Too much story in modern games? *spawn

[Rodéric]

I'd just like to add that stories in games are usually poor, which doesn't help.

So we get detracted from the primarily focus for something poor...

 

[Billy Idol]

I'd just like to add that stories in games are usually poor, which doesn't help.

Yeah, that is really a problem. A problem, which is also shared by other entertainment medias, such as movies and often even books.

 

[tuna]

I'd just like to add that stories in games are usually poor, which doesn't help.

So we get detracted from the primarily focus for something poor...

Most games are poor, or at best <= average

 

[fearsomepirate]

But you said a bot-training mode would've been more of a value for those who only wanted the offline experience. Why would a story mode with some actual context behind it be worse than a training mode that has no context whatsoever? The latter seems more counterproductive to me than the former.

I didn't need a lot of context to shoot ducks and robots in Timesplitters, because context isn't the appeal of bot matches. The appeal was the challenges, the features, the many customization options, and having a solid, skill-based, single-player experience that could also be played co-operatively and competitively.

Bot matches shouldn't be viewed or developed as "training" for online multiplayer, because those of us who play them don't view them that way. They should be viewed as a different kind of single-player game that are fun in their own right for their own reasons.

 

[JB9861]

The first Halo compared to the first Uncharted featured virtually no story at all compared to the rich storyline in Uncharted. Yet the Halo series and it's minimalist story telling continues to attract consumer attention far more than Uncharted and its much more expansive story telling. I believe the minimalist Halo: Combat Evolved has sold quite a bit more copies than the story rich Uncharted along with more recent big budget story based FPS shooters (ME2 and ME3 for example or one of my personal favorites, Bioshock). The mega-blockbuster COD series at least features a somewhat more fleshed out, if somewhat disjointed story. And people that are fans of the single player likely wish less time was spent on the story if it could have meant there was a longer SP campaign. And even its story is considered quite bare bones by many.

What makes you feel there's a cause and effect relationship here? Or am I getting the wrong impression? Half-Life has done pretty well for itself.

 

[green.pixel]

Why do we need to obsess over stories when games by their natures are interactive challenges? The plot and the characters serve to create the setting for the mechanics. Delivering an engaging challenge should be a greater goal than delivering a narrative. The lack of control should be used as a pacing tool perhaps. Games with good writing like SH2 aren't particularly good games (in the mechanical sense) when you move past their stimulating atmosphere.

I can't find an interview with Amy Hennig when she talks about how they create set-pieces first then write a story around them like it's a good thing.

This is the best thing I've seen even attempted to be written about the significance of stories in games, if you don't mind his overconfidence:

One point remains to be touched on, and it's indeed, as one would expect, since I left it for the end, the subtlest and most delicate one. We must realize the difference between a review and a critique. The dictionaries are of no use here because they regard the terms as mostly interchangeable -- and nor are they mistaken: in the grand scheme of things they indeed are. Yet at this point, for reasons I will explain at a later date, we are obliged to make at least a provisional distinction. By "review" we should refer to a critical essay which attempts to place a specific work within a hierarchy whose construction is always a work in progress. Such essays must necessarily confine themselves within the scope of the hierarchy under construction, with any references to greater issues being off-topic and undesirable, because they do not in any way contribute to the hierarchy's construction. Such essays, as we have seen, should also always come with ratings, especially if they are produced in great numbers and with any degree of regularity -- as they must in order to better contribute to the construction of the hierarchy.

A critique, on the other hand, while still described, like the review, as a "critical essay", does not confine itself within a specific medium, nor does it bother with constructing hierarchies, but proceeds to place the work within a larger framework -- indeed almost the largest: that of human culture and civilization (the largest would be that of the universe, and there are indeed such ambitious critiques: we call them "philosophical critiques"). -- And it would of course be ludicrous to suggest that such essays should come with ratings. That is why, for example, George Orwell's most famous book "reviews" (some of which are themselves almost of book-length) do not come with ratings: because they aren't book reviews.

