Jumplion said:
"Yeah! Games are about fun man! We don't need no stinkin' pretentious dickweed art games! We just want to blow shit up, who gives a crap about story, it's the game part of Video games, man! GO JAFFE!"
Augh, I hate the "fun = explosions" crowd. Fun means you are enjoying yourself, and yes, all games should try to do that. Fun does not mean explosions everywhere, with a side of blood and maybe tits.
Metalhandkerchief said:
Lovely, another shovelware creator with opinions that makes me want to punch them in the face.
Do you even know who David Jaffe is and what game's he made? Do you know what shovelware means? Your statement is completely illogical. If you don't like his games, fine. But shovelware? No, his games are not shovelware.
Jumplion said:
It's not that they focus on story more than gameplay, it's that they focus on bad storytelling rather than gameplay, and the gameplay is stagnant across the entire genre. Why mess with the wheel if people still play with it the way it is?
There's nothing wrong with focusing on story over gameplay, but it still becomes a problem if the game can nearly play itself. At that point, the creators ought to step back and ask themselves one simple question: are they trying to make a game, or are they trying to make a movie? Both can have a focus on story if that's what is wanted, but for a game, there needs to be a certain level of player interactivity as well. That's what makes it a game.
People can make fun of the Metal Gear Solid series for being more game than movie or whatever all they want because the game does have a lot of cutscenes (many of which are quite long), but in between them there is still some pretty solid gameplay in there.
Then there is Heavy Rain, which is all about the story and decides to use prompts and quick time events for everything to keep things simple for all actions and all characters you will do and play as in the game, which works very well for telling the story it came here to tell and keeping the player involved.
And then we have Final Fantasy 13, which decided the best use of the person holding the controller should basically be to make the characters walk in between cutscenes, pausing occasionally to make them hit what might as well have been a "let the AI fight for me" prompt so we can kill some monsters or something. Regardless of the quality of the story, there's a problem there. It seems to want to involve the player so little that they might as well have just said "screw it, let's just make this a movie" and it could have been an improvement over the really bland corridor walking and auto-fight option selecting.
So yeah. Focus on story is fine, but like anything else, there are right ways to do it and there are wrong ways. Doing it the right way keeps the game enjoyable for the player; doing it the wrong way makes them wonder why they paid $60 for a game that would have provided a better experience if the creators had decide to just make a movie.
