254: Playing for the Story

[wolfister]

Is it just me who feels that storytelling in gaming peaked at KOTOR, Morrowind and Half Life 2 and will never again reach such dizzy heights?

Oblivion, Fallout 3, Mass Effect (1+2), Dragon Age all had rubbish main quests that were adaquate rather than epic. It seems that most video game writers are good at doing the small stuff but always seem to try to hard when it comes to the big plot arcs.

i will agree with you there although i did enjoy Fallout 3 the story was somewhat interesting at best whereas KOTOR kept me wanting to play and explore. I guess in the wave of a new generation of gamers developers are having to go with the masses and as unfortuante as it is the masses demand headshots from across the map rather than a story that truly makes you feel tied to your character and the events that shape the world surrounding it.

 

[Marowit]

I know I've found myself playing games on easy/medium just for the story now.

Come to think of it, the first game I did this with was the original BioShock. I just wanted to see the story unfold, and not bang my head against the wall. Also, I hit a wall in DA:O as well...I must try this with that game too, because I found having the pause the game after every action got pretty tedious...

 

[kram789]

I too am much more interested in entertainment than difficulty. Unfortunately I think games have lost their way. They want to be like movies, but movies are a passive medium and games are an active one. They need to be more like books. Books are an active medium. They are more engaging than movies. Have you ever stayed up reading all night because you just want to read one more chapter? Sounds like an addictive game doesn't it. Besides, the movies in games are always too slow, too stilted and too boring.

 

[ben---neb]

Is it just me who feels that storytelling in gaming peaked at KOTOR, Morrowind and Half Life 2 and will never again reach such dizzy heights?

Oblivion, Fallout 3, Mass Effect (1+2), Dragon Age all had rubbish main quests that were adaquate rather than epic. It seems that most video game writers are good at doing the small stuff but always seem to try to hard when it comes to the big plot arcs.

i will agree with you there although i did enjoy Fallout 3 the story was somewhat interesting at best whereas KOTOR kept me wanting to play and explore. I guess in the wave of a new generation of gamers developers are having to go with the masses and as unfortuante as it is the masses demand headshots from across the map rather than a story that truly makes you feel tied to your character and the events that shape the world surrounding it.

I don't even think its 'pandering to the masses' I just think it's plain lack of ability of game writers because they probably don't get paid enough. Or maybe it's just laziness....

 

[Megalodon]

Have to agree with the general consensus about Dragon Age, I also turned it down to easy, mainly because I was sick of damaging my party with every spell I cast.

Mass Effect on the other hand, I will play through on the harder difficulties (especially 1, as even Hardcore is pathetically easy), those games are pretty much unique in that I must beat everything the game offers.

 

[wolfister]

Is it just me who feels that storytelling in gaming peaked at KOTOR, Morrowind and Half Life 2 and will never again reach such dizzy heights?

Oblivion, Fallout 3, Mass Effect (1+2), Dragon Age all had rubbish main quests that were adaquate rather than epic. It seems that most video game writers are good at doing the small stuff but always seem to try to hard when it comes to the big plot arcs.

i will agree with you there although i did enjoy Fallout 3 the story was somewhat interesting at best whereas KOTOR kept me wanting to play and explore. I guess in the wave of a new generation of gamers developers are having to go with the masses and as unfortuante as it is the masses demand headshots from across the map rather than a story that truly makes you feel tied to your character and the events that shape the world surrounding it.

I don't even think its 'pandering to the masses' I just think it's plain lack of ability of game writers because they probably don't get paid enough. Or maybe it's just laziness....

Yes this could also be true yet again if it was pay we all know pay in video game design is directly related to how well a game sells and ergo requires, as you pointed out, "pandering to the masses". So i guess my question is why is it game developers will pump millions into the fighting side of a game yet story writing for the most part is mostly forgotten? (hmm that could be an interesting thread question)

 

[Rad Party God]

I think this is something our generation is having, more good and sometimes awesome story going on and a god-awfully hard difficulty, or simply a chore to play.

Last year, after finishing Fallout 3, I became interested in the franchise and I bought the first two Fallouts. Around that time, my GPU died on me and I started to play humbler games (in graphics department) and the Fallout games combined with Guild Wars were like life savers.

