EvilAvatar donne la parole à Sheldon Pacotti qui écrivit les dialogues de Deus Ex et s’est vu promouvoir lead writer lors du développement de Deus Ex 2. Cette fois-ci, il ne s’agit pas d’un postmortem, mais d’une interview où Sheldon réfléchit sur la meilleure façon de raconter une histoire dans un jeu vidéo.
- Comment intégrer au mieux les phases de récit et celles de gameplay ?
- Est-ce vraiment une bonne idée de toujours laisser au joueur le contrôle de son personnage ?
- Un personnage muet favorise-t-il l’immersion ?
Beaucoup de questions et quelques éléments de réponse. Extrait :
Almost every other medium manages to immerse its audience, and none (okay, few) of them give the audience any control over the characters. I think there are a lot of ways to immerse a player in a world. But I do agree that most straightforward (and probably most powerful) way is to give the player control. I guess my one reason to hold back and not give too much importance to that fact is that we’re very good right now at giving the player control, at least with regard to killing things and blowing stuff up, but we’re not so good at everything else that surrounds and enhances gameplay.
Thinking of Spore with regard to that … and Will Wright’s approach to design in general. His mantra is to give the player gameplay « verbs » that have semantic meaning in themselves. I think maybe that’s partly what you’re getting at. Let the player live something, or build something, and you’re done. We don’t need to give the avatar a name and a red beard.
I agree that this is where games need to go. However, and maybe it’s just the writer in me that wants to remain relevant to the 21st century, I have a strong interest in taking all of the window dressing of games (visual storytelling, character, dialogue, etc.) and bringing it in closer to the gameplay. So that a game can be a truly cinematic experience, and still be a game.
