He's so right. I've mostly abandoned games that aren't sandbox/survival/strategy (also known as "make your own narrative") because the stories are so bad. If I have to do the same mediocre combat...
Exemplary
He's so right. I've mostly abandoned games that aren't sandbox/survival/strategy (also known as "make your own narrative") because the stories are so bad. If I have to do the same mediocre combat for half an hour to get to the next story nugget, and that nugget is poop as opposed to gold, why am I doing this?
DayZ is the best game for this in my opinion. But it’s a huge time investment. Even a skilled player like Smoke (a twitch streamer) might take 3 hours to get to the point where he’s not just...
DayZ is the best game for this in my opinion. But it’s a huge time investment. Even a skilled player like Smoke (a twitch streamer) might take 3 hours to get to the point where he’s not just running around and trying to find interesting player interactions. And because everything resets when you die, most every time you load up the game you’re starting from scratch. So each session can start with hours of setup and anticipation.
I wish we'd get more games like RimWorld where the game is actively trying to generate an interesting experience for you, but the game is sandbox-y enough that anything can happen once an event...
I wish we'd get more games like RimWorld where the game is actively trying to generate an interesting experience for you, but the game is sandbox-y enough that anything can happen once an event fires. The other day I had colonist with a religion that made him extra against seeing dead bodies. Then a massive space battle took place and it littered the map with dead bodies. The guy went fucking nuts, decided to go become feral, and wandered the map like an animal until I could tame him. Nobody's going to write that into a game, it's something that happened organically and it was hilarious and interesting because the game's the perfect mix of randomness and crafted story.
I think the reason more games aren't like that is because it can often lead to really frustrating moments (where the game just completely commits itself to destroying your colony), but still. I'd like to see more of that.
I'm going to throw a match in this gas station, and postulate that the same thing kind of happened with The Last Jedi, in that a lot more people wanted a paint by numbers experience that the movie...
I'm going to throw a match in this gas station, and postulate that the same thing kind of happened with The Last Jedi, in that a lot more people wanted a paint by numbers experience that the movie just was not interested in providing, and hated it for not even trying to live up to the expectations that they had in their mind.
Seems a little derivative to say, "this game makes a horrible book, ergo the writing is bad." Your average triple-A RPG isn't looking to create a three act narrative so much as keeping a player...
So, if your game has a story that coherently gets from the start to the end, has a couple memorable characters and lines of dialogue, and doesn't waste a ton of time, the world's most forgiving audience will hail it as great.
Seems a little derivative to say, "this game makes a horrible book, ergo the writing is bad." Your average triple-A RPG isn't looking to create a three act narrative so much as keeping a player playing and giving you moments that resonate with a character or an aspect of the world or pay off a previous bit, which is hard to do in a non-linear medium.
Dammit I just came here to post this. For the most part I hate stories in games, I play games for the not-story, and the part that makes me hate the story is that the stories are at such a...
Dammit I just came here to post this.
For the most part I hate stories in games, I play games for the not-story, and the part that makes me hate the story is that the stories are at such a conflict with the medium of the game. It feels like every story lead of a AAA game wishes they could be a movie director, because they keep cramming in a movie-style story through cutscenes in to games that are at odds with the content of the cutscenes.
I was playing some Madden 21 the other day (it's free on the EA Pass on origin), and tried their career mode. The entire format of the career mode is that you start out playing in high school, there's a bunch of cutscenes setting up your character, showing them interact with the high school coach (who you'll never interact with in game), your friend and teammate (who I don't believe plays any role in the games), as you progress through one or two games of high school football, then going to college, then playing in college, presumably all the way through to getting drafted to the NFL. The main problem is that -- well first it's mediocre writing that I can't skip so I'm sitting there bored waiting to get to the gameplay part -- but then the cutscenes don't follow the gameplay at all. I accidentally set it on easy mode, so it puts me in to a game between cutscenes, I end up crushing the other team something like 63-0 as a QB, and then I get a cutscene from the college coach about how he doesn't have confidence in me so he's putting the other QB in and leaving me on the bench. My in-game persona is the god of football, destroying teams and blowing out records every time I play, I'm not just a Hall of Fame candidate -- at this pace I will pave over the HOF and put up a museum to myself. My in-story persona is the complete opposite, because they wrote a story and made a movie and had to include the game part in there somehow, so they just lazily shove it in on the side.
FIFA 21 has the opposite approach for their career mode, it has no cutscenes at all (almost to a detriment). You design your character, you choose the attributes and stuff you want, and then you go play. You get better over time as you play (and do drills outside of games, etc.), and your career progresses as you play the game. There's no alter-persona going through a storyline while you play the main game to the side of it, the game is the main attraction and the career progression happens alongside it.
