What happens within Skyrim's snowy borders is a step closer to the holodeck fantasy many game designers and players are familiar with – an immersive, dynamic environment that responds to the player's actions in a coherent, even dramatic way. How has Bethesda achieved this, and what might it mean for the notion of videogame storytelling in the future?
Full to the 'Rim
What Bethesda has done (and has been working toward since the first Elder Scrolls game) is create a world that works as a system or a simulation, rather than a story that works like a narrative. Fantasy and sci-fi literature is often criticized for spending too much time on the world-building aspect of fiction, at the expense of character development, psychology, and drama -- but open-world games like Skyrim turn that kind of criticism upside-down by foregrounding what can happen in the world that's been built.
There
are so many locations of note throughout the land that it's harder to
not get sidetracked on your way to an objective.
The first element of this near-limitless storytelling is an enormous
game world. It's not the biggest of videogame worlds by any means,
though its size is certainly adequate for an adventurer who doesn't
benefit from speeding down the road in a hijacked Infernus. But a world
isn't just space: it's a place where things happen, and what Skyrim
might lack in sheer size, it makes up for in density of content. There
are so many locations of note throughout the land that it's harder to
not get sidetracked on your way to an objective than
it is to find
something to do along the way. The mini-narrative histories we can discern from the various locations are an example of "spatial storytelling," or investing fiction into the geography itself through the placement of objects for the player to interpret. Sometimes a shack you stumble upon will have a hunter sitting outside selling his game, sometimes the place is empty, and other times there's blood everywhere, a corpse, and evidence that someone has been testing fury spells on skeevers. Scenes like the skeever massacre are clever little triumphs which would be tedious to read through that are doubly enjoyable instead -- once for being satisfying little tangents, and again because you "discovered" them yourself. All visual media, and videogames in particular, benefit from this technique, though it'd stop a novel dead in its tracks. Over-describing a room in text is painfully boring, whereas a player can investigate every little detail -- right up until the boredom kicks in, at which point we can just walk away.
Busy Bodies
That will only take you so far, however -- good fiction almost inevitably requires believable, human-like characters the reader, viewer, or player can relate to, sympathize with, or otherwise become emotionally involved with. (Consider the work Pixar put in to make Wall-E and Eve human-like enough that we can read their emotions.) Bethesda tackled this by populating Skyrim with hundreds of autonomous characters with their own internal desires, schedules, and attitudes. Most have some way of engaging you, generally through asking you to perform a task, or providing a service. Each character has a routine and purpose, which helps alleviate some of the feeling that these NPCs are standing around waiting for you to talk to them. Giving the characters their own limited autonomy gives the world a sense of momentum -- that it continues to exist with or without the presence of a Dovahkiin.
The system determines which NPC should be
captured by examining your character's history.
Within the Radiant AI system, Bethesda's encoded the idea of a quest
which the player can pick up at inns throughout the province. One of
its formulae is: "{NPC} has been captured, and is being held at
{Location}." Those variables are decided by the game on the fly. This
would be an easy source of the infinite gameplay that Bethesda
advertised, but Skyrim takes it a step further: To add meaning -- and
perhaps drama -- the system determines which NPC should be
captured by examining your character's history and picking an NPC that
you've actually had a relationship with in the past. Maybe an old
companion, or a shop owner you've sold surplus gear to. An NPC, that
is, the player knows and might care about. Secondly, the system picks a
nearby location that the player hasn't explored yet. Compare this to a
random NPC in a random dungeon, and we have the beginnings of a
procedurally generated adventure that might actually mean something to
every player, different as their adventures may actually be. Memorable Accidents
"Might" is the operative word here. Simulation systems aren't infallible -- they trade the certainty that traditional, scripted narratives provide for the joy that unexpected serendipity creates. The Radiant-generated quests can be as simple and meaningless as a random NPC in a random dungeon, but they can also be quests we want to take on because it means something, not because the story says it's necessary.
The
Radiant
systems create opportunities. If things
come together correctly, the experiences can be exhilarating.
So while the idea of a linear story written by an author and delivered
through dialogue and cutscenes in the style of Batman: Arkham City or
Assassin's Creed: Revelations is probably going to stick around a while
longer, this developing approach to more dynamic stories will certainly
have an impact on the narrative experience of future games. The Radiant
systems create opportunities, rather than guarantees, but if things
come together correctly, the experiences can be exhilarating. These
kinds of systems will only continue to develop, and eventually may
learn to spontaneously create more subtle and complex dramas in the
future. Imagine if the Battle-Born and Greymane clans of Whiterun ran out of patience and decided to settle their differences without the help of the Dragonborn. Perhaps the winner of the family feud would install themselves as leaders of Whiterun, without the assistance of the Stormcloaks led by the player. At some point, the player steps into Whiterun into the middle of the melee, and either has to join in or just see what happens. Perhaps the losing family would be driven into hiding, only to generate more quests designed to snipe away at the winners. True, you'd miss a lot of action, but the glorious part is that every time you arrive on the scene, the situation will look completely different.
When picturing this future AI, it's easy to imagine the various factions in Skyrim interacting with one another, vying for the allegiance of the player. Perhaps as the Thieves' Guild gains strength, the Companions begin generating quests to rid their city of the Thieves. These kinds of struggles for power could go on virtually forever. The longer the player stays in the world, the more events can happen, and the more differences we would see. Though some repetition would probably begin to surface after long enough, but the details would be different every time. Rather than plotting out each individual event, the art of storytelling will become about crafting a situation full of interesting, believable characters with their own agendas and conflicts with whom the player can interact. It's about creating possibilities.