Balancing Action and RPG in 'Horizon Zero Dawn' Quests
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Download the full presentation here: http://www.guerrilla-games.com/read/balancing-action-and-rpg-in-horizon-zero-dawn-quests Abstract: Prior to creating Horizon Zero Dawn, Guerrilla did not have a quest design team. To meet the their vision of a vast open world filled with narratively driven quests, studio leadership identified early in production that a new group of designers would be necessary to supplement Guerrilla's existing design expertise. Blake Rebouche, Senior Quest Designer at Guerrilla, was hired in 2015 to be part of that new team and to bring his experience to the development of Horizon Zero Dawn. Blake will explain through his own experiences and anecdotes what it was like finding a happy medium between the systems-driven content of open-world RPGs like The Elder Scrolls and the action focused level design of games like Guerrilla's own Killzone.
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Balancing Action and RPG in 'Horizon Zero Dawn' Quests
- 1. Balancing Action and RPG in 'Horizon Zero Dawn' Quests Presented by Blake Rebouche, Senior Quest Designer Blake.Rebouche@guerrilla-games.com Twitter: @Bigrebo
- 3. Talk Outline
- 4. Talk Outline 1. What I Brought to the Table
- 5. Talk Outline 1. What I Brought to the Table 2. Early Vision of Quests in Horizon
- 6. Talk Outline 1. What I Brought to the Table 2. Early Vision of Quests in Horizon 3. Open World vs Bunkers
- 7. Talk Outline 1. What I Brought to the Table 2. Early Vision of Quests in Horizon 3. Open World vs Bunkers 4. Lessons Learned from the Past
- 8. Talk Outline 1. What I Brought to the Table 2. Early Vision of Quests in Horizon 3. Open World vs Bunkers 4. Lessons Learned from the Past 5. Putting it All Together
- 9. Talk Outline 1. What I Brought to the Table 2. Early Vision of Quests in Horizon 3. Open World vs Bunkers 4. Lessons Learned from the Past 5. Putting it All Together 6. Questions?
- 10. What I Brought to the Table
- 12. What I Brought to the Table
- 13. What I Brought to the Table
- 14. EarlyVision
- 17. But what about Quests?
- 28. Early Quest Outline 1. Evening. It’s Raining. Aloy wakes from unconsciousness, lying in a smoking crater. Aloy stands, dazed, and starts moving towards a burning village in the distance. 2. Aloy enters the village. A villager approaches Aloy and begs her not to pursue the machine that attacked the village, claiming it’s too dangerous. 3. Aloy being Aloy, she follows the path of destruction out of the village passing the bodies of Nora warriors slain by the beast. 4. A herd of machines blocks her path. 5. Aloy picks a machine off from the herd in the plain and overrides it, making it her mount. Now with a ride, she makes haste to pursue the rampaging machine. 6. Aloy catches up to the hunting party sent after the beast in the nearby mountains. All but one are dead. The last hunter tells Aloy to beware, the beast is near. 7. From nearby, a Thunderjaw shrieks and attacks. Aloy engages with and defeats the machine.
- 29. Horizon’s Main Quest Chapters • A Gift from the Past • Lessons of the Wild • The Point of The Spear • Mother’s Heart • The Proving • The Womb of the Mountain • The City of the Sun • Maker’s End • The Grave-Hoard • To Curse the Darkness • Deep Secrets of the Earth • The Terror of the Sun • The Heart of the Nora • The Mountain that Fell • The Looming Shadow • The Face of Extinction
- 30. Horizon’s Main Quest Chapters • A Gift from the Past • Lessons of the Wild • The Point of The Spear • Mother’s Heart • The Proving • The Womb of the Mountain • The City of the Sun • Maker’s End • The Grave-Hoard • To Curse the Darkness • Deep Secrets of the Earth • The Terror of the Sun • The Heart of the Nora • The Mountain that Fell • The Looming Shadow • The Face of Extinction
- 34. Open World vs Bunkers
- 35. Open World vs Bunkers
- 36. Open World vs Bunkers • Open World Quests – Free Heap – Fatal Inheritance – A Moment’s Peace • Bunker Quests – The Grave-Hoard – Maker’s End – The Womb of the Mountain
- 37. Open World vs Bunkers • Open World Quests – Free Heap – Fatal Inheritance – A Moment’s Peace • Bunker Quests – The Grave-Hoard – Maker’s End – The Womb of the Mountain
- 38. Free Heap
- 39. Free Heap as Experiment
- 58. Breadcrumbing
- 59. Breadcrumbing
- 62. Free Heap Conclusions • More Linear than MMORPGs • Story is your Structure • Invest in Player Guidance Systems
- 63. The Grave-Hoard
- 67. The Hole I chose to Die On (In)
- 68. The Hole I chose to Die On (In)
- 69. The Hole I chose to Die On (In)
- 70. Macro vs Micro Level Design
- 71. SWTOR Horizon
- 72. Macro vs Micro Level Design
- 75. Initial Armory Feedback • Bad Readability • Overly Simple • Uninteresting • Like a bad Killzone level – How do you make a good Killzone Level?
