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AdviceToolbox
What can we learn by breaking down the interactivity of
The Witcher 3’s best side quest? Quite a lot, as it turns outOf mice and Witchers:
structuring quests
AUTHOR
TONY JEFFREE
Tony is Wireframe’s new game writing and narrative design
columnist. He’s also creative director of Far Few Giants, and you
can find his work via tonyjeffree.co.uk or @tonyjeffree on Twitter.his is the first in a series of
columns about how games get
written. Where I’ll explain the
inner workings of how interactive
narratives are structured, how
compelling non-linear game stories are crafted,
and what the hell ‘narrative design’ means.
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt is held up as a shining
example of game writing, with the richness of
its side quests widely singled out for particular
praise. As the player roams the open world,
these diversions build a landscape gripped
by tragedy. The player wanders into a story,
affects its course for better or worse, but they
can never save everyone. A Witcher is there to
mitigate tragedy, not prevent it.
These isolated short stories, then, are the
perfect opportunity for us to figure out what
goes into a good quest. We can begin by
mapping out the story’s ‘possibility space’: a
two-dimensional map containing every aspect
of the quest, from relevant interactions to the
branching flows of conversations, to enemies Figure 1: There are details
which are only really apparent
in the fully detailed flowchart,
particularly around pacing.
You can find it at
wfmag.cc/mice-dream.we encounter, to locations we visit. We then
arrange these according to their relationships
to each other. This is easy for a conversation
where a binary choice will directly lead to one of
two possible outcomes, but is more challenging
when trying to isolate exactly which interactions
will trigger or enable other, new interactions in
other gameplay systems.ONE I MADE EARLIER
I chose what many consider to be the game’s
best side quest, A Towerful of Mice. In it, the
player must break the curse gripping an island
tower. As you can see in Figure 1, the mapping
exercise leaves us with an extensive map of the
quest’s information flow – too extensive, even,
to print in full here. To make things clearer,
I produced Figure 2, which is a simplified
version of this quest’s possibility space focusing
on the key information, while summarising
everything else.
The first thing that stands out is the simplicity
of the quest’s structure: the quest has an ‘A plot’
wherein the player breaks the curse, a ‘B plot’
which tells the story of the curse’s origin, and
two outcomes, one which occurs more or less by
default, and one which can occur if you engage
with the optional content. And that’s it.
Everything to do with the A plot and some
hooks in the B plot are on the yellow critical
path (a term which means the shortest possible
route from a mission’s start to finish), and the
B plot is mostly in the white, optional paths.
Of the two endings, both are tragic, but the most
emotionally satisfying and harder to achieve one
is simply designed. It’s the one where the playerT
Part of the genius of this quest is its
isolation, allowing the writer more creative
freedom with the fates of its characters.