#gamenarrative

Sources and Significance Bog 1

This post looks at an emotional scene from God of War Ragnarök and how its storytelling engages the player.

In God of War Ragnarök, there is a scene where Atreus’ wolf Fenrir dies… , that scene literally hits different. I picked this scene because it’s not about fighting or boss battles it’s just pure emotion. You can actually feel what Atreus is going through, and the game doesn’t rush it. It’s slow, painful, and honestly one of the realest moments in the whole game.

If we look at this scene using Todorov’s (1971) narrative structure, it follows a clear progression. The equilibrium is Atreus caring for Fenrir in a calm, intimate setting. The disruption occurs when Fenrir suddenly collapses. The recognition is visible as Atreus realises he cannot save him. The resolution comes when Atreus accepts this and comforts Fenrir in his final moments. This leads to a new equilibrium, where the emotional loss becomes part of Atreus’ character development.

The scene also makes strong use of binary oppositions as described by Lévi-Strauss (1963). Binary oppositions are opposing concepts that help structure meaning within narratives. In this scene, life vs death and innocence vs reality are particularly clear. Atreus represents emotional openness and hope, while the inevitability of death introduces harsh reality. Another important opposition is control vs helplessness. Although Atreus wants to change fate, he is confronted with the limits of his power.

What makes the scene even more powerful is how the game makes you stay in the moment. No clicks , no fighting just you, Atreus, and Fenrir. The breat slows, the music drops, and you genuinely feel like you’re right there. It doesn’t feel like a cutscene it feels personal.

This scene reminds you that Ragnarök isn’t just gods and battles. It’s about loss, growth, and those moments that stay with you long after the story moves on. That’s what makes it unforgettable.

The Short Read

In God of War Ragnarök, the scene where Atreus’ wolf Fenrir dies is one of the most emotionally powerful moments in the game. I chose this scene because it avoids action and focuses completely on emotion. The moment is slow and quiet, allowing the player to truly feel Atreus’ pain and understand his emotional state. This makes the scene feel real and deeply personal.

References

1. For Environmental Storytelling: Dark Souls, Hollow Knight, Inside

2. For Branching Narratives: Disco Elysium, The Walking Dead, Detroit: Become Human

3. For Player-Driven Stories: The Outer Wilds, Skyrim, Baldur’s Gate 3

4. For Emotional Impact: The Last of Us, What Remains of Edith Finch, To the Moon

Certain genres, such as adventure games and their various sub-genres, have narrative as an essential element, while others, such as real-time strategy, do not require detailed stories as a feature. Some games feature a "story mode" (sometimes also called "narrative mode"), a mode that is designed to focus on the story.

So I decided to do a separate post for talking about my final project as I wanted to write my thoughts about the project from the beginning to the end and how I could have approached things differently or if I think I did the best with what I knew at the time.

So starting from the beginning which was actually during the summer I knew I wanted to do the game project as it’s something I have passion for and have a strong interest into the process of making games. I knew I was going to have to learn Unreal as I had watched GDC talks in the past and I recall them most of the time saying they like to see the animation in game, so I began work to look into how the basics of Unreal worked but most of my time was spent looking into how game animation are different to film animation though now looking back I would have recommend looking into unreal more as I could have learnt about game animation and the difference between them and film during the actual animation process.

The first part of my brief was the concept generation my main worry with this was not having enough animations for my final piece and not reaching the 80-100 cycles which was stated in that brief which now I understand I was clearly underestimating how much animation had to be done because if I went with some of my earlier drafts and didn’t tweak my final one to work with some of the animations I did I don’t think I would have had enough time to get everything done. This project has really opened my eyes in terms of how much animation goes into game for preforming some actions which at first may not seem like they need that much but the further you go down you realise how much you actual need and for me that was the cover animation as I did understand the majority of the animations I had to do but when it came to the cover transition stuff I released I would need actions of the character entering cover from the side which I didn’t really consider at the start. Another example was the climbing though this was to a small extent with the climbing up with the hands close together I didn’t really take into account I was going to need to do this animation twice one for each hand going first to make the action of moving up much cleaner.

