Environmental storytelling

[Rochester]

For new players and old alike, what do we think constitutes ‘environmental storytelling’ within ED, and do we think this is applicable across Legacy (console) and 4.0 or limited now only to Odyssey?

Please post examples where applicable.

Environmental Storytelling

As a game designer, what can you do with a huge open world filled with thousands of different kinds of objects? You can tell stories with the environment itself.

www.gamedeveloper.com

Environmental Storytelling, Part II: Bringing Theme Park Environment D

Part II of Don Carson's article on enviromental storytelling examines specific techniques used by the designers of physical "real world" spaces and how they mig

www.gamedeveloper.com

 

[GraphiteGB]

There are No updates to legacy beyond server farm compliance when its servers fail...
EDO 4.0 engine was updated last time without taking EDH3.8 offline. Showing how complete the separation has become that it allows 3.8 to stay up whjile 4.0 was taken offline....

There are still quests in legacy that forced "fetch quest mode" go to A read text that tells you to go to B then B tells you to go to C... O what's this on planet... then C says you done go back to A and the fetch quest is done when you get back to A... They are still in legacy but they're all so old now...

Reading a piece of text via a wall or a voice message or a body does not hide that they're just fetch quest missions...
It still works well and its core in adventure games and as lomg as you can get invested in the lead they work well. when you dont give a dam about a person in the game players then spend time testing the rag doll animations as the storys of no interest and spend more time finding ways to kill the player in gun ways...
In UC1 did not give a dam. so the quests never mattered... last of us still dont care... Mass effect cared and did a ton of its fetch quests in all 3 games... same with Resident Evil..

EDH had a few that i could be bothered with but tjhey were all Time limited ... Their conclusion was then posted on galnet telling anyone who did not complete them the result

Getting a permit to unlock a specific system used the fetch quest system. go herre read that. Which meant going to the next system and then read another then go to the final system and get given a permit to the system and find a base run by a bunch of people that had tho leave for some reason... You don't need to do this any more as the system is now wide open after an update in salvation vs Aegis vs thargoids made the system public...

The Xmass thief event which was again time limited was the same.. go to A get told some thing go to B go to system C get a free ship and some credits... Along the way..
Now EDOs 4.0 engine allows people walkies in building there can be EDO exclusive fetch a MacGuffin after finding multi text logs but it going to be hard to do so with any thing new...
No mans sky is on its 8-9 version... of their new fetch quests series but its getting old...

 

[Shabine]

I suppose some of the crash sites would qualify as environmental storytelling, as does Guardian architecture and equipment design. The Thargoid sensors might also qualify given that there was no context to their introduction and players needed to encounter them and unravel the mysteries behind what they represent. The resulting UA bombing campaigns were very much emergent loops informed by little more than understanding the effects of sensors on machines in close proximity.

That said, you're probably not going to encounter Scorn levels of deciding for yourself what's going on in ED.

 

[sidereal6]

tl;dr for anyone interested:

Environmental storytelling is the art of arranging a careful selection of the objects available in a game world so that they suggest a story to the player who sees them.

Here's one example that's a bit different: a planetary nebula is a kind of environmental story about the history of that solar system. You know there was a supernova there in the distant past.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Environmental storytelling is when you set out in a Fallout game e.g. and discover what happened by visuals, notes, recordings, tales and other narrative pieces found in the world.

 

[Shabine]

Environmental storytelling is when you set out in a Fallout game e.g. and discover what happened by visuals, notes, recordings, tales and other narrative pieces found in the world.

Environmental storytelling lacks scripted sequences. That's what defines it. Interpretations are completely open to the player. In the case of Fallout, notes and recordings provide context, but are not open to interpretation; they tell us the story instead of us seeing something and deciding for ourselves what it means. Yes, looking at ruins tells us that a disaster occurred, but we already know that because of how the overall story is framed in Fallout games.

