Four Guidelines for Making an (RPG) Introduction

Jay ‘Rampant Coyote’ Barnson has written a blog post on good intros, and specifically, good role-playing game intros. In the post Jay explains what he considers to be the common cardinal sins committed by developers both indie and mainstream, and gives some guidelines to avoid repeating them.

Here’s a snip:

#1 The player is there to play.

This is the cardinal rule. While it’s okay to take a little while out in your menu screens and introductory cut-scene or what have you to try and get the player ready and hyped to play the game, the focus must always be on playing. Thirty seconds of intro is cutting into thirty seconds of play-time. If you have only five minutes to make an impression. Is this thirty seconds worth the trade? Maybe. But if not, then the intro should be cut down. Think (Opportunity Cost) here. You are cutting into their game time, so be very sure of what you are doing.

My favorite (bad example) in recent years is Dragon Age: Origins. The intro video is well-done, but it’s basically a 3.5 minute info-dump. It’s not fun to re-watch. The entire background could have been summarized in three sentences, and even then most of the information could have been more interesting if discovered by the player through, you know, playing. Seeing the Gray Wardens mocked behind their back, learning that there are very few left and that the evil they were meant to fight is long gone, and then discovering first-hand that the evil is back with a vengeance.

…

#4 Don’t be vague!

Vagueness kills interest. Again look at the sample crawls from the movies. While they introduce more questions than they answer (deliberately!), they name specifics. Names. Ape-like (man killers.) The Arena. The Death Star is mentioned by name, as well as its key features (armored, capable of destroying an entire planet). The hidden rebel base is left a little vague, but it’s revealed by the end of the movie.

Compare this to some intros for (particularly indie) RPGs that speak vaguely of prophesies, evil, great heroes, struggle against a dark force, blah blah blah. Measured in power of putting the player to sleep, this is second only to describing the lineage of the main character back four generations. The player should receive concrete details, but without elaboration. Flash Gordon was fighting killer ape creatures in an arena? Holy crap, that sounds awesome! This is much better than (Flash had to fight monsters.) But I don’t need to know how the ape-like creatures were genetically engineered by Ming’s great-great-great grandfather to create a slave race that proved too dangerous, and they rebelled, and when the rebellion was quelled in the year 182 of Ming reckoning (calculated by. etc. etc. etc.). It has enough details to give it flavor, and that’s all.