Too much story in modern games? *spawn

You'd better not be talking about SquarEnix ;p

Wasn't always like that, Outcast still shines.
(Beyond Good & Evil was really good at it too.)

 

Exactly. I'm not saying cutscenes are a bad thing, but it can't be all cutscene, or even mostly cutscene. Take Max Payne 3, for example. Based on the video that I mentioned above, even being generous in my timing, a full half of what I saw was watching non-interactive dialog scenes and even some action scenes (in an action game). It was so over the top and unbalanced that it caused the video's creator to make an entire other video discussing the problem. And he was right.

Most gaming is about roleplaying to an extent. Even if the role we have is that of an action hero. If you keep pulling the player out of it, and make them just watch the character do something, it takes that roleplaying away. In MP3, the player never gets a chance to really be Max Payne. They just watch the Max Payne movie and occasionally give him a nudge in the right direction or to help him shoot some bad guys.

I agree, it wasn't always like that. I mentioned Soul Reaver earlier, that one had quite a bit of story in it, but it was very spread out.. the cutscenes were there, and they were good, but they were also few and far between, buffered by hours of kick-ass gameplay. I worry that the reboot won't have that balance (that's what worries me about them calling it a "reboot" instead of a "remake", because I would be all over a straight-up remake like white on rice).

Prophecy, it looks like we agree in principle. Story is good, but not if it doesn't serve the gameplay, and vice versa. You bring up a good point in RTS games.. what's the point of a long involved story that doesn't have anything to do with the game?

I'm not saying that WD is too cutscene-heavy, based on what we saw, I'm just worried that it has the potential to be, based on recent trends in AAA gaming. And you're right.. modern AAA titles don't interest me as much as they used to. It really depends on what the balance is moving forward. I want to get in on the new generation, I just want to do it and not just watch it.

 

I don't know how you can look at the wealth of popular games out there--including non-video games--that lack any sort of "story" and conclude that without a story, people get bored and don't want to play. If everyone in the world actually had the tastes you think they do, chess would have fallen out of favor 100 years ago and all board games would be RPGs. Don't project your personal preferences onto the whole world. Lots of people aren't looking for playable stories and are perfectly entertained without them.

 

I think part of the problem with story is that these days it seems like they are being used much like different graphics were back in the platformer days. It's the same game all over again, but with a different skin/story. That gets tired sooner or later.

 

You're late to the party with this one. Earlier in the thread we uncover a difference in meaning between 'story' for different contributors, meaning a clash of understanding.

 

It's you that's misread my post. I said:

"Without plot, setting, characters, atmosphere, narrative and thus context, games would quickly get very boring"

Not just story.

I agree that a game doesn't have to have a story, but it must have characters and setting at least. And the more of the above mentioned narrative elements a game has, the more engaging it can be beyond just the core gameplay mechanics.

You see my meaning now?

 

Tetris.
'nuf said !
;p

 

This is perhaps the wrong-thinking that I think is prevalent. If the core gameplay mechanics are just right, the rest doesn't add anything, and can even take away from the experience. Take Roderic's example of Tetris. That game needs nothing more than it has. If you were to layer personailites onto the tetriminoes, and some story about having to save a tetrimino princess, would that add to the game? Not obviously.

An example that does bring together the elements well is Puzzle Quest, with an engaging puzzle gameplay fleshed out with narrative variety. But makers of other puzzle games know when they don't need an excess of narrative content, in a way makers of AAA titles don't. But then the definition of AAA title might involve heavy narrative anyway - it's not like that term really means anything. It's not a proper game grading system measuring game qualities or such.

 

I havent followed this thread and just started reading it at the last page, so i don't know if it has been mentioned before.

To me the most "too much" in modern games is the "cinematic" experience (and by that i don't mean the scenes with dialog i see those quite valid as a form of narrative through (cinematic)presentation) but the over-use and exaggeration of effects such as, motion blur, DoF, lens-flare/camera effects, the shacky camera for ex. that's what's too much in modern games imo.

As for the story side of things, quality is better than quantity/longevity. But since quality can be somewhat subjective it mostly can come down to presentation/execution/interaction. For example, some people think the story and presentation from crisis 2 better than the first one, while i find it completely appalling far fetched and ridiculous.

 

But why do we compare not like for like experiences? I mean....I like and want a good story and narrative in games. That doesnt mean I expect it in a simple game such as Tetris. But I surely expect it in an adventure game like Uncharted or Gears. I am not concerned about a silly plots in Virtua Fighter or Tekken. But I do want a good story and narrative in an RPG like Final Fantasy or Mass Effect.