Next up was Character design which I am still happy with how my characters look as I do still believe they are different enough to stand out and not be mistaken but fit into understandable roles that the characters have to perform I am also glad I was talked into focusing on just two characters by Mario as again I had stated in my previous paragraph I originally wanted to stealth takedowns which now knowing what I know I was again underestimating how many animations would need to be done to complete this action and having to make another character would have reduced the quality of my models rigs I think as I struggle with the skinning process and while not perfect far from it I think Rogue and the Drone turned out as models/ rigs well.

Next was the animation and here I began working through my cycles and here I basically used gathered my reference and animated to that blocking the poses and then proceeding to spline and then tidy up adding more key frames as needed, though towards the end of my project I began to work more with the graph editor to achieve little changes between poses as my keyframe method I used for my films would not always work due to how quick the pose would change which would cause the animation to jump and be less smooth. Though I do feel this project has changed how I approach animation and my process for making better animation and I even learned about some tool which can help me improve my animation with the main one being the “visualise arc” tool which I used to create the AZRI sword swing seen in my showreel.

After the animation was then testing them in Unreal which for one I do believe it might have been better to instead of having a “training area” as I called it building the environment as I went showing off the animation as I worked on them which with the current map I have would have changed the order I worked on each of the animation sets. As stated I feel like more knowledge in Unreal and the programming in animation would have benefited me greatly and while I could have learnt some of the basics during the summer and maybe having an understanding/ picking animations which wouldn’t have needed as much programming as I feel like I might have picked two game functions that are difficult to program and if I had considered that I might have only focused on one and done one and doing more animations to smooth them out.

So here is my final submission for AX3002 which is shows both all my animation samples at a 3/4 view so you can see the majority of the action being performed but some animations like the vaulting animation and moving forward out of cover have a forward camera so you can actually see how the character  leaves the cover. I have added title cards to break the video ups to make the transition between Maya and Unreal less abrupt.

So here is my final Showreel unfortanlly due to some issues with Unreal and having all my focus on that I havn’t been able to completely finish all the aniamtion I wanted to get finished to go along with the music which lead to me having to use some old/ new video which I didn’t plan on using to fit the gap but match the music.

Unfortunately with my final piece Unreal had some issues with the sound which has taken up the majority of my focus (still not fixed) these past few weeks and I didn’t get the other animation I wanted to do which I think would have made my showreel for the show more gaming focused though because of time i have changed that to still be more gaming focused but also shows off some cinematic stuff from my two minute film.

I also included a AZRI piece I did a while ago which was done when I was getting use to using the model with the idea behind the shot was to show expression and telling a story through the expression. Here the idea was that she would turn see someone which causes her to be shocked/ surprised before getting angry and grabbing her sword.

The animation I didn’t have time to finish was a attack combo with a sword and shield, a death animation.

Here is the current gameplay footage of my character moving throughout Unreal with the sounds added to they're respective action to be performed during the gameplay. 

Overall I think this is fine there is definitely a lot of things that could be smoother  which I believe is how I’ve programmed the actions to work and as for there sound they work exactly as they do in the previous video. 

One issue that I am confused by and am struggling to understand what it wrong is that there is always a “beep” noise during the climbing section and it always seems to take place at the second leaping animation. Which at first I thought was the idle animation for the “looking at computer” and this was being triggered due to the pause between the leaps as I have the idles on a cycle quickly so I could show them off. 

I decided to first move all the idle animation to be triggered sort of like emotes using the 1-3 keys (this was better for showing of anyway and am not sure why I didn’t do this earlier in the project) as this would mean the sounds would no longer be on a random cycle like the animations and instead would have to be triggered though this did not fix the issue and the beep remained.

I then out of curiosity backed up my files and deleted all the idle animation sound files to help narrow down what it might be and as expected the sound remained still. 

I then did a double check on my leaping sound effects to make sure the beep wasn’t part of the audio and again no the audio was clean.