Amy Hennig is a legend within the video game industry for her work on titles such as Legacy of Kain, Jak and Daxter, and Uncharted. With such experience within the video game industry, Hennig has a board understanding inside the world and in a recent interview with Venture Beat explained her views on developing a story within a video game.
During the interview, Hennig spoke about her time at Naughty Dog, crunch times, and the physical and emotional investments that come with video game development. Hennig also touched on single-player narrative games.
When asked about how she viewed Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 not including a single-player campaign and yet surpassing Battlefield V which included 4 campaigns, 3 at launch, Hennig explained how short narratives are harder to pitch.
Hennig: When we say single-player is dead — and again, I don’t subscribe to that — I think people are also talking about narrative games. Not just a game that you can play by yourself, because of course there’s plenty of that, but whether narrative is still front and center as one of our key tenets of the title. It’s just harder to do. Yes, you can look at Spider-Man and Red Dead and God of War, and they’re deeply narrative. But they’re also really long. There’s also an understanding that a lot of people may never finish it. They’ll only play the first part of a game.
Hennig also explained how telling a story has to complement the gameplay and it can be difficult when you try to balance story-telling with skill trees.
The length and complexity and the layers that are in these games now, sub-missions and skill trees, all these things are great. I’m not saying we shouldn’t have them. But it makes it harder. It’s harder to tell a single-player, narrative-focused game. That’s why people go to publishers like Annapurna, but it’s at a different tier.
Hennig explained that short narrative-driven experiences are mostly left to indie developers, with a smaller scope and budget, and make for a short but memorable experience. Big publishers are less likely to commit to it because people want their money's worth.
Hennig does have a point. Personally, I found Ubisoft's Transference to be a great game but was very overpriced at $30 due to the short nature of the campaign, which was about 2 hours. For indie games, it's assumed they will be short as opposed to AAA games, the general notion would be that they're long. Hennig did keep things open, stating that it's up to the personal choice of what type of narrative or lack of that the player enjoys.
It's definitely an interesting interview, personally, it opened my eyes to things such as building a story around gameplay so everything flows. Something I didn't think much about till now.
Adam Siddiqui, NoobFeed
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oy, Uncharted sure is an action packed series of enchantment, isn’t it? Even yours truly described it as ‘Tomb Raider for men’ at some point and sticks by it to t
| Platform(s): | PS3 |
| Publisher(s): | Sony America |
| Developer(s): | Naughty Dog |
| Genres: | Third-Person Shooter |
| Themes: | Action, Adventure, Platform |
| Release Date: | 2011-11-01 |
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