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How exactly are Raiders of the Lost Ark or Breaking Bad storylines better than those of the first Mafia, The Witcher 3, Uncharted 4, Metro Exodus, Kingdom Come: Deliverance or Half-Life 2 + episodes? And I'm not even mentioning artistic pieces like What Remains of Edith Finch or Life is Strange. There are quests in The Witcher 3 you could make a movie from (Bloody Baron).
I remember all the press praising the original Half Life for its story. I was really surprised - it was the same story as all first person shooters going back to Doom: Bad guys spawn across an inter-dimensional portal and start wreaking havoc. Protagonist has to kill them all, crossing the portal in the process to go destroy the alien leader. There were some cool extra details - the G Man, the marines entering as a t…
I think the praise for Half Life was the story telling. The story itself is pretty generic scifi action, but the fact that you discovered it through the player rather than a paragraph of exposition or a cutscene was pretty novel for that genre
For the first hour or two you were implored to, "Get to the surface" because it was your and your fellow scientists hope of being rescued.
When you run into the marines you aren't told they're bad, they just start trying to kill you and you figure out that you're not getting a rescue.
World-building wise it was leaps ahead of anything that came before it and the in-game (rather than FMV) dialogue was fantastic and immersive.
It didn't have "level screens", the level transitions were natural rather than forced with loading screen hints and title cards.
While that's all completely standard now, the other competitor titles at the time were games like Quake 2 and half-life's predecessors were games like Duke Nukem 3D and Quake, which while both ground-breaking in their own way weren't a touch on the visceral world of half-life.
The only other FPS games that came close to lore was rainbow six, but that was the "set pieces" style of choosing levels and going through rehearsed action rather than what felt like an emergent world in half-life.
While replaying half-life now it feels far more linear and scripted, that's because we have nearly 15 years of gameplay improvements built on top of where it lay the foundations.
For players at the time, going from games like quake to half-life it really did feel like it was genre defining.
Reading this article makes me realize how little I know about games. I've never heard of any game the writer used as examples, except World of Warcraft (which I never played, however). The author made a lot of pithy statements, but the article feels strangely lack of substance. There's little evidence or elaboration. Just statement after statement, with a lot of repetitiveness. And the writing. Paragraphs like these:…
> He's quite plainly saying, that he's mediocre, but because everyone else is bad, he's great. Why is this bad thing to say? If he thinks this is true, then it is OK to say it. And earning money making games is actual achievement - most indie game makers are in financial loss and that is it. Someone who make small profit is exactly people who can say the above.
I mean it's fine to like your own achievement. Nothing wrong with that.
But he's certainly not successful enough to be so cocky as to detract everyone else's work (and again, he did so without much evidence or elaboration).
- Bastion
- The Stanley Parable
- Bioshock Infinite
- The Elder Scrolls series
- GTA: V
- Control
- Sam and Max
Sure this isn’t high art, but often is deeply compelling regardless. The possibilities of the medium are still yet to be fully explored.
Are there other titles I should look into?
How exactly are Raiders of the Lost Ark or Breaking Bad storylines better than those of the first Mafia, The Witcher 3, Uncharted 4, Metro Exodus, Kingdom Come: Deliverance or Half-Life 2 + episodes? And I'm not even mentioning artistic pieces like What Remains of Edith Finch or Life is Strange. There are quests in The Witcher 3 you could make a movie from (Bloody Baron).
Are you really suggesting Uncharted 4 has as good a story as Breaking Bad?
Edit: to explain a touch more - I liked the story and its characters more, and even though I played it over 2 years ago I still remember the story pretty well. Breaking bad had a couple interesting points but I couldn't tell you what happened between seasons or really much outside of the main points.
How exactly are Raiders of the Lost Ark or Breaking Bad storylines better than those of the first Mafia, The Witcher 3, Uncharted 4, Metro Exodus, Kingdom Come: Deliverance or Half-Life 2 + episodes? And I'm not even mentioning artistic pieces like What Remains of Edith Finch or Life is Strange. There are quests in The Witcher 3 you could make a movie from (Bloody Baron).
