"I will overlook sh**ty game mechanics for hours if I'm enjoying the story": Skyrim and Fallout veteran says RPGs "live and die" on narrative
Aug. 20, 2024“RPGs live and die on story”
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A former Bethesda developer who worked on both Skyrim and all three of the studio’s Fallout games says RPGs “live and die” on the strength of their story.
“It’s a little scary to work outside of an established story,” Gardiner replied. “You’re creating things whole cloth. It’s a shocking amount of work that I wasn’t even really prepared for. We spent a lot of time working on back history and story, and making connective tissues.” All of that is extremely important, Gardiner says, because “these RPGs, they live and die on the story.”
“I will overlook shitty game mechanics for hours if I’m enjoying the story.Hours, in an RPG. And you have to have really compelling characters, a narrative that’s pulling you through, and those are all the things I remember most. I don’t remember all the rats I fought in turn-based Fallout, where it took me 20 minutes to kill a freaking rat, but I remember story,” the project lead says.
Gardiner turns his attention from there to theFallout TV show, suggesting the success of that project stemmed directly from an understanding of the games' “setting and tone:” “It was enough connective tissue and glue for Jonah Nolan and the showrunners to make an amazing series out of.”
It’s an interesting perspective, and personally not one I think always rings true. When it comes to something character-driven, like The Witcher 3, I think Gardiner is spot on. But for Bethesda’s RPGs, I was much more interested in design than story, particularly when it comes to Skyrim - you can weave me the wildest narrative you like if you’ve got a good stealth archer that you can give me.
Elsewhere,Gardiner says he got into fights with his Bethesda colleagues over the RPG’s most notoriously heavy item: “You can’t just give the player everything they want.”
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I’m GamesRadar’s news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I’ve run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam’s latest indie hit.
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