- 77. Lessons Learned from the Past
- 79. EG – Readability • Entrances, exits, alternate paths/flanking options need to be clear to the player. • The players also needs to recognize where the enemies are • It needs to be clear what can be used as cover • This needs to be done in conjunction with vis/envart/lighting Ex : Light attracts players
- 84. Optimizing use of environment • Multi staged encounter • Routes lead player efficiently through environment • Provide opportunities for flanking • Keep multiple paths within the same area • Create variety in heights
- 93. Putting it All Together
- 94. RPG Action
- 95. RPG Action
- 96. RPG Action
- 97. RPG Action 1. Quests guide players through stories. 1. Spaces guide players through challenges.
- 98. RPG Action 1. Quests guide players through stories. 2. Consider how players approach quests. 1. Spaces guide players though challenges. 2. Consider how players approach spaces.
- 99. RPG Action 1. Quests guide players through stories. 2. Consider how players approach quests. 3. Movement should be guided and should prevent backtracking. 1. Spaces guide players though challenges. 2. Consider how players approach spaces. 3. Movement should be engaging and fun.
- 100. RPG Action 1. Quests guide players through stories. 2. Consider how players approach quests. 3. Movement should be guided and should prevent backtracking. 4. Quest should have meaning. 1. Spaces guide players though challenges. 2. Consider how players approach spaces. 3. Movement should be fun in and of itself. 4. Quests should have explosions.
- 103. Acknowledgements • Guerrilla Games • Sony • My Team
Notas do Editor
- Welcome everyone! Quick warning: Some things in this talk might be considered spoilers. Also, please do not record the talk and please fill out the talk evaluation you will be sent over email. A copy of this presentation will be available on Guerrilla’s website after the conference so you’ll be able to download it. The title of the talk is “Balancing Action and RPG in Horizon Zero Dawn’s Quests.
- So how much is Horizon an action game and how much is it an open world RPG? Truthfully I can’t answer that question. We never drew a line in the sand and said, “Yep, this is it. This is the perfect balance.” When I talk about finding the balance, I’m going to talk about my own experiences searching for it: the open world RPG concepts I applied during development that worked and the Action game concepts I had to learn, sometimes painfully.
- Here’s an outline of the talk.
- First I’m going to describe my background a bit. This will give you context for what I brought to Horizon and to Guerrilla.
- Second, I’m going to walk you through an early vision of Horizon’s quests.
- Third, I’m going to talk about Open World quests versus Bunker quests and do a deep dive on two examples from Horizon to illustrate the difference in technique and approach used for each.
- Fourth, I’m going to talk a bit about my own shortcomings and the things I learned from Guerrilla’s institutional knowledge of action game level design.
- Fifth, I’m going to try to introduce some rules for thinking about balancing Action and RPG.
- Lastly, I’ll leave some time for questions at the end of the presentation.
- This is me. Hi. My name is Blake Rebouche, and I’m a Senior Quest Designer at Guerrilla Games. I was hired in 2015 to join a new team the studio leadership identified would be necessary to supplement Guerrilla’s existing design expertise: The Quest Team.
- This team. This is the quest design team at GG. Hi guys!
- So prior to working at Guerrilla, I was a quest designer on the Elder Scrolls Online at Zenimax Online Studios. ESO embraces the Bethesda model of Open World RPGs like Skyrim and Fallout. Quest designers at ZOS write, design, and script their quests but level design is a separate discipline.
- Before that I was a World Builder on Star Wars the Old Republic at Bioware Austin. Old Republic is a take on the Bioware model of RPGs. Again, we had separate level designers or “architects” at Bioware. Most of the levels were grayboxed before I started working on them. The common theme here as far as what I brought to the table is that my expertise was scripting, narrative design, and quest design, NOT Level Design or action game design.
- I arrived as production was swinging into full gear. Horizon had a very strong, very compelling vision, but one that didn’t fully encompass the game we ended up making.
- Majestic Wilderness Awe-Inspiring Machines and Exotic Tribes These were the aspects of the game that drove our early design thinking.
- And let’s not forget Aloy.
- But what about quests? That’s what my team had been hired to make. What did quests look like in the world of Horizon? Let me paint you a picture.
