Scriptwriting for Reach

I became responsible for scriptwriting on Reach around half way through development following the departure of the fantastic Frankie Wakefield-Harrey. At this point, we had a developed VSD script and a first draft of major beats in Reach’s story. Over the next year, I was tasked with writing the full script and helping get it implemented into the game.

Getting Started...

I began this process with research, diving deep into the current script and narrative documentation. I also looked at how narrative was implemented in other action adventure games, namely Uncharted and Tomb Raider, both of which have broadly similar gameplay breakdowns (combat vs narrative vs traversal, etc.).

Through this research, I identified the areas that needed the most development, and worked with department leads to outline the necessary changes.

Refining Reach’s Characters

The narrative in Reach revolves around three major characters:

• Rosa - The player character (played by Andrea Valls)

• Atlas - The mentor figure (played by Alec Newman)

• Lithos - The antagonist (played by Alix Wiltton-Regan)

At the point when I took over the script, all three characters had thorough backstories and well-defined personalities. Our experience with making VSD, however, had shown that all three needed refining in one way or another. In the case of Atlas and Lithos, their histories needed simplifying to reduce the amount of backstory that needed to be delivered during gameplay, and to improve the player’s understanding of the story as a whole. Additionally, Lithos’ narrative voice needed further defining, as she hadn’t featured in the VSD script. Rosa’s history remained unchanged, but her dialogue was too determined to be too quippy, and didn’t quite fit the changing tone of the game.

Before writing any dialogue, I updated summaries of each character’s history, traits, and beliefs, all of which would go on to inform my writing of the script.

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Rosa is the lens through which the player comes to understand the narrative. She is a fish out of water. A headstrong, sometimes foulmouthed stuntwoman plunged into the ruins of an ancient civilisation against her will. At various times, she's bewildered, scared, angry, dour, and vengeful. Her headstrong side surfaces as she spars verbally with Lithos, and when she discovers Atlas has lied to her. At other times, Rosa takes a gentler tone with Atlas, patiently explaining concepts he's unfamiliar with from the surface world, and asking curious questions about the world below.

Atlas is friendly and fatherly, but very out of touch with the modern world. Face-to-face exchanges between Atlas and Rosa are typically grave, with Atlas outlining the stakes of the tasks Rosa is due to undertake. During remote exchanges (talking via a drone) Atlas is much more relaxed and playful, asking questions about Rosa's life and what has happened on the surface over the last 3,000 years. He speaks elegantly and precisely, using few contractions and no slang. He delivers exactly one swear word in the entirety of Reach, saved for the moment when everything falls apart.

Lithos is vicious, with a barbed tongue that she uses to great effect against Rosa. She is quick with an insult and deliberately verbose, taking pleasure in threatening Rosa and her family but never uttering a single swear word (she'd never stoop so low). She is utterly convinced of her genocidal convictions, and is determined to wring every ounce of pleasure out of killing Atlas and Rosa when she eventually catches them.

Reworking the Narrative

Narrative in Reach is primarily delivered in two ways, either in dedicated narrative scenes where the player is face to face with another character, or during gameplay, with the other character talking via a flying drone.

It had been noted during VSD that players often missed important pieces of narrative information delivered using this second method. On reviewing the script and VSD levels, it became clear we were trying to convey far too much information in too little time, and that this stemmed from the backstory being too complex for the size of game we were creating.

I began by cutting several subplots that weren’t relevant to the player’s journey and reducing the mid-gameplay dialogue down to only information that was essential for the player to know. I edited all VSD dialogue to be inline with the updated character descriptions, and used my experience writing concise marketing copy to ensure every word of dialogue pulled its weight.

The VSD levels were updated using this new, cutdown script, resulting in stronger narrative pacing and players having a better understanding of the story. I took learnings from this process forward into the writing and editing of the full game’s script.

Initially, most tools, weapons, and objects in Reach had unique names inspired by either Spanish, Latin, or their function. The language-based names didn't fit with the game's timeline, however, as neither language existed 3,000 ago, and we found that even the functional names for some objects made tutorialisation harder. Instead, we opted for recognisable names (e.g. drone, shield), and explained this narratively by giving Atlas powerful translation abilities.

Building Reach’s World

Having cut non-essential information from narrative scenes and major gameplay dialogue beats, the script was very light on worldbuilding. To counter this, I added wrote more than 50 optional conversations that players could choose to engage with by scanning objects in the environment.

Each of these conversations focuses on either an aspect of a character’s backstory or an aspect of ancient Ferran society. These conversations were written to be lighter than the main game narrative, bringing moments of levity to the player’s journey and rounding out each character’s personality.

Studies of ancient cultures (e.g. the frozen-in-time city of Pompeii) have revealed startling similarities to modern society, with scrawled political slogans, service menus, details of personal relationships and more. I kept this in mind for these conversations, depicting an ancient society that was based on the same wants, needs, and desires that are present today. Conversations detail everything from bathing habits and sporting events to political struggles and prison systems.

In early drafts of the script, the underground civilisation was named Ferromontaña. The name was shortened in later drafts to Ferra, which was easier to place within a variety of sentences, and was less obviously Latin and Spanish in origin.

Concise Gameplay Hints

Dialogue in Reach is also used to direct the player through Ferra, and to give puzzle & combat hints. Of all types of lines I wrote for Reach, these had to be the shortest, clearest, and most concise, partly because the player was usually concentrating on something else simultaneously (e.g. solving a puzzle), and partly because the player might move away from the location/puzzle step being talked about while dialogue was playing and become confused.

I drew on my background writing concise marketing copy to make these lines as short as was necessary to convey information to the player while still ensuring each line was in-character. As much of the game was still in active development at this point, I included alternative versions of most gameplay lines where I felt it was wise, and avoiding mentioning things that were likely to change (e.g. specific directions such as left, right). This was done to cut down on the likelihood that lines would need to be re-recorded. It was better for the budget to record too many lines during a recording session than to discover lines were missing or not suitable, necessitating a second session.

Several hint dialogue were written for most puzzles, but not all of them ended up being needed for every puzzle.

Working with voice actors

Having edited 10k words and added a further 10k words to the script, a week’s worth of recording sessions were booked with Reach’s cast at SIDE Studios London.

During these sessions, I worked directly with Reach’s incredible cast (Alec Newman, Alix Wilton-Regan, and Andrea Valls) and our amazing dialogue director (Danny Baldwin), providing context and clarification where necessary to ensure their performances matched the action and emotion required for each point in the game.

In circumstances where actors had wording or character suggestions, or struggled to deliver certain lines as written, I was able to swiftly approve or veto suggestions, ensuring everything fit within the narrative and world we were creating. Where necessary, I wrote alternative lines then and there, refining them with the actors and updating the master script during the session.