Sylvius the Mad wrote...
When he says, "There's no room for ambiguity," it's possible he's
talking about how the quest is presented to the team, not how the quest
is presented to the player.
Veex wrote...
I believe, as a writer, he's saying specificity
from a design standpoint is really important, even if it doesn't
necessarily appear that way in game.
That's how I read it. Story flow is something that Bioware always seems to 'get' very well, which absolutely shone forth from DA:O, and it doesn't surprise me one bit that Gaider is a key architect of that.
I don't believe he was saying that each storyline (be that the main quest, or a small diversion) has to be scripted in a step by step way to funnel the player's experience down a completely linear path - although, clearly, that is one option.
What I think he was getting at was that deciding / scripting 'how' the player is going to run into the bits of the game that act as story exposition, or are designed to give the player / character a chance to evoke a certain emotion towards what's happening, are just as important as the story making coherent sense in terms of why things are happening and broadly when they happen.
I think this is just as much making sure that the writer thinks through how the story will best come out of their head and be
experienced by the player / character to avoid the "Oh, I don't know when they meet the mage. At some point. What does the level design look like? Okay, there. That'll do. What is the mage doing there? I don't know...just don't explain anything, people don't need that level of coherence, they'll never notice...jeez!"
It doesn't mean making it choiceless by any means. You'd also consider how (and why) some critical choices can be offered, what consequences they would have, how will people run into those consequences, etc. As someone who has played a GM / DM role on a number of occasions, it rings a ton of bells.
In terms of the disarming power of ambiguity, a sketched together story outline could go; "Player is in a mine area and meets a scary person who will turn out to be a major antagonist. They have to escape, during which they meet one of the scary person's henchmen and learn a small amount about the henchman and scary person. At some point the scary person escapes in front of the player. Later on, the scary person warns the player about another antagonist who threatens them both. At the end stage of the game, the player has to decide whether to let the scary person live or die."
Sound broadly Bioware-like? Here's a million dollar question for you...was it a broad plot summary of some of the key elements of DA: Awakening, or a broad plot summary of some of the key elements of KOTOR: The Sith Lords?
...and if you delete the words 'mine' and 'scary' and assume that the precise order of events could be rearranged a bit, does it also describe Loghain in DA:O?
Despite having a raft of common themes, the way those particular stories were told and shown to the player were wildly different...and felt wildly different. I would argue that was probably just as much down to the 'how' players went down that path as much as the difference in settings. The 'why' was actually not necessarily the most relevant part at all in those stories, all of which gave the player significant freedom to decide that for themselves.
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