GDC 2025 Session Viewer

How do you make players care about NPCs they'll never see? Why should they care about story when the game asks them to loot, craft, and outrun a Category Five storm in a taped-together station wagon?

Pacific Drive's Lead Narrative Designer & Lead Writer Karrie Shirou Shao shares how the game's creative pillars and gameplay shaped its deeply emotional story—told entirely through characters heard over a decrepit car radio. With the player's attention focused on navigating a voiceless character and poring over its detailed mechanics, Pacific Drive navigated numerous narrative challenges to present a story that bonds players with its characters.

This session will walk through how to conceive emotional stories in a gameplay-first genre and narrative techniques to get players invested in faceless characters. It will highlight how decisions on character embodiment can affect everything from the game's plot, its emotional impact, and even the sentence-level execution of the story.

Takeaway

Attendees will learn how emotional stories can be conceived in a gameplay-first genre, why it can be important to success, techniques to make players invested in stories without any characters on-screen, and how decisions about character embodiment (whether on-screen or voiceover only) can affect the entire plot of the story.

Intended Audience

Game writers, narrative designers, creative leads, and game directors who want insight into how gameplay and creative pillars can shape the story that your game tells, from how narrative is delivered, what limitations they impose, and its effect on the game's mood as a whole.