Gameplay-Driven vs Story-Driven Games

[hanselthecaretaker]

Interesting responses. To sum up my feelings on it I?d say that the more gameplay can drive the story the better. I don?t like it when most of the interactive elements are passable at best even if the story is great. It needs to be fun to play or it?s a chore to get through, since the disappointing gameplay only acts as an impediment that other mediums don?t have to experiencing the story. God of War did an exceptional job of melding the two, but it was still just a very well-crafted roller coaster. That?s great, but it doesn?t fully explore what the medium is capable of.

I?m more interested in how gameplay can affect the narrative outcomes or shape it in significant ways. I know The Witcher 3 has choices, but it sounds like Cuberpunk 2077 [https://www.pcgamer.com/story-comes-first-in-the-making-of-cyberpunk-2077/] will have a design approach that will more dynamically impact a play through. To me the video game medium can truly sing when the gameplay is both solidly designed and has emergent effects on the story.

 

[SweetShark]

Boring answer but ideally you get both. Gameplay makes the game fun, story makes it memorable.

I want to disagree [sorry].
I am in love with Final Fantasy XII and its story is a piece of shit. I love SO MUCh its gameplay.

Anyway, if I had to choose, I would go with Story. Sometimes you get games which other media can simple translate this experience. Hollywood try and the majority of time the videogame movies are bad...

 

[Kyrian007]

There's ways to do both right. The best of the Telltale games are 100% story based and truly were amazing experiences. And some truly excellent games actively have little or throwaway stories... and can be infinitely playable as well. There's even good ways to do mixes of the two properly... its not an either/or situation. Whether a dev goes more story driven, more gameplay driven, or tries to mix the two... they still have to make a good game. How much or how little "story is in it" has no bearing on its quality.

 

[sXeth]

There's a lot of visual novel hybrids nowadays like Tears to Tiara 2 and the Utawarerumono series. Basically they have Srpg gameplay like final fantasy tactics or fire emblem but the story parts are all like a visual novel until a battle happens.

Then they'd be strategy games with a different flavor of cutscenes. Soul Calibur does that too. Along with a chunk of mid-late 90s CRPGs (that tended to be first person dungeon crawlers, but if you had to go into town or engage in story beats and dialogue would jump back to that style). That they just sub-in for a visual element in whatever gameplay genre just kind of hihglights that they don't themselves bring gameplay.

Granted, I've harped on this before, pacing means a lot here. A 40 hour game needs to feel like those 40 hours are justified, not 5 hours of game/story with 35 hours on grinding tacked on. If you only have 5 hours of worthwhile material, make the game 5 hours long and price it accordingly.

That was my main quibble with Subnautica. After the initial acquisition of your vehicles, it just becomes a loop you repeat three times to grind for slightly better depth modules. And the story is about a dozen short audiologs and one brief conversation.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

There's a lot of visual novel hybrids nowadays like Tears to Tiara 2 and the Utawarerumono series. Basically they have Srpg gameplay like final fantasy tactics or fire emblem but the story parts are all like a visual novel until a battle happens.

Then they'd be strategy games with a different flavor of cutscenes. Soul Calibur does that too. Along with a chunk of mid-late 90s CRPGs (that tended to be first person dungeon crawlers, but if you had to go into town or engage in story beats and dialogue would jump back to that style). That they just sub-in for a visual element in whatever gameplay genre just kind of hihglights that they don't themselves bring gameplay.

See, I think you're thinking of something like a fire emblem game's amount of story being told in a visual novel style, which has confused and tricked many a prospective player into disappointment by using this logic and going into a game like Tears.

These games are actual visual novels first. It is common to go multiple 2-4 hour segments without any Srpg gameplay at all and just various story squences in those games. They're 60-80 hour games where the visual novel takes up a good 80% of the playtime whereas something like an Srpg divides its playtime considerably differently.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

I would say story is nice, but the fact of the matter is other mediums often do it better by design and that's what adventure games are for on the flipside of that equation. That and all the screeching of people on a Westboro Baptist Church level about SJWs and the gay agenda or whatever buzz term they'll be using by next week.

