The Story

[Tempest13]

But how would one make turn based, more traditional RPGs more seamless in regards to story telling? Would there have to be a change in gameplay to make that happen, or would the environment tell more while dialogue became more fluid. I suppose traditional RPGs don't have that same problem, since it's an expected outcome of the genre and the narrative can be treated in a book like manner at some points, but it doesn't mean there can't be improvements. SMT does some interesting things at times with this, such as the final battles in Persona 3 and 4, but otherwise there arn't many leaps and bounds for the RPG genre.

 

[Taynas]

I wish there had been a bit more exchange between everyone but it was cool to let some different people in to the discussion. Hopefully Shamus and Graham will be in this again because I both appreciate their opinions as well as thinking that adding more intelligent opinions to this is always good.

Comment to Graham about Fallout and Mass Effect arbitrary conversation options locking out things: I don't know about Fallout but I know in Mass Effect that this rarely happens (I can think of once and it is more a talk too long leads to death then anything else). I know this particularly because I was worried about missing out on cool experiences or cool characters so I looked in to it previous to my playing and found that while your choices have effects, they so far have not locked out anything (especially within the game the decision is made). These decisions probably will lock out things in the third game but what it keeps you from doing should not be surprises (such as collector base decision or geth decision)

 

[StriderShinryu]

Couple things. First, I'm in the same boat as many others here where, if a game gives me the chance to make choices, I want those choices to mean something. I want to be locked out of certain things if I choose Option A instead of Option B. It allows the developers to tell a much richer story that rewards player interaction as opposed to laughing at it and games that offer the illusion of a choice with no impact at all are little better than old JRPGs that used the infinite YES?/NO? loop. If you feel robbed of your play experience by not "winning" the game the way you wanted then you were probably approaching the game with the wrong intention.

Secondly, I'm one of those who doesn't like the Half Life way of storytelling (or, more particularly, conversations). I don't want the NPCs to talk at me while I'm running around the room jumping on the architecture. Scenarios like that, or even the possibility of them existing should you choose to sit there and be a good boy, make me feel like the game world doesn't even care if I'm there or not. That sort of thing works for world events, but it's the complete opposite of immersion when interaction is assumed. Next time you are having a conversation with someone in real life try to run around the room and rifle through their drawers. Approximately no one in the world would just continue their conversation as normal under those circumstances.

 

[The Random One]

Hey look, it's Graham! Cartoon Graham! Welcome, Cartoon Graham!

I largely agree with what was discussed; most games today want to have a pretence of a story, but you shouldn't bother if you don't think you can deliver an experience like that. The problem is that most people don't think of stories the way they are presented in videogames, which is why people don't follow the HL lead - they think of stories as linear things, not exploratory things. I remember one of the Deus Ex devs talking about how his team complained when he said not all things would be available to the player depending on the path they took, because they didn't want to work on a major scenario or cutscene the player might skip; likewise, there's the railroading DM who treats her players as video game characters and merely sets up a story for them to drive through without input. Perhaps a good video game writer is not one who is otherwise a good writer, but one who is a good GM.

 

[bjj hero]

1: Voice acting sucks!

I'm not saying game voice acting is doomed to suck from now 'till eternity, but as a general rule it's just not that good for various reasons. Even if the actors are capable they're simply handed a heavy binder full of words to be read into a microphone. As long as that tasks is completely things like characterization, shifts in emotion depending on the situation and that unshakable feeling that they're not talking to you so much as reading a list to you aren't important enough to get right.

In games like Torment and the Baldur's Gates there was very little acting. Most characterization was done through text where shifts in mood and expression were described for you to imagine rather than implied and not really followed up on by the actor/character model. Basically, we remember the stories and characters as better because we were left to, for the most part, imagine them rather than have a bland performance forced upon us.

Still, I think the craziest part is the gamers of today who claim to love the acting in games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect, standards fallen so low that they would be blown away by some random soap opera on tv. The procedures for voice acting need to improve a lot before they can compete with our imaginations.

