The Problem With the "Walking Around Simulator"

[someguy1231]

A game could have the best story I've ever seen, but if it's not fun to play, I won't buy it. Simple as that.

I'm sick of developers acting as if good writing somehow "makes up" for poor/nonexistent gameplay. If all I ever do in your "game" is press my WASD keys and occasionally my "interact" key, then your "game" is no game at all.

 

[Cecilo]

If I make a program that turns pages in a book, and sell that to you. You are not playing a game, you are reading a book with an interactive way to turn the pages. Pressing forward, backwards, left, right, or turning is not playing a game. And if that is what you want to do with your time, FEEL FREE. I am happy you have something for you, but do not call it a game, it is not one. It is at best an interactive painting, sometimes with a voice over program, like you could find in a museum that you attach the headphones to.

 

[Llarys]

I think a big problem with these "Walking Simulators" that I don't feel like anybody has addressed particularly strongly about is the fact that they just have weak stories.

I mean, if we wanted to break down a "video game" into its core components, we could say: The Gameplay (what the player does), the Visuals/Audio (what the player sees and hears), and the Story (what the player experiences).

These Walkabouts aren't about gameplay, so that means in order to create a good one they would need a strong Visual/Audio and a, stronger still, Story to support the missing leg. Of course, many of these are made by tiny groups (one person?) with nearly no budget, so the Visual/Audio is typically going to be weak as well.

...and all that leaves us with is a table with one leg - the story.


Yet, at the end of the day, the stories these games deliver are fucking SHITE, if they have a story at all (a legless table?)!

When the story is the focus of your work, and you have no real visuals or gameplay to back it up, then the story needs to be good. And I mean REALLY good. Not a 5 minute teen angst drama. Not 2 hours of non-sequitur dialogue that leaves the player with more questions than when they started. And, seriously, if your game has no gameplay, the visuals and audio are all free assets from the unity store, and you didn't even write a story, then sod off; your game doesn't even deserve to be called a "Walking Simulator." Maybe a Scam Simulator.


A game like Dark Souls have a Q/A team and play-testers whose job is to test all the equipment, fight all the enemies/bosses, etc, in order to find bugs, glitches, and gauge the balance of the game to determine tweaks to improve the experience.

What these Walk-Abouts need, and currently lack, are editors, and people to "test" the script. See what makes sense, what doesn't, where this bit of story could fit better into narrative they've created. Writing is hard, and I don't know if the people who make these games even have that much experience with it (this is getting too far into the assumption territory, and I'm already behind enemy lines).

Right now, their stories come on as pretentious, if they're even coherent, but I believe people would warm up to them if they had a strong script to engage the player in lieu of gameplay.

 

[El Camino of Rampage]

I really like Yahtzee's point about challenge. In a traditional story, the protagonist has to face some sort of conflict or the story is probably gonna be boring (I'm leaving out more abstract stuff). The issue is that, in video games, "challenge" too often means a puzzle or man-killing. I think there are more interesting ways of incorporating challenge and conflict into a story-driven game. Making a difficult choice, solving a mystery, etc. are good examples and I think they count as challenges (for example, the ending of Mass Effect 3 is the former. I haven't played Gone Home but I believe it is the latter).

 

[Pitzotl]

Digital modern art installations. And I'm off.