![]() Aiden is a 39-year-old white American male hacker. To illustrate this, Hennessy brought up the protagonist for the first Watch Dogs game, Aiden Pearce. Speaking of traits, Play-As-Anyone also brought along a significantly more difficult hurdle than just writing 20 different scripts. Each of those 20 versions was assigned a persona and recorded by 20 different voice actors, ensuring that characters felt unique and that their dialogue matched their other traits. “We didn’t have a static script – we had a dynamic script with 20 different variations,” said Hennessy. A policeman might say “much obliged ” a young activist might say “appreciate it, fam ” and a grandmother might say “thank you, dearie.” For example, to express the sentiment of “thank you,” the team needed to find multiple different ways to say it, and then assign each of those ways to a specific character persona. That dialogue needed then to be tied to that character’s procedural traits. ![]() Anytime a player character speaks in Watch Dogs: Legion, the narrative team needed to write 20 different versions of that dialogue line. The first hurdle came in the form of writing for a seemingly infinite number of characters. Watch Dogs: Legion presented a unique set of hurdles that the narrative team would have to overcome thanks to its Play-As-Anyone gameplay approach. Forget the challenges of telling a story when players can navigate the open world and tackle missions as they see fit how do you tell a story when you don’t even know who your protagonist is? That was the question that Narrative Designer Brendan Hennessy answered during AAA-TYPICAL: Character and Story Arcs in Open Gameplay Structures, a game narrative summit presented at the 2023 Game Developers Conference, alongside Ubisoft Toronto Lead Writer Heli Kennedy. ![]() ![]() It's a system that required a dramatic reimagining of many aspects of game design, narrative included. Watch Dogs: Legion’s Play-As-Anyone game design allows players to recruit and play as any one of the thousands of characters wandering futuristic London. ![]()
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