I started playing Fallout 1 in my old laptop and after a bit steep learning curve, I found an amazing game with an even more amazing story. The combat was a bit of a chore, but I simply overlooked at it because of the story. But after reaching the 2 main "dungeons" at the end game, my character was so poorly prepared that I simply couldn't do even a scratch to the Super Mutant General.

I didn't turned down the difficulty, but what I like about this game is that you can come up with a non-violent solution that has almost the same results as if you gibbed in a million of pieces that bastard. Same after reaching the Master Mind, that bastard, I didn't know I had to be equiped with certain items to even get close to him and I tried everything, buying lots and lots of stimpacks, ammo, weapons, laser gattlings, everything I thought would give me a chance to fight him was an epic fail. Then, again, the non-violent solution came in and after saving the Vault 13, I was more than sattisfied for gibbing in a million pieces that mother f***ng Overseer.

I just hope Obsidian don't screw up with Fallout New Vegas.

 

[Klishu]

That is why it is high time the Adventure genre is revived to all its glory. Games like Myst, the old ones coming from LucasArts and now Telltale Games is also doing great are all about the story.

 

[rembrandtqeinstein]

I beat Nethack Slash'em legit after >10 years of trying and not with a Monk. All games are easy mode now.

 

[McShizzle]

As an old adventure gamer at heart, I can totally relate. While I do like a bit of a challenge, if it starts to interfere with the narrative I'm not really interested. I rarely these days have the compulsion to move the slider up past normal. The main cases where I do, seem to be in FPS settings where increased difficulty may help to emphasize the struggle for survival (ie. Half-Life, both of them). Still I'd much rather be pulled into the story than work on my fast-twitch reflexes. I'm still well rounded I guess,I can kick some serious ass in Left 4 Dead, but I'd trade it all to play Grim Fandango through again for the first time.

 

[lysanderprophet]

It all comes down to the game for me, really. If I find that a game is challenging me so much that I can't enjoy it, I'll lower the difficulty (e.g. the original Baldur's Gate, in which I died pretty much every eight seconds until I put it down to easy), but if I find that the challenge is really invigorating and exciting me, I'll keep it up or even ramp up the difficulty a bit (e.g. Devil May Cry 3, which I wound up beating on Dante Must Die mode, because I am a complete lunatic).

 

[Gildan Bladeborn]

That's an eerily accurate description of my personal mindset - I'm not in any way bad at games, but I'm not playing them to be challenged, I'm playing them because I find immersing myself into the narrative framework of a universe to be a fulfilling experience. It helps if the gameplay is fun too of course, but purely skill-based gaming experiences are not even remotely appealing to me - as far as my brain is concerned, I might as well be playing an exceptionally difficult game of "Bejeweled".

Mind you, I'm flexible enough that even the barest skeleton of a story will tide me over, but I literally cannot make myself care about a game that has no story at all - without that narrative framework, there is no meaning or purpose behind my actions, and any illusions I might possess that what I'm doing is not inherently pointless are quickly dispelled.

Finding oneself frustrated by seemingly insurmountable odds or dealing with the annoyance of frequently having to replay things because your avatar keeps shuffling off the mortal coil are therefore impediments to the reason I game in the first place, and the thus I happily play on easy all the time, unless that changes the game in a meaningful way that makes it less fun (like removing/altering things rather than simply changing stat balances) - if I could cheat and be invulnerable in every game then I would do it in a heartbeat, as dying typically makes the story stop and why would I want that to ever happen?

This flies in the face of the traditional truism that "success is more meaningful when it is achieved at great effort" of course, but one doesn't read books or watch films to "succeed" at them: the point is the experience itself.

 

[carpathic]

This almost perfectly describes me, but generally I am wayyyy too arrogant to ever admit that. I am doing ME2 on insanity just because I want the last elusive gamerscore/achievement. I am honestly not really enjoying this playthrough very much at all...

 

[Woe Is You]

Interestingly, this is the exact opposite of what I feel. I used to love games with huge sprawling stories; played them on normal or below for the most part. Now? I like having a story that intrudes as little as possible with actual game time. If there's little to no story to interfere with that, no biggie.

These days if a game doesn't challenge me, it quickly becomes boring. I understand that it's fun feeling like being a badass but if the game offers no resistance, I don't really get that feeling.

