Speaker 1: One of my favorite game stories of all time is from an indie game called A Short Hike. A Short Hike has no real cutscenes, no voice acting, and no cutting edge graphics. In this game, you play as Claire, a little bird being sent off to camp. Your mom drops you off for what should be a carefree week in the woods, meeting new friends and playing games, but on the first day, Claire seems to be a little bit worried. She's been waiting on an important call from her mom all morning, but it hasn't come. Claire is then informed that the only place on the island with cell phone reception is the top of the highest mountain peak, and to talk to her mom, she's going to have to get there somehow. You know, I used to be one of these people that just didn't care at all about story in games. It so often feels to me like the story of a game is just relegated to the cutscenes and it's just there to give some justification to your gameplay objectives. Oh no, you gotta save the guy trapped in an enemy camp, he's got the secret formula, blah blah blah. But lately, I've been learning just how ignorant I was about story in games and what elements are needed to get people emotionally invested in something. In A Short Hike, the story feels different right away and starts to get you curious and interested in helping Claire within just a few dialogue lines. On the surface, the main quest of the game is no different than any other collection quest, you gotta collect feathers to reach the top of the mountain, but A Short Hike is doing something that the others aren't.

Speaker 2: You're f***ed, basically. You got something pretty boring. What should happen between every beat that you've written down is either the word therefore or but. Right? So what I'm saying is that you come up with an idea and it's like, okay, this happens, right? And then, this happens. No, no, no. It should be this happens, and therefore, this happens. But this happens, therefore, this happens. And there's so many scripts we read from new writers and things that we see. F*** that, I see movies.

Speaker 3: Yeah, you f***ed it up. You see movies that you're just watching and it's like, this happened, and then this happens, and then this happens. That's when you're in a movie just going, what the f*** am I watching this movie for? Just like, this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened. That's not a movie, you know? That's not a story. Like Trey said, it's those two but because, therefore, that gives you the causation between each beat. And that makes, that's a story.

