A Storytelling Crysis
- Thread starter Yahtzee Croshaw
- Start date
It's funny how a game series that uses an engine like the Cry engine is still resorting to "steal ideas from Valve." Have they learned nothing from Insomniac games!
Nothing anymore. I currently live at home on social security, having been forced into retirement by brain damage which is where I've been for a number of years now.Grey Carter said:
I've explained it all before on these forums and to half the planet, but basically when I was a baby there was some kind of problem with my head closing up. They wound up wedging a plate in there, and then later wound up having to remove it. I grew up bouncing in and out of various placements with some serious problems in my youth. With age came a degree of perspective and control, and my problems started to do better. I wound up going to school where I majored in Forensices, I did okay but my grades weren't exactly in the top 1% to qualify for a free ride, my family made too much money for most financial aid, and simply put I wound up being forced to stop part way through and get a real job. I went to work for Mohegan Sun when it first opened, working for ESD (Janitorial) for the first month to get my foot in the door and managed to get a job in security back when they had standards and some pretty substantial requirements (this later changed though), pretty much a dog and pony show, but they did make us do a decent amount of training that we were never going to practically use, and I wound up eventually moving into what they referred to as "Monitor Room" at a time when it was not only responsible for all non-gaming areas of the facilities, but also acted as dispatch for "Protective Services" which was basically the outside patrol (vehicles, etc..) that controlled the outlying areas. As part of this job I also wound up basically doing the job of some rather lazy investigators in responding to a lot of the penny ante crap that happened in parking garages and such. I wound up being forced to change shifts for medical reasons, wound up in some political crap between rival groups of upper management that hated each other since I was "in" with a differant crowd than the one that ran the shift I was forced to change to, and wound up getting fired, but was almost immediatly picked up by the competition (Foxwoods) where I continued to work for the next four years, albiet entirely as floor security where I previously did that at most part time. While at Foxwoods I was also fired, but largely because my problems got worse, and when all is said and done it comes down to the basic fact that I not only had a few emotional outbursts that pissed people off, but had developed a tendency to pace and mutter to myself, or wind up grinning crazily for no reason, etc.... In short with those problems no amount of accumulated training, and "brownie points" were going to save me.
In short, I've spent a lot of time following people and snooping on orders both on and off a gaming floor, while running surveillance equipment and such largely oriented off of it, which included areas ranging from parking garages, to retail space, to arcades, to resteraunts, to hotels and bars and nightclubs. I can't say too much in the way of specific details, but that's a basic outline. As disgruntled as I am, and as archaic as my information is, there are a lot of things I simply won't say, especially seeing as I'm less POed with my former employers than with specific people working there for the way things finally went down in the end.
I've met people from all over the world, and spend a lot of time being trained by police, security professionals, etc... even if a lot of that knowlege is kind of useless. I should even have an "anti-terrorism" certificate from Homeland Security around somewhere. If you think I'm paranoid, lol, I'm a lightweight. I just tend to be a little more vocal on the internet than I probably should be.
I'm rambling, but to be honest it's kind of ironic that many years ago when I went to college the guys teaching the classes, guys like Former-Chief Pendleton or Professor Williams (former head of the Connecticut State Police) kind of warned the class that becoming a cop, or high end security would seriously alter your world view to the point where it could be very difficult to deal with other people. The whole "colored glases" analogy I use all the time is the way they put it in class. I never did go into Forensics like I planned, but just doing what I did, has made it very difficult at times to discuss anything other than the extremely trivial with people who don't have any similar ranges
of experience. I suppose my biggest problem is simply not keeping my mouth shut and just letting things go the way
most people do.