 

Because the thread is me complaining about seemingly every game adding story elements even when it isn't needed. Tetris and Uncharted/Heavy Rain are polar opposites. But there are games that add story elements (not narrative, but actual explicit story) that don't need them, like Starhawk, and I'm suggesting that developers have got a bee in their bonnet about adding story unnecessarily and are wasting effort on it.

 

fair enough

 

I disagree fundamentally that story was superfluous in Starhawk. Might have been impemented badly (i dunno as I haven't played the game). But I wanted a Warhawk sequel with a SP player campaign. And according to Dylan Jobe and the rest of LBI, so did most of the the other fans of the original Warhawk game.

 

Starhawk's solo campaign isn't a proper single player experience. It's only a few hours long and serves as a tutorial for the campaign. The meat of SH's game is coop missions and online competitve play. There's certainly room for a single player Warhawk-type game, but it should be made as such, with the same care and attention as any other single player game rather than being a loose collection of cutscenes and maps from the multiplayer game.

 

Given that then, shouldn't the complaint be with LBI's implementation of a story mode campaign, rather than the question of whether the game needed one in the first place?

I'm sure a proper fully fleshed out story mode, would have served the game better and garnered much better reviews than if the game released without any story mode at all.

 

Most of those things are synonyms for "story."

Who is the main character of Sudoku? What's the setting of Tetris? What's the atmosphere of Words With Friends?

There are a variety of games where adding "plot" and "narrative" make the game less appealing to a lot of people, because for certain kinds of games, they're obstructions to the enjoyment. For example, I don't think Sudoku would be more popular if you had to click through cutscenes or read narrative text or whatever it would take to add a "narrative" and a "plot" to the game. The story modes in fighting games are not only widely panned, but fans of them explicitly express a complete lack of desire for a story. Same with sports games--no one wants drama in the next version of Madden NFL or FIFA.

I'm guessing you don't much care for those sorts of games, which is fine. To each his own. The problem is it appears that people like you run a lot of game companies and incorrectly assume everyone has the same desire to know what kind of person Yellow Triangle Bird is on the inside.

 

The cost of implementing a proper first person game is many millions. If LBI wanted that, they should have shelled out on it, but that'd have made for a very unwieldy, expensive game. It might have worked, like Uncharted, but LBI were really only wanting an online game, with the solo campaign as a trainer. If they had paired back on the trainer story and just provide a scenario editor or somesuch so the players could compete against bots for training, they'd have provided a better multiplayer experience at less cost.

My point here is that the designers should have focussed entirely on their game as an online game not needing a story and so designed the best experience for that, instead of designing a game and then adding a story-dressed training mode. The story was unnecessary and limited the solo experience. It's this intent to add story to every game that I find has gone to excess. Some games don't need story, and in these games the devs should focus on the gameplay and activity experience without worrying about the story experience, in order to produce the best possible activity experiences.

That doesn't mean story should be eradicated from all games. That doesn't mean some games don't do it right. It doesn't mean stories can't be 'games' as a form of entertainment. It only means the balance of elements in design favours story too strongly IMO such that games in general are investing in it unnecessarily, to the detriment of other areas of games where their efforts should be invested instead.

 

I wonder why more developers haven't done anything like the challenges in the Timesplitters games. TS2 was a critical and commercial success (I think TS3 wasn't as popular), and surely "101 things to do against the AI" wouldn't cost as much as hiring professional voice actors, scripting movie-like action sequences, and the like.

To some extent, I think that the arrival of online gaming has resulted in more than a few gaming babies getting thrown out with the last-gen bathwater.

 

There's also the reverse, to be fair. Stupid things like 'collect the junk' in the middle of a story-driven game, where the hero takes time out from surviving and saving the world to explore for trinkets to collect. Or as I just experienced, a stupid target to shoot a bottle in Sniper Elite 2 that caused the enemy to come and kill me. Why pollute games wtih random gameplay elements just to add longevity?

Perhaps this thread is really about a lack of general focus in game design?

 

"Collect all the crap" is a gameplay trope that should have died last gen.

Timesplitters challenges worked because they were variants of a multiplayer game that was fun in its own right--you know, "Win a 1 vs 8 game of team deathmatch using only shotguns," or, "Snipe the monkeys." That basic idea would work in any multiplayer game with a workable bot AI. Did you ever play it?