The Force Unleashed revisited – Haden Blackman interview, part one

With the Ultimate Sith Edition of the game due out soon, I thought the timing was right to post this Q&A I did a couple of months ago on The Force Unleashed, as well as narrative in videogames overall. It was originally for the feature on scriptwriting I wrote in issue 49 (on-sale now, with Assassin’s Creed II on the cover!), and the second part on storytelling I’m currently writing for issue 51. Anyway, here’s the first half of the Q&A with LucasArts project lead, Haden Blackman reflecting on the ambitious new chapter in the Star Wars saga. The second half will follow later in the week:

Apparently, you pitched several ideas to George Lucas – why did he opt for The Force Unleashed? What was it about the story that struck a chord with him?

HB: We did pitch several concepts to George Lucas, mostly for approval over some specific elements like the time period. He gave us very general, high-level feedback in those early meetings regarding what he liked and didn’t like about each concept. Eventually, we pulled elements from several concepts and crafted those into what ultimately became The Force Unleashed. But the game was really greenlit based on some early pre-vis work we did to show the potential of the over-the-top Force powers, which George evidently saw as well-suited for a game. In terms of basic story advice, he encouraged us to create new characters based on familiar archetypes – a comic sidekick, a love interest, and a mentor specifically. We then went away and developed characters that we felt were “familiar but new” and wrote a first draft of the story on team. We later presented all of this to him for approval and feedback. My biggest concern was that he wouldn’t accept that Darth Vader would take a secret apprentice, but he seemed to support that idea.

What was the difference between writing The Force Unleashed and your other projects?

HB: Compared to other games projects I’ve worked on, we really put a huge amount of emphasis on story. It was one of our pillars from the initial kick-off meetings. I’ve seen other projects where the story has been at the mercy of the design and has been butchered as a result of gameplay or level changes. On The Force Unleashed, we tried to strike a better balance and let both story and the game design needs drive decisions. Obviously, the game design changed over the course of the project, but we weighed every change against the impact to the story and always tried to find solutions that would work for both design and story – they truly were of equal weight.

Compared to other mediums I’ve worked in, the biggest difference writing for games is obviously wrapping your head around the notion of interactivity. It’s so obvious, though, that I think people really underestimate how it transforms the writing process. I think there’s an assumption that if you’ve written for comics or television or film you can easily make the transition to video games because all are visual mediums. But the interactivity and a desire to allow the player to remain in control as much as possible changes everything. As just one example, very few games feature any kind of major setbacks for the character, which is a key part of traditional story structure. The character needs to hit rock bottom at some point and have a moment where he is worse off than when he started. But games are all about a series of “successes” – defeating an enemy, finishing a level, solving a puzzle, earning a high score, and any setbacks often feel like “failure.” Therefore, it’s incredibly difficult to design satisfying ways for players to succeed and “fail” at the same time without taking away some degree of control or downplaying the payoff for success, which leads to players feeling cheated or let down.

Another big difference is the degree of collaboration. I’ve worked closely with artists on comic books, but writing for a game really requires a great deal of outreach to every discipline, especially design and art.

Watching people come into the industry as writers, I’ve seen time and again that coming to terms with technology constraints is another big hurdle. Many of the other mediums are much better understood in terms of both technology and story telling methods. Technology is changing every medium on some level, but the games industry has undergone a complete overhaul roughly every five years because of the changing platforms. Just when we figure out how to get the most out of our engines and tools, we’re building new technology for the next transition. I think writers are surprised by the team sizes and how difficult it can be to do even simple scenes or effects that are common in film within a game engine. And when you’re building tech and tools while trying to build a game, the problem becomes exponentially more pronounced because things break and change constantly. So, a technique that might have worked one day could easily be rendered useless the next.

Obviously, it was a long project for the company – how much did you tweak the script over the course of production? Did the casting of the game change the way any of the characters were portrayed?

HB: Once we had the core plot down, it didn’t change a great deal over the course of development, though we did rearrange a few things based on changes to the game design. At one point, we felt that we had too many “Jedi hunting missions” and weren’t getting the player into the second act soon enough, so we transformed Maris Brood from a Jedi pirate you fight early in the game to a “fallen” Jedi you encounter later. In order to still introduce her early, we made her Shaak Ti’s apprentice, so you get a glimpse of her before you confront Shaak Ti.

The script itself went through about twenty-five revisions. I’m a big believer in the adage that bulk of writing is actually editing, especially in terms of dialogue. Our first draft of the “shooting script,” which was really just me brainstormingout everything I wanted the characters to say and do, was about 120 pages long (at about one minute per page), but we were planning for only 60 minutes of cinematics. In the end, the script hit our target page count, but I removed very few scenes overall – the bulk of the editing revolved around getting the characters to say what they need to say as economically as possible, while still developing their personalities and adding some subtext.

I didn’t actually start the shooting script until we had most of the main actors cast, but the dialogue went through additional revisions as we did read-throughs, and then again during the actual recording process. We rewrote nearly every one of PROXY’s lines in studio to try to steer him further and further away from any C-3PO comparisons. The actors themselves came up with some great ad libs and variations as well.

How do you feel storytelling in videogames has progressed over the past decade, in both quality of script and execution? Technology seems to play a big part for LucasArts.

I think there are two different aspects to “good story” in games. I think you need to have both a great plot – the central conflict, the characters, the structure – and great storytelling – how the plot is conveyed. As an industry, we’ve made huge strides in the storytelling methods, thanks mostly to technology, more and more emphasis on putting story elements into gameplay itself, and some ingenious experimentation. But I think the industry is still very weak in terms of plot and character development. The same plots and characters just get rehashed over and over again, and there is no focus on character arcs or transformation beyond a player character getting more powerful over time. Our “heroes” rarely function as heroes do in literature or film – there no inner journey, no confrontation and defeat of a fatal character flaw, no greater understanding or meaningful self-sacrifice. And I think that dialogue (which is integral to both character development and storytelling) is still generally very heavy-handed, stilted, or “on the nose.” Exposition, and not character development, seems to drive most dialogue in games.

One area I think we are really advancing, however, is in the “user stories,” especially in games with very little “scripted” story. A game like Left4Dead is heavy on setting but very light on story, yet I still find myself telling stories to other people about my experiences in that game all the time. And because the mechanics encourage (and in fact require) you to work with others, I feel like I’m on my own little hero’s journey every time I play. Am I going to risk my life to save someone I barely know?