Now in videogames, to get back to our subject, the only decent equivalents to Orwell's book critiques that I am aware of are my essays On Role-playing Games and Arcade Culture, and a few others in the same vein which I am currently working on ("On Real-time vs. Turn-based Strategy", "Dungeon Crawling", and others). These essays do not confine themselves to the evaluation of a single game, but take in entire genres or design philosophies within the world of games -- always within it -- and critique their underlying fundamentals and evolution. They still, however, do not equal in scope Orwell's most extensive book critiques, and with good reason. To do that they would have to relate the significance of the games to the world outside of them, to place the game -- no longer in the context of its genre or that of videogames as a whole, but in that of culture and human civilization. But this is a decisive jump, a jump which Orwell and other literary critics were not obliged to make, since the novels they critiqued were always already placed within that context. A novel, you see, a work of narrative fiction, always refers back to the culture which produced it, and this is especially true of the significant novels (also called "philosophical novels") which serious critics are mostly concerned with. But videogames are nothing like that. The "story" or the "visuals" or the "music" or the "atmosphere", which the pseudo-intellectual gamers become so laughably enraptured with, are never ultimately valid objects of critique, since they can be easily changed without significantly altering the essence of the game. These are secondary, incidental aspects, which the pseudo-intellectuals in their ignorance and stupidity elevate to aspects of primary importance. When these secondary aspects are disregarded what then remains is a system of rules which erect and constitute a reality -- a reality which short-circuits the existing one and substitutes itself for it. How then, to relate the new reality to the old one? The old one has been abolished -- there is nothing to say for it -- except perhaps "Good-bye, you won't be missed!" The very act of game reviewing, of critically examining a videogame so as to place it within a hierarchy of videogames, presupposes that one has no interest in reality. Critiquing a specific game, therefore, or a genre or series or philosophy of game design, in the sense that we defined the term "critique" above, would be childish -- it would be a mistake that only a child would make, a child simply playing with words whose meaning he can't even begin to comprehend. For the only way to marry videogames and the concept of "critique" is to undertake a critique of videogames -- and that, as things currently stand, no one other than me is capable of doing.

An electronic game is like a mini-world made of its own rules.

The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is, and everything happens as it does happen: in it no value exists — and if it did exist, it would have no value

 

[DuckThor Evil]

Why do we need to obsess over stories when games by their natures are interactive challenges? The plot and the characters serve to create the setting for the mechanics. Delivering an engaging challenge should be a greater goal than delivering a narrative.

Why should I care too much about the mechanics when I really care more about the story and the setting? I'd rather have my mind be entertained/challenged and it to be the deciding factor instead of what I can do with my hands or body, because for those a reality based sports/entertainment provide me plenty of satisfactory activities and challenges.

And still I prefer the mechanics of say Gears of War way more than the ones in for example Quake and it's ridiculous looking fast twitch rocket jumping.

 

[Prophecy2k]

The first Halo compared to the first Uncharted featured virtually no story at all compared to the rich storyline in Uncharted. Yet the Halo series and it's minimalist story telling continues to attract consumer attention far more than Uncharted and its much more expansive story telling. I believe the minimalist Halo: Combat Evolved has sold quite a bit more copies than the story rich Uncharted along with more recent big budget story based FPS shooters (ME2 and ME3 for example or one of my personal favorites, Bioshock). The mega-blockbuster COD series at least features a somewhat more fleshed out, if somewhat disjointed story. And people that are fans of the single player likely wish less time was spent on the story if it could have meant there was a longer SP campaign. And even its story is considered quite bare bones by many. It could be argued that if you reduced the story down even further to just small cutscenes every 3-5 missions to string together the mission that it would have sold just as well.

The first Halo (and probably every Halo since) have never really told much of a story because Bungie have never really been great story tellers. Saying that though there was still about the same amount of story in Halo:CE as there was in the majority of action/shooter type games of that similar genre in that generation. Comparing a last gen-game whose story-telling was very much limited by the budgets and technical limitations of the HW last gen, with a current gen game like Uncharted and ME is more than a bit of an apples to oranges comparison. And your proposed link between sales and story quantity in games is demonstrably incorrect, as games like God of War, Gears, ME, Skyrim, COD & BF3 all had considerably more story/narrative emphasis than Halo:CE.

