Is the future story-led games that aim to be totally different?

By the time you read this, GTAV will be out, and you’ll be raving about it to everyone in earshot. The acting, the realism, the immersive detail and the sheer scale of the thing will be keeping you awake at night, even if you’re not actually on the sofa playing it.

The game is expected to take interactive storytelling to a new level, both in terms of the heist ‘plots’ and the sheer quality of the animation and voice acting. And frankly all the adulation will almost certainly be highly deserved. I’d have given my right arm to have had both hands on this one while they were developing it.

Also by the time you read this, the long-running AMC TV show Breaking Bad will have finished. You’ll probably be raving about that as well. The shocking twists and turns of the storyline, the astonishing acting, the sheer bravery of doing telly differently – the blurring of the lines between good and bad, the smartness of the plotting and the effective use of cold openings, as well as symbolism, colour and foreshadowing.

No matter how well a game is put together, there is so much of the Breaking Bad-style satisfying narrative stuff which simply can’t be included. Foreshadowing on the small screen simply looks like tramlining in a game. Symbolism looks like the seeding of clues for the eagle-eyed player to spot. Colour? Who really looks at the colour of things in games? It’s only important if it’s glowing and surrounding an oversized chicken drumstick, which will, of course, upon ingestion, mend serious gunshot wounds.

Great acting? Yes, that still helps. GTAV will bear this out (I hope). And this is totally achievable. Don’t sit the VO people down in a booth. Have them stand in a studio. Everyone who’s in a scene does this. They have read the scene, they know it (not necessarily word for word), and they have rehearsed the scene together. They know what it’s meant to achieve and how it fits into the greater picture of the game. And they act it, as a take, with as many movements and gestures as they can get away with before microphones get their plugs torn out and things get broken. This is filmed and the animators base as much of the characters’ moves and expressions as they can on what they see when they replay the footage. Yes, yes, like Pixar and all those film guys do.

Of course, all this adds time and cost to the development schedule, and because the result is often more cohesive and natural, it can also impact on later changes and pick-ups. The manageability of individual lines which can be chopped up into computer-friendly chunks and altered and replaced with ease is compromised, but the result is well worth it. Probably. Breaking Bad cost an eye-watering $3 million per episode, by the way. Just so you know.

Hey, forget that. Put the calculator down. The way forward might be not to emulate the processes used by the big-money guys. Perhaps making story-led games which aim to be totally different is the future. There is a company called Upper One Games which is doing just that. They are, it seems, the first Native American studio and they’re aiming to infuse all their product with the unique culture of the peoples of Alaska. This is clearly worthy, and their goal of dismantling the classic stereotypes of Eskimos with a hundred words for snow is laudable.

Ah, but what I’m truly interested in, because I’m shallow, is the way that the first game looks truly, epically cinematic and yet seems to be steering away from the world of glossy cinematicism in its storytelling. It’s about an Inupiat (me neither) girl trying to survive all the Arctic can throw at her by drawing on the wisdom of her forebears. Myths, legends and humour all get thrown into the mix, and while this looks to be far from an interactive documentary, it also appears very far away (in a northerly direction) from the Hollywood-aping games I always seem to be banging on about here.

The trouble facing Upper One (whose name I’ve just understood; they’re not part of the lower 48 US states) is that we want our games to be cool. And we think cool is flashy cars and slick one-liners and hip, finger-clicking violence. We don’t buy games to be educated, and if there’s a hint of that, we’ll stick on a movie instead. The developers have done a ton of research and if they can pull amazing engrossingness from the giant history-pit of Native Alaskan culture, and can turn that into a game I damn well want to finish, I will rejoice in it and its difference.

For too long the neatest ideas seem to have been born in the smaller companies and have appeared on mobile devices. GTA, with its variants, now number over 100 discs, thus proving that if it ain’t broke (and if the developers certainly ain’t broke), then don’t fix it. But with GTAV costing a reported £163 million, you can see why Rockstar wants it to be as movie-like as possible. It makes $3 million for each Breaking Bad episode seem tiny. And that’s dollars. So I wish it well, but I also want to see the as-yet-

unnamed Arctic Inupiat game win as well. Oh, and I want the moon on a stick too.

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