Poll: i hate exposition
- Thread starter _zuul
- Start date
Recommended Videos
By what you mean exposition you probably mean explaining the story and the themes in long monologues. Which is a pretty shitty way of telling a story if used excessively, but hardly all the word exposition means.
Not explaining the story much at all, like they did it with SotC (and to slight lesser extent SH2), is fine for some games and stories, but it would seriously get old if everyone started being that ambiguous.
You gotta know pretty well what kind of atmosphere you are after if you want to write a story like that.
But no, exposition is just another tool of telling a story. Nothing wrong with it in itself, since it can be used well or badly depending on the quality of the work.
And please for the love of god stop throwing comments like: "Go read a book if you want a story". Video games are a medium, not "just games", they can't be used in which ever way you or the audience likes it.
Not explaining the story much at all, like they did it with SotC (and to slight lesser extent SH2), is fine for some games and stories, but it would seriously get old if everyone started being that ambiguous.
You gotta know pretty well what kind of atmosphere you are after if you want to write a story like that.
But no, exposition is just another tool of telling a story. Nothing wrong with it in itself, since it can be used well or badly depending on the quality of the work.
And please for the love of god stop throwing comments like: "Go read a book if you want a story". Video games are a medium, not "just games", they can't be used in which ever way you or the audience likes it.
I can't even imagine how you would enjoy it. Why play a metal gear game at all then?_zuul said:
Exposition can be oh so great and oh so frackin terrible. Uncharted 2 is probably the best recent example of good exposition, well scripted well paced cut scenes with voice capture and motion capture recorded at the same time for once! Plus the way they integrate the scene/event with gameplay really made the game.
Then there's MGS4...
Now I'm a huge MGS fanboy and I love MGS4 game play oh so much but sweet jesus christ Hideo Kojima needs a new editing team badly. eight and a half hours of painful, poorly acted, badly scripted exposition (and thats not even including the codec!) thats almost as long as a season of the Wire! The game has more endings than lord of the rings... and then that epilogue half way through the credits with big boss! The voice actors must have made a fortune!
Then there's MGS4...
Now I'm a huge MGS fanboy and I love MGS4 game play oh so much but sweet jesus christ Hideo Kojima needs a new editing team badly. eight and a half hours of painful, poorly acted, badly scripted exposition (and thats not even including the codec!) thats almost as long as a season of the Wire! The game has more endings than lord of the rings... and then that epilogue half way through the credits with big boss! The voice actors must have made a fortune!
i have never heard of the game either, shadow of colossus was heard of but no one i know liked it so we didn't care to check out any of the other games obviously, so Ico just must be a thing not around here, because i've never heard of itJulianking93 said:
Sorry...my brain has a hard time computing what you just said.gmaverick019 said:
You...didn't like Shadow of the Colossus?
Hiphophippo said:
nuke launching mechs... sneaking and shit... not skipping all the cutscenes in other metal gear solid games... oh fuck i gotta fight 20 RAYs... shit was so cash... being sad at the end of mgs3, even though alot of the game was kinda goofy... realizing big boss is cooler than solid snake because nano-machines are for wusses... laughing that raiden was a joke about the player... etc
Incidentally Ico also reminded me of something, when I played it. It reminded me that I had better things to do... Like knock my head into the wall..._zuul said:
Also, to answer your question, plot-exposition can be good. Although, I hate it when people take themselves seriously. It's pathetic.
There's no problem with well-placed and well-made xposition.
An appropriate example would be BioShock. The gameplay was great, but you got almost no story from the gameplay. You had to pick up recordings and listen to the musings of the citizens of Rapture to find out what the hell went down before yo showed up. It was sone so well though that I found myself hiding away whenever I found a new recording and listening to it quite intently.
People bash MGS for its exposition, and yes there is too much of it, but its fun to listen to it all mash it together with all the other nonsense Hideo Kojima has thrown out at us. Its like listening to a hobo rant for a few hours about government conspiracies. Actually, that summarizes it pretty well. Its vaguely interesting and almost humorous in nature. The fact remains that there is too much of it and after listening to the hobo rant that long you really feel like hitting him with a baseball bat and few hundred times.
I dunno, I find myself a little too interested in useless trivia. For example, I've read every FFXII bestiary entry I've found. That's a good novels worth of info that has no bearing on anything ever, but I still read it all.
Crap exposition on the other hand is terrible. FFX falls under that category unfortunately. As much as I love FF games, that game's storyline still makes me want to strangle small orphans. Gragh! You know, I would have been a little miffed by the ending if I didn't want Tidus to die by the end of that game. Auron wa sthe the only merit that game had... Oops, i"m ranting...
I dunno To each their own I guess.
An appropriate example would be BioShock. The gameplay was great, but you got almost no story from the gameplay. You had to pick up recordings and listen to the musings of the citizens of Rapture to find out what the hell went down before yo showed up. It was sone so well though that I found myself hiding away whenever I found a new recording and listening to it quite intently.
People bash MGS for its exposition, and yes there is too much of it, but its fun to listen to it all mash it together with all the other nonsense Hideo Kojima has thrown out at us. Its like listening to a hobo rant for a few hours about government conspiracies. Actually, that summarizes it pretty well. Its vaguely interesting and almost humorous in nature. The fact remains that there is too much of it and after listening to the hobo rant that long you really feel like hitting him with a baseball bat and few hundred times.
I dunno, I find myself a little too interested in useless trivia. For example, I've read every FFXII bestiary entry I've found. That's a good novels worth of info that has no bearing on anything ever, but I still read it all.
Crap exposition on the other hand is terrible. FFX falls under that category unfortunately. As much as I love FF games, that game's storyline still makes me want to strangle small orphans. Gragh! You know, I would have been a little miffed by the ending if I didn't want Tidus to die by the end of that game. Auron wa sthe the only merit that game had... Oops, i"m ranting...
I dunno To each their own I guess.
nope. the only person i know who does is the guy down at gamers, he recommended it for a rental and so me and my friends got it, we got about 4 hours in and we were bored out of our minds, so we returned it and got some other games instead.Julianking93 said:
I'm not saying its a horrible game, im just saying no one i know likes it