I remember all the press praising the original Half Life for its story. I was really surprised - it was the same story as all first person shooters going back to Doom: Bad guys spawn across an inter-dimensional portal and start wreaking havoc. Protagonist has to kill them all, crossing the portal in the process to go destroy the alien leader. There were some cool extra details - the G Man, the marines entering as a t…
Nah, the standards are just different because of the medium. Just like you wouldn't write a book where people sing for 10 minutes every time they talk, and you wouldn't write opera that lasts for 40 hours and has realistic acting and dialogs - you can't compare stories between different media ignoring the differences. And the difference that interactivity makes is bigger than the different constrains between novels and opera.
The more detailed and intricate a story of a game is - the less freedom of choice the player has. In the extreme case you have so called "visual novels" which let you make 10-20 choices the whole game at predefined places. They barely qualify as games and they are very niche genre in gaming because they don't play to the strengths of the medium. At that point you might as well read a "choose your own adventure" book. The most common emotion they cause in players is frustration because they wanted the protagonist to do something else, but they can't influence the story in any way at the moment.
On another end of the spectrum you have games like minecraft - where the story is your struggle vs the mechanics of the game, and there's no need for any pre-defined plot because you create the plot with every keyboard input you do every second. Freedom of choice = 100%, plot = 0%. Most gamers prefer these kinds of games because they can only be realized as games.
The plot in minecraft can be "night was coming and I forgot the close the doors to the mines, then a creeper came and blew up my bed and pushed me into a chasm near a river of lava - I had 5% hitpoints left and if I died then I would get respawned in random place on the map cause no bed - I would maybe have to spend hours trying to find my base again so I had to think hard how to get out of there alive". It's a great story that forces the player to feel strong emotions. And it won't happen to any other player the exact same way which makes it even better. If you add traditional plot to Minecraft you make it worse.
No matter if a story in art is detailed and intricate, or barely there - what matters is how it makes people feel. Novels have 100s of pages, poems might have 4 lines, but you won't say "stories in poetry suck".
In Opera the main point is music, so the story is designed around that (and the time and place constraints). In games the tradeoffs are different, but it doesn't mean that it's somehow "low standards".
Most games tend to prefer less plot and more freedom because it plays to the strengths of the medium. It's a trade-off.
> it was the same story as all first person shooters going back to Doom: Bad guys spawn across an inter-dimensional portal and start wreaking havoc
almost every book is Hero's Journey if we look from high enough. Details matter. You can take the same central conflict and write 1000 books that make you feel 1000 different emotions.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think the praise for Half Life was the story telling. The story itself is pretty generic scifi action, but the fact that you discovered it through the player rather than a paragraph of exposition or a cutscene was pretty novel for that genre
Absolutely this. In half-life you were exposed to a world and left to figure out what was going on from that. You were rarely directly told to do anything. For the first hour or two you were implored to, "Get to the surface" because it was your and your fellow scientists hope of being rescued. When you run into the marines you aren't told they're bad, they just start trying to kill you and you figure out that you're…
That is not exactly subtle nor needs much figuring. Them trying to kill you is game telling you they are bad in very straightforward way.
This author seems to have never played a game with an actual good story. You can tell from his comparison of game stories to movies. How can you compare a 2 hour narrative with a 10-100 hour narrative? This article grossly overgeneralizes stories in games and ignores the unique storytelling device that is a "game". A good book doesn't necessarily make for a good movie and a good movie doesn't necessarily make for a g…
> How can you compare a 2 hour narrative with a 10-100 hour narrative?
Not only the length makes video game stories different. Another huge difference is that in video games you actually get to be the character(s). You don’t just passively experience the story like in a movie or a book, you’re an active part of it. Even better: you can have the player make meaningful choices that affect the plot, which is something unique to games as a medium.