The Devil in the Details - A Case Study on Deus Ex: Mankind Divided
Hades , the critically acclaimed rogue-like by star indie developer Supergiant, was a massive step forward in narrative storytelling through video games. The script, written by Greg Kasavin, stretched to over 300,000 words - but this novel-length text was not spat out at the player through paragraphs upon paragraphs of lore, but rather integrated into the game as part of its dynamically reactive narrative, through dialogue and narration. These hundreds of thousands of words are not written for every player; rather, they exist for every possibility, such that when a player experiences an event unique to them, the game will be able to recognize and acknowledge what the player has done. The example of this everyone has at least heard of is with the boss of the first area, Megaera. She, of course, has tons of variation in her dialogue, keeping the encounter feeling like a genuine conversation between two characters, rather than just repeated generic dialogue. But Supergiant goes even ...