Too true. The need to voice everything and to have HD visuals to go with it has really hurt story telling. It is so obvious that voice work and "acting" (facial expressions, body language, casually doing paper work while talking...) are done seperately. It really kills it for me. We have worlds populated by stationary, staring, socially aukward, zombies impersonating real charecters in video games. at what point will we be able to have actors controlling body movement, face, body language and voice at the same time? It will really help story telling and charecterisation... if the actors and script are good.

 

[rsvp42]

I agree that at its core, gaming is about interactivity and player agency. It's true that the "purest" game story will be one where a player stays in control except where it's important to the story that they lose that control.

BUT

At the same time, there is no one "right" way to tell a story in games. There is only what's fun, entertaining, enjoyable. I find BioWare games to be immensely entertaining, despite their reliance on cutscenes and dialog wheels. These things are part of the experience and make it what it is.

Too often, I feel that opponents of cutscenes and cinematic storytelling in games would prefer a world in which no games tell stories in that way and I think that would be an incredibly tragic loss. There are many ways to tell a story and gaming is one medium for doing so. We shouldn't be trying to exclude certain methods just because they don't fit into our idea of a pure game.

 

[Hyperactiveman]

"I'd like an NPC to start talking to me as soon as I come close to them, rather than staring mutely at me until I hit the context-sensitive prompt flashing over their heads. I'd then like to still be in control of my character throughout the conversation, walking around,"

You've played the Darkness Yahtzee and that offers a flowing form of reralistic dialog that doesn't limit control between ingame playing... they call to you as you move towards them, they curse at you for moving away, the communication is both witty and gritty adding to the story or to the mini quest you're currently doing, the camera does switch postitions so you can see a perspective where you see yourself and you can still move as freely as you would...

Small Spoiler Alert

... Having said that besides being an awesomely layed out game... Jackie Estacado is a sort of Keanu Reeves of an actor showing as little emotion as possible... Even though he ain't a pussy and like most of us would rather rage at Paulie than cry over your girl he just murdered in front of you.

Oh and great comments about Saints Row Graham... You're right on the money!

 

[RTR]

How about a discussion regarding moral choice in games some other time??

 

[Andy of Comix Inc]

I think everyone should get the cartoon avatar treatment, Yahtzee, Bob, and James included. I really freakin' like them. Whoever drew them should get many cookies.

...or just money

 

[Evil Alpaca]

Graham Stark: Yahtzee, it's funny you mention Alpha Protocol, because it did another thing I liked when dealing with conversation trees, which is making your choices largely unimportant to the story. If they're giving you a time limit to answer, they'd pretty much have to, but you could make whatever choice you felt like, knowing that while you might miss out on something fun by picking the "wrong" option, you wouldn't ruin your whole experience.

I completely disagree with this. If your choice is meaningless aside from deciding if you fill the good or evil bar, what is the point? This was one of the biggest disappointments about Mass Effect 2 for me. I played both paragon and renegade and I was rather let down by the fact that neither choice seemed to have an immediate impact on your interaction with the world. Aside from one choice about a minor character (I'm sorry but Morinth and Samara are the same character with a pallet swap), your crew accepts your decisions regardless. I found that it took the immersion quality out of the game when I realized that it didn't matter what I did, sense the journey would be the same.

An example of this choice done well is from a previous Bioware game: KOTOR. At the end of the game, if you chose the dark side, characters in your party will not accept your decision and fight you. It made the story much better when you realized that your party members would stick to their principles and you could lose them if you made the wrong decisions. It added a whole new element to the game where you not only considered game mechanics like whether decision A got you more experience than decision B but also if your decisions could lose you party members.

 

[rsvp42]

In games like Torment and the Baldur's Gates there was very little acting. Most characterization was done through text where shifts in mood and expression were described for you to imagine rather than implied and not really followed up on by the actor/character model. Basically, we remember the stories and characters as better because we were left to, for the most part, imagine them rather than have a bland performance forced upon us.

