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Advancement of Storytelling in Games

Dr Eggman said:
They are some of the most recent great gaming stories. If you want me list all of the best stories in games it'd take me a good amount of time.

LA Noire's storytelling is good until now; I can't criticize the ending as I haven't finished it but I like the mystery the game exudes.

Mass Effect's story can be described as generic but the characters make you overlook that.

God of War caters to mythology fans. You'd appreciate it more if you were into Greek mythology.

Just because I picked 3 games you don't find to have good stories doesn't mean I have low standards (if that's what you're implying).
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I'm not. It's just that often when gaming stories are praised as being great, they're really only great in comparison to the rest of the stories in the medium.

It's like, would you like a shit burger, a dirt burger or a grass burger. Obviously reviewers will choose the grass burger because it doesn't have shit or dirt on it, but the grass burger certainly isn't tasty.
 
Dr Eggman said:
Mass Effect's story can be described as generic but the characters make you overlook that.

God of War caters to mythology fans. You'd appreciate it more if you were into Greek mythology.
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Outside of a few characters (which were even ruined in the sequel), ME's cast feels generic.

And I'm a myth buff and I despise GoW for bullshitting it. Hell, Disney's Hercules was much more fun despite it treating the mythos poorly too!
 
CoffeeJanitor said:
I'm not. It's just that often when gaming stories are praised as being great, they're really only great in comparison to the rest of the stories in the medium.

It's like, would you like a shit burger, a dirt burger or a grass burger. Obviously reviewers will choose the grass burger because it doesn't have shit or dirt on it, but the grass burger certainly isn't tasty.
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It's kind of the same with modern movies though. I haven't seen a purely great movie since The Social Network.

^ Really? They weren't the deepest characters but certainly they I had some sentiment for them.
 
I still think games can be great storytelliing mediums. Some games have shown glimpses of what it can become, even if the definitive story-telling game hasn't been made yet.

Uncharted: Movie-like "cinematography", characterization.
Mass Effect: Some characterization with some level of interactivity (even if it's limited to moralchoice)
Heavy-Rain: A new look at interactivity in a story-focused product.


And then there are titles like Alan Wake (written more like a novel than a video game?) and Half Life (removing some of the divide between player and protagonist) but I haven't played either so I don't want to comment too much on those.

The potential is there.
 
SalsaShark said:
Both Half Life 2 and Bioshock were better in terms of storytelling.



i dont get it :(
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No it wasn't better than System Shock. It also borrowed a lot of the basic ideas and plot twists from System Shock.
 
Maybe it's time for me to play System Shock 2.

How well has the game aged gameplay wise? Is it at least playable to experience the story?
 
Seda said:
I still think games can be great storytelliing mediums. Some games have shown glimpses of what it can become, even if the definitive story-telling game hasn't been made yet.

Uncharted: Movie-like "cinematography", characterization.
Mass Effect: Some characterization with some level of interactivity (even if it's limited to moralchoice)
Heavy-Rain: A new look at interactivity in a story-focused product.
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Can become?

These types of games have existed for a good while now.
 
What I want game storytelling to experiment more into is its interactivity. Not stupid BS like 'am I going to be the good guy or the bad guy this time around?', but actual scenarios where I want to think long and hard about what I (or my character, whatever) really want to do or reply in that situation. But not necessarily all 'it's all grey! everyone is bad in their own way!'. Doing that for its own sake gets old too.

HK-47 said:
I like how Chris Avellone isnt on the list
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Who's that? Didn't he write that Sonic RPG game?
CoffeeJanitor said:
Alyx is one of the most overacted and annoying game characters I've had to deal with in a long time. It also doesn't help that Gordon seems to be a joke character: he's mute and subservient to everyone.

I always found it really weird when Alyx attempted to flirt with Gordon...Or the player....Eh, it didn't work if you actually thought about what was happening.

HL2 also has cutscenes, it's just that you can move around when they happen. It doesn't make them any less obvious.
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Wow, I won't be the one taking all the flak this time around.
/hi5!
 
Fimbulvetr said:
Can become?

