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Truths about video game stories

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Re: Truths about video game stories

#101

Post by bananamerica »

Aaargh20318 wrote: post #60
vjancik wrote: post #34

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…

> (…) his comparison of game stories to movies. > 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 ch…

You don't get to be the character, you get to control it within very narrow constraints...

Re: Truths about video game stories

#102

Post by bananamerica »

Toutouxc wrote: post #47

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).

In almost every way?

Re: Truths about video game stories

#103

Post by etiam »

Toutouxc wrote: post #47

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).

Out of curiosity, would you be willing to expand a bit on what specifically what you liked (and maybe didn't) about The Witcher 3?

Re: Truths about video game stories

#104

Post by bananamerica »

EdwardDiego wrote: post #69
imbnwa wrote: post #16

I wanna know what quality of zombie movie this guy is watching that The Last of Us is somehow beneath them. The only zombie movie worth a damn this century is 28 Days Later. The Last of Us Part II was an even more amazing story, I literally was saying NO at the penultimate scene on the beach. The franchise is so well done HBO is adapting it.

I'm one of those weirdos who thinks 28 Weeks Later was artistic genius, and that's a hill I'm willing to die on - all those people dying to save an asymptomatic carrier because he's a kid? Entirely plausible and tragic.

Weeks or days?

Re: Truths about video game stories

#105

Post by dudeman13 »

worrycue wrote: post #62
nosianu wrote: post #26

I have not played any computer game in over more than a decade, but I played a lot earlier. Anyway, what I did for a while - not recently due to a lack of good targets - is watch Youtube "playthrough no commentary" videos (and with story-less gameplay parts heavily cut out). That's usually 4-6 hours of game movie . The Last of Us was good, but the very top #1 for me as far as story goes - ignoring the game play compl…

> top #1 for me as far as story goes - ignoring the game play completely - was Horizon Zero Dawn I watched people play it to the end - mostly. I played it when it came out on PC - never completed it; the combat didn’t work for me. Personally I think it has a cool sci-fi premise but that’s it. I found the characters … stiff, shallow, and pretty cliché. Aloy is yet another messianic player character that we have seen a…

>I’m going to get skewered for saying this … but the story feels like it’s pandering to current social political trends - i.e. the obsession with diversity

How so? I didn't get that feeling at all from Horizon Zero Dawn.

If someone told me HZD had an obsession with diversity I'd react with a standard "wat?". I do agree that some of the forced diversity in modern stories is annoying, mind you. I just didn't get that vibe from that one story.

Re: Truths about video game stories

#106

Post by freeflight »

watwut wrote: post #59
eterm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. 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.

Let's be a bit more specific here: The first scene where the player encounters the marines is one where a scientist runs up to one of them, and gets gunned down by the marine.

That kind of scripted event, and environmental story-telling, was extremely novel in a FPS game back then.

It's easy to nowadays handwave that away as merely "Marines shoot player, player realizes Marines are enemy" like that kind of heavy scripting is just something mundane. But back then it wasn't mundane, it was quite revolutionary.

Before that the norm in the genre was mostly maze shooters with very limited NPC interactions, like certain Doom enemies fighting each other or some wall or another blowing up in Quake, Half-Life took all of that and brought it to a whole new level.

Re: Truths about video game stories

#108

Post by dudeman13 »

dakial1 wrote: post #82

As I get older (40 y/o) I'm noticing that my video game taste is migrating from dont-think-just-shoot FPS towards well written RPGs (but still with some action, and not turn based rpg). Might be interesting to know i f this happens with everyone...

I'll get back to turn based RPGs once the industry stops going bonkers with random encounter frequency (or ditches random encounters altogether).

It's ridiculous how The Last Sovereign, a lewd game made with RPG Maker is one of the few turn based games that got story and turn-based combat right.

Re: Truths about video game stories

#109

Post by freeflight »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #74
Aaargh20318 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (…) his comparison of game stories to movies. > 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 ch…

Exactly. And even if you don't have any real choices to make, you still get to experience the story as your story , not a tale. The author would probably think I'm a lunatic for it, but I consider the original Call of Duty: Modern Warfare trilogy to have a good story . I thoroughly enjoyed it, and unlike with other shooters, and even though it followed multiple characters simultaneously, I was able to suspend disbeli…

> it can make you live through a story, which neither books nor movies can. It's a distinct kind of experience.

SOMA is a great example of this; It could maybe also work as a movie or book, but the FPS perspective fits the story and narrative so good that it elevates the whole thing to its own unique experience.

A VR version could turn this to 11, but sadly any work on that seems to have fizzled out.

Re: Truths about video game stories

#110

Post by freeflight »

ycombinete wrote: post #66
DeathArrow wrote: post #14

Another truth is that you don't need a good story to achieve success. There are many successful games with no good story or no story at all.

I like the John Carmack quote: "Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important."

Imho that quote says more about what parts of games John Carmack has mostly worked on during his life than it actually says anything about storytelling in games.

The guy is so deep in code engineering that sometimes other, more nuanced, details can be seemingly totally lost on him.

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