Still, I think the craziest part is the gamers of today who claim to love the acting in games like Dragon Age and Mass Effect, standards fallen so low that they would be blown away by some random soap opera on tv. The procedures for voice acting need to improve a lot before they can compete with our imaginations.

Well it's obviously the voice acting, not the physical acting that impresses people. A lot can be conveyed through the tone of the voice with simple visual cues in the body. What we see in recent BioWare games isn't as good as say, what we're seeing from L.A. Noire, but it does the job. Just as a person can become immersed in a classic sprite-based RPG, where simple visuals imply detail and invite the player to imagine how it might "really look," physical acting in BioWare games--when coupled with the top-notch voice acting--suggests enough of the reality of the scene to tell the story and let our mind fill in the blanks.

So it's not high-quality body motion, but it's a significant step up from static NPCs and text boxes (which would feel very out of place in their games). It's a trade-off really. BioWare could probably give us much better physical acting in their characters, but at the cost of all the different dialogue options. They use a modular approach where specific clips are strung together to get the right feel instead of one continuous scene. I compare it to Red Dead Redemption, which has noticeably better character animation in its cutscenes, but nowhere near the level of choice.

 

[MB202]

Holy Cow, Yahtzee's seen the Plinkett reviews! They're awesome, for those who haven't seen it.

 

[pigmy wurm]

I remember the bit I played through of GTA 4 being really jarring. Unlike previos games they set up this likable character who has a troubled past and who they were trying to make a fleshed out three dimensional person. The problem is that this guy who keeps saying "I don't want to kill any more people" is in a GTA game where the reason you are playing it is to drive around, cause mayhem, and slaughter vast amounts of people. And if he doesn't want to kill people any more, why can I only choose jobs that involve killing people. Personally, I felt like a dick playing it and stopped, while I had no problems with GTA 3.

To a comment graham made to Shamus at the end, I think that video games leaving more of the story to out imagination did make them better. Sure they didn't have a choice, but games today do, and more should choose it. Personally, when I played Half-life 2 I hadn't played the first one so I filled in the gaps myself and while I knew the plot I was constructing wasn't correct it was still fun. Just try playing through half-life 2 while rationalizing Freeman's muteness, I found it really fun. Every time I came to a radio in a resistance base calling for someone to respond I pictured Freeman tortured over his inability to respond and tell them that all of their friends are dead and that they should probably watch out for soldiers..

 

[Srdjan Tanaskovic]

An example of this choice done well is from a previous Bioware game: KOTOR. At the end of the game, if you chose the dark side, characters in your party will not accept your decision and fight you. It made the story much better when you realized that your party members would stick to their principles and you could lose them if you made the wrong decisions. It added a whole new element to the game where you not only considered game mechanics like whether decision A got you more experience than decision B but also if your decisions could lose you party members.

They used that System again in the Dragon Age games didn't they?

and the setting of Mass Effect is different then that of KOTOR

Holy Cow, Yahtzee's seen the Plinkett reviews! They're awesome, for those who haven't seen it.

I could never stand more then 30 second of that guys voice

and if I got it right then Yahtzee complained that all they where doing was just sitting there and talk? Didn't they do that in 12 Angry Men as well?

 

[cerebus23]

Different stroke for different folks.

Me i love a great epic cut scene like the final confrontation in mass effect 1, i love the interactive movie aspects of the metal gear series, not just because the story is so bat crap crazy but because the parts you do play are fun to play.

Older rpgs like fallout 1 and 2 get to be more varied in their dialogue simply cause it is just text, no voice actors to hire to sit in a booth for 12 hours a day for weeks on end recutting the same lines over and over to get the proper feel for a 2 min conversation branch in a game.

Lots of people love their stories, lots of people just want to shoot things and blow things up. It is very hard to please both camps.

