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I feel like the author has missed some important games, like Star Control 2 and Final Fantasy 7.
Looks like they covered FF7.
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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…
A great example would be Dark Souls: incredible setting, but really bare-bones plot. The plot is effectively: "You're the chosen undead, and you must quest for some items." The setting, on the other hand, could fill books.
In some sense, it's similar to comparing a good news article to a good story. A good story. Good story generally can't be purely fact-based, since this interrupts the needs of narrative: pacing, good vs. evil, moral decisions, defeats, and victories, etc. A good news story may have something like a narrative, but it's more of a collection of facts. If there's an narrative at all, it exists simply to help explain the relevance of the facts presented.
Video games are metaphorically similar: You may have an interesting plot in the game, but it is punctuated by the actions you get to take as a player. For example, in Wind Waker you must rescue your sister, but in practice the player is running around an island, breaking pots, and doing sidequests. The narrative plot and the play actions are almost totally disparate. The plot is nearly a side story, which helps add context to the player actions.
I think the author is right that games generally have poor, or poorly executed stories, and even great stories need to be squeezed into the game play box (e.g. his "ends with bang"-trope.) But I also feel like the author misunderstands how the medium can elevate a story: "Old mans Journey" was critized for having too simple puzzles, but it is not a puzzle game. It's a story, where a few simple puzzles gives you time…
This question hints at how well gameplay and story interact which each other. In most action games, they barely interact at all.
(Also, as interactive experiences, games just are not necessarily dependent on having a story, as the article points out. If the experience is good enough, a story isn't really necessary. Alien Isolation doesn't have much of a story, but visceral, devastating gameplay. Bethesda games generally have poor stories, but it doesn't really matter because the gameplay is open ended enough that everyone can just make their own story inside the game. Online games don't have a story, or some thin veneer to put on a loading screen; they don't need that, because the people are here solely for the gameplay experience.)
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Got some examples for good games from China? As a counterexample to the first part, check out Nier Automata. One of the most original and compelling games I've played in recent years.
I actually found nier automatas story beats so cringey that I was turned off on the playing of it, honestly. Pretty early on a pile of robots start an orgy that creates a human-looking clearly-not-a-human villain. It felt totally directionless and random at the time. I didn’t really want to continue if I was just going to get weird shit happening with an overlay of philosophical hand waving.
You were unironically filtered. The game does name drop a lot philosophers, but it's meant to contextualize, not as part of the game's themes. Hell, the game doesn't even care about the "humans and robots aren't actually so different" question. I don't want to write a whole essay, so I'll just say that Automata is probably the best existentialist story written this decade, with a lot of subtle details, some _great_ acting, and melding of story and gameplay that has not even been attempted elsewhere. It is unique, and uniquely excellent, beyond the point where it can just be described as "a fantastic game". Doom 2016 is a fantastic game. Nier Automata is a game I've had as much fun thinking and writing about as I had playing it.
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…
> our standards for story telling in video games are really low. At the same time, the upcoming Uncharted movie is looking to be substantially less interesting than Uncharted 4.
The fact that the movie studios are now looking at videogames for inspiration is very telling IMO.
One thing that isn't mentionned is that games makes you engage way more with the story than movies because of how they are. In most games you can explore areas to discover more things. The equivalent doesn't really exist in movies or books. You can maybe reread a chapter or a paragraph. Pause a film and look at all the details. But that's something people rarely do unless they are analyzing the thing. In games, you h…
The more effort you make to integrate player actions, the less resources you have to make a compelling story. In the most obvious case: story branching, you have double the work for each branch, some of them may be hard to make interesting.
Some Japanese visual novels may have great stories, but they are games in name only. For example the "when they cry" series are literally visual novels (or sound novels as they like to call them), there are zero gameplay elements, and no branching, you are basically reading a book with a few illustrations and (very good) background music.
On the other side, some games focus so much on action that the only goal of the story is to tell you who the bad guys are and not get in the way of shooting them.
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Journey and Abzü are great examples of what video games can do with just exploration of the environment telling you a story with zero dialogue/exposition that by definition can't be done in other mediums
I haven’t played either game but any sort of visual medium is capable of story telling without dialogue or exposition: visuals can tell a story at least as effectively, if not more so, than words can. For a somewhat recent, very well regarded example, see the opening prologue of Up.
Too bad Bulletstorm has no jumping so I did not buy it.
In any case, even that's too much story for me. Look what happened with Doom. The 2016 game was pure. It knew what it was and ended that nonsense right away. Doom Eternal, on the other hand, had to feature a story, a castle, idiotic cut scenes and what not. Dear god. Just stop it.
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I played WoW for almost a decade and the only story I remember with much clarity is that of Pamela. Otherwise things happened quest objectives lit up and I think Arthas married Thrall or something.
I used to be deeply immersed in Warcraft lore. WoW helped me kick that habit, ironically. I think though if the game had good stories told well, more people would be interested in paying attention. And people are interested in WoW's story. Or else there wouldn't be as much squabbling about the latest way in which Blizzard butchered the story. FFXIV shows how much many players want to care. Some of my favorite story-b…
But to do that you need the main story set well which WoW has lacked since post-Arthas.