- Evening. It’s Raining. Aloy wakes from unconsciousness, lying in a smoking crater. Aloy stands, dazed, and starts moving towards a burning village in the distance.
- Aloy enters the village. Everywhere she looks chaos reigns. A villager approaches Aloy and begs her not to pursue the machine that attacked the village, claiming it’s too dangerous.
- Aloy being Aloy, she follows the path of destruction out of the village passing the bodies of Nora warriors slain by the beast.
- A herd of machines blocks her path.
- Aloy picks a machine off from the herd in the plain.
- And overrides it, making it her mount. Now with a ride, she makes haste to pursue the rampaging machine.
- Aloy catches up to the hunting party sent after the beast in the nearby mountains. All but one are dead. The last hunter tells Aloy to beware, the beast is near.
- From nearby, our quarry the mighty Thunderjaw shrieks and attacks. Aloy engages with and defeats the machine in epic fashion.
- Pretty cool, right? This is an early illustrated vision of the E3 trailer we would eventually use to reveal Horizon to the world. This kind of quest I could understand and wrap my head around given my background in open world RPGs.
- A quest like this is very similar to a quest like the ice giant in Witcher 3. Big monster destroys town, protagonist tracks monster, protagonist kills monster. I’m being reductive, but you get my point. This was my wheelhouse but this was NOT exactly what we ended up making.
- This is the story I just told you. There are many quests in Horizon similar to this but almost half of the main story of Horizon differs in one key way. That difference led to a lot of lessons for me on action game design. You’ll notice I’ve bolded and underlined all of the indications of place. There are no interiors in this story and indeed there were no interiors at all in the vertical slice of Horizon.
- These are the main quest chapters of Horizon.
- The quests that I’ve bolded are quests that take place at least partially in interiors. 7/16 quests, more than 40% of the main quest story, takes places place at least partially in the spaces we call bunkers. But what is a bunker and how does the design of one inform us about balancing Action and RPG?
- As I mentioned, the Early Vision of Horizon focused a lot on exteriors, machines, and tribes, but we needed spaces in which to tell the stories of the old world. Bunkers are those spaces.
- Whereas open world quests in Horizon feature big outdoor spaces and combat against large monstrous opponents.
- Bunkers are relatively tight, linear interiors featuring cover shooter combat against primarily human opponents.
- So if open world quests resemble open world RPG quests…. What do bunker quests resemble? I’ll give you a hint.
- (Wait) But more on that later.
- To return to the theme of the talk, each of these types of quests requires a different balance of action and RPG design thinking. Each required a specific set of tools and experience that didn’t always completely overlap.
- To illustrate all of that, I’m going to talk about two quests specifically: Free Heap, and The Grave-Hoard.
- Free Heap was one of the first side quests I pitched and built and It was also a bit of an… experiment.
- As I mentioned, I’d come from designing MMORPGs and so did our quest design lead at the time. We wanted to see if we could build a quest using the same kind structure we were accustomed to that would also work for Horizon. It was also something of an experiment on how “open world” our quests should be.
- This is what Free Heap looks like today, but it was not always so.
- Initially we tried a very open quest concept. Three quest locations, each essentially a pocket level, connected by the open world. A benefit of this type of open design is that it gives players lots of options for how they approach your quest and the challenges within it. Also, within the context of a multiplayer game, it spreads your players out and prevents bunching. Unfortunately, a major downside of this design is that players can bumble into the goings-on of your quest without realizing what actually IS going on. Many open world RPGs suffer from this problem to some degree.
- One way we solved this problem on Elder Scrolls was to get the quest bestower to come to the player when they entered the vicinity of the quest. This just didn’t work for Horizon. As we developed the game, it became more and more cinematic. For any significant character, we wanted to stage their conversations and we needed a definitive location for that.
- That conversation happens here in Free Heap and we really wanted you to have that context for the situation before you encountered the Bandit camp or Scrapper Den so we employed a tried and true strategy:
- We added big damn walls to help with player funneling.
- This is an MMO technique used to onboard open-world quests and quest locations. Basically you limit the number of approach angles and make sure all of those vectors of approach lead to a quest bestower.
- But now with the added walls, we started to loose the “open” feeling of the quest. It became more and more like a linear level. (Click) To combat this we focused on the level design of the transitional spaces.
- This is an early early gray box of the transitional space leading up to the Bandit area. Because we lost so many vectors of approach to this quest location, I wanted to the maximize variety of traversal options available to the player in the space we did have. We called this the “jungle gym” concept.
- These early paintovers emphasize the verticality, route variety, and range of movement options through the space.