Scorn is an example of environmental storytelling. There is no dialogue in that game and no text. The player has to figure out what everything means by either looking at it or interacting with it and then deciding entirely for themselves what is going on.

 

[Navigare Necesse Est]

Environmental storytelling lacks scripted sequences. That's what defines it. Interpretations are completely open to the player. In the case of Fallout, notes and recordings provide context, but are not open to interpretation; they tell us the story instead of us seeing something and deciding for ourselves what it means. Yes, looking at ruins tells us that a disaster occurred, but we already know that because of how the story is framed in Fallout games.

Scorn is an example of environmental storytelling. There is no dialogue in that game and no text. The player has to figure out what everything means by either looking at it or interacting with it and then deciding for themselves what is going on.

I'm pretty sure there is also a game that does it like the Kurosawa classic Rashomon, where the same thing is viewed with different eyes, different intent and conclusions.

 

[Screemonster]

Does this count?

 

[Thatchinho]

One example of environmental storytelling I would put forward is the bases of the Guardian Relic Towers.

The Relic Tower bases have several layers of panels, some of which have triangular markings on them.

Those markings are of a much simpler form than the other triangular markings which can be found elsewhere.

This suggests they’re an older and more primitive form of that style of Guardian writing, and initially suggests that the towers are older then the Guardian Relics (which have a more complicated version of the writing on them).

However when looked at closely it can be seen that the triangular patterns on the relic tower bases aren’t the original markings, and they have been roughly hacked into the panels, destroying most of the original markings on those particular panels.

And so we have Relics and Relic Towers built by the Guardians at some point, and then at the later date they are crudely vandalised with some words from a very primitive version of the Guardian written language. And that tells a story.

 

[Thatchinho]

Environmental storytelling, or perhaps more accurately environmental storyreading does have its challenges in ED I would say, often because it is almost impossible to distinguish between environmental storytelling, environmental coincidence and environmental accident. And for that matter, environmental misreading or part-reading.

Some examples which are less clear cut than the relic tower bases:

- a good while back now, the distribution of discovered Ancient Ruins vs the distribution of Braintree sites suggested a territorial crossover between Thargoid and Guardian space. (This was before the Thargoid/Unknown Structures were discovered.). We know now that there was indeed a territorial clash, but was the environmental suggestion of it intended or a coincidence?

- the system used as a reference point by Thargoids is almost as exactly on the boundary of Guardian space (as defined by Braintree locations). Intended, coincidence, or complete accident?

- Guardian sites being found at various nebulae suggests they may have been there for the same reason we are various (different) nebulae now - harvesting meta-alloys. It’s just conjecture at present, but it could well be environmental storytelling. On the other hand it could just be a complete artefact of search bias - the sites may just appear to be in nebulae because nebulae are the main places we looked (although this has steadily looked increasingly unlikely since 3.3 was released).

- the relationship between Guardian sites and Braintrees appears to tell some kind of story, but we don’t know what it is. What is known so far is that everywhere there are Braintrees there are Guardian sites in that area of space. What we don’t know is whether Guardian sites always have a Braintree area of space around them (because apart from the main Guardian area to the East of the bubble, all other Guardian areas have been found via first finding Braintree areas.). We also don’t know the causal nature of the relationship. Did the Guardians plant the braintrees? Did the Guardians settle places where Braintrees were? Did they evolve from something else associated with the Guardians? Or were they planted by another species to enclose Guardian areas (either while the Guardians were there or after the Guardians were wiped out) for some reason?


And perhaps pertinent to current events, Soontill’s location suggests that the Thargoids may have been researching Guardian tech there (and developing blended Thargoid/Guardian tech) until the main Thargoid civilisation lost Soontill, whenever that was and however that could happen. The question of course is whether that is indeed intended environmental storytelling, or whether it’s a coincidence or even a potentially misleading accident. (I’d like to think it’s intended, and we’re supposed to be able to read into things like that and work out parts of the secret history of the ED universe, but it’s very hard to say for sure.)