RDR2 had a few moments like that too, where (well aside from us already knowing the beats of the game because they used the same story beats in the last 20+ years of GTA games so you can usually tell how a character's arc is going to turn out from the moment you see them because it's written on their forehead) in game you're on a rampage in a city, blowing away dozens and dozens of cops, completely murdering their entire police force, wiping it out in one day. The cutscenes after the mission treat as an event that requires you to go underground and escape the heat, and you have a huge bounty on your head and how could anyone pay that off -- the cutscene ends and I'm back in the game and since money doesn't have many sinks in the actual gameplay, I just paid off the bounty right away and was free to return to that city all I wanted, strolling through town on my horse right after committing the worst terrorist act in America for another 100 years.
The Dark Souls games had the best story experiences for me, because they load the setting full of awesome atmosphere and incredibly creativity, and carry the story in very thin lines of cryptic dialogue, the rest to be discovered through item descriptions, or paying attention to environmental details in the game world. There's lore videos on youtube that people have put tons of effort in to, piecing together the history of the world and how it fits in with the dreamy logic of the gameplay. The story and plot and lore of the Dark Soulses is borne almost entirely through the gameplay -- not thrown in your face through long boring cutscenes where you're watching a character that looks like you(r game avatar) but doesn't act anything like you. And the best part is you can skip through or past the story as fast and easily as you want the next time.
The recent post-2016 Hitman games does a similar thing, where the cutscenes are very short and just glue together context for the levels, and the gameplay takes centerstage. You learn about the characters in the game by listening in on conversations in-game, and finding details in-game. You can play however you want and it's not at odds with the story. Almost everything about the setting, characterization, and world is discovered by you in the game, with you playing and moving around the character and controlling the engagement.
I think the biggest successes in story in games is when the person writing and developing it understand that video games are a medium unto themselves, and the best way of conveying a story is in a way that naturally fits with the main and most important part of the game: the gameplay. I'm tired of watching movies in games, that sit alongside the game, but aren't the game itself. I don't want to watch the movie, I want to play the story.
Yeah. I've basically stopped playing AAA games for this reason. All the games I've played recently are indie titles that, despite having no particular focus on narrative, end up revealing...
Yeah. I've basically stopped playing AAA games for this reason. All the games I've played recently are indie titles that, despite having no particular focus on narrative, end up revealing compelling characters and relationships over the course of the game, whether shaped by player agency or not. Good examples include:
Celeste
Supergiant games (Bastion, Pyre, Transistor, and especially Hades)
Startdew Valley
Crypt of the NecroDancer (an interesting example because it's got very limited player agency, but the characters and their relationships are imo quite compelling)
Everspace
Meanwhile, the few AAA games I have played end up needing to rest completely on their gameplay, because their narrative is either boring or downright abhorrent - see, for instance, the entire Call of Duty franchise, which has gone from bog-standard war hero narratives to deeply screwed up stories like those of Black Ops and Modern Warfare 3. (I don't know about more recent games in the franchise as I gave up at that point.)
Yeah, I just finished playing the latest episode of the story of The Long Dark, and despite loving the Survival mode, I'm really conflicted about the story. For a game where the gameplay is so...
Yeah, I just finished playing the latest episode of the story of The Long Dark, and despite loving the Survival mode, I'm really conflicted about the story. For a game where the gameplay is so freeform, the story has you on really tight rails.
I know that the term "ludonarrative dissonance" is thrown around a lot these days, but it's really one of the core problems of game stories. When the story is aligned with gameplay, both are supported, but a lot of otherwise enjoyable games fall down on this front.
Hm, it's kind of odd they removed the campaign mode in FIFA 21. 19 and 20 both had campaign modes that are reminiscent of the Madden 21 one you described. The 19 one is especially annoying since...
Hm, it's kind of odd they removed the campaign mode in FIFA 21. 19 and 20 both had campaign modes that are reminiscent of the Madden 21 one you described. The 19 one is especially annoying since the cutscenes are long, laborious, and totally unskippable for some reason too.
Huh from what I can google around, it looks like there might still be a Madden-esque story mode in the "Volta" mode. I guess I'm in the other career mode where you just play your pro and have fun....
Huh from what I can google around, it looks like there might still be a Madden-esque story mode in the "Volta" mode. I guess I'm in the other career mode where you just play your pro and have fun.
I remember NBA 2k19 had a Madden-esque story mode that was not bad. Had a lot of the mediocre writing (that always aligns to the basic journey all these games have to follow) but also had a great focus on actually playing the game.
I'd definitely say most video game stories are quite bad. But I also feel there are some great stories in video games. The average video game story might be worse than the average movie story. But...
I'd definitely say most video game stories are quite bad. But I also feel there are some great stories in video games. The average video game story might be worse than the average movie story. But the average movie probably also has a terrible, generic, uninteresting story, so I don't know.