- This new, more closed design still offered the player a choice about which quest objective they wanted to accomplish first, but that too eventually fell to the wayside. Again this was due to the fidelity of the story we wanted to tell.
- This is the quest today. The quest has three “acts” each of which correspond to a movement within the story, an area, and an objective.
- The quest is bestowed here by Petra. Petra needs Aloy to recover some components that she will use to restore a weapon she’s working on.
- Act I takes the player to the bandit den where the human bandits have stashed stolen power cells. Aloy breaks in, takes the cells, and we foreshadow retribution by the bandits.
- Act II, Aloy enters a lair of scrapper machines and grabs the parts she needs from their scrapper piles.
- In Act III, Aloy returns to the quest bestower Petra to give her the collected power cells and parts. Petra uses the returned materials to restore the weapon just as the bandits arrive and attack the town. So here was the rub, and why we ended up going linear. If you did the Scrapper Lair section first and then the Bandit Hideout, it didn’t make any sense that the bandits show up instantly to attack Free Heap.
- This narrative structure naturally suggests a looping flow so we built a special one way shortcut from the Scrapper lair back to Free Heap to facilitate. Why? Because backtracking is the devil. The problem was players never used it. They didn’t know it was there. What we needed and what we didn’t have at the time was a breadcrumbing system. So we built one.
- A breadcrumbing system helps a player understand how to get from where they are to where the quest is telling them to go.
- We do that manipulating the quest objective marker on the compass and in the world. It’s like GPS for the player.
- Let me share with you some images from the design doc I wrote for this system three years ago. As you can see, I am an ARTIST. If a quest objective takes place in a space with a discreet number of entrances and the player is outside of that space, the bread crumbing system will point them to a valid entrance into that space
- We do that with a marker like this. Important point: A door in the context of this image can be a crack in a wall, a ladder, or a one way drop. Any entrance or exit into or out of a discreet space. A level in the traditional sense doesn’t have to worry about stuff like this because it is bounded. Quests are in an open world game are unbounded so a system like this is very important.
- I defined the Scrapper Lair as a discreet space with two “doors.” (click) When the player collects the parts necessary in this area I simply invalidate the door they came in through and open the other door.
- Then the breadcrumbing system takes them out through the shortcut.
- As an experiment in open world RPG quest design, what did Free Heap teach us? Multiplayer online RPGs, though open world, require you to structure your quests in ways that single player open world RPGs just don’t. (Click) Story informs our quest structure a lot. Openness will often take a back seat to a great story in Horizon. (Click) Lastly, invest in player guidance systems. This is extremely important and will save you a lot of heartache in open world games. (Click)
- Next I’m going to talk about “The Grave-Hoard.” Grave-Hoard is a linear bunker quest taking place around the middle of the main story of Horizon.
- As I mentioned before, there are a lot of main story quests that take place in bunkers.
- Here’s an illustration of what I’m talking about.
- Add the cauldrons to that and you begin to get the sense of how much linear interior space there really is in Horizon.
- This is the earliest wireframe graybox of The Grave-Hoard done in Maya. If Free-Heap’s flow is like the loop, this sucker is basically a straight line.
- Compare the graybox wireframe above against the shipped version of the Grave-Hoard below.
- The colored areas indicate the spaces that correlate to one another. The MACRO level design of this quest stayed pretty consistent throughout development but that is NOT true of the MICRO level design.
- Quickly, let me define what I’m talking about here. Macro Level Design – Each space is a significant moment (aka “beat”) of the level as a whole.
- The image on the left is an in-game map of a starship level from Star Wars. On the right is an image of the in-game map from The Grave-Hoard. (Click) In both cases rooms serve as story beats and/or gameplay beats with the corridors in between sized to help pacing. This is the type of level design familiar to RPG designers like me given my background building dungeons in ESO or Star Ships in SWTOR.
- Micro Level Design – Each space within the level is itself a story and must be designed with its own beats. This is the type LD familiar to action designers. This is also the type of level design I was least familiar with given my background.
- This is the earliest playable graybox of the armory combat area of the Grave-Hoard. The armory is right in the middle of the level and is one of three combat spaces in the bunker. The beat before the armory is a puzzle and the beat after is a story moment so it makes sense structurally to do a big combat beat here in the middle. (Take a beat)
- Here’s another angle for you. The lines indicated are the intended player path for clarity’s sake.
- Feedback on this early graybox was negative to say the least. (Read Above) This led me to one question. Click How do you make a good Killzone Level? I had no idea. Our creative director had 10 years of experience making Killzone, whereas the quest team had comparatively little expertise. In fact…
- Remember that team photo from earlier. Only one guy on the quest team had worked on Killzone.