That and as a board gamer, who routinely plays Gloomhaven in their BG group... mechanics is king, and the mechanics can be glorious. That really good mechanics can incentivize human greed, but ultimately foster some next-level co-operative gameplay just to survive partly self-created problems of being self-interested powergamers at the start of a scenario facing the problems you inadvertantly birthed and met with the realization that you're running out of time to beat the scenario creates its own 'odd couple' style stories that are in the end deeper than most formal narratives...

Though I would say video games wouldn't know good mechanics if it bit them in the arse. So that basically leaves action games like Soulsborne and Monster Hunter, and RPGs like PF: Kingmaker, and RTT games likes Close Combat or RTS games like the Hearts of Iron series.

Basically all the stuff you can't really get in boardgame format. Or, you know... want some Pathfinder but not necessarily enough to GM a campaign or join yet another group... Not that Kingmaker is superior to tabletop Pathfinder--just easier. And convenience matters.

And you know what? Just going to say it but Soulsborne games are all about the action to me. I mean some of the backgroud hidden story stuff is interesting ad fun to ruminate on to the point where Asperger syndrome could legitimately be seen as contagious, but really you're just there for the gameplay. Unless you do have Asperger's... then IDK, maybe the very literal wording they use to describe a random item matters to you rather than some awesome and routinely mediocre boss fights, but mediocre only really in terms to how awesome the other boss fights are... though sometimes just mediocre. Frequently sometimes just mediocre.

Put it this way, if the gameplay wasn't great would anyone legitimately like Soulsborne games?

 

[Yoshi178]

Boring answer but ideally you get both. Gameplay makes the game fun, story makes it memorable.

tetris didn't become one of the most famous video games of all time because of it's story...

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

Boring answer but ideally you get both. Gameplay makes the game fun, story makes it memorable.

tetris didn't become one of the most famous video games of all time because of it's story...

No, it was through lack of viable competition at the time. It's like saying Citizen Kane didn't get anywhere for it's impressive CGI. A little bit weird.

Story is great. Hzd story was quite enjoyable. Hands off, human! But can also appreciate the Zelda's and Mario's of the world as long as there is charm and exploration. Otherwise the morey of story I implore ye please! But one should not necessitate sacrificing the other, preferably.

 

[stroopwafel]

Preferably for me a story needs to provide context but no more than that. I don't like to be constantly interrupted by cutscenes, dialogue trees, slow walk sections, NPCs that don't shut up etc. So many games pull you out of the experience by mandatory story sections that are never really good anyway. It's a shame too b/c of the amount of resources they often seen to have put into them. I'd rather have they really focus on gameplay and tone(atmosphere, worldview, sound design etc) and have the story serve more as seasoning rather than being front and center of the experience.

There are some exceptions of story heavy games I did like, such as Witcher 3 and Red Dead Redemption 2. But at the same time I really need to be in the mood for such a game, which isn't often. RDR2 is probably my favorite in this regard as it atleast had the superior gameplay to compensate for it's slow pace and heavy story focus. Completing Witcher took me like over a year. Otoh, I'm pretty much always itching to play more Bloodborne, Nioh or Dark Souls 3.

 

[CaitSeith]

gameplay. why would i play video games for story? i can just go the cinemas and watch a movie if i want story.

.

Let me know when Persona has a movie on cinemas. Until then, I'll keep playing the series for the story. Thank you.

 

[CaitSeith]

It depends. I don't play games for either gameplay or story. I play specific genres for gameplay and others for story (I enjoy a splash of one in a genre dedicated to the other tho). People who say "games used to be all about gameplay" never played JRPGs and adventure games in 80s and 90s (and there were tons of them, far too many to be called "few exceptions").

I enjoy both very much, and I don't want either one to go away.

 

[CaitSeith]

Boring answer but ideally you get both. Gameplay makes the game fun, story makes it memorable.

tetris didn't become one of the most famous video games of all time because of it's story...

