Elite 4 is still being worked on

Story Time

With the dichotomy of secrecy and hype already guiding the discussion, it seems fitting that David gives nothing away about certain other Frontier Developments projects. He tells me that the elusive Elite 4 is still being worked on, but can say nothing more. Likewise, with regard to The Outsider (billed as an espionage-thriller and not, to my slight disappointment, the game of Albert Camus’ “L’Etranger”), the studio are keeping tight-lipped: “Too much early press I don’t think helps, but we will talk about that sometime soon.”

Instead the talk turns towards game narrative. “The problem with any story-based game is making sure the story is rich and works and soforth … which is fine,” says David “When you’ve got a nonlinear story, where the player can do things in a completely different order, you need a way of kicking the tyres of that – ideally long before you’re committed to it … so you can change it, or rewrite it, in a way that is minimally disruptive.” To do this, Frontier Developments use a method dubbed a ‘story crawler’ which allows a full playthrough of a game narrative from start to finish, essentially in text-adventure style, where decisions that would be far more fleshed out in a full release are reduced to simple commands.

“The concept of a story crawler is a really fantastic one, which we’re using on other games [besides The Outsider]. You really need it to understand the story logic. The story logic is such a high level thing, that if you don’t do this, you only get to see what the story is like right at the end and that’s probably too late to change it,” David tells me. “Otherwise you can have an army of people model the locations, the characters, record the dialogue – all of that sort of thing – and then you suddenly go ‘oh my god … this doesn’t work.’”

We then touch on the general concepts behind narrative design decisions. “I find it quite frustrating when there are cataclysmic events the player can’t avoid,” says David “But having said that, sometimes you need it for a story mechanic … it is a balance. I loved Fallout 3, really loved it, but I felt the ending of the game without any of the DLC is a bit frustrating. There are variants of the ending, but they’re all variants on a single theme.” I ask whether the problem with non-linear gameplay that features narrative will always be the extent to which the player still has to be guided: “You do need to guide the player to some extent. It’s down to, firstly, how visible the guidance is and also how closely in line it is with what the player would naturally want to do … The point is, it’s how much in control [the player] feels. Narrative can confine that, but you always have a degree of flexibility.”

Winds Of Change

Of late, Frontier Developments have been concentrating on their well-received WiiWare series, LostWinds. Drawing artistic inspiration from Inca, Mayan and Tibetan cultures, the game (and its recently released sequel LostWinds: Winter of the Melodias) concerns the platforming adventures of Toku and his lively wind spirit companion. The original idea for the series, David tells me, sprang from another internal initiative at Frontier, the Game of the Week forum: “People just present ideas [there] … some of the ideas are presented fully-formed and others are just ‘wouldn’t it be great to do a game about a cat’ or whatever. [At first] most of the comments were unprintable, or just jokey. The point was … people very quickly got much better at not wasting time or making wisecracks, and actually came up with some common sense suggestions. There’s a stack of ideas on there. The sad thing is that we haven’t gone forward with enough of them – there aren’t enough hours in the day.”

Winter of the Melodias introduces a number of new gameplay elements and puzzle solving methods to the game. “A lot of these [features] were considered before the first game was even written,” David says “If you look at the very early concept art that appeared in Edge a year ago, it actually shows some of these newer features … and there are a lot of features which still haven’t gone into this game.” Key to unlocking many of the new features is Toku’s ability (once he has encountered a particular Goddess) to turn Winter to Summer and back again.

I ask whether this will result in various temperature-based puzzles to overcome. “That makes it sound really, really dull!” laughs David, before going on to clarify a few of the game’s newer elements: “When you turn the season to Winter, all the watery bits go solid – so you can walk on it. It starts snowing, which means you can use the vortex from the first game to make snowballs and fire them at things. Things like waterfalls now become barriers, because they freeze into ice … and then smash. Toku also gets cold, so you need to use the fires to keep him warm.” Clearly, there are pros and cons to using both seasons, and David also explains a few of the aspects unique to summer: “You can use the tornado to suck the water up to make clouds, and then you can gust those clouds about – which means you can make it rain on things, it means you can take water and then make it rain into a pool you want to fill up. You can, for example, make it rain in a gap, then turn things to Winter which freezes it … meaning you can walk across it.”

Interestingly, given our discussions about narrative flexibility and player freedom, it seems that many of the puzzles in Winter of the Melodias can be solved in multiple ways. Not always those which are most obvious, as David tells me. “We’ve found a number of really strange solutions to puzzles that weren’t the intended solutions, but still work,” he says “It’s a joy finding different ways round.”

It’s precisely this kind of flexibility, and indeed this kind of original concept, which owe a debt of thanks to the huge success enjoyed by Elite back in 1984. Without the success of that terrifically inventive title, it may have been a great deal longer before ideas from outside the arcades were able to challenge the status quo.

Many thanks to David Braben for speaking with us. All the latest news from Frontier Developments can be found at their homepage.