For a special feature on storytelling in videogames in issue 49 of X360, on-sale 12/08/09, I sent some questions over to Lead Designer on Pandemic’s The Saboteur, Tom French. These are his narrative-centric responses:

While previous Pandemic games have some story content, it seems as though The Saboteur is the studio’s most narrative-heavy game yet. What prompted the shift towards a heavy story?

When the core team for The Saboteur was assembled we were very film influenced.  The idea of a race car driver turn Saboteur set in an over the top stylized world with WWII as a backdrop was definitely a challenging task.  To help flesh out our hero Sean Devlin and tie all these threads together literally the second designer we hired for the project was a writer.  We watched a lot of movies to find qualities and ideas to inspire our designs.  Indiana Jones, Die Hard, and Bullitt were great influences to help us achieve our goal of making Sean the hero we in our hearts all want to be.  Sin City and Amelie were fantastic references for our color palettes and the separation of our occupied and inspired world.  Ultimately to make all these pieces fit together we needed to really make story and the telling of it one of the most important elements of the game.

What makes Sean unique in the context of other videogame protagonists? Is his unusual background and slightly seedy lifestyle a response to less interesting, gruff heroes?

We had a lot of goals for Sean when we first began working on him; the need for a daredevil nature to make the actions we wanted feel in character, a personality that could at one point be funny or charming but tough when he needed to be, and have personal rather than political/national motivations.  His unusual background is inspired by the real Grand Prix Champion William Grover-Williams which was a great touchstone for a larger than life hero but grounded in reality.  Part of making Sean our hero was creating ways for him to be separate from the war.  Paris has this inherit sexuality that worked with the grittier more Film Noir inspired tones we wanted in the game so tying Sean into it was a great fit for his character.  Going back to film again, the more timeless heroes from some of movies we loved really let us pick a lot of traits that fit in the period and would elevate Sean as an action hero.  What’s great is that we have a very clear understanding of who Sean is.  To the point that I could say with all honestly he is one of my best friends and I care greatly for what happens to him.  Strange, but true.  Our sanity check against anything is WWSDD (What Would Sean Devlin Do?) which helps keep everything grounded in the world we’ve created.  One of my biggest desires for The Saboteur is that it introduces people to Sean and lets them relate to him like everyone on the team has.

To what extent is the game’s storyline based on real historical figures and events? Obviously, the Nazi occupation of Paris is real – but what about the events within that?

I like to say everything in The Saboteur is more inspired by history than based on it.  While we certainly do have things in the game that happened in history they are changed to fit into our story or just exaggerated to make things bigger and more “larger than life”.  Even our occupation is stylized and heavily layered into the world because it would make for fun gameplay as you explore the world.  We have characters in the world that are inspired by real members of the resistance or Bugatti racing team, but essentially we made all of it our own so we could take liberties to enhance the story, missions, and gameplay.

When it came to capturing the attitudes of WWII in the script, did you seek out any consultants to help with capturing the time period?

No, we didn’t bring in a consultant but we just did a ton of research.  Scouring the web, books, comics, and of course film to find little snippets of ideas that we could find inspiration in.  Because early on we knew right away we were going to make The Saboteur not about the war but instead a big action adventure with the war as a backdrop we really could just run with our imaginations as long as it fit into the world we were creating and felt it was something that Sean would do.  There were some interesting real resistance characters and details that we got a lot of ideas from, but like everything else in the game it was changed and altered to fit into the world we wanted to create.  This really allowed us to take a lot of liberties without being tied to anything so it was more about what we could imagine and how far we could push the limits.

How does scriptwriting work within Pandemic? Is there much crossover between writers and designers?

While it works a bit differently with each project at Pandemic, for The Saboteur the writing and the design have worked hand-in-hand together to design the game from the ground up.  Because Sean and his story were such a large focus we needed to make sure that both the storytelling and the missions served each other.  The cinematics and conversations leading into a mission drive what happens in the missions and vice versa, one change to each affect the other.  Luckily we were happy with our core character and story within the first few months of preproduction and it has remained pretty much intact throughout revisions we had to make along the way. It was a delicate balance and even difficult at times but it was worth it to make the experience more cohesive.

How much of the game’s story is told in cutscene form, as opposed to in-game? To what extent do you think gaming should be cinematic?

It’s really hard to tell story without any sort of cutscenes.  We made it a goal to try not to do things in cinematics that the player would want to do.  So we try to use cinematics where the player doesn’t have control really only as accents in the missions like exclamation points or to move things along in the story where we want the player to pay attention.  In between the cinematics the mission design and gameplay are part of the storytelling experience.  Every mission tells a piece of the story in one way or another.  Sean isn’t just doing random missions, they all lead to his vengeance goal or are part of aiding various resistance members who have their own problems and could use Sean’s skills.  Along the way we’re scattering in-game story telling elements where it fits to tell part of the story even if it isn’t an objective to interact with; planes flying across the skies and Nazis forces mounting at the border when the invasion of France is happening; characters talking about what’s happening in the background, and things like that.  Games, like movies, are very much an escapist medium and I think they can be very cinematic experiences but I don’t think gaming always needs to be cinematic.  I think developers sometimes to try to force cinema into their games when it really doesn’t need it but at the same time I think it is also the market that has really more and more demanded it.  It’s a tough line to walk at times but basically if the game demands it, absolutely go for it, but don’t feel obligated to make every game cinematic.

To what extent do you think the storytelling capabilities of videogames have changed over the past decade? The capacity for accurately capturing a part of history has increased with the technology, right?

Thinking back on a lot of the classic games I grew up with there was really great effort to tell story but it felt more somewhere between a novel, comic, or even just a good pen and paper session.  Especially old RPGs or adventure games, they really planted the seed for everything to grow out of and technology really has just allowed us to take it to the next level. Technology definitely has had a large contribution to the advancement of storytelling in videogames; graphics, animation, audio, storage space, physics, lighting, everything really.  On top of that we have developers that have really built their company around the concept of pushing game storytelling.  While several have made some great strides in that area, I don’t think anyone has pushed it to the level Bioware has.  What I love is that the storytelling advancements they do are doing don’t just translate to RPGs alone.  Even action game developers can learn from them to advance the medium as a whole.  For The Saboteur we had some good talks and meetings with their storytelling designers to figure out how we could adapt some of their processes and how we could learn from some of their system designs.  All this just really allows the player to become more immersed into the game.

How much does the medium gain from factors like motion capture?

Motion capture can do some amazing things to make characters feel lifelike it really does depend on the game though.  Hand animation really can add that extra flair that you can’t get from motion capture.  We use motion capture on The Saboteur to enhance important animations and for the key cinematic moments.  These animations then go through a bit of cleanup and sometimes even get a little extra hand animation for flair. So while motion capturing is definitely used for a lot of animations in game and in our cinematics, we also like to animate by hand to a great extent.

What other videogame storylines/narratives have caught your eye over the past few years?

There have definitely been some really solid story driven games in the past few years.  It’s hard to deny how big of an impact Bioshock has had from a storytelling and narrative perspective.  Not only was there this interesting overarching story but the world really told such a key piece of the story as you just explored it.  It showed everyone that you could really do something fresh that could still appeal to a very mainstream audience.  I think it raised a bar across the industry that will be talked about and debated for years to come.