I very much agree with observation 6, as most of my favorite video game stories are in indie games. Having a single person, or few people create the game and thus the story is a good way to prevent having a soulless bad story. Of course most indie games too have bad stories, because the story often just isn't the focus of the game. Most games aren't designed with the story as the main focus, so I think it is very understandable that the story isn't going to be something incredible.
I almost think it is a bit unfair in this situation to consider story based games and purely mechanics driven games the same thing in this context. If I am playing an auto battler I don't care if it has no story or a bad story.
Games are also just a mix of so many different things, mediums, it is pretty much impossible to have all of them be good. The game play, the graphics, the music and other sounds, the story. No other medium has to tackle so many things at the same time. So yes, video games stories are often quite bad, but that is because making a good video game story is hard. Making good video games is really difficult.
That must make me an outlier then, because I play videogames to experience stories and I care a lot about good storytelling in videogames. That said it is true that most videogame storytelling is...
Gamers don't generally care about your game's story. They want the adrenaline spikes of shooty-bang-bang, or the sweet dopamine hits from filling up status bars.
That must make me an outlier then, because I play videogames to experience stories and I care a lot about good storytelling in videogames. That said it is true that most videogame storytelling is lousy at best...
He's so right. I've mostly abandoned games that aren't sandbox/survival/strategy (also known as "make your own narrative") because the stories are so bad. If I have to do the same mediocre combat for half an hour to get to the next story nugget, and that nugget is poop as opposed to gold, why am I doing this?
DayZ is the best game for this in my opinion. But it’s a huge time investment. Even a skilled player like Smoke (a twitch streamer) might take 3 hours to get to the point where he’s not just running around and trying to find interesting player interactions. And because everything resets when you die, most every time you load up the game you’re starting from scratch. So each session can start with hours of setup and anticipation.
I wish we'd get more games like RimWorld where the game is actively trying to generate an interesting experience for you, but the game is sandbox-y enough that anything can happen once an event fires. The other day I had colonist with a religion that made him extra against seeing dead bodies. Then a massive space battle took place and it littered the map with dead bodies. The guy went fucking nuts, decided to go become feral, and wandered the map like an animal until I could tame him. Nobody's going to write that into a game, it's something that happened organically and it was hilarious and interesting because the game's the perfect mix of randomness and crafted story.
I think the reason more games aren't like that is because it can often lead to really frustrating moments (where the game just completely commits itself to destroying your colony), but still. I'd like to see more of that.
I'm going to throw a match in this gas station, and postulate that the same thing kind of happened with The Last Jedi, in that a lot more people wanted a paint by numbers experience that the movie just was not interested in providing, and hated it for not even trying to live up to the expectations that they had in their mind.
Seems a little derivative to say, "this game makes a horrible book, ergo the writing is bad." Your average triple-A RPG isn't looking to create a three act narrative so much as keeping a player playing and giving you moments that resonate with a character or an aspect of the world or pay off a previous bit, which is hard to do in a non-linear medium.
Dammit I just came here to post this.
For the most part I hate stories in games, I play games for the not-story, and the part that makes me hate the story is that the stories are at such a conflict with the medium of the game. It feels like every story lead of a AAA game wishes they could be a movie director, because they keep cramming in a movie-style story through cutscenes in to games that are at odds with the content of the cutscenes.
I was playing some Madden 21 the other day (it's free on the EA Pass on origin), and tried their career mode. The entire format of the career mode is that you start out playing in high school, there's a bunch of cutscenes setting up your character, showing them interact with the high school coach (who you'll never interact with in game), your friend and teammate (who I don't believe plays any role in the games), as you progress through one or two games of high school football, then going to college, then playing in college, presumably all the way through to getting drafted to the NFL. The main problem is that -- well first it's mediocre writing that I can't skip so I'm sitting there bored waiting to get to the gameplay part -- but then the cutscenes don't follow the gameplay at all. I accidentally set it on easy mode, so it puts me in to a game between cutscenes, I end up crushing the other team something like 63-0 as a QB, and then I get a cutscene from the college coach about how he doesn't have confidence in me so he's putting the other QB in and leaving me on the bench. My in-game persona is the god of football, destroying teams and blowing out records every time I play, I'm not just a Hall of Fame candidate -- at this pace I will pave over the HOF and put up a museum to myself. My in-story persona is the complete opposite, because they wrote a story and made a movie and had to include the game part in there somehow, so they just lazily shove it in on the side.
FIFA 21 has the opposite approach for their career mode, it has no cutscenes at all (almost to a detriment). You design your character, you choose the attributes and stuff you want, and then you go play. You get better over time as you play (and do drills outside of games, etc.), and your career progresses as you play the game. There's no alter-persona going through a storyline while you play the main game to the side of it, the game is the main attraction and the career progression happens alongside it.
