Design Brief - Investigations | Journey to 4.0 (CitizenCon 2952)

Transcript — every row opens the video at that moment

1. 00:00:03

   foreign system designer I work with Luke Presley on the mission feature team I'm here today to talk about one of the new Mission types we're prototyping so this is an early look a new Mission time and usually we don't give you a look this early it's because we don't have the nice shiny visuals but people keep asking to see the design brief so we thought what the heck we'll let you see [Music] mission is built out of objective types and the mission type really is just the most critical or um challenging objective in that mission currently we have a number of mission

2. 00:00:52

   types in the game some of these are not built in that modular sense some of these are very much bespokely built to test out a feature at one time the original P I wanted is one of those the current Mission types that do exist is we have deliveries which are essentially a form of collect and drop off we have eliminate missions which is just kill someone and eliminate ship missions which is go there and killer you know destroy a ship that has a person inside of it and there's many more the way we see missions is they're comprised of little bits of gameplay so for example we have missions where you're sent to kill a singular person or pick up a box or kill a bunch of enemies so the way how we build our missions is we combine these together so we'll have Mr where you have to pick up a box but we'll have enemies there that you have to kill as

3. 00:01:40

   they're kind of like an obstacle for you to get around that isn't to say that you can't build a mission out of a single objective and the assassination mission for instance has one objective assassinate a Target but even the most um like simplistic Mission like the delivery mission is actually built out of two objectives there's the collection of the item and the delivery of the item and if we made the collection of that item like even more difficult we'd refer to it as a collect Mission rather rather than a deliver Mission so our objective types uh for the time being have been pretty simple you know kill this person go here do this until now we're now looking at doing one of the most complex type of objective

4. 00:02:29

   and gameplay things we've tackled in mft with that said we're working on a new Mission type and that's investigation currently in the game uh the player can feel like a bounty hunter a mercenary a a person who does deliveries you know a cargo hauler we want to make them feel like a detective as a new route you know the we're expanding constantly we're building mining Salvage and detective is going to be our focus in mft the experience we want to give players with investigation mission is that they feel like a detective that they feel like they're collecting evidence that will ultimately answer the question that has been posed to them and that they're able to kind of search through the evidence

5. 00:03:17

   and find the red herrings um and and like choose the the right answer so what we want is we want to build a mission that requires you to have to think requires you to have to look around search your environment in detail look at each individual clue and make sure you fully understand it before you make your decision as the detective and they'll also be red herrings thrown in there so evidence will really have to be like poured for through Port over to be able to determine whether it's actually credible or not we also wanted to create narratives around our locations that we hadn't done before like really dig into like why it has been sterily become a derelict or why have all the ship's crew come to be

6. 00:04:06

   there oh why has this cargo gone missing at the core of this Mission we're really asking the player to use their brain rather than their gun or their ship so for this Mission type I don't want to break from players along I want you to feel like a detective I will give you a story I will give you little bits of Clues and you have to make up this full sort of painting and decide exactly what has happened here and then the rest of the decision is on yours I might not tell you if it's wrong or right you might find out the idea is that you feel like a detective and you're so sure of your decision that you're going with that so the next stage in this whole process is building a pitch you know we have to

7. 00:04:54

   come up with our ideas how we want it to work and then we have to present it to uh CR Tony and Todd and make sure they're all happy with it and all of our Visions are aligned so when we're building the pitch we start off by going over the ideal experience we want for the player we start off with the the most advanced things all the gameplay mechanics we could dream of to bring this sort of role to Life as a detective and then we have to start looking at stripping it back to see when we can release it what's the minimum viable product for this experience and in the case of the investigation Mission we came up with too so the first pitch is extremely simple and it's um around being able to find a definite answer like something that is undisputable and for instance we came up with a mission

8. 00:05:41

   where there is a repairman that's gone missing and you can go to his office and you can find some correspondence that will lead you to another place which will have their his um like work itinerary on there and they're all crossed off until one and if you're smart you'll go to that location and should you go to that location to do a little searching you'll find his body there and he's been like electrocuted fixing the final thing on his list and there's your definitive ending whereas the second Pitch um it's more about allowing the player to choose when they're done like when they think they have solved the um the mystery and um the way we do it is

9. 00:06:29

   um we scatter evidence around the the location and clues that lead you to that evidence um and obviously there can be red herrings in there um you can get your like answer up to a credible state which might still be the wrong answer if you if you but you can you can complete the mission then whereas if you'd have carried on digging a little more maybe found a few more clues and followed them you would perhaps find an indisputable um piece of evidence like you know I did it kind of thing um that would get you like the bonus for the mission and both pictures have their strengths and weaknesses and the the simple pitch we could see like how easy it was to scale and it involved less

10. 00:07:19

    less complex narrative work but we ultimately decided to go for the second because we'd like the idea of giving the player the agency to decide when they were done so we're in the Prototype phase with the investigation Mission which is more important than ever because it's such a complex Mission and we need to ensure that it's scalable and that other designers can make their own Mysteries with it with the pitches we can now prototype and sort of get that gameplay feel and see which one we we want to explore more uh for the Player's experience the some of the hardest points of this are going to be the scalability of it an investigation at its core is a story so the story should always be at the Forefront and the focus

11. 00:08:08

    so the first stage of prototyping was to prove that we can make it like a mystery happen in the most restrictive location we have which was like a derelict so it's kind of into interplay between the crew of it from there we're going to expand so that it takes into account more locations and uses all of the um like evidence retrieval interactions that we currently have for instance like you can kill a guy and get information off them you can find a corpse information off it you can loot a box get information off it um and then we'll be prototyping the newer ways of getting information like offer things we're looking into using the med gun to find the name of cause of

12. 00:08:55

    death of people and we're looking into being able to like find the mobilizing in inventory and download data from it one of the hardest things that we have to figure out is the story the investigation will live and die by its story so we work very closely with the writers to try and figure out what kind of story we want to tell what kind of Clues we want to give and then after that point we look at sort of what obstacles we want to put in your way you know a keypad locked doors uh enemies like traversal puzzles things like that the main challenge with creating this mission is that ensuring that the player has enough guidance to to complete it without putting Mission markers on everything like it is supposed to be about them searching figuring Clues out

13. 00:09:43

    for themselves and and finally answer themselves we want you to still feel like that detective but ensure that we're giving you enough information in the ways that we can and we're working with the UI designer on the new mobile list which should really help with this so this has been our video design brief on our investigation missions we're really excited to bring these to you we wanted to give you an early look to let you know what we're thinking and and see what you're thinking about these as well and we're really excited about it because it will allow us to inject a lot more story Into the persistent universe so with everything we do iteration is a key part of how we build things so by the time you see this and maybe by the time it comes out it might have changed drastically we don't know yet

14. 00:10:31

    we're still working on it and figuring out the fine details but player experience and player agency is that the focus of what we're trying to achieve we're really excited and hope you are too and I'm sure we'll be talking about this again in the future