No, it was through lack of viable competition at the time.

Not to mention the unforgettable music...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQwohHgrk2s&t=59

 

[Casual Shinji]

Put it this way, if the gameplay wasn't great would anyone legitimately like Soulsborne games?

I would say yes, since there's plenty wrong with that franchise mechanically that people choose to ignore because they love the way it presents itself. The camera sucks, the lock-on sucks, the fact that your weapon bounces off of walls while enemies' don't sucks, not being able to aim your gun sucks.

Of all the videos about the Soulsborne games on YouTube, the majority are about the lore. And the fanbase can get really pissy if you don't play it the right way, like not doing the rather obtuse side quests or triggering story events. It'd say it's actually the lore that saves this franchise from it's rather cumbersome mechanics. Let's put it like this, if Soulsborne was set in, say, a generic zombie world would it have the pedigree it has now based soley on its mechanics?

 

[Something Amyss]

Of all the videos about the Soulsborne games on YouTube, the majority are about the lore. And the fanbase can get really pissy if you don't play it the right way, like not doing the rather obtuse side quests or triggering story events. It'd say it's actually the lore that saves this franchise from it's rather cumbersome mechanics. Let's put it like this, if Soulsborne was set in, say, a generic zombie world would it have the pedigree it has now based soley on its mechanics?

This is of course the new Latin.

I avoided the series because the original hype for it was basically gatekeeping. "It's Nintendo Hard!" "It doesn't explain anything!"

And ironically, that was its biggest trick. People had so much difficulty because it was deliberately obtuse, like a clunky old NES title. People can pretend otherwise, but this shit was all over the Escapist and other gaming communities back when Demon's Souls and Dark Souls came out.

It was only after the mechanics were examined and people stopped measuring their True Gamer "sword" length that people started harping on the lore. Before the post-hoc "lore" reasoning, there was the "finally, a hard game for real gamers" reason, and that pushed the earlier games. It's quite possible that any such game could have survived and even thrived in a generic zombie setting. And we can kiiiiinda see that in a number of souls-alikes and what they focus on.

 

[stroopwafel]

Of all the videos about the Soulsborne games on YouTube, the majority are about the lore. And the fanbase can get really pissy if you don't play it the right way, like not doing the rather obtuse side quests or triggering story events. It'd say it's actually the lore that saves this franchise from it's rather cumbersome mechanics. Let's put it like this, if Soulsborne was set in, say, a generic zombie world would it have the pedigree it has now based soley on its mechanics?

Ehmm..yes as these games have the best melee combat of pretty much any game ever, save perhaps for Nioh's combat. On top of that it has varied locations, highly imaginative creature designs and some very cool bosses that actually requires a degree of skill to defeat. The lore is intruiging, but nobody plays these games for the story. It's actually the best example of a series of games where story is solely contextual. Which is actually way more intriguing than most straight-forward garbage considering the popularity of youtube videos.

Compare that to Dad of War: cutscene, slow walk scene, cutscene, giant QTE, more slow walk, few branching corridors with gameplay, cutscene, another slow walk scene, *booooyy*, some gameplay, more melodrama and watching the game instead of playing it. The flow is constantly interrupted and the gameplay is fun but not that fun that the experience doesn't feel entirely scripted. Souls and Bloodborne is the complete opposite. They are Da Bomb! Sekiro is gonna own every other action game again.

 

[Addendum_Forthcoming]

I would say yes, since there's plenty wrong with that franchise mechanically that people choose to ignore because they love the way it presents itself. The camera sucks, the lock-on sucks, the fact that your weapon bounces off of walls while enemies' don't sucks, not being able to aim your gun sucks.

Of all the videos about the Soulsborne games on YouTube, the majority are about the lore. And the fanbase can get really pissy if you don't play it the right way, like not doing the rather obtuse side quests or triggering story events. It'd say it's actually the lore that saves this franchise from it's rather cumbersome mechanics. Let's put it like this, if Soulsborne was set in, say, a generic zombie world would it have the pedigree it has now based soley on its mechanics?