RDR2 had a few moments like that too, where (well aside from us already knowing the beats of the game because they used the same story beats in the last 20+ years of GTA games so you can usually tell how a character's arc is going to turn out from the moment you see them because it's written on their forehead) in game you're on a rampage in a city, blowing away dozens and dozens of cops, completely murdering their entire police force, wiping it out in one day. The cutscenes after the mission treat as an event that requires you to go underground and escape the heat, and you have a huge bounty on your head and how could anyone pay that off -- the cutscene ends and I'm back in the game and since money doesn't have many sinks in the actual gameplay, I just paid off the bounty right away and was free to return to that city all I wanted, strolling through town on my horse right after committing the worst terrorist act in America for another 100 years.
The Dark Souls games had the best story experiences for me, because they load the setting full of awesome atmosphere and incredibly creativity, and carry the story in very thin lines of cryptic dialogue, the rest to be discovered through item descriptions, or paying attention to environmental details in the game world. There's lore videos on youtube that people have put tons of effort in to, piecing together the history of the world and how it fits in with the dreamy logic of the gameplay. The story and plot and lore of the Dark Soulses is borne almost entirely through the gameplay -- not thrown in your face through long boring cutscenes where you're watching a character that looks like you(r game avatar) but doesn't act anything like you. And the best part is you can skip through or past the story as fast and easily as you want the next time.
The recent post-2016 Hitman games does a similar thing, where the cutscenes are very short and just glue together context for the levels, and the gameplay takes centerstage. You learn about the characters in the game by listening in on conversations in-game, and finding details in-game. You can play however you want and it's not at odds with the story. Almost everything about the setting, characterization, and world is discovered by you in the game, with you playing and moving around the character and controlling the engagement.
I think the biggest successes in story in games is when the person writing and developing it understand that video games are a medium unto themselves, and the best way of conveying a story is in a way that naturally fits with the main and most important part of the game: the gameplay. I'm tired of watching movies in games, that sit alongside the game, but aren't the game itself. I don't want to watch the movie, I want to play the story.
Yeah. I've basically stopped playing AAA games for this reason. All the games I've played recently are indie titles that, despite having no particular focus on narrative, end up revealing compelling characters and relationships over the course of the game, whether shaped by player agency or not. Good examples include:
Meanwhile, the few AAA games I have played end up needing to rest completely on their gameplay, because their narrative is either boring or downright abhorrent - see, for instance, the entire Call of Duty franchise, which has gone from bog-standard war hero narratives to deeply screwed up stories like those of Black Ops and Modern Warfare 3. (I don't know about more recent games in the franchise as I gave up at that point.)
Yeah, I just finished playing the latest episode of the story of The Long Dark, and despite loving the Survival mode, I'm really conflicted about the story. For a game where the gameplay is so freeform, the story has you on really tight rails.
I know that the term "ludonarrative dissonance" is thrown around a lot these days, but it's really one of the core problems of game stories. When the story is aligned with gameplay, both are supported, but a lot of otherwise enjoyable games fall down on this front.
Edit: I expand on my thoughts on TLD: E4, over here in the current game thread.
Hm, it's kind of odd they removed the campaign mode in FIFA 21. 19 and 20 both had campaign modes that are reminiscent of the Madden 21 one you described. The 19 one is especially annoying since the cutscenes are long, laborious, and totally unskippable for some reason too.
Huh from what I can google around, it looks like there might still be a Madden-esque story mode in the "Volta" mode. I guess I'm in the other career mode where you just play your pro and have fun.
I remember NBA 2k19 had a Madden-esque story mode that was not bad. Had a lot of the mediocre writing (that always aligns to the basic journey all these games have to follow) but also had a great focus on actually playing the game.
I looked up that Volta mode in 21, I thought that's what you were referencing because it does seem very pared down compared to its version in 20.
I'd definitely say most video game stories are quite bad. But I also feel there are some great stories in video games. The average video game story might be worse than the average movie story. But the average movie probably also has a terrible, generic, uninteresting story, so I don't know.
I very much agree with observation 6, as most of my favorite video game stories are in indie games. Having a single person, or few people create the game and thus the story is a good way to prevent having a soulless bad story. Of course most indie games too have bad stories, because the story often just isn't the focus of the game. Most games aren't designed with the story as the main focus, so I think it is very understandable that the story isn't going to be something incredible.
I almost think it is a bit unfair in this situation to consider story based games and purely mechanics driven games the same thing in this context. If I am playing an auto battler I don't care if it has no story or a bad story.
Games are also just a mix of so many different things, mediums, it is pretty much impossible to have all of them be good. The game play, the graphics, the music and other sounds, the story. No other medium has to tackle so many things at the same time. So yes, video games stories are often quite bad, but that is because making a good video game story is hard. Making good video games is really difficult.
That must make me an outlier then, because I play videogames to experience stories and I care a lot about good storytelling in videogames. That said it is true that most videogame storytelling is lousy at best...