Kelsey Beachum: Telling story solely through cutscenes is "actual madness"

gamesindustry.biz:

Developers that relegate their storytelling to cutscenes and linear dialogue are severely limiting themselves in how they tell stories — and likely driving players away.

That's according to Kelsey Beachum — best known for her narrative work on Mobius Digital's seminal 2019 title Outer Wilds, but who has also written for Dying Light 2, The Outer Worlds and Groundless, among others — as she delivered the opening keynote at Devcom in Cologne today.

Her opening example was the classic Super Mario Bros, where the story boils down to Toad telling Mario that the princess is in another castle. Illustrating this as a timeline, she marked these moments in red as they bring a complete halt to gameplay: the player is no longer involved.

And, Beachum says, this is still true in so many modern titles. She pointed to the cutscenes found in Kingdom Hearts, Uncharted, and the majority of AAA blockbusters or "anything that's designed to feel like a film." Even Nintendo still does this, with Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom stopping gameplay to deliver the memory cutscenes that Link unlocks.

Cutscenes are often referred to behind the scenes as 'story wrappers,' but Beachum pleaded studios to stop using this terminology.

"'Story wrapper' implies that story can be discarded," she explained. "Wrappers are trash, trash goes in the garbage. Please stop calling my job trash.

"As much as I joke, this is a really flippant attitude to narrative, which de-emphathises the story's importance. This is a problem because we end up thinking things like, 'Well, our game doesn't really have a lot of story to it' or 'We can just add story later.' But story and narrative do a lot in a video game, regardless of how big your story is."

Beachum told attendees that story can help define the structure of your game, as well as developing relationships between the player and the characters, and providing the much needed context and motivation that drives them to continue playing.

While she recognised that cutscenes are