Fulfilling fantasies and building investment: The narrative design of Alan Wake 2
Last year's Alan Wake 2 released to critical acclaim, winning awards such as the game Award for best narrative at the 2023 Game Awards, and this year's BAFTA Game Award for Artistic Achievement.
At GDC 2024, principal narrative designer Molly Maloney and associate game director Simon Wasselin talked about a few narrative design elements that help make the game such a cohesive experience, focusing on gameplay actions players can often take whether they're controlling Alan and Saga.
In an industry where the distinction between writer and narrative designer is often unclear or the terms are even used interchangeably, Wasselin and Maloney's central message is this Narrative design is about identifying and designing features and tools that support a cohesive story. If the narrative design team is properly empowered, it is possible to create deep investment purely through opportunities for expression.
The central question Wasselin and Maloney asked themselves when beginning work on Alan Wake 2 was how to build investment in players; after all, the story itself was strictly linear and didn't give players the opportunity to influence it through tools such as branching dialogue, either.
"It is not a particularly hot take that that linear, single-player story games have less agency than a branching game or a sandbox game that constantly throws these choice moments at the player," Maloney said. "So it's actually more important to take advantage of or even create new player expression opportunities in linear games."
Alan Wake 2 has three fixed game pillars, meaning elements the game definitely needed to have: combat, opportunities to play with light and darkness and the very aptly named 'make it scary' pillar. Beyond that, every piece of content needs to support storytelling, so while narrative and combat are often seen as separate aspects of games, for example, in Alan Wake 2 even combat actively tells the story or aids it.
"Why make the player watch something when they can do it?
Read more on gamesindustry.biz
