how you get the money or clothes is completely quest-agnostic and up to you. In fact, you could wander somewhere else entirely, Gothic 2 being an open world game. It's "level design", though, confronts you with enemies you won't be able to tackle on until you're stronger, so the game soft-forces you along a "linear" way. However, there's no level gating. If you put every early skill point into combat, you can get to places with a level as low as let's say 4, while someone on level 10, having spent skill points into thievery and crafting, will have a much harder time.

This is excellent stuff! Systematizing the flow of causality in a simple and meaningful way that allows for full player freedom and responds to the player... world class.

The magic system in Sorcery isn't just cunning it's utterly incredible. Every spell has a 3 letter word, and some of them have a required item, players can only read the spellbook between game sessions, and can only cast spells they have actually, irl, memorised. There are several spells that are just obviously good, ZAP, NOK (opens locked doors) etc. but many were very contextual and specific, but if used correctly could give you massive rewards/cool new content. I can still remember that small pebbles explode with the spell POP!

This video blew my mind. I never think about this...

This is my favorite GDC talk. I keep coming back to it.

Watching this talk again after playing bg3 is great

This incredibly, exactly what I've been looking for. Thank you for breaking it all down like this.

This is actually a masterpiece. Thank you very much for this talk!!

But this "Sorcerer!" model is how quests work in some open world rpgs like Fallout (at least 1, 2 and NV).

The Witcher example is astounding, because so much of The Witcher 3 does let you do quests out of order. I played one of the quests on the main path before I was prompted to go there just because I was wandering around in the area looking for fun quests to do. It blew my mind when Yenn told me "you need to go help this werewolf (different quest) and that should help lead us to Ciri." Because I had already met that werewolf and helped him, and was surprised that they let me break the sequence that way, Geralt even had a bespoke line to tell her that he already did it. The lead quest designer from CDPR gave a GDC talk where he talked about another main-line quest that lets you complete it before triggering the first step, too. Maybe it's because these are examples of side quests that are interwoven into the main quest and not just side quests that are just dotted around the map? Not sure what exactly the difference is, if the main quest won't progress until you complete it, it's not a side quest. But whatever lol, point is, you can do a lot of quests out of order and it's interesting to me that they neglected it in other places.

Amazing talk. Truly incredible and extremely well explained. Thanks!

Thank you for this brilliant talk! Now I can't stop thinking about how grinding could appear in a choose your own adventure -book: a varying loop of turning pages and throwing dice, which annoyingly repeats every time you're trying to do something? It would be an infuriatingly ridiculous concept for sure. xD

This is an utterly brilliant talk and answers my biggest question about game structure and narrative design. Thank you so much!

Very good talk... I already have ideas on how to use that in my current game. Much cleaner and simpler than what I did before.

Now whatcha do is combine this with Tarn Adams' Villains update talk. You put hooks and state machines in every direction and you're off to the races.

frantically taking notes I am so going to make something amazing off of this talk alone, thanks.

Such a wonderful presentation!

This whole talk, I found myself thinking a lot about Majora's Mask, and wondering what Jon's comments would be on the narrative structure of that game.