Story and gameplay don't mix? What do you prefer?

[xPixelatedx]

I really liked Bioshock Infinite and The Last of Us. I thought other people liked them too, but when I saw an article about the rising numbers of story-based games I saw from the comments that a lot of people feel that these games threaten the "game side of games".

And can you really blame them? As we saw of Gen 7, any 'flavor of the month' can potentially spread like a virus. Look how many franchises were obliterated because the developer "wanted the call of Duty audience". So many games have been impacted negatively from other unrelated games, it's really quite sad. So seeing a game do something you don't enjoy, and seeing it starting to become a fad should indeed raise all the red flags. Dev's have trained gamers to think this way, because of the shit they've been pulling these last 6 years. DLC, always online, everyman protagonists, multiplayer mandatory, CoD audience and now the "cinematic experience" is starting to become a very popular thing. It's already bleeding into some unrelated games too much and making them worse for it.

I wish things were different, but that's the state of the industry.

 

[Maximum Bert]

Hard to say really I just want to be entertained mostly. Whether it does it through story, gameplay or a mixture doesnt bother me I have no preference.

 

[Specter Von Baren]

I 95% of the time need some kind of story for my gameplay. It doesn't even need to be all that complex above, evil farmer took your children and wife, go and dig your way to victory! But I need something to actually make me feel like there's a point to my actions.

But I'm a greedy person I guess, because my favorite is a balance of the two. Games like Tales of Symphonia or Fate/Extra are good examples of this in my opinion.

 

[LetalisK]

If I had to pick one, I'd take gameplay over story every time.

 

[Eve Charm]

If you don't get both you kinda of lose interest. If anything I rather have gameplay over story, I might not be happy at the end of the game but with rpgs like FF13 if the gameplay is so bad and long and just drags on I'll quit before getting far enough and play something more fun.

 

[MHR]

Why can't we have both? I love gameplay and I like story and a truly great game can combine the two stupendously to make a great experience. But you cant always have both because the thing is most games aren't truly great. Many have good gameplay and no story, and many have a good story and crap gameplay. One often comes at the cost of the other.

Bio infinite has a good story and the gameplay is boring. You got a gun in the right hand and a spell in the left. The spell is some basic skill you can spam to win and the guns are as basic and boring as they get and you get to use all of it against the same type of cannon fodder columbians through the whole game start-to-finish. It's obvious the Bioshock mechanics were dumbed-down for the casuals so they wouldn't get in the way of the story.

I prefer gameplay. I bought a game dammit, if I wanted a story I'd get a movie or a book or some obscure video-novel indie crap. Bio Infinite was a very good game, but I was disappointed about the game part of the game.

Gameplay in games should be the primary focus in my eyes.

 

[Bellvedere]

I think you need a bit of both even if it's not necessarily in the one game. Sometimes I enjoy playing to see what happens next, sometimes I couldn't care what's supposed to be happening and just want to play. While obviously being able to tell a great story and have great game mechanics in the same game is great, I think that playing without any pressure of narrative* still has a place. So if I had to choose one I'd go with gameplay. If I were simply after a narrative fix, there's other options like TV, movies and books.

 

[Lil devils x_v1legacy]

Gameplay of course, I honestly hate developer made storylines and do everything I can to skip through them most of the time. I would prefer a game that players write the story and are a part of it. Like you walk into a library in a game and players wrote all the books in it. Like you walk into a skill guild and the statues are of the players characters who have the highest stats, where the players with the highest PKs get wanted posters of them posted all over the towns and the game produces an in game bounty on their heads for players that can take them out. A game that players are actually a part of it, rather than just playing in the developers story.

 

[JagermanXcell]

Gameplay>Story
Is the answer seriously not obvious? Games simply need to have a lot more enjoyable interactivity, its been their thing since we had a ball smacking two sticks in Pong. To stray away from that in favor of hollywood quality scripts and "shakespearean" VAs is down right silly. Yes they can mix and I love when they do it well: Persona 4, The Last of Us, and Shadow of the Colossus are good examples of this. But saying that story is everything in a medium that is more about controlling the experience yourself... well... you should be slapped and sent to go watch a movie or read a book if you enjoy story so much.

I don't play God Hand for the weird exposition that shows up 3 hours in. I play God Hand so I can kick people into the sun and bust my enemies' balls BECAUSE I FRIKIN CAN!

 

[Miss G.]

The story and the gameplay are very important things for me to get a game, sometimes one is more of a deciding factor than the other, but both are always taken into heavy consideration. For what I do end up getting, they manage to be two great tastes that taste great together.
e.g. just a short list
Gameplay:
Persona/SMT series - I get to use the power of multiple-personality disorder as summonable demons or straight-up use demons to fight for me and I get to fight alongside them.
Pokemon - simple to get, but hard to master mechanics.
Kingdom Hearts - Birth By Sleep combat all the way
Okami - I get to run around as a sun-goddess in wolf form, platforming that even I can handle, the world as a sumi-e painting, must get all 100 stray beads to truly god-mode.
The Last of Us - I played something that actually had guns in it, even though I went melee for most everything, and took up to half an hour sometimes to steel myself to get the jump on a guy as non-JRPGs are a foreign thing for me.
Disgaea - the strategy and moves and group combos

Story:
The Last of Us - a few minutes of a Let's Play had me hooked enough to buy something that's not a JRPG.
Persona/SMT series - the occult lore, the characters, the demons, the story routes you can take without having to be straight-up evil or paragon.
Kingdom Hearts - always need to know what happens next, Chain of Memories gave me Axel and Zexion, Birth By Sleep gave me my girl-crush, Aqua.
Pokemon - its my journey and I get to set my pace
Okami - so many engaging characters and tearful moments that get me every time (No! ...Not Tobi! He was so young... *sniffle*).
Disgaea - Etna. The Prism Rangers. Flonne.