 

[Ceres_O7]

Well, I would say environnmental storytelling can be found in bespoke places like all the abandoned Horizons bases, particularly the INRA ones. Sure they have logs and whatever, but a couple of them also have a big pit covered in torture instruments and Thargoid limbs. So things like that count.

Environmental storytelling is also procedural - finding a crashed ship on an abandoned world surrounded by canisters of narcotics and weapons. Was someone setting up a cache here? Organising a trade? Did their engines fail? Were they shot out of the sky? Were they EMP'd by a Thargoid? That's all environmental storytelling.

Craters on planets are environmental storytelling. So are rocks found at the bottoms of cliffs and inside ravines. Why does that plant seem to grow only on the parts of the planet coloured this way? What material composition could that ground colour be the result of?

Abandoned stations and outposts in the war are environmental storytelling. They tell the same story, but they do it without words.

Even your ship cockpit tells a story of the kind of reasons it was built - the mamba being a decommissioned racing ship, the anaconda being functional but industrial what with its exposed wiring. The Gutamaya ships that show luxury, with sleek interiors clearly designed to convey status as opposed to a Lakon ship designed to just fly and haul effectively.

Concourse screens showing 30 day shift times, evidence of the dystopian hellscape that is being in the Elite Dangerous working class.

So yeah, the game is full of environmental storytelling.

 

[Rochester]

Source: https://youtu.be/XvBQJRz7wsc

 

[Rochester]

 

[Rochester]

Nemb | Canonn Research Group

Nemb is a Samson Class Bulk Cargo megaship that can be found in the LP 892-51 system, in orbit of body 3 a.

canonn.science

 

[DNA-Decay]

Not sure if this fits: but BGS manipulation tells a story.

Long time ago, the team I played for (Alliance Elite Diplomatic Corps) ran 3 'core' minor factions (1 officially acknowledged as our "player minor faction).
We'd been pushing one faction in a roughly southerly direction for a long time and expanded them across 70 light years. We got to the point where two more directed expansions and we could be inserted into the Sol system. Putting an Alliance faction into Sol was worth a try. We suspected that inbound expansions into Sol had been turned off (otherwise Hutton Truckers would have been in a few months previous) but we thought there might be a chance. Our faction was adopted not inserted, so maybe the rules would not recognise it as a player group.
We pushed an expansion that should have gone into Sol, and rattled the locks on the gate, but it didn't work.

However on the way, our second last expansion had to go through a heavy lore rich system. Ross128.

It's a Federation maximum security prison system with a permit lock. As an "Alliance Only" player I had zero Federation rank, and had to get to lieutenant or whatever so I could participate in the activity to insert our faction and conquer the system.

The week we were overthrowing the Feds, Ross128 hit the news in the real world. (The planet Ross 128b was discovered. 1.4 Earth masses, Rocky and only 11 LY from Earth). Whenever something interesting happens IRL to a star system, there is always a boost in traffic to that system in-game. So we were worried that we would be spotted and opposed. We didn't have quite the manpower to fight off a big Fed push if they gathered enough players, but in the end, we weren't spotted and won the system.

Of course this has been a thorn in the side of Fed players, so there's been several player group wars over the years, and I don't think our faction is ruler there anymore.

But at the time, I was hugely interested in game lore. Toured all the tourist beacons, collected the text from in-game for the previous games (Elite, Elite II, FFE)., and read some of the novels. Some of the in-game stories have branching outcomes, so there are several possible "histories". I tried to find consistent versions of lore that were independent of which branch the player had followed, and had canonical continuity between games.

 

[Ozric]

Not sure if this fits: but BGS manipulation tells a story.

I am going to leave the rest of your post up, because it has some merit. But that video is not remotely suitable for a computer game forum, and if you post anything like it again it will be fully dealt with.