GAMESTAR
1. How different is it to write a script for a videogame compared to writing a comic?
The biggest difference is that you can follow all of the different possible consequences from one action – have branching storylines. That’s an exciting freedom. With a monthly comic book, if you stay on it for long enough, every story you tell closes off the possibility of telling half a dozen others. You take characters down a particular path, ignoring the other ways they could have gone and the other courses of action they could have taken. In a video game, you can have your cake and eat it too. You can allow genuine choice and let the player control the story.
The pacing of a game is very different, too. The story logic feels more like the logic of a movie screenplay than like an episodic book told in chapters.
In one sense, though, they’re the same. You have to make character be the focus and let action arise out of character, so it feels real and carries weight within the story.
2. X-Men Destiny places an emphasis on choice and does not have a linear type of gameplay. How do you write a story with so many possible branching paths?
With the aid of a lot of cards, a pinboard and a part of the brain you didn’t know you had – a sort of four-dimensional reasoning centre. It can be challenging to keep all the variables in your head, but then it simplifies out again as you get towards the climax, since the big reveals come in all of the different decision lines and characters have to react to them when they occur.
3. What is the difference between the three characters we can choose to play as? Do we get three completely separate stories?
Each character has a completely separate back story. And, there’s a sense in which what’s at stake is very different for each of the three characters. That means there are differences in how other characters interact with the player and respond to his/her decisions. But the situation in which the character is placed is the same in each case and after that, it’s very much a question of the decisions that the player makes. You’re getting variations on a theme, in other words.
4. How can the player choose his path, his destiny? What impact does this have on the story and the gameplay?
There are many points in X-Men Destiny where the player has to decide how to react in a given situation and there isn’t a right answer or right course of action. Those choices have narrative weight and narrative consequences. Different options are made available by different choices. This is against the backdrop of a San Francisco in which both the X-Men and the Brotherhood of Mutants are active – and so the question of mutant separatism versus mutants engaging with humanity and trying to keep the doors open is a very urgent one. The Purifiers are killing mutants and a lot of ordinary people think they’re right to do so. At a time like that, do you stick to your own and protect them or try to build bridges and become a kind of ambassador for your race? Do you hold the line against killing or pull out all the stops against enemies who are out to wipe you and everyone like you off the face of the Earth? You have to decide where you belong in the spectrum of responses displayed by the other characters – and it’s a pretty broad spectrum.
GAMER.CO
1. Could you tell us about your past work in both the comics and gaming industries?
My comics work has been very extensive. I’ve written Hellblazer and Lucifer for DC and I’m currently writing The Unwritten. For Marvel, I’ve been working on the X-Men line for six years now – first on X-Men and then on X-Men Legacy, as well as the Origins series and Secret Invasion. I’ve also written Daredevil and Fantastic Four. I worked in comics for many years before I branched out into other kinds of writing.
In gaming, I’ve got far fewer credits to point to. I’ve consulted on games like Fable (briefly) and Mirror’s Edge, and done some overall story planning work. X-Men Destiny is the first game in which I’ve worked on the entire script, and it’s been crazy fun to do.
2. What is your specific role in the creation of X-Men Destiny?
I was one of two writers on the project, the other being Silicon Knights’ Madeleine Hart. Between us we did all the structural planning and all the scripting.
3. What do you like most about this project?
I like the way it dramatizes a core aspect of the X-Men universe. In the X-Men, finding out that you’ve got super-human powers always brings challenges and tough decisions, as you also find that you’ve just become a member of a minority group, which faces a lot of fear, prejudice and misunderstanding. Finding your identity in a world that doesn’t welcome or trust you is what the X-Men comic book was always about, but I think X-Men Destiny is the first game to put that experience at its thematic centre.
4. Is the recent success of the X-Men: First Class movie helping the creation of the game?
It didn’t impact on the creation of the game, but it’s bound to be a factor in how people respond to it. There’s a lot of interest in the core characters at the moment and many of the characters from the movie, such as Magneto and Mystique, play key roles in the game. So, in that sense I think the timing is great. There’s also a sense in which the movie – like X-Men Destiny – strikes off at a slight angle from the continuity we already know and accept. Familiar tropes and events are played out in a somewhat different way. It’s good that we know there’s a willingness to accept that premise.
5. The game will feature brand new characters to play with. What can we expect to see from them? Which unique mutant powers will they have?
What we tried to do was to have not just a range of powers but a range of situations to kick off from. The characters are very different in terms of their back stories, where they are when we meet them and different things are at stake for each of them. They all come to the same decisions, at least to begin with, but they come to them from different angles and with different velocities, if that makes any sense. Some of them have existing relationships with the factions who are present in the game. Others are, to start with, detached, innocent and finding their way from scratch.
As for the powers, our main concern was that all the powers available should have both aggressive and defensive potential, and that they should all be flexible enough to be used in a range of ways. Some of the power-ups are pretty spectacular. We’ve worked within the usual parameters of energy-based powers, strength-and-resilience-based powers, speed-and-movement-based powers, and so on, but we’ve tried to do interesting and different things within those broad tramlines.
GAMEZILLA.PL
1. You’ve written scripts for comics, several novels, a feature film and now a video game. How has working on X-Men Destiny differed from the other writing you’ve done? Were there any pitfalls you had to look out for when writing the script for a videogame?
