Michael K. Walker Game Design

Summary

An assignment for my Advanced Seminar in Narrative design comparing and contrasting how narrative is created in two different genres.

narrative in Divinity: Original Sin ii and Total War: Warhammer II

A few days ago, I picked up the game Divinity: Original Sin II after hearing some friends talk about how excellent it was. As a primarily strategy game player, I thought it may be time to check out how top down RPG’s have evolved since I stopped playing them in the mid 2000s, especially as strategy games have been integrating RPG elements recently. The example I’m most familiar with would be Creative Assembly’s Total War: Warhammer II’s Vortex Campaign. After playing a few hours of each, I can say that both appeal to me a great deal. As Divinity II and Warhammer II are both in different genres, it’s evident that their respective intended gameplay experiences differ as well, and that (obviously) has an effect on the narrative experience.

Warhammer II, as a strategy game, should seek to provide the player with a series of meaningful and interesting decisions, that impact gameplay over the long term. But how does one implement narrative to support this goal? Warhammer II implements harrative in two chief ways, firstly through the context in which the player is fighting their enemies, and secondly through character specific quests.

Players control one of four unique factions fighting over control of the Great Vortex, a powerful font of magic whose power contains the means to save or destroy the world. As they progress along the rituals to bind the Great Vortex to their will, players are given cutscenes which detail the story as they go.

They pick a Legendary Lord to lead their faction, who provides further narrative context to the player’s actions - some fight for personal vengeance, or duty to protect civilization, characterized to the player through cutscenes during several parts of the game. This lord also provides to the player several quests to provide them with unique named wargear. These quest items are often unlocked after special quest battles - battles with specific setups that differ from the average campaign map battle that the player is used to seeing.

There are some other minor ways narrative is conveyed, such as through character traits generated from contextual actions, but on the whole...that’s it. Warhammer II is really good at what its primary goal is - providing a canvas for the player to paint the map in their faction’s color. It immerses the player in the massive battles of the Warhammer IP in a way that a character driven game would be hard pressed to emulate. For me at least, this is the ideal - huge battles have been a staple of the Total War series for over a decade, and I think that a major deviation from that formula would be a big negative for the franchise.

That being said, these little quest battles help to spice up the game significantly - they often have some sort of gimmick to them that a player would likely never see in a normal campaign, and reward the player with a cool item or effect at the end. While some are decidedly average, other special weapons are extremely valuable to the player from a gameplay perspective - the deviation from the traditional formula of conquering the world is rewarded by exploring a bit of narrative specific to the Lord of the player’s faction. That this gear then helps the player to return to conquering everything keeps it feel like a valuable experience for the player.

In contrast, Divinity II simply oozes narrative, from the start of a session to the end of one. The player can pick a character to play as, customizing them in all manner of ways, from their appearance to their class and “tags”, which are a manner of simple backstory beats that help to define a character. Furthermore, the player can choose some of the default characters in the game, each with individual voice acting and fully voiced backstories for each. These backstories lead to quests and random encounters that keep the world alive. The player can have up to four characters in their party, and their quest lines overlap, causing some interesting interactions. In one case, one character needs to talk to a particular seer, while another needs to kill that same one. In other cases, the assassins set out to kill particular characters on sight, while ignoring parties without those characters.

Players can do pretty much anything in Divinity, whether it be sneaking around, teleporting party members around guards, or simply breaking down every door in sight. Through this, the player creates narrative through gameplay in addition to experiencing the written narrative in the world. Almost everything in some way contributes to the narrative. I played for a few minutes, and found a really good helmet with a weird status effect. A while later, it summoned a demon!

A simple look at the 94% positive steam reviews demonstrate how well received Divinity is by its players for it’s narrative, and the ability of the game to adapt to everything that players seem to throw at it. I, as well as others, enjoy the narrative twists that come with the ability to split parties, as each player pursues their own secret agendas. The consequences of players’ actions can have ripple effects hours of playtime later.  In all, it’s a masterpiece of creating a world for the players to experience.

In that regard Warhammer II and Divinity II have their greatest differences. Warhammer II seeks to create a narrative for the player focused around the growth and decline of empires on a grand scale, with small narrative nodes to guide the player’s sandbox experience. According to Andy Hall, lead writer on the Total War: Warhammer series, narrative was one of the game’s design pillars. However, how the player gets to the “nodal points that structure the game” is up to the player.  In his words, “[the story] is there to enhance the campaign rather than get in the way”.

In contrast, Divinity II is an experience that follows the lives of four individuals and their personal interactions with thieves, assassins, and the occasional king. They talk with crabs and dogs, and craft their own knives on a stick. As a result, the player can experience far more of these characters, and how they choose to interact with in the world,  than the players of Warhammer II can connect with their characters. In short, both games are capable of crafting unique and compelling narrative experiences relative to their genres, and differences between them can best be attributed to the stylistic requirements of their respective genres.