Jagged Alliance 3 - DevDiary 8 - Quest Creation

Redglyph spotted the development diary #8 for Jagged Alliance 3:

DevDiary 8 - Quest Creation

The making of a story

Hello, I’m Radomir Mirchev, Senior Narrative Designer of JA3, and it’s story time once again.

This time I’ll tell you about how stories are created in Jagged Alliance 3 and how more threads are woven into them.

For that purpose I’ll guide you around one of my favorite places in Grand Chien. This is spoiler territory, but don’t worry – I’ll leave enough for you to explore and discover when you get to play the game and reach Port Cacao Docks. While I introduce you to the neighborhood, I may drop a hint or two about what’s going on there. It’s mostly stuff that anyone at the Docks could tell you.

Design goals

But before we start, let me bring you back to Jagged Alliance 2 for a while.

In JA2, there were just about a dozen of quests and most of them were adoringly simple. They managed to do so much with so little – mostly because they were well-integrated into the framework of the game, made use of existing mechanics and provided different, sometimes quite specific quest outcomes. That helped bring the game world to life.

For example, you could convince Doreen to shut down her factory where she exploited child labor, or simply kill her – or both. You could obtain the Chalice of Chance by killing the poor old guard, or take great effort to sneak into the museum and steal it. The game reacted to these choices, for example by modifying Loyalty at the sector.

We wanted to keep this kind of integrated content and build upon it.

We had to make sure that we give you freedom of choice, including implicit choices. But as I said in a previous Dev Diary, freedom only means something if there are suitable outcomes that react to your actions – so you should be able to kill (almost) anyone, and the game should be attuned to your dark psychotic side.

In addition to that, we tried not to insult your intelligence by expecting you to follow series of fetch steps. As with other game aspects, we wanted to encourage you to try things and see what happens. However, we shouldn’t allow you to feel lost and end up scratching your head what you are supposed to do next. We decided to provide subtle hints here and there that were presented as notes in your PDA.

Now let’s fast forward to Jagged Alliance 3 and see how we built the Port Cacao Docks sector with these goals in mind.

Narrative concept

While building the sector, we needed to establish the scene first.

We wanted to show how tough life is in Grand Chien, and how people adapted to the realities of a post-war country that is on the brink of chaos once again.

A document is written that describes the general feel, features and specific points of interest of the place. It is important to supply it with real world visual references which will be used by the art team to produce the necessary assets.

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