At any rate, that's a basic summary of me, yet again. Nothing paticularly impressive when you get down to it. Just a lengthy explanation as to why I say some of the things I do in general. Not that it likely matters much on this subject. Most of what I mentioned politically is stuff right from the news, the point of my post not being to sell any kind of philsophy, but to simply point out that you can't complain about a lack of good storytelling, when people freak out every time someone uses the real world, makes an analogy, or even just does something that might be taken as an analogy when it's not intended. Yahtzee himself makes recurring "jokes" about Americans and white europeans murdering darker skinned foreigners, even to the point of recurringly saying that "Uncharted" comes accross as a game made for white supremicists. Combine that with all the QQing about "Resident Evil 5", and whatever else, and it shouldn't be surprising that given a modern audience that can't deal with unreality deeply constructed enough to avoid analogies, that game developers have seemingly stopped trying recently out of a combination of fear and annoyance. Had "Crysis 3" had more
of a plot, someone probably would have started screaming about racist/bigoted American military bravedo (yet again), if it had fully embraced unreality and developed the aliens and such better it would have had people claiming that this kind of exposition doesn't belong in a game of this sort, the core group of players not caring. Your typical "Crysis" player doesn't want an entirely fictitious alien culture developed to give them personality and then a completly bogus and unreal socio-political dynamic constructed so you can really see where the aliens are coming from. At the end of the day your Crysis player just wants to shoot them in the face.... after writing all of this I'm sort of at a loss as to why of everything I've written this is the post that would get an inquiry about what I do for a living.
This was a great article. As I was reading I was thinking that it's like the intro to any modern FF game, then he started talking about Final Fantasy XIII, I literally laughed out loud. No matter how cool a scene looks, if you have no connection to what is going on it's not interesting. I return to the opening scene of Final Fantasy XIII-2. Lightning and some guy fighting, but even knowing who Lightning is, I couldn't bring myself to give a damn because it's a completely alien environment and you have no idea why they are fighting. They just are. And it literally just didn't matter at all at that point what happened next because I knew it was going to be leading to just more questions.
I would think that Crysis 2 would get a pass on same grounds that Halflife 2 got a pass. It had been years since the first game came out, it was taken from a perspective of someone who didn't really know what was going on (least of all about Nanosuits) and I would argue that it was a reasonable jump. The first game ended on a cliffhanger and the threat was only just begun. This one takes place a full 24 years later, the aliens are gone, but not, Prophet is talking about the existence of something that everyone else denies (the Alpha Seph) and he is on a completely different page than the entire rest of the characters. It was a way way way bigger jump than the previous jump. And all the while there was nothing to explain what had happened in that time. It was fail.RTK1576 said:
Vault101 said:
I think on a lot of levels the devs keep doing it because they feel they sort of have to make the attempt, that and as I pointed out, the plotline and context is something that can be used to justify the game if it's criticized.
I also think that these lame attempts at storytelling allow people to try and justify their own involvement in playing the games. To someone hammering through Crysis 3 they at least know the story is there, and even if it was horribly done and described several differant ways, they at least on some levels know there was an alleged "plot twist". It's truely horrible for real gamers, or people like Yahtzee who have been doing the critic thing for long enough where they have seen tons of games good and bad, but to the undiscriminating audience playing the game, it doesn't really matter.
That's all a rather mixed bag of statements, but I pretty much agree with your sentiment that the people who play these games don't deserve the effort being made. To be honest I don't think your average "shooter" player would notice if the storyline was entirely removed from most games. On some levels it's like kids playing old video game machines, there was no storyline behind "Elevator Action" for example, all it was is dropping into a building, shooting a bunch of dudes, and exiting through the door at the bottom where your car takes off, before you do the same thing again. We pretty much developed all of this really great technology and the abillity to tell stories, largely driven by the serious gamers who once dominated the hobby, but in the end it all fell through the cracks beause at the end of the day the money is with the lowest common human denominator on the level of those people who were popping coins into slots long before anyone even seriously considered having a story behind a very basic framework.
