Clear goals and organic paths: The Arkane guide to player agency

gamesindustry.biz:

James Batchelor

Editor-in-Chief

Thursday 13th January 2022

Arkane Lyon

Arkane Studios

Play your way. That's the promise of a multitude of games, from the open-world antics of Far Cry 6, to the timeloop thrills of Deathloop, to the choice-driven zombie apocalypse of the upcoming Dying Light 2.

The notion implies a level of interactivity that goes beyond the traditional shooting galleries found in the likes of Call of Duty or strict solutions to most puzzle titles. It raises player expectations about the agency they have over everything, from story to the minute-to-minute events of the game in question.

It's perhaps the ultimate selling point for a video game, especially as the medium has become so advanced and such agency is increasingly possible -- but how do you deliver on that as a developer?

First, it's probably worth thinking about what player agency means. Arkane Lyon's campaign director Dana Nightingale describes it as "a combination of a player knowing what they want to do and knowing how to achieve it -- or at least knowing how to attempt to achieve it -- with a relative certainty that this thing they're attempting makes sense within the game's rules."

Dana Nightingale, Arkane Lyon

Nightingale has worked on every Dishonored title as a level designer, a position she initially had on Deathloop before she was elevated to campaign designer (and then promoted this week to campaign director). The campaign designer role can mean different things on different games, but in her case it meant overseeing the player's critical path through the game -- or, as she puts it, making her the "author of the murder puzzle" at Deathloop's core.

We asked Nightingale for more insight into how developers can give agency to their players.