The biggest difference is that when you’re writing a game you can follow all the different possible consequences from one action – have branching storylines. That’s an exciting freedom. With a monthly comic book, if you stay on it for long enough, every story you tell closes off the possibility of telling half a dozen others. You take characters down a particular path, ignoring the other ways they could have gone and the other courses of action they could have taken. In a video game, you can have your cake and eat it too. You can allow genuine choice and let the player control the story.
The pacing of a game is very different, too. The story logic feels more like the logic of a movie screenplay than like an episodic book told in chapters.
In one sense, though, they’re the same. You have to make character be the focus and let action arise out of character, so it feels real and carries weight within the story.
2. Were you inspired by some other video game scripts (not necessarily the plots, but by any unique/interesting storytelling devices that you liked)?
No, I can’t say I was. When it comes to actually playing games, it’s safe to say that my tastes are very retro. As in 1980s! My partner in the project, Madeleine Hart, was much more attuned to the modern gaming world and suggested a number of cool ideas that we ended up adopting. I was more concerned with telling a compelling story that worked as a vehicle both for the existing X-Men characters and for the new characters we were creating for X-Men Destiny.
3. How did you expand the X-Men mythology in the game to reflect the recurrent themes of intolerance, social ostracism and conflict of beliefs/attitudes?
Well, I think those things are part of the core X-Men mythos to begin with. “Hated and feared by a world they’re sworn to serve†was the X-Men‘s original and defining remit when Stan Lee brought them into the world almost fifty years ago and it’s been a constant right through to the present day.
It’s because of how mutant powers work – because they’re not just something you can do, they’re something that’s fundamental to who you are, that as far as the world is concerned define your racial affiliation. So the X-gene becomes a tribal marker, if you will, a badge of identity. And even if you put your powers to good uses, people won’t necessarily like or trust you. You have to work within constraints which most superheroes never encounter, and as a result you face different choices.
4. What is your opinion on the X-Men movie adaptations (the Bryan Singer film, the Wolverine prequel and First Class)?
I’m a big fan, generally speaking. I didn’t enjoy Last Stand all that much, because the story logic seemed to falter a little, but I loved the first and second movies. The second in particular was text book: it did everything right in terms of borrowing what works best in the comics and re-imagining it in a very different medium. Wolverine was a hugely enjoyable romp, and First Class was a triumph, which achieved the difficult task of embedding these larger-than-life characters in real events.
5. Can you tell us more about the "choice" and "destiny" aspect of your story? Could it be looked at as something akin to the two sides of The Force?
Maybe a little except that it’s not an all-or-nothing, one-off choice: I’ll serve the dark side or else I won’t. It’s a progression of choices in X-Men Destiny, each of which has immediate consequences and longer-term, cumulative effect. The destiny is, you know, about the endgame – where you finish up. But your choices determine that, so your destiny is largely chosen by you as you move through the game.
ETERNITY.GR
1. As one of the key people behind the comic book series of X-Men: Legacy, did you see Silicon Knights’ video game take on the franchise as a chance to further develop the story?
Very much so. You could compare the story in X-Men Destiny to the recent crossover event, Age of X, which I helmed and largely wrote. In both cases you have a story that involves familiar characters and situations, but skewed in some very significant ways from what we already know; so it’s a different continuity, if you like, but one with some very strong links and parallels to the core situation in the comics.
2. Did the prospect of creating new, original mutants, from their appearance down to their powers, give you even more freedom to shape the storyline?
I think what it gave us was an opportunity to present the X-Men‘s world from the point of view of someone who doesn’t take it for granted, who’s seeing and interacting with it for the first time. Everything looks and feels very different from that angle – and as a result of that, the story has a different logic and impetus. Your character is finding their feet and defining their identity in this world – forging relationships with characters like Magneto, Wolverine, Nightcrawler, Mystique and so on. I think it’s a different experience from anything that’s been in previous games.
3. We know that the events of the game, regardless the nature of the player’s character, are going to take place in San Francisco. Will the fate of the city depend on the players’ decisions and the path that they choose for their mutant?
Oh yeah. In fact, not just the fate of the city depends on players’ decisions but the fate of the world, and, as a part of that, the survival of mutant kind. The stakes are very high – and the nature of the real threat is something that emerges gradually.
4. What about the already-existing X-Men – can we get an indication of how many will be featured in the game? It has been said that a player’s allies and enemies will depend on the players’ actions, and it’ll be very interesting to see how the paths of the original characters cross with the ones of the likes of Cyclops, Magneto, Gambit, Nightcrawler, Wolverine and the rest…
Well, all the character you just named are in the game, along with many more. Colossus, Surge, Quicksilver, Mystique… lots. But some are more deeply embedded in the game than others. There are some characters whose relationship to the playable characters is more crucial in story/gaming terms and others who are more like chance encounters or who become important in relation to a single mission. I don’t want to commit to an overall number, I’ll just say that creating a rich and peopled world was one of our explicit goals in X-Men Destiny.
X-Men Destiny will release this September for PlayStation 3, Wii, Xbox 360, and Nintendo 3DS
Last Updated: July 12, 2011