Speaker 1: To me, this is just one of those diamond-in-the-rough YouTube clips that when you see it, it feels like you just got years of education and a subject for free. The way Trey Parker and Matt Stone are explaining things here, suddenly it kind of makes sense to me why the fetch quests in typical RPGs are so unsatisfying. It explains why so many campaigns have me skipping cutscenes when I get halfway through the game. Even people who play a lot of games and have a great critical eye often attribute bad storytelling to the acting, the believability of the characters, or even the facial animations. And certainly all those disciplines have the ability to distract from a good story, but none of them really make the story. Those things are icing on the cake. The real substance comes down to the exact principle that Trey Parker is talking about. You're a little bird named Claire going on vacation on an island and that's exciting and fun, but you're not having fun just yet. You're worried about your mom and you're waiting on an important call. But your cell phone has no service. Therefore you ask where you can get cell service and find out you gotta get to the top of the mountain, but you can't get there because your wings aren't strong enough, so therefore you need to start collecting feathers around the island. There's a certain momentum there. This game could have just as easily said the quest is to reach the peak, get there by collecting feathers, and just set you out on your journey without the story, but who wants to play that? The story adds tension and emotion to the entire experience, and all without a single actor, performance, or cutscene. I won't spoil what Claire was worried about, but the emotional payoff is well worth the roughly two hours that it takes to complete this game, and I highly recommend that you play it from start to finish. It's an amazing experience. Now let's compare a short hike's storytelling to the standard collection quests that you find in any AAA roleplaying game. They go something like this. A farmer tells us he's been losing his crops because of some enemies nearby, and then we tell him we'll deal with the problem, and then we kill an arbitrary number of enemies at a location, and then we go back and get our hundred gold from the farmer. This is what I call the gold standard of filler quests. A quest like this has no causation from beat to beat, things just happen as you would anticipate right from the first dialogue line through to getting your reward. Even more importantly, we the player could stop doing this quest in the middle of any of these moments and not even feel curious or left wondering what would have happened. Because no part of the narrative strongly compels me to get to the end, the developer has to dangle this monetary reward to make it worth my while. A short hike didn't have to give me a hundred gold upon reaching the top of the mountain, I just wanted to complete that quest for the sake of helping Claire. Now I get it. I'm a sound designer, not a writer, so I'm not really qualified to be teaching storytelling, and the writers watching me are no doubt bored to tears as I explain learning one of the most basic elements of good storytelling, but recently I've been thinking a lot about how this concept applies to sound design. How do you take a storytelling method and make it an audio method? Well honestly it's more similar than you might think. Let's say we've got a sound to make, we're working on Watch Dogs, and in this part of the game we've finally broken into the evil CEO's server room headquarters. We're here to destroy the servers and screw everything up. Long time viewers may know we've actually used this example in another video as well. Now what the player expects to hear here is some sort of server room beeps, air conditioning sounds, and a dark kind of foreboding atmosphere. Basically the digital equivalent of some sort of evil lair. But what if we applied the but and therefore thinking to this sound? What if the player got to the final evil server room and expected it to sound dark and scary, but instead it sounded angelic and uplifting? Maybe with that approach we could create even more tension. First let's start by creating a bass drone, but this time we're going to use the sounds of a church choir singing an angelic chord pitched way down, and we'll layer in some more dreamlike synth pads on top. We're also going to put the synth pads through Wolf Compressor, which is a warm vintage sounding compressor from Goodhertz, to give it some subtle vibrato and saturation. Then next we're going to get some telemetry digital beeping sounds going, but we've got to make sure that each beep we hear resonates well with the chord that we're hearing below. We can do this by sampling some interesting sounds and throwing them into a randomly arpeggiating sampler in the key of the chord that we're using. Let's also throw a limiter on to make sure things sound nice and uniform. This one's called Pro-L2 from FabFilter. You all certainly do not need to use these specific plugins to achieve great results, but I personally can't get enough of Pro-L2 and the Goodhertz Wolf Compressor. They've easily worked their way into my daily rotation. FabFilter and Goodhertz were kind enough to send me these plugins to try out, and I highly recommend that if you're looking to upgrade some of your basics, EQ, compression, limiting, saturation, that you check out these companies, because I genuinely think they're both doing some of the most amazing plugin work in the industry right now. But back to our design. Okay, so now we've got the telemetry layer sounding good, let's bring it all back to reality a little bit by layering some real server ambience and air conditioning noise over our other layers. I'll also give the whole thing some room verb to glue it all together. See I think this kind of design, while of course it's not accurate to a real server room at all, is more interesting to the hypothetical story that we've got here. I like small exercises like this because they're a good reminder that we don't have to approach a sound exactly the way the player would expect us to. The player expects this, but I'm going to give them something more interesting, just as a good story should be doing with its major beats. This whole thing reminded me of the Institute in Fallout 4. The entire game, you spend barely scraping by in this dusty, irradiated wasteland, but then you finally reach the Institute, which is a place that's supposed to be the most evil and secretive in the game, and you're greeted with pristine, beautiful, clean hallways and foliage. The same concept works here. You know, I've got to admit that even with all this said, I still feel like a critic of story-driven games at heart. While good voice acting, captured performances, writing, and graphics aren't necessary to telling a great story, in my opinion, each one certainly has the potential to pull you out of a good story. It seems to me sometimes like the higher the budget, the more action, the longer a campaign of a crazy AAA game, the bigger chance the story has to really fall flat. And maybe that's why I've gravitated so much more towards the countless amazing indie titles that don't bite off more than they can chew. I mean, was the God of War Ragnarok story good? Yeah, it had everything, interesting characters, plot twists, amazing acting, but I never cried. And I don't know if I can say the same about when I flapped my wings up to the top of this mountain. A tear may have been shed. Thanks for watching guys, I'll see you soon.