Also, COD SP games stories are not at all barebones at all. Especially when you're talking about the quantity of story, or amount of emphasis or focus placed on the narrative or gameplay. COD is bascially a bunch of shootouts inbetween story cutscenes/scripted scenes etc etc ad nauseum. Halo games are exactly the same in concept, except the gameplay segments are maximised and the scripted moments kept to a minimum. COD game have no less story in them than Uncharted games or Gears games for example. Trying to intimate anything otherwise is entirely disingenuous.

 

[fearsomepirate]

Why should I care too much about the mechanics when I really care more about the story and the setting? I'd rather have my mind be entertained/challenged

You need to stop playing video games, then, because 99.9999999% of video game stories don't even rise to pulp fiction level. If you want a narrative to feed your brain, I might suggest books.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

You need to stop playing video games, then, because 99.9999999% of video game stories don't even rise to pulp fiction level. If you want a narrative to feed your brain, I might suggest books.

Im not that picky or hard to please, but yeah most of the time the scale is more full at the entertained side instead of challenged. I don't demand perfection, because it doesn't exist very often. Plenty of good enough stuff for me to enjoy out there.

Books don't offer different paths or animation/audio. Both formats are good but not competing in my eyes.

 

[Rodéric]

I think it's a general trend on scripting like a movie instead of making a game.
There are many things you have to do "as intended", otherwise you'll get stuck, and that's really no fun.
(Worst offender being QTE, those which are random add insult to injury by repeatedly testing your slow reaction time and saying you don't deserve to continue playing...)

Also have strong feelings against being stolen control except for very short informative sequences. (Such as short dungeon walkthrough/hints in Zelda Ocarina of Time.)
LET ME PLAY DAMNIT !

I suppose people should just get hammered the equivalent of "Don't tell, show." for games which would be something like "Don't show, have them play it." or something.

 

[Prophecy2k]

You need to stop playing video games, then, because 99.9999999% of video game stories don't even rise to pulp fiction level. If you want a narrative to feed your brain, I might suggest books.

I would say that this prevailing internet mentality which continues to purport the idea of "video game stories being shite", is at its heart fundamentally flawed, and also fails to see the very reason why more cinematic elements and devices are used in modern games in the first place.

It isn't that most games' stories are crap. Not at all. Many games have fantastic stories, back stories, and incredibly entertaining and interesting universes. It's actually the manner in which these stories are told in games which should be the subject of people's ire, and not the stories themselves (which can range from simple tales to astounding epics more compelling than some stuff lauded in other literative forms).

There's a huge difference between "story" and "story-telling" or "narrative". And it's the latter that many game developers get wrong, not the former. In fact I would go as far as saying that, although perhaps not always expounded in the most compelling or entertaining manner, many many games have stories that I find far more rich and enjoyable than any other fictional media form. The sheer number of people who go out and buy books, comics, animated films etc, i.e. all material that expands on the game universes that they love, proves that many people enjoy stories in games.

People who go around banding about this line about VG's having terrible stories, as if their literative tastes somehow place them as superior to everyone else, are arrogant and fail in possessing the ability to properly deconstruct and qualify their argument.

Story focussed VG's have become popular over the last decade precisely because people enjoy being told a compelling story through the games they play. It's a greater dimension than simply being handed a bunch of incoherent and non-relatable mechanics and being told to make your own fun. It's enjoying the privaledge of being afforded player agency within a finely crafted world, with its own rules, characters, backstory of someone else's (an artist's) making. The story (plot, setting, world, characters) grants context to your fun, and ties everything together in a manner which allows your imagination to take you out of the real world and let you be absorbed into the game's fiction for a time and an adventure.

What games, and thus developers need to work more on imho is the "story-telling" or "narrative" part. That's the balance between interactive gameplay and story exposition. The best games do this very well, and of these there are a great many, stretching back from the very inception of videogaming as a medium. It is unfortunate however that many games also fail at this, leaving the player with a sense of either irrelevance to the gameworld (through a lack of player agency), or a sense of being left to his or her own devices too much without being given enough context to fully appreciate, enjoy or be entertained by the game overall. It's a very difficult balance to get right, and I feel that to throw around sweeping statements like "99% of game stories are shit", is offensive to those who do such a great job of balancing an exposition of the gameworld's story, with the level of interactivity that gamers expect from games.

