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

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 still useful tools, she stressed that they are one of many. Developers should also be using dialogue between characters, voiceover, examinable and interactive objectives, environmental storytelling, art, music, sound effects, and practically any element of game design to tell the story.

Beachum gave the example of visual effects, such as a pillar of smoke on the horizon that tempts the player to explore. Objectives can provide context and frame the player's goals and actions. Level design can provide space for conversations that would otherwise be crammed into cutscenes, such as when characters converse while riding in a lift.

Even UI can present the story in a more digestible and engaging way; Beachum pointed to Outer Wilds' screen that records your discoveries and the links between them. "If players had to take notes, that would be a terrible experience," she said.

The point Beachum built towards was that, for all the many narrative tools available (and the many she didn't list), some games still only rely on cutscenes and linear dialogue to deliver the story.

"This is actual madness. Why are we limiting ourselves? We don't have to do this. And the reason it's so limiting is because the rest of our department — gameplay and everyone else — they're not helping to tell the story. And we need those guys so badly to help share the heavy lifting. None of the things I've just shown work without you. That is why it's so important for us to connect with everyone else in every department, because when that doesn't happen, we have to convey things in a much less interesting way — and that sucks. We want this to be the best possible experience.

"Keep asking yourself about the best way to deliver each piece of information"

"If you imagine this problem in another medium, like film… if I asked you to make a film right now, but you can't zoom in or out, no tracking shots or dolly shots, no moving shots at all, fixed frames and let's make it black and white. You can make a story like that, sure, but it's not going to be as good as it could have been if you had the full range of tools available to you."

This, she said, is a key reason why writers and the narrative design department need to be working with every other team during development of any video game.

"I know we're like weird little gremlins, siloed off by ourselves and hunched over our little typewriters, but we really do want to connect. It's so gratifying to get to work with everyone in games because if we didn't want that, we'd all be off writing novels or something by ourselves."

Beachum added that working with a limited number of ways to convey everything players need to know, cramming it into small sections between gameplay, can result in info dumps, which she described as "the worst possible outcome for this."

She cited the classic example of Kaepora Gaebora, the owl from Zelda: Ocarina of Time that first appears after you emerge in Hyrule Field and interrupts before you can begin to explore. In this unavoidable monologue, the owl halts the player's adventure by introducing himself, repeating information about where you're up to in the story, reiterating your gameplay objectives, telling you what's going to happen (e.g. you're going to meet the princess), and even telling you how to use the map.

"I hate that owl so much — he stands for everything I hate," Beachum said. "I don't care about the map subscreen right now, I want to run around Hyrule Field and hit things with my sword.

"Info dumps are really ineffective ways of communicating things to the player, even though they are absolutely things we need to communicate. They tend to create a worse player experience because everyone remembers a time when they were playing a game and just spamming the A button, thinking 'My god, when does it end?' They suck because they seize control from the player — suddenly we're not playing a game any more, we're just getting through it."

Beachum concluded by offering a range of solutions, including planning for fewer cutscenes and shorter dialogue. She also recommended that story beats should be aligned with major gameplay moments — an earlier example she gave was Resident Evil 4's knife fight against Krauser, which delivers a crucial conversation in a more memorable way that makes players watch a cutscene.

"Keep asking yourself about the best way to deliver each piece of information," she concluded.

"Avoid the trap of thinking you can make a great story if you're not going to support it with gameplay elements. You will get writers saying they can do this — I was once one of them — but god bless them, they can't. It just does not work that way. We do need buy-in from the team.

"The less your story is kept separate from the rest of the game, the better both the story and the game overall will be."