- I went to my boss at the time, distraught, and I said to him, “I don’t know if I’m the best guy in the building to do this. My knowledge of action game level design is limited and there are a bunch of people at Guerrilla way better at it than me.” (Beat) His response to me was, “You’re right. Let’s get you some help. Let’s use that institutional knowledge.”
- This led to me being sent the Killzone guide for good level design TM I want to share some wisdom from a small part of that document with you and show how I applied it.
- So, Readability. I was told the readability was bad. (Read Points) This slide helped me realize something very important about this room. I was thinking too much about the content of the room and not enough about the way the player saw it.
- This is the view from the entrance to the gray box room.
- This is the exit and the goal. Because this is a small crawlspace, and because (genius) I put a whole bunch of boxes in front of it, that’s not clear.
- Speaking of the boxes, this is where all the bad guys are supposed to be but because the boxes fill the room, you couldn’t tell how many bad guys there were and where they were.
- These tanks are supposed to be your cover, but you can’t tell because they’re irregularly shaped and much too close to the entrance to be perceived in their entirely. Anyway, you get the point. Red, Red, Red. Bad, bad, bad. My readability sucked.
- This slide was also gold for me but not in the way you might first expect. Read it. (Click away all the stuff)
- This, this I could understand. This is one of the first interior sections of Killzone 2. If this was a “good” Killzone level, I could do that. When we talk about aping, we’re describing learning by copying something. The funny this is that other apes don’t learn this way, humans do.
- So I reworked my graybox to match the example as closely as I could. I kept the armory feeling with the tanks and ammunition boxes as well as adding the smaller sub-interior rooms as offices… Basically, I learned a lot by trying to copy the example as closely as possible, by aping it. The new design offered multiple routes that led the player efficiently through the space. The routes offered flanking opportunities and a variety of heights.
- This is the new view from the entrance to the room. Much more readable and much more optimized.
- As we moved to proper arted building blocks we ditched the straight ramp into the room and replaced it with this switchback staircase.
- Jumping down right as you enter the room is an option, but the bannister in your way helps to encourage the player to have a look around the space.
- Here’s what that looks like to the player. Now I’m going to show you what this area looks like in it’s finished state.
- Here are some still images of the finished product. Kudos to the environment artists and lighting team that worked on this. It’s an incredible result as you can clearly see. The goal of the space is clearly lit and highlighted. Enemies aren’t hidden. Their placement and pathing makes player options clear.
- The space is multi-layered, has multiple paths, and contains sub-interiors with collectibles and goodies to find. I don’t know if it’s a great level design but I do know that it’s not like a bad Killzone level anymore.
- So… putting it all together. What lessons can we abstract from these two level examples from Horizon about finding the balance between RPG and Action?
- First, these two concepts are not opposing forces.
- I’d encourage you to consider them as lenses in the way Jesse Schell uses that term in his book “The Art of Game Design.” Each represents a viewpoint through which you can consider your design priorities.
- So
- Concept 1 – Macro versus Micro (Wait 5 seconds) As I’ve demonstrated, RPGs focus more on macro design whereas action games focus more on micro design. When you think about a quests’s macro design, think about structuring your quest in service to the story. When you think about a space’s micro design, ask yourself if the area is designed to the demonstrate the challenges AND the options at the player’s disposal.
- Concept 2 – Approach (wait 5 seconds) As I illustrated with Free Heap, you should try to design your quest space to funnel to the player to the quest bestower and thus the beginning of the quest. It is equally important, as demonstrated by the Grave-Hoard armory to think about how player’s approach individual spaces. A player’s first view of a room has to tell them a lot about it.
- Concept 3 - Movement (Wait 7 seconds) RPGs are principally interested in a player’s movement from space to space and from beat to beat. I explained a bit about breadcrumbing to demonstrate how we manipulate the player’s guidance system to ensure optimal flow through a quest space. The “Jungle Gym” concept in Free Heap was an attempt to capture how movement itself can be engaging and can provide a feeling of openness. There are many things you can do as a designer to make spaces themselves more engaging and fun.
- Concept 4 – Final point. Though we may fancy what we create as art, it is also entertainment. To make a film reference, sometimes we’re Wes Anderson and sometimes we’re Michael Bay. Strive always for engagement as well as emotion, feeling as well as fun, and meaning….
- Meaning….
- as well as explosions. Thank you.
- I’d like to thank Guerrilla Games and our published Sony for supporting me giving this talk. I wouldn’t be here today without the faith, patience, and gratitude they show me. I’d also like to thank my team and the rest of the designers at Guerrilla from whom I have learned so much.