Hence to put it in a mmo perspective many people do not even bother to read or listen to the quests, many of them do not want to sit through a cutscene no matter how well done it is, why tor could be sink or swim depending how they handle the dialogue and cutscenes since some people are not going to want to be arsed about them while other will want to listen and watch and pick their choices carefully. Granted many mmos standard dialogues boil down to go kill XX x, y, and zs for XXXX reward and X plus x. TOR better be a tad more creative in their quests if each and every quest giver is going to be spoken and in cutscene form.

Half life 2 in and of itself was just pure epic because the gameplay and the story are great. Not many games nail one or the other or both. Bioware does a decent job in many of it's games of lest giving us characters and events that seem to matter and therefore your choices matter.

ANd yea for your 50 to 60 dollars do you want a wholly linear rpg that lasts 25 to 40 hours and then your done with it or would you rather have the option to play things out a different way, bring different characters to your side, make events happen differently. Sadly the one thing that does fail pretty hard in those cases is those branching events do not mean a ton to the overall story. Picking dragon age and the like where the choice events seem to have a tiny bit to do with the story especuially since bioware has an official canon story for the outcome no matter if you do everything differently from what they want you to do.

Like you can piss all over the ashes of andraste in dao and kill leandria right then and there but by da2 she is a fairly key is background figure in the da2 story. Half tempted to go back to dao and kill here just to see what the hell happens in da2 if she is dead.

But it does fly in the face of choices matter when there is an official canon ending rather than the canon ending of the games is what you make of it. And if they do have a canon ending why even allow you options to kill certain npcs and etc.

 

[GiantRaven]

The only point of having dialogue options is to allow the player to make significant choices that affect the story.

What? There is only one function of dialogue within a story? Do you not find that idea somewhat limiting?

 

[ArmorArmadillo]

Eh, this wasn't a great one for me because there were no disagreement. I would have wanted to see someone taking an alternate opinion from someone else to drive the discussion, this one was more just brief and saying "A is good. I agree. B is good. I agree."

Which will happen when people are being honest about games and the issue ends up being not especially contentious, but still.

As for game stories, I think an issue that people should touch on is the problem of dialogue trees making characters too vague...I mean, take a bioware game, because it gives you all these options of reacting as good or evil it forces the game to make the character blank enough that any of these character options still work in the game. It inevitably ends up that your character becomes at best a sort of background observer who just ends up watching other people react to things and make decisions and occasionally chiming in with hitting something or saying "Yes, that sounds great"

Which makes the whole story less interactive feeling because it feels like everyone else is leading you around and it is really really hard to care about or connect with my character when they're just a blank slate.

Counterexample: Infinite Space (EXCELLENT storytelling)
Sure, you don't control Yuri's reactions, but giving him dialogue allows him to actually express himself actually makes him into a fleshed out character that I can care about leading to victory.

 

[MB202]

Holy Cow, Yahtzee's seen the Plinkett reviews! They're awesome, for those who haven't seen it.

I could never stand more then 30 second of that guys voice

and if I got it right then Yahtzee complained that all they where doing was just sitting there and talk? Didn't they do that in 12 Angry Men as well?

Oh-ho, but you see, in 12 Angry Men, there was more to it than just standing and talking. The men moved around the room, , tested out theories, and above all, they actually showed some emotions in the movie. That, and the movie was WAY better-written than any of the Star Wars prequels. The problem with the Star Wars prequels is that they're just standing/sitting and talking to get expositionary dialogue out of the way so they can get to the CG-green screened action. Hell, even when they're talking there's a green screen, and it's through this that you can tell that these dialogue scenes are unnatural. You can just TELL that they're filling these talking scenes in an enclosed space, because there's little movement and all they do is say the lines they were supposed to say. There's nothing dynamic about any of it, and boring to boot. The review mainly uses the scene where Anakin reveals to Mace Windu that Palpatine is a Sith Lord as a primary example. This SHOULD be an exciting revelation, in which they learn that they're in trouble, but they just say they're lines and walk off screen at what can't even be called a brisk pace.

So yeah, even though his voice sounds weird, Plinkett makes SUCH good points throughout his reviews.