The number of people who actually care about the Crysis storyline being bunk are probably few and far between. Consider right now the big "market" is on multiplayer, where it's the story modes and single player that is increasingly being tacked on, at least when it comes to this genere. Look at say Total Biscuit's review of "Medal Of Honor: Warfighter", and the very valid question of who that craptastic single player campaign was aimed at. With Crysis the core audience is likewise not really someone who is interested in the story, but someone who just wants to play with a bunch of destructive toys. The game isn't so much about aliens or the plotline, as much as about having superman powers and tormenting "enemies" that are almost entirely at your mercy. Even with the original Crysis they pointed out it was kind of an easy shooter if you played it "straight" but that defeated the purpose of what they created. As Yahtzee pointed out in his video review, our big "development" for Crysis 3 is complete nonsense... the abillity to stick enemies to walls with pointy spears of death because that's fun to do for the core audience of these games. When the big innovation is as Yahtzee points out, to give your super-future soldier a bow and arrow, that kind of says a lot about what your dealing with and how they are just dialing in the plot on the way to servicing a specific kind of player.
I'm not a big shooter player, but let me also put it to you this way, how many people have you generally ever seen talk about the plot of Crysis 1 or 2 that weren't either serious nerds or involved in the industry, looking at the game critically? Mostly you hear people talk about how awesome they were in finding ways to kill specific enemy set ups. Really, I've probably heard more from Yahtzee and critics about Alcatraz, Prophet, etc... than I have from players who have talked about it, and this is a game with three installments.
Peace, democracy and co-existence? The US and UK? Bahahaha! That's hilarious. Maybe if, say, Sweden, and Finland, and the one or two other countries that actually value compassion, peace, happiness, and the more positive aspects of human existence had the chance to spread their culture around a bit that might help. But a great deal of the current problems around the world are a direct result of the US and the UK spreading their cultural ideas about. Ideas like "It's perfectly fine to murder and pillage, and we will even give you weapons and political support to help out, so long as we can point you at our own enemies too".Therumancer said:
Let me tell you something: US and UK are not just doing charity. They go in, do whatever is convenient for them under the pretense of establishing "democracy" and then fuck off when things go hairy. Why exactly do you think did USA never go on a democracy rampage in Africa?Therumancer said:
For one, it's damn expensive, impossible to fight off every single warlord and second USA only goes to those countries, that got oil and resources. Every country has its own interests in mind first, and that includes America, and they want to establish a secure supply of oil by gaining connections and a preferred status.
It is a pretty naive idea, that any country - be it USA, UK or China - can fix the problems of the world if only those ignorant meanies would let them.
I am merely throwing my 5 cents here before I leave this thread forever. Not getting into a discussion about politics round here.
Sadly, the trend to sprinkle exposition over a game via documents, audio logs, etc. is only on the rise.
Like, in what world does it not make sense to make everything a freaking easter egg hunt when you have to have 50 (?) mandatory achievements in your game on launch day?
This "Oh, they will LOVE to do all that extra work if we give them an achievement."-theory that is perpetuated by companies like Microsoft (Valve, maybe?) is only going to make this worse. Sometimes you get achievements for just watching a cut scene, picking up a weapon, "Left the house", and so on. Easy achievements to get you hungry for more.
An example of how to do it well would be Aliens: Colonial Marines.
Do you know why that is? Because that game looks like it is 2008, and so, maybe, the narrative structure has been lifted from far better games.
You have exposition during mission (radio), in cut scenes (film), and as audio logs, strewn across the level.
You can experience the story while playing the game normally, or you can go hunting and find some extra titbits.
Now, the story is shit, riddled with plot-holes and logic bugs, the gameplay in between is boring, etc.
But the structure is there - so whoever made the initial plot layout, constructed what was to go where, did a good job.
Later on, some incompetent bastard got a hold of that work and fucked over Aliens so hard, as if, instead of "a team of fans" they were a team of Xeno-phobes (if you pardon the pun).
