So we ended up focusing a lot more on what you could sort of call micro choices happening all the time, as opposed to big, chunky branching choices.”
And that can be anything from a whole conversation to just changing one line in the middle of a conversation and leaving anything else the same, or anything in between. In theory, other things can happen but in a game like Firewatch, the main payoff is lines of dialogue. “Then as a result of those things being tracked, different lines of dialogue can play. “Basically, anything the player chooses to do can be tracked by the game,” Remo explains. Even whether a player chose to pick up a bottle and then look out the window, or look out the window before picking up a bottle, was constantly tracked by the game, and could be used to influence the game’s responses.
#Firewatch game documents how to
Once the team had figured out how to design the food supply choice, everything else in Firewatch could take on more subtlety. “And that one little thing really opened up a lot of thinking for us.” “If you take all the extra food, there's an additional little dialogue that you get after that, in which Delilah yells at you for basically being an asshole,” Remo explains. This also led to a greater design emphasis on dialogue, with how Deliah reacts serving as the reward - or punishment - for your actions. According to Remo though, the team didn’t feel telegraphing thisin such an obvious way was necessary, or improved the experience for the player, so it was left as a more implicit decision. Originally, this had been a set choice, where the game would have stopped dead and asked you what decision you wanted to make. It's just Delilah, the person on the other end of the walkie talkie, says, ‘Hey, make sure you only take your own food’.” The game doesn't present it as a choice in any way. “Then if you want you can also take other supplies for other lookouts that have not been allotted to you. “We had mocked up a prototype, sort of a choice input mechanism that we had, when you can choose to take your allotted supplies from a supply box. While Firewatch eventually came to be a contrast of the ‘Choose A or B’ styles of many other narrative games, Remo explains that this only came about after trying the binary system first. But it’s a very different style of game, and that seems to be a lot more what's going on in the indie space now.” Fall Guys, Among Us, and Human Fall Flat, which I've enjoyed a lot. “When you think about the years since then, we've seen a big rise of sort of a new genre in the indie space that's almost the complete opposite of this, which is the chaotic multiplayer game. And then, I think, a couple years prior to that 80 Days had come out, and that was something that was a big influence on us. “In addition to DontNod and Telltale, there was also Oxenfree, and they were trying to do a lot of things with interactive conversation that was sort of similar to what we were trying to do. “I think in some ways we were at something of a particularly strong period for narrative games,” Remo says. Related: The Making Of Mass Effect 2's Jack So much so that many players didn't even realise they were making choices at all.įor the fifth anniversary, I spoke to Chris Remo, the game’s story designer and audio director, about how those choices came about. Throughout the course of the game, the choices you make range in stature, but rarely offer a Sliding Doors moment commonly associated with the narrative game cliffhanger. Where many other narrative games posited their choices as clear, divergent forks in the road though, Firewatch took a more subtle approach to decision making. Firewatch, five years old this month, released at the height of the mid-2010s narrative game boom.
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