I think it's a multifaceted reason why Soulsborne lore videos are popular are;

1: These games were ridiculously popular.
2: Videogames attract autistic people.
3: The lore videos are built sometimes solely on the basis of a three or four circumstantial pieces of text or NPC encounters.
4: The story and lore is purposefully told in a way that autistic people like... it's effectively a jumble of blue sky jigsaw puzzle pieces in narrative format.

You could make the same argument about videogamers and the Zelda timeline and lore videos and how Nintendo has for many of its interactions baked this esoterica into their gameworlds often even more meta and environmentally through architecture, monster, game mechanics and premise. Like I remember seeing a Zelda lore video that its whole argumentation cetred on some Hylian architecture with a texture decal that if you squint at it long enough it looks like the game mechanic lyrics of I think it was Zelda's Lullaby for OoT.

And guess what? Hundreds of thousands of views.

Seriously, recent sociological studies of videogaming and autism suggest that aout half of people on the spectrum spend most of their free time playing videogames or talking about videogames as compared to 18% of neurotypicals. It's basically a way for an autistic person to manage (or enable) their continued crippling social anxieties while being able to bond with another person like them that helps mitigate their loneliness and isolation from the poor social results that occur when people do not routinely socialize, often by creating an incredibly facile exterior of tribalistic 'supercommunity'.

It's actually really unhealthy how people consume videogames, if you haven't noticed.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3536490/#R30

 

[Yoshi178]

gameplay. why would i play video games for story? i can just go the cinemas and watch a movie if i want story.

.

Let me know when Persona has a movie on cinemas. Until then, I'll keep playing the series for the story. Thank you.

here you go. if you want it on a cinema screen just hook the computer up to a projector.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lXxsXq_Gto

 

[Casual Shinji]

This is of course the new Latin.

I avoided the series because the original hype for it was basically gatekeeping. "It's Nintendo Hard!" "It doesn't explain anything!"

And ironically, that was its biggest trick. People had so much difficulty because it was deliberately obtuse, like a clunky old NES title. People can pretend otherwise, but this shit was all over the Escapist and other gaming communities back when Demon's Souls and Dark Souls came out.

It was only after the mechanics were examined and people stopped measuring their True Gamer "sword" length that people started harping on the lore. Before the post-hoc "lore" reasoning, there was the "finally, a hard game for real gamers" reason, and that pushed the earlier games. It's quite possible that any such game could have survived and even thrived in a generic zombie setting. And we can kiiiiinda see that in a number of souls-alikes and what they focus on.

Would it have had the staying power though? See, I initially checked out Demon's Souls at the time because the word-of-mouth of it being this hard game, but I kept playing because of the world and the atmosphere. In Bloodborne it's a weird step back that you need to warp to a different place to level up and upgrade weapons, when in Dark Souls you could just do this by the bonfire. Yet nobody ever really complained about this mechanic because the hunter's dream and the doll were a pleasant part of the lore.

There's obviously some people who like having games be this mechanically cumbersome, having to bend themselves over backwards to excell in it, but if that's all Soulsborne was I doubt it'd be as big as it is.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Boring answer but ideally you get both. Gameplay makes the game fun, story makes it memorable.

tetris didn't become one of the most famous video games of all time because of it's story...

No, it was through lack of viable competition at the time. It's like saying Citizen Kane didn't get anywhere for it's impressive CGI. A little bit weird.

That, and the fact I said memorable, not famous (or popular, or any other word that isn't "memorable").
For something to be memorable it has to be unique in a way ordering random algorithms at an increasing speed isn't.

 

[CaitSeith]

gameplay. why would i play video games for story? i can just go the cinemas and watch a movie if i want story.

.

Let me know when Persona has a movie on cinemas. Until then, I'll keep playing the series for the story. Thank you.

here you go. if you want it on a cinema screen just hook the computer up to a projector.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-lXxsXq_Gto

It's not even the 5% of the story, pal.