I especially liked when an audio file told me that the entire Way-Yun facility was set up with one power generator only, with no back-up. Like, what? Most dangerous species in the universe, the secrets of an alien spaceship to unlock, hundreds of people commited, but you go cheap when it comes to a poxy power module? In a sci-fi setting?
But I got an achievement progress for found documents.
So I guess the logic and the continuity of Aliens can go out the window, right?
Like, in what world does it not make sense to make everything a freaking easter egg hunt when you have to have 50 (?) mandatory achievements in your game on launch day?
This "Oh, they will LOVE to do all that extra work if we give them an achievement."-theory that is perpetuated by companies like Microsoft (Valve, maybe?) is only going to make this worse. Sometimes you get achievements for just watching a cut scene, picking up a weapon, "Left the house", and so on. Easy achievements to get you hungry for more.
An example of how to do it well would be Aliens: Colonial Marines.
Do you know why that is? Because that game looks like it is 2008, and so, maybe, the narrative structure has been lifted from far better games.
You have exposition during mission (radio), in cut scenes (film), and as audio logs, strewn across the level.
You can experience the story while playing the game normally, or you can go hunting and find some extra titbits.
Now, the story is shit, riddled with plot-holes and logic bugs, the gameplay in between is boring, etc.
But the structure is there - so whoever made the initial plot layout, constructed what was to go where, did a good job.
Later on, some incompetent bastard got a hold of that work and fucked over Aliens so hard, as if, instead of "a team of fans" they were a team of Xeno-phobes (if you pardon the pun).
I especially liked when an audio file told me that the entire Way-Yun facility was set up with one power generator only, with no back-up. Like, what? Most dangerous species in the universe, the secrets of an alien spaceship to unlock, hundreds of people commited, but you go cheap when it comes to a poxy power module? In a sci-fi setting?
But I got an achievement progress for found documents.
So I guess the logic and the continuity of Aliens can go out the window, right?
And I'm building on the joke by accusing Crytek of the same thing, because more than once Yahtzee pointed out how innovation nowadays equals "do what Valve did years ago."kenu12345 said:
Sorry, but what are you trying to say? Is your claim that developers avoid actual storytelling because they don't want to accidentally make some politically incorrect reference to the real world? If so, I don't really see the necessity of a incredibly lengthy rant about how the third world is evil and the wonderful democracy-loving US and UK (both of which played a part historically in much of the fucked-upness of the rest of the world) are benevolently trying to save it. From my perspective, and correct me if I'm wrong, it seems that you just wanted an excuse to rant about political correctness and how the third world sucks, both of which are hardly relevant to the subject at hand (exposition).Therumancer said:
Plenty of games have had "third world" enemies. Call of Duty does it every time; the Russian ultranationalist thing might be more politically acceptable now that the Cold War is over, but they certainly don't shy away from having Middle Eastern nutjobs trying to destroy the world, not to mention the Chinese. ARMA 3 has an Iranian invasion of Europe. Homefront has the North Koreans invade America. Hell, even the first Crysis used North Korea as the human antagonists. Developers have been using "minorities" as enemies for years. It's not a fear of political incorrectness that's to blame for Crysis 3's lack of exposition.
In fact, Crysis 3 already has two perfectly political correct enemies as the antagonists: aliens and corporate mercenaries (who have somehow taken over the world). They have no excuse not to tell a story. Unless you think they were vague on purpose for fear of offending Goldman Sachs, or Exxon, or GE?