In conclusion, I would agree with anyone who says that games need to push into more subtle and seamless methods of story narration, emphasising stuff like player discovery etc. I would also agree that games as a medium need to mature their tools & devices for story-telling, and not just rely on extensive scripting, cutscenes and QTEs (which can come across a bit lazy if overused). But I would not agree that games need to de-emphasise story or do away with it completey ("because it's all shit"...tut...), because in doing so, how would the medium improve further?

No... I'd like to see a melding of story and gameplay perfected. And that will take ambitious developers, many many attempts, and a communitive learning effort across the board.

 

[DuckThor Evil]

^ Good stuff!

 

[Silent_Buddha]

The first Halo (and probably every Halo since) have never really told much of a story because Bungie have never really been great story tellers. Saying that though there was still about the same amount of story in Halo:CE as there was in the majority of action/shooter type games of that similar genre in that generation. Comparing a last gen-game whose story-telling was very much limited by the budgets and technical limitations of the HW last gen, with a current gen game like Uncharted and ME is more than a bit of an apples to oranges comparison. And your proposed link between sales and story quantity in games is demonstrably incorrect, as games like God of War, Gears, ME, Skyrim, COD & BF3 all had considerably more story/narrative emphasis than Halo:CE.

And you've pretty much proven my point. With the exception of COD, all of those have performed worse than a game with very little story. And out of those COD along with BF3 probably have the least story. And considering that a large and significant chunk of the COD/BF3 user base have never touched the SP, just how important is it? I know I love the SP for COD, but if I go to a forum it appears I'm in the minority there.

ME and Skyrim having the most with ME doing worse than COD or BF3 while Skyrim is closer to BF3 at least. Hell, ME3 has gotten so FPS oriented that there's quite a few people that haven't even touched it's SP and have only played it's MP. Even with Skyrim, it being at least somewhat of a sandbox like the ones prior to Morrowind, albeit far more limited, has many people who don't really pay attention to its story. And the first TES game had very little story to speak of. Only barely more of a story than Halo: CE.

Gameplay matters far more than story. Except that for some reason many developers/publishers think it's the story that sells the game (which is true in some cases, but not all). And hence we have story's shoehorned into games which don't need them and oftentimes the game ends up worse.

Regards,
SB

 

[fearsomepirate]

It isn't that most games' stories are crap. Not at all.

I have no trouble in saying "most" with full, complete confidence. I've played around 25 games this gen. The ones that had high quality settings/plots that in my opinion actually took advantage of the medium (regardless of how I felt about the gameplay) were Dead Space, Journey, COD: W@W, and Demon's Souls. I'm not sure I should put W@W since it's WW2, but I think it did what it did quite well without ever devolving into absurdity.

The solidly B/C-rated, campy stuff that is full of all kinds of crap that only gets accepted because it's a video game includes the first two MW games, Black Ops, Oblivion, Bioshock, Borderlands (which could have been better, but they dropped the ball halfway through), Rage, the first two Resistance games (esp. the 2nd), Dragon Age: Origins, Crysis 2, Uncharted 2, both Killzone games, Assassin's Creed 2, and Darksiders, all for different reasons. Some of those I think I could confidently extend to the sequels and prequels I haven't played.

In the LOL WTF category are Just Cause 2, MW2, MW3, and Resident Evil 5. (Black Ops is marginally between these two categories, but I liked Reznov and at least could follow the story, so I put it in the second group.)

I didn't play White Knight Chronicles long enough to hate it intelligently, but I think it would end up in LOL WTF. And I'm not sure if I'd put R&C: ToD in the first or second category.

I feel that to throw around sweeping statements like "99% of game stories are shit", is offensive to those who do such a great job of balancing an exposition of the gameworld's story, with the level of interactivity that gamers expect from games.

I don't see how 99% being bad is offensive to the 1% that are good.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

I would say that this prevailing internet mentality which continues to purport the idea of "video game stories being shite", is at its heart fundamentally flawed, and also fails to see the very reason why more cinematic elements and devices are used in modern games in the first place.
...
No... I'd like to see a melding of story and gameplay perfected. And that will take ambitious developers, many many attempts, and a communitive learning effort across the board.

