Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
▪
Plot Point 1: The player is forced to choose a side—pro-registra-
tion or anti-registration—and fight in a super-powered civil war.
On a standard playthrough, this would encompass about two to three
hours.
Spending this much time in Act I is very rare for most narrative-driven
games, but it seemed to serve
MUA2
well, with reviewers describing the
story elements as “gripping,” “satisfying,” and “one of the best stories from
any superhero game in memory.”
In the Middle of a
Tomb
The developers at Crystal Dynamics, when creating the story for their pop-
ular and well-received 2013 reboot of
Tomb Raider
, attempted to find a
way to have their cake and eat it too when it came to Act I.
Tomb Raider
's opening cutscene reveals less than thirty seconds of Hero
Lara Croft's normal world before introducing the Inciting Incident: the ship
Lara's on runs aground and she barely survives the violent crash, ending up
alone and afraid on an uncharted tropical island. Before she can react, an
unknown attacker knocks her out from behind. She wakes up to find her-
self hanging her by her feet in a dingy cave, condemned to a slow death.
By the time gameplay has begun, Lara's world has literally been turned up-
side down, and she's in a fight for her life.
As the player, within these first few minutes you've already crossed into
Act II, having accepted the challenge of the main conflict: survive, find
your shipmates, and escape the island.
However, over the course of
Tomb Raider
's Act II, bits of the apparently
absent Act I begin to emerge, via a series of video clips Lara plays while
resting at campfires, thanks to her recovered camcorder. These short vign-
ettes, fed intermittently to the player at lower-tension moments, help fill in
the backstory and relationship development that in many tales would have
come first. By the time you've completed Act II and its numerous, increas-
ingly challenging missions, you've also been gradually fed a complete Act
I.
This technique, called
in media res
(“in the middle of things”), is clever
and effective, but hardly new. The fact that it's translated from the Latin in-
dicates its age. Some of the primary examples of
in media res
are
The Iliad
and
The Odyssey
, dating back to the ninth century B.C. Starting a story
in
medias res
and subsequently filling in backstory via flashbacks and other