 

[The Enquirer]

As a few other people have said, the two can co-exist. The Timesplitters series in a stellar example of this case. The first game had really no story, just a loose set of objectives and enemies spawning, and the 2nd game had more of a story but it was still fairly lackluster, while the third game had a very strong story. All 3 games have excellent gameplay. The gameplay you provide just needs to suit the story. It's a simple matter of not bringing the knife to the gun fight. You want to have gameplay to match your story. If your story is very fast paced the gameplay should show that. If the story is more in depth have your gameplay show that. Mass Effect has great gameplay and story simply because the two do not intrude on each other.

Writing this now actually the best possible example I can come up with of the 2 meshing together is the Batman: Arkham games. As you swing around the city and hear conversations between people, they progress with the story. As you progress through the story and things become more tense and the stakes raise, the enemies become tougher and better suited to fight. The story and gameplay don't step on each other.

 

[hooglese]

Good gameplay. Good gameplay can hold up no story, while the inverse isn't true for me atleast

 

[piinyouri]

Of course we can have both, and they can work well together.
If the question happened to be "You can only have one, choose." I'd choose game play every single time.

I can skip or ignore bad stories or stories I've experienced one too many times.
Can't (as easily) ignore bad game play.

 

[Something Amyss]

Put it this way: I have nothing against storytelling in games, but the storytelling is rarely strong enough to carry a bad game. I prefer gameplay as-is, but strong narrative is good, too.

They can work together, I think.

 

[Olas]

I think that some of these gamers who complain of these story-based games feel like games should just be that, games with only the gameplay mattering, nothing else. But I can't just play a game; I can't play a mindless fps-multiplayer or some retro-game with an extremely bad plot. I need a good story with my gameplay.

I don't think anybody feels that a game should always be JUST gameplay, or that story shouldn't matter. We just recognize that gameplay is the meat of a game's experience whereas story generally serves as a backdrop. Hence you can have genuinely good games without any story

But you can't really have a good game without any gameplay.

Ideally the story should actually be told through the gameplay, so that there's no need for a compromise between the two. Unfortunately that's not a simple task and many games fail at it or don't try at all. I don't really have any answers except that game's aren't movies and shouldn't try to emulate them but instead play to their own strengths.

 

[Racecarlock]

Heavy rain has an okay TV story, worthy of a season on NBC.

As a game, it sucks. It just sucks. Hold stick right to shave. Hooray. Oh and look, QTES so we can pretend that your actions have consequences, as though you can't just load the previous checkpoint.

Give me Escape Velocity any day.

 

[WOPR]

I'd prefer if story driven games that can't pull off gameplay, stay smart and keep away from gameplay. (The Walking Dead, Primordia, Monkey Island, Dear Esther)
While games that have great gameplay but kinda suck at stories stray away from the story push it sparingly or through background info rather than direct confrontation and/or unskippable cutscenes. (Painkiller, Resident Evil 4, The House of the Dead 2... actually almost anything by Capcom or Sega... Nothing personal I love them both just... There was nothing we could do... "YEAH?!")

Games that can pull off both however are amazing. Just look at the number of fans Shadow of the Colossus and Dark Souls have. Both had tight gameplay and a great story delivered through background info. The games truly defined "Depth". They could tell stories without saying a word.
Another thing that works is keeping the story and gameplay in separate parts of the game (StarCraft II, Divinity: Dragon Commander) although this method isn't near as effective in my opinion.

but what really turns me off from a game, one that tries to give story with uninteresting and repetitive characters (with all the same voice actor), while giving sloppy, loose, nonsensical gameplay (you know where I'm going) and using both as excuses for eachother, backed with "well it's just so wide open and you can do anything in the world!"
This said. I've never liked "The Elder Scrolls" series. I like their races and lore, but only when kept far away from their "games" (I personally think of them more like modding tools).

So my conclusion, they CAN work together, but USUALLY they're better when kept separate.

 

[Naeras]

While I prefer games to have both, I have to say that very few games have managed to carry me through the game on the merits of the story alone. I'd definitely have Super Mario Galaxy over Bioshock Infinite(I haven't even finished the latter). On the other hand, I do think Majora's Mask is a better game than Ocarina of Time, simply because MM actually has an emotionally engaging world, while the gameplay is still very solid.

 

[Casual Shinji]

You know what I like, that I can choose what I'm in the mood for.

I can play The Last of Us if I'm in the mood for a fantastic story-centric game, or I can play Rayman Legends if I feel like having a fantastic gameplay-centric experience.

Variety being the spice of stuff and all that.