These types of games have existed for a good while now.
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What? All the games I mention are great great games (maybe Heavy Rain less so). I'm just saying it will be an awesome day when the complete package is put together. When someone jeers "lol story in games" and then I can go "heres exhibit A bitch" and then the tears of apology begin!

I'm not sure that game exists yet. But I'm open to see candidates, because I haven't played every game.
 
CoffeeJanitor said:
Alyx is one of the most overacted and annoying game characters I've had to deal with in a long time.
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Alyx has always been the western virtual waifu. More and more big games continue to fill a companion slot with a female character similar to her.
 
tiff said:
I thought the introduction of characters like Alyx was a detriment. Valve's method of storytelling works best when the player is relatively isolated, observing the events around them. It doesn't work as well when they add in important characters that you're supposed to form emotional attachments to, despite being unable to interact with them in any way.
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That's a valid point, i guess it depends on the player.

For me, personally, i thought adding Valyx as a companion kept you gonig and realizing there was a much bigger story arc happening at the same time as you made your progress trough the game. Same thing with Barney, etc. The fact that you only saw them from time to time, that they were doing their own stuff somewhere else, worked much better in selling you the scope of the whole thing.

The isolated aspect wasnt lost at all for me, since you actually spend most of the time with the game alone.
 
I've said this before but developers need to seriously sit down and think of someway to incorporate storytelling into the GAMEPLAY of their games. One of the biggest challenges, which has been brought up time and time again, is that games are an active medium.

Compared to literature and movies, where the story is set the the viewer is simply passively watching and unable to alter or change it, it's much easier to establish a good story and make it flow well. The viewer is constantly engaged and there's no unpredictability on their part, aside from not paying attention carefully.

So, here's the challenge:
Incorporate storytelling into games in an active and engaging manner

And the issues:
1. Cutscenes. They work because players can't act in unforeseen ways, but they're passive and non ideal for the medium
2. Players are unpredictable. You can have something like in the HL games where cutscenes are "real time" but even that has to restrict where players can go and what they can do during it

Possible solution:
I really think Valve has the right idea with the HL games. It's definitely moving in the right direction. Some changes I would make would be

1. Make the restrictions more natural. For instance, in cutscenes they prevent you from firing your weapon. Why not simply have the characters react to it (like Alyx saying "Wtf are you doing Gordon? Put that down!") and then resuming the cutscene afterwards.

2. This might be drastic, but impose penalties for stupid behavior. Back to HL, let's say the player is dumb and shoots Alyx and she dies. Have it be a game over then. Sure it'll suck, but it'll tell the player there are consequences and they won't do it again, BUT, more importantly, it'll be the players choice, not a game restriction

In addition to those things, just an improvement on the writing, but I honestly think that's a small issue compared to what I pointed out. You can always find good writers, but it takes skilled designers to be able to mix gameplay and storytelling in the manner I suggested
 
I'm pretty sure MMORPGs are the way forward for fantastic story-telling in this medium.

Singleplayer focused story-based games only appeal to a niche set of RPG/adventure gamers, or become non-games like Heavy Rain and LA Noire. The rest of the genres (FPS, TPS, beat-em-up) are fine with recycling B-movie action/adventure/hero themes because the story element takes a back seat to the action/gameplay.
 
daviyoung said:
I'm pretty sure MMORPGs are the way forward for fantastic story-telling in this medium.

Singleplayer focused story-based games will only appeal to a niche set of RPG/adventure gamers, or become non-games like Heavy Rain and LA Noire. The rest of the genres (FPS, TPS, beat-em-up) are fine with recycling B-movie action/adventure/hero themes because the story element takes a back seat to the action/gameplay.
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So you're saying devs shouldn't bother? Not to mention, how can you claim single player story based games are niche and then point to MMORPGs? There is still a significant portion of gamers who don't play those types of games at all
 
Dance In My Blood said:
Alyx has always been the western virtual waifu. More and more big games continue to fill a companion slot with a female character similar to her.
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Oh man don't get me started. One of the more freaking annoying trends. I'm not quite sure who started it, but Alyx and Cortana are definately to blame for this. Bioshock 2, Prince of Persia, Gears of War and Mass Effect are just some of the more recent offenders. It seems once game designers realised we were all secretly White Knighting Forever Alones they started designing female characters that would look up to the gamer, offer emotional support and get captured so we could save them.

