About ubisoft
Ubisoft is one of the world's leading video game publishers, with blockbuster franchises like Assassin's Creed, Far Cry and Watch Dogs.
Oasis
Stories in video games were traditionally written like a movie or a book - linearly. A beginning and an end.
With role playing games featuring player choice dominating the market, Ubisoft had to adapt.
Due to Oasis's status as proprietary software and a competitive advantage, this case study won't contain visuals of the product.
Responsibilities
Product design lead
Design system manager
Assisted with UX research & testing
The objective
Empower writers and narrative designers to create modular, non-linear stories.
Chapter 1
What is non-linear storytelling?
Prior to this iteration of Oasis, writers had been writing the same way they'd write for a non-interactive media - like a TV script, with a scene, actors, lines - everything you'd expect from a script.
archive.org
How do we go from a linear to non-linear? First, let's explain what a non-linear narrative is.
Simply put, a non-linear narrative is when the story reacts to player input, whether through gameplay or dialogue choices.
interfaceingame.com
In this example, the player might choose to antagonize the character they're interacting with, meaning it might lead to a confrontation or an enemy instead of the character joining the player's party.
This can have rippling effects on the story down the line, such as losing alignment with other characters or acquiring different rewards.
Ultimately, the concept is about giving the player agency and letting them shape the narrative with how they play.
Chapter 2
A paradigm shift for writers
One of the main challenges was that writers and narrative designers aren't necessarily tech savvy folks. The discipline's been done one way since forever and non-linear storytelling meant fundamentally shaking up how writers and narrative designers work.
How do we get them there?
Writer
This one's easy: they write the words.
Narrative designer
They outline story beats. They're the ones who think about the narrative pacing of the game, how missions flow into one another, etc. They place the boxes the writer's words go into.
Since the narrative is based on player input, a non-linear script looks more like a flowchart or a diagram than a traditional script. However, that's something that was completely unfamiliar to users.
The first major change comes from needing to componentize writing. Instead of writing a scene from start to finish, writers need to isolate dialogue line by line so that they can flow into one another depending on what's happening in the game.
Then, lines can be connected to form a scene. Scenes contain all possible permutations of a dialogue tree.
Finally, scenes can be embedded into other scenes in order to form the larger narrative.
A visualization of a node-based dialogue tree in Unreal Engine 4, a similar product. (nerivec.github.io)
Since the narrative is based on player input, a non-linear script looks more like a flowchart or a diagram than a traditional script. However, that's something that was completely unfamiliar to users.
The first major change comes from needing to componentize writing. Instead of writing a scene from start to finish, writers need to isolate dialogue line by line so that they can flow into one another depending on what's happening in the game.
Then, lines can be connected to form a scene. Scenes contain all possible permutations of a dialogue tree.
Finally, scenes can be embedded into other scenes in order to form the larger narrative.
Easing users into this new way of working wasn't going to be easy, and the internal tools department was going to need design help.
Chapter 3
The state of design at the time
The internal tools department at Ubisoft has a very strong engineering-led culture. At the time of my hire, there were 3 UX researchers and I was the first design hire. With very low churn, that means there were roughly 150 extremely skilled .NET developers who had never worked with a designer before. This wasn't your average design-immature organization.
I'm a firm believer in the human factor as the biggest force multiplier in work. Since I was hired specifically for the biggest shift in Ubisoft's tooling strategy, I was determined to do it right.
At first, the dynamic was more one of a consultant. I very quickly demanded to embedded into the development team - it was important to establish ourselves as teammates working toward a common goal. Considering the culture at the time, it would've been easy to only been seen as a pixel pusher.
Even though they didn't have much experience with this type of cross-functional collaboration, the team was very open to this new way of working. They're all very smart folks and knew pieces of the puzzle were missing.
I, alongside with my UX research partner, quickly started demonstrating value through our work. We held education sessions with the development team, introducing them to design tools and processes.
Ultimately, the best way to seal the deal is through the work and creating results. As this was proprietary software, we were blessed with easy access to our users and quick turnover for testing.
Prior to our arrival, there was a direction that had lines embedded into a traditional script structure. There had been some vague feedback, but we put a test plan together and gathered real, actionable data.
The team was blown away and we continued validating further hypotheses and eventually ended up with the node-based editor that the tool is today.
This successful collaboration eventually ended up making its way through the sinewy hallways of the old textiles factory that is the Ubisoft office and more and more development teams started asking for our help.
As previously mentioned, the design team at the time of my hire was 4 strong. At the end of my 3 years tenure, the team had scaled to be a 20-man organisation and we were well on our way to establishing a design system to be shared by both desktop and web tools.
This success was a testament to what I, again, think is the most important factor of success in product development: people. When you create an environment where people get along and trust each other, you're 100x likelier to get move fast and get to the right conclusions.
Conclusion
Oasis was a success both organisationally, but also on the business end.
Ubisoft's shift to a non-linear strategy for its role-playing games paid off, propelling the Assassin's Creed franchise to 200M total sales.