I generally agree with this. Some of the stories being told are very competant, or at least the equal of Hollywood. However, I don't think wanting a better integration or telling of story is mutually exclusive to wanting games that are just games and don't need a story to remain focussed on just games. eg. Motorstorm. That franchise launched as just a racer, like many last-gen racers. Motorstrom:Apocalypse added a story which isn't of any value to the racing experience. Now maybe a good story is added value to any game, but it is unnecessary and they could have got away without any story. I see no point in trying to develop clever story-telling techniques that'll work within a lap-based racer so that Motorstorm 4 can tell an amazing epic. Leave the story telling techniques to the Mass Effects and Uncharteds and sci-fi shooters.

 

[fearsomepirate]

One of the things to keep in mind about story is that to the extent it takes away from gameplay, it actually lessens replay value. A great story told through cutscenes and scripted events is exciting to sit through once. The second time is okay. The third or fourth time, though, when you're focused on getting achievements or just replaying your favorite levels, it becomes a hindrance. Halo's relative lack of cutscenes is one reason why I've played through the campaign at least a dozen times. So the developer also need to ask whether his game is intended to be played over and over, or just once or twice before moving on to the multiplayer.

 

[green.pixel]

You need to stop playing video games, then, because 99.9999999% of video game stories don't even rise to pulp fiction level. If you want a narrative to feed your brain, I might suggest books.

This.

I'd rather have my mind be entertained/challenged and it to be the deciding factor instead of what I can do with my hands or body, because for those a reality based sports/entertainment provide me plenty of satisfactory activities and challenges.

So your mind isn't entertained/challenged when you are playing a good action or strategy game? If you could sleepwalk through them or press a button to win, you wouldn't enjoy yourselves, would you?

Im not that picky or hard to please, but yeah most of the time the scale is more full at the entertained side instead of challenged.

This is the problem with your argument. People are often caught up in a narrow meaning of entertainment'^, usually something cheap or dumb or shallow. While it's the opposite of that and can vary to great lengths, even descend into pain and sadness (i.e. reading/watching tragedies). Challenge and fun are inseparable. People tackle challenges because they are stimulating, and they are enjoying themselves (aka having fun) because they are stimulated by the material. In other words, challenging yourself is empowering. Afer a certain time, they need more intricate material to keep them stimulated because the novelty of whatever they have been dedicated to will worn off, i.e they have developed their taste.

*entertainment = fun = pleasure/enjoyment. The purpose of all art is to give pleasure. The most complex artworks have the potential of being the most enjoyable/entertaining. Because of the confusion of this simple concepts, people like this and TGC may one day be considered the experts of gaming just like the modernists did in painting/sculpture during the last century.

 

[Shifty Geezer]

*entertainment = fun = pleasure/enjoyment. The purpose of all art is to give pleasure. The most complex artworks have the potential of being the most enjoyable/entertaining. Because of the confusion of this simple concepts, people like this and TGC may one day be considered the experts of gaming just like the modernists did in painting/sculpture during the last century.

You can't use that definition. Some people find entertainment in being shocked or scared, such as watching horror flicks. That's a very different form of entertainment to having fun. Entertainment mostly seems to be about keeping brains from getting bored.

 

[snarfbot]

i just think that if were at a point where games cost as much or more than hollywood movies to make, the devs should know whether the story they intend to tell is garbage or not. not to say that bad movies dont get made they certainly do. but at least everyone participating in the production probably knows start to finish that theyre making a crap movie. it seems like in videogames they dont actually realize that the story they created is crap for some reason.

another problem is that devs or publishers seek writers, rather than writers pitch ideas to studios. this in combination with the recent desire for all AAA games to be "story-driven" often results in an uninspired story force fed down the players throats. crysis 2, for example had a character devoted to info-dumping the entire plot, nathan gould.

this is poor storytelling. although it has worked in the past, for instance nolf's story was pretty heavy handed, but it was funny and entertaining, so execution matters obviously.

anyway, games can be fun to play without having compelling stories, but a game with a really shit story thats in your face makes it suck fast.

diablo 3 for instance has a horrible story, and for some reason your forced to play through the story over and over again, the devs should have known better. known that their story was garbage, and designed the game as to make the story less integral to the experience. now the game does have some other problems but at its heart its mechanics are solid, and its fun to play.

in other words as long as a bad story doesnt get in the way of a good game, the game will still be good. a bad game with a good story likewise can also be successful.