As for story telling, I'd say it's declined in big budget games. There simply is nobody like the Bioware of old or Troika left. However I have hope that Indie games might step up soon, we've been getting better and better games from smaller teams (Amnesia and The Void come to mind) and I believe it's only a matter of time until a smaller dev team steps up and makes a game that caters to the niche market of players who like good stories and don't mind that not every line isn't read by a voice actor.
 
Really? Most of those companions are females because of Alyx's character?
 
Zoramon089 said:
So you're saying devs shouldn't bother?
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Pretty much, for many genres the story is somewhat irrelevant. It's great to have a fun, well-written, well-performed and well-thought-out one, but it should just be the glue that holds the action together.

If you're stuck with a protagonist you don't like, then you're going to dislike the game as a whole a lot more.

Zoramon089 said:
Not to mention, how can you claim single player story based games are niche and then point to MMORPGs? There is still a significant portion of gamers who don't play those types of games at all
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At the moment yes, and in the same way that a summer blockbuster sells more tickets than a story-heavy indie.

Story driven games will always be niche, but MMOs allow the player complete freedom in their world, with instantaneous story-telling from the developers regardless of scope. They could create a twist that affects a player, a group, or the entire world.
 
Alyx is embarrassing and all action game female companions suck except the blonde chick from Uncharted 1 (the one from UC2 sucks). I just beat Singularity this week and I cringed when the chick showed up, they just couldn't help themselves.
 
How to fix game narratives:

- shorten the length of games, but increase choices for how to proceed in resolving it (more replayability)
- stop making everything about combat and killing
- start with the script and then build the gameplay
- get rid of the juvenile themes (and people)
- let the player decide what sort of story they want to experience, but give enough options to satisfy more people
- hire real script writers and pay them properly
 
One of the biggest problems I tend to notice is pacing and length. If your game is 12 hours long, then you need a story, characters, arcs, etc that can support that length. Most games feel to me like they pack like 2 hours (A movies) worth of story and exposition...into like a 15 hour game. It's ridiculous. I think that the entire "Story-Gameplay-Story-Gameplay-Story-Gameplay" structure that most games seem to have is ridiculous.

I've never really liked the "cinema worship" critique for this reason. And if gamemakers are looking at movies for inspiration...I think they would be better off looking towards television programs, or even books. They are better examples of long form story telling. Alan Wake tried to go with this route I suppose...but in my eyes, they failed miserably. Cutscene....Alan runs through the forest for 2 hours....Cutscene....Alan runs through the forest for 2 hours. There were a couple of sections,
the scenes in his apartment, as well as the first part of the hospital level
, that seemed to lean more towards what I am thinking about, but they're weren't many.

There are sooooo many other issues, I barely know where to start, but this is one of them.
 
Storytelling in games is fairly pathetic overall and definitely held to a much lower standard as literature or even movies.

The older I get the more painfully obvious it becomes.

I prefer the more lighthearted , less pretentious stories these days when gaming, at least I don't have to feel shame in the place of the writers then who try to pass all kinds of muck off as serious A grade business.

Some games make up for it with atmosphere and setting (MGS1/hl1), others with sheer charm (ICO) but most just make me throw my hands up in the air going 'what the fuck is this shit' somewhere halfway through.
It seems like the more ambitious the storytelling gets, the more pretentious and obnoxiously bad it gets.

Apparently there's an audience for it though (hell look at all the 'books' spawned from game series that apparently have people buying and reading them by the thousands) , so whatever.


All the copy pasta clone spawning in the jrpg genre doesn't help either.
Some of my old favorites were okay/great through the eyes of teenage me, but seeing the same formula and story telling mechanics repeated ad nauseum in 100 other games when it's only really interesting the first time is depressing.