That's also a part of why I don't really rate Bioshock that high: the story and aesthetics are awesome but the game itself is a really loose feeling generic FPS. I barely could complete the game because the game part just felt shoddy.

 

[wfpdk]

I can really relate to this article, I've always turned the difficulty level in games to easy as soon as I can so i can breeze through the story then later on down the line if i ever feel like playing it again, then I'll turn it up to hard.

 

[tjarne]

Why play a game if it isn't immersive? I mean I was really hooked by mw2, but the good games are those where I feel like I am someone. So Elder scrolls games and Fallout where I got a world and they told me to be whoever I wanted to be, well that was bliss.

 

[Tharwen]

I often find myself in a rut of compulsively retrying part of a game or playing a similar experience over and over again (read: Modern Warfare 2) instead of actually doing things that I want to do, like helping Ezio take revenge against his enemies, or trying out some of those source mods I downloaded but haven't played yet. If I spend an hour or two repeatedly mashing my character against campers in Wasteland, I feel like I've wasted my time.

Mass Effect 2 somehow contained both sides of this. I spent ages trying to procure enough raw minerals to develop new tools of destructo-mayhem so I could get through the missions more easily, but I found myself rushing through the shooting, crouching, and hacking just to get back to the ship and continue to learn about the crew's stories and character developments. I started to spend time just running around the space stations, talking to people, doing non-combat side quests and listening to the game salesman making cryptic references to games sold nearly 200 years earlier. When I got to the suicide mission, I found, for the first time, gameplay which directly rewarded the time spent shamelessly trying to make Miranda remove her space-suit. This was the first time I had seen anything like this in a game and it made me realise that there can be such a thing as [Warning: cliched title insertion] Playing for the Story.

 

[Woe Is You]

Why play a game if it isn't immersive? I mean I was really hooked by mw2, but the good games are those where I feel like I am someone. So Elder scrolls games and Fallout where I got a world and they told me to be whoever I wanted to be, well that was bliss.

Depends what you mean by "immersion". I've sank more than 500 hours into (S)SF4 not because "I feel like I am someone" but because I like a game where there is room for near infinite improvement. Competition and/or breaking the system is as good a reason as any to play these games.

That's one reason why games are such an interesting medium. Your game doesn't really have to have a story or dialogue to be a success in its own way.

 

[wonkify]

I'm a retired Marine, cyber "shooting" doesn't have the appeal it did when I was younger. If I wish to, I go to the range and blow the X ring out of some targets (or head shot the zombie targets!) yet struggle to do well with twitch based titles.

My gaming preferences have changed as I get older. Twitch games and mass shootout ones leave me cold now. My son was jazzed with Borderlands but an hour or so of it and I felt like I had experienced what the game had on offer.

Both age and a love of reading make the Bioware (I know, everybody has said this) products more enjoyable all the time.

I'll play on whatever difficulty setting lets me play through without dying at all if possible and experience the flow of the story like an interactive book.

In recent years I have struggled to even finish a game due to flagging interest, but I was so engrossed with Mass Effect 1&2 that I did multiple playthroughs with multiple characters to experience the myriad story branchings and am still on the edge of my seat for what the story arc will bring in the third act of the trilogy.

If cheat codes, mods Casual difficulty settings are necessary for me to play through the way I want then that's what I do without apology. It seems a lot better than leaving yet another game half finished due to frustration.

And if anyone is a fan of Twin Peaks and can cope with a game having ugly graphics, sound and controls but still offer an always quirky, surprising story, then don't miss out on "Deadly Premonition."

The $20 sleeper hit for people who love all things oddball in their stories. Breaks every rule of good game making yet succeeds. A real joy.

 

[tjarne]

Why play a game if it isn't immersive? I mean I was really hooked by mw2, but the good games are those where I feel like I am someone. So Elder scrolls games and Fallout where I got a world and they told me to be whoever I wanted to be, well that was bliss.

Depends what you mean by "immersion". I've sank more than 500 hours into (S)SF4 not because "I feel like I am someone" but because I like a game where there is room for near infinite improvement. Competition and/or breaking the system is as good a reason as any to play these games.

That's one reason why games are such an interesting medium. Your game doesn't really have to have a story or dialogue to be a success in its own way.

I agree. I guess the reason to why I prefer story based games is because I have never learned how to play fighting games for example, which makes RPG's and such games much more accessible to me.