Eh, I see your point, but imo those points aren't relevant to Crysis 3. The game just doesn't really bother to tell you shit. I'm not talking about unraveling the Nameless One's story in Planescape Torment; Crysis 3's storytelling makes the Modern Warfare series seem like Booker-prize quality literature in comparison. Between Crysis 2 and 3, the bad humans (CELL) have taken over the world despite getting their teeth kicked in and pretty much being declared an enemy of the state in Crysis 2, and the game doesn't even bother to tell you how, except for the most threadbare mention that they took over all the alien artifacts and control the world's energy (despite the fact that it was the US Marines who had the dominant human presence in New York by the end of Crysis 2, not CELL). How they managed to avoid bankruptcy / criminal charges against their CEOs is beyond me. Corporations get away with a lot, but an act of war against the US? Probably not. At the very least, the game could have put some exposition in the loading screens, as many of today's action shooters do.Therumancer said:
Your complaints about mainstream gamers not appreciating plot (and more specifically, world-building) and its effect on the industry aren't inaccurate, but Crysis 3's exposition falls flat even by the FPS industry's low standards. It just doesn't put any effort into explaining things to the gamer at all.
As for the plot twist thing, I don't really see how it would help for Crysis 3 to spoil its twist in the optional collectible documents; if it wanted the mainstream gamers to figure out what was going on, there's no point in putting the plot in documents that they wouldn't read anyway (hell, even I didn't want to read them after awhile...the documents aren't exactly compelling. This isn't exactly Bioshock-level material).
"I would think that Crysis 2 would get a pass on same grounds that Halflife 2 got a pass. It had been years since the first game came out, it was taken from a perspective of someone who didn't really know what was going on (least of all about Nanosuits) and I would argue that it was a reasonable jump. The first game ended on a cliffhanger and the threat was only just begun. This one takes place a full 24 years later, the aliens are gone, but not, Prophet is talking about the existence of something that everyone else denies (the Alpha Seph) and he is on a completely different page than the entire rest of the characters. It was a way way way bigger jump than the previous jump. And all the while there was nothing to explain what had happened in that time. It was fail.[/quote]"RTK1576 said:
I can't agree. First off, the protagonist in Half-life 2, Gordon Freeman, gets transported to the future, so he's in our boat - lost on what has happened with the world. As he learns, so do we. Not to mention that Half-Life ended fairly conclusively, unlike Crysis. But in Crysis 2, we NEVER learn how things were resolved in the first game. All we know is that Prophet survived and that the alien outbreak was resolved. We were also supposed to take for granted that the aliens in Crysis were the same ones in Crysis 2, despite the fact that they're using completely different weapons and technology.
Crysis 3 did to Crysis 2's story what Crysis 2 did to Crysis. EA has shown it doesn't care about story continuity. My argument is that Yahtzee should have been complaining about this one game earlier.
This had to be the most dispassionate EP article yet. I bet Yahtzee could put out articles of this caliber nonstop and not have to think much at all.
Whilst I agree with pretty much all Yahtzee says in this EP, part of his central agruement is completely flawed...
Crysis 2 was released in March 2011!!!!
Crysis 3 was released in Feb 2013!!!!
This is not a year, it's almost exactly 2 years... agreed that's a lot less than say HL1 -> HL2 but still, it's not an unreasonable amount of time for a sequeal.
Just a warning Ben, once you get past 30 it's worth checking your facts when it comes to remembering how long ago something happened... degenerating neurons and desparate denial of our age tends to make it seem that less time has passed than it actually has...
One or two landmarks for you, Yahtzee:
"Creep" by Radiohead was released 21 years ago!
So was "Killing in the Name of"!
The first Matrix movie is now almost 15 YEARS OLD!
And Saving Private Ryan IS 15 years old!
Crysis 2 was released in March 2011!!!!
Crysis 3 was released in Feb 2013!!!!
This is not a year, it's almost exactly 2 years... agreed that's a lot less than say HL1 -> HL2 but still, it's not an unreasonable amount of time for a sequeal.
Just a warning Ben, once you get past 30 it's worth checking your facts when it comes to remembering how long ago something happened... degenerating neurons and desparate denial of our age tends to make it seem that less time has passed than it actually has...
One or two landmarks for you, Yahtzee:
"Creep" by Radiohead was released 21 years ago!
So was "Killing in the Name of"!
The first Matrix movie is now almost 15 YEARS OLD!
And Saving Private Ryan IS 15 years old!