I guess anyone who was well read back when said games were released felt the same about them as many of us must feel about new games and their stories.
 
choodi said:
How to fix game narratives:

- shorten the length of games, but increase choices for how to proceed in resolving it (more replayability)
- stop making everything about combat and killing
- start with the script and then build the gameplay
- get rid of the juvenile themes (and people)
- let the player decide what sort of story they want to experience, but give enough options to satisfy more people
- hire real script writers and pay them properly
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I want to live in a world where a game based around these elements can succeed.
 
BioWare - Casey Hudson, Executive Producer:

Storytelling in video games has definitely matured a lot in the last decade. One way to look at the maturity of a medium is to look at how well the content makes use of the unique aspects of the experience. Just like early movies had not yet developed the sophisticated language of cinematic storytelling, early games had neither the features nor the content to really weave the emotional impact of great storytelling with the interactivity of the medium. And with games, interactivity is the core of the experience. The best contemporary videogames are doing really interesting things to bring storytelling subtleties and emotion into the interactivity.
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Hilarious from the company that made Dragon Age 2
 
choodi said:
- shorten the length of games, but increase choices for how to proceed in resolving it (more replayability)
- let the player decide what sort of story they want to experience, but give enough options to satisfy more people
- hire real script writers and pay them properly
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The first two are in contradiction with the third. By "real writers" I assume you mean people who have been taught to write for books and movies. The problem is, as someone pointed out in the ign article, these writers aren't necessarily prepared to write for an interactive medium. They may not have the knowledge to account for shit like gameplay and story segregation, or to include choice without contradicting their own writing.

Also the first two assume that choice is the end all be all of interactive storytelling, which(while nice) really shouldn't be necessary.

choodi said:
- stop making everything about combat and killing
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It is true that the majority of modern games are based around violence, but that isn't in inherent flaw in writing.

choodi said:
- start with the script and then build the gameplay
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This is not necessarily a solution, not as long as writers and game designers are not collaborating anyway. Once you get that to happen it can go in any order.
 
Metroid Prime had some of the best storytelling i've played in a game...mostly because you can pretty much choose to follow the scans or ignore them entirely.

Extremely interactive and that's what I loved about it.
 
Master Milk said:
It sounds like a VN.
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Pretty much this. A lot of the storytelling techniques that existing media rely on will mean sacrificing interactivity for narrative, and there's no real way around it. That's not to say it can't be done, however. Half-Life and Metroid Prime are what I would call good examples of how to deliver a story in a way that's still very conducive to, y'know, a game as opposed to a movie.
 
Chiggs said:
I can't really wait to discover the stunning narrative in Gears of War 3.

Should be faaaaaaantastic.
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Marcus is going to reunite with his father, show some respect.
 
Half Life 2 by definition doesn't have cutscenes (there is no "cut"). However, it does have scenes and they are awful. But I like to try and jump on people's heads while they express my greatness.
 
Y2Kev said:
Half Life 2 by definition doesn't have cutscenes (there is no "cut"). However, it does have scenes and they are awful. But I like to try and jump on people's heads while they express my greatness.
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No one is saying they are literal cutscenes, just that they fill the same role, often locking you in the room.

Really I think people hate on cutscenes to much because whats going on in them usually neither interesting or well written.
 
HK-47 said:
No one is saying they are literal cutscenes, just that they fill the same role, often locking you in the room.

Really I think people hate on cutscenes to much because whats going on in them usually neither interest or well written.
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Also probably from the assumption that the player is the main character and should always be in control, even though that's not necessarily the case.
 
NotTheGuyYouKill said:
Luckily for some of you guys, no actual IGN editor has actually written anything here, just the responses from the Devs. I thought it was interesting to see the thoughts of a few of these people despite some responses that are very uh... dry.

Edit:

Perhaps a list of the people being asked might interest people:
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Nope!

That said, I don't know why people think that developers are the authorities on question 1. They often say that they have no time to play games and certainly don't play obscure stuff. 2 is obviously their domain, but I'd like to think having a good 1 answer would make for a better 2.
 