 

[Jumplion]

Oh thank goodness SOMEBODY has finally mentioned the story of GTA4. I honestly don't get why people were going around, giving it 10/10s, and saying the story was comparable to The Godfather when it just wasn't.

Sandbox games are probably the hardest games to write a story for because pacing goes completely out the window and it goes at the player's discretion. You need to keep the player's attention, so you give them a bunch of sidequests to do, but sometimes these sidequests don't fit with the whole story.

I'm pretty sure that Nico Belic was bipolar or schizophrenic or something. In one mission I had to keep a sniper watch over a "business meeting" with some mobsters and Nico eagerly accepted it and smiled, going "Alright, I'll do it." After that, I went around, did some stuff, went crazy with the police, and decided to go to another mission. I went to one of Nico's gay friends who wanted to take him on a relaxing boat ride, saying "It'll be fun!" to which Nico responded furiously with, "Fun? I'm trying to keep a low profile with mobsters and criminals going after me! I don't have time for your games!" and then he begrudgingly accepted, and somehow they ended up shooting some mobsters in the water.

Do you see the problem here? It's a huge inconsistency, and I can't really blame Rockstar for this (though I will) because it is pretty hard to keep a sandbox game with any form of consistency, let alone for the story. Red Dead Redemption was much better with this, but it still suffered from inconsistencies with John Marston (seriously, why did he need to go and help a revolution in Mexico? I had forgotten why I had come down there in the first place). Hopefully L.A. Noire will provide a better example of a story in a sandbox with consistent characterization, and consistent gameplay in general.

 

[Kermi]

I love BioWare games but my replay of ME2 I'm doing right now (I just got it back from a friend) is really making it clear that the dialogue - while great for building a character - really does take you out of the game. It's really like ticknig a bunch of boxes. I'm doing an Renegade Femshep playthrough (in contrast to my first run of Paragon Manshep) and it's like Investigate > Option 1, Option 2, then move the analogue stick to the lower right to be a dick.
At the same time though, I want the best possible ending - I don't want to screw up so badly that the game becomes unwinnable or otherwise unpleasant. I don't care too much if I don't get a perfect run and keep everyone alive through the endgame, but I want to keep some people alive. So while I'm a dick to almost everyone and grab every Renegade QTE (while ignoring the Paragon ones) I'm still nice to most of my crew members. I bought Chakwas her brandy and toasted to Joker. I'm flirting like a mofo with Yeoman Chambers (even agreeing to call her Kelly), and I won't be rude to Joker even if I did refer to him as a cripple while the Normandy Mk.1 was going down in flames. I'm friendly but professional with Miranda (since I want to do her loyalty mission but I don't want to shag her) and I'll probably be nice to Garrus since I do want to shag him. I'm wondering if Femshep gets romance options with Jack? I don't really like Jack so if I lose her loyalty by taking advantage of her early on I'll probably do that then let her die.

These are all things I'm thinking about when plotting out my character. On playthrough 1 all I did wasp ick paragon dialogue options, flirt with everyone, turn down Jack then invite Miranda back to my room. Granted, I probably would have gone the Paragon route anyway because that felt more natural to me, but I'm glad I'm deliberately doing a Renegade run because the contrast is quite interesting.

Fallout 3/New Vegas feel a lot more unnatural to me. Maybe it's the voice acting. Maybe it's the plastic look and feel of the people who are talking to me. Maybe it's the fact that I'm scrolling down a list of options and most combat is via VATS so it feels like my involvement is basically just walking around and mashing the stimpack hotkey when I get into trouble.

Mass Effect and Fallout 3 have great stories and let me make choices that shape my experience, but i'm very aware that I'm making those choices.

The most engaging games for me are the ones where they're aren't really any choices, but the game flows in a natural way that doesn't feel linear. It is linear, but the game design makes me not care. This is why while Mass Effect 2 is a better game, I enjoy playing Modern Warfare 2 and Halo Reach a bunch more.