Technical limits with development can make stories "heavy, dead" says Far Cry 3 writer
Far Cry 3 lead writer Jeffrey Yohalem feels that with game technology progressing, it will get easier for game writers to tell more subtle stories.
Speaking with GameFront's E3 correspondent Wil Wheaton, Yohalem said some stories in games can fall a bit flat, but as the tech changes to allow for better motion capture of the actors, it will only get better as things progress.
“Because it’s full body motion capture, I can write lines of dialog that mean one thing but say another, and that’s a new thing for video games,” he said. “In the past facial expressions weren’t clear enough, and as a writer you got told constantly — you’d write a line for a character like, ‘Give me that jar,’ but what the character really means is ‘I’ve had a terrible day, so just give me that jar so I can have one thing go right.’ And that won’t be conveyed because the facial isn’t there and it’s just conveyed through the spoken.
“So what will happen then is a director will say, Could you just change the line to ‘I just had a really terrible day.’ So then you get a line that’s on the nose. For me, story is a game and players should constantly be trying to figure out what characters mean by what they’re saying, and then that game just disappears.
"So story is just this heavy, dead object that’s inserted into the middle of the game itself.”
The full video featuring Yohalem is below.
Far Cry 3 is out September 4 in the US and September 7 in Europe on PC, PS3, and Xbox 360.