Cage had a point when he said that games are difficult to relate to when you only have 10 actions. But the counter point I think is that if a game is well designed, you never feel like the actions you have are limiting. Freeman is never in a situation where he needed anything more than to run and gun. Creating tightly scripted experiences is a section of storytelling, one that I feel games are doing better and better all the time. It's also unique to an interactive experience.

Bioshock, Freespace 2, Portal 2 all fall under that category for me. Their scripts might not be the best in the world, but I always felt engrossed in the story they tried to convey to me. Shadow of the Colossus might even be the pinnacle of this type of story telling, with no script to speak of but a lot of emotional story telling shown in its gameplay, its music and its animation.
 
tiff said:
I thought the introduction of characters like Alyx was a detriment. Valve's method of storytelling works best when the player is relatively isolated, observing the events around them. It doesn't work as well when they add in important characters that you're supposed to form emotional attachments to, despite being unable to interact with them in any way.
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Well, I played Episode One going for the no shooting achievement, so I was completely dependent on Alyx to kill enemies for me. I'd flip Antlions onto their backs or lure zombies out into the open for her.

I'm not sure what you're expecting on the interaction front, as long as she's not getting in the way and is a cool character I'm satisfied.

Also, for all the B-B-BUT HALF-LIFE DOES HAVE CUTSCENES posts, would you prefer watching Gordan talk to characters and do silly QTEs or something? The best thing about HL2 is that it totally submerses you into this world, no cutting away from the first person, interactive perspective, no Mission 1 *briefing* Mission 2, etc. It's just *You're in City 17, go."
 
beastmode said:
Well, I played Episode One going for the no shooting achievement, so I was completely dependent on Alyx to kill enemies for me. I'd flip Antlions onto their backs or lure zombies out into the open for her.

I'm not sure what you're expecting on the interaction front, as long as she's not getting in the way and is a cool character I'm satisfied.

Also, for all the B-B-BUT HALF-LIFE DOES HAVE CUTSCENES posts, would you prefer watching Gordan talk to characters and do silly QTEs or something? The best thing about HL2 is that it totally submerses you into this world, no cutting away from the first person, interactive perspective, no Mission 1 *briefing* Mission 2, etc. It's just *You're in City 17, go."
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Its basically the same thing. No one said anything about QTEs/
 
I think HL2's bigger problem is that the silent protagonist gimmick really limits what kind of stories you can pull off effectively. At a certain point, relationships cease to remain believable and immersion ends up compromised.
 
Storytelling has BARELY advanced, just production values.

Except Red Dead Redemption, the pinnacle of video game storytelling to date.
 
One videogame-storytelling-technique. that really worked great so far, is archaeology-storytelling. I mean that stories, were the important parts already happened and leaved clues over the past behind. So its mostly an optional and interactive mission to find this clues and set the pieces together to understand what is going on in the gameworld. This clues can be items, architecture, monsters, characters, hidden texts, other information's and even gameplay. Two great games. which are using this technique, are the Metroid-Series and Zelda: Majoras Mask. Of course this is just one possibly, but i really liked the story to be told in this way and the games gave me the feeling, that i was finding something special.
 
CoffeeJanitor said:
I can't read the article right now cause of time, but here's my two cents.

Game storytelling is very immature compared to other mediums' storytelling, mostly because of bad writing and the medium itself.

That is....


Interactivity gets directly in the way of great storytelling. Great movies and books have complete control over the user's experience, while games allow a certain amount of interactivity (especially if the game still wants to be a good game). The best that gaming can hope for if it hopes to keep the interactivity in tact is to go toward a choose your own adventure setup.

Note: I am not saying stories haven't been told well or have been entertaining in gaming, but I am saying that great gaming stories do not compare to great stories in film or books, whether that be because of crap writing, pacing, characterization, etc.
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Which is why every team that aims for the moon involving story yet fails either muscles the gameplay out of the way/starves it of attention during development, or has substandard narrative as a payoff.

Remember, the higher a dev shoots, the better their aim has to be.

Also I agree with the 80s PC angle; for a similar reason I trot out MGS or Vagrant Story cutscenes out to show how often some narratives and execution have backslid.
 
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