Why are most AAA stories so... awful?

[09philj]

Writing a story into a game is hard. You can do the plot in cutscenes, but the intervening time has to contribute as well to make it work, and that's where most games have a problem, as the gameplay sections don't build the world or characters. Wolfenstein: The New Order didn't exactly have much plot in the gameplay sections, but it did use them to explain the world and add atmosphere. Same goes for BioShock.

 

[Worgen]

I'm surprised no one linked this yet

The short of it is that story tends to come later in development.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Make that videogame stories in general.
And that's an easy one.
The stories in videogames aren't written by writers.
They're written by roomfuls of execs with a budget and a deadline. Or Hideo Kojima, the literary equivalent of a heart attack.

I think that's overly negative. Sure, stories in videogames might not always be of the highest quality but same goes for movies(which is by its definition a story driven medium). 99% of it is garbage. Sure, a lot of it has to do with studios providing screenplays by checklist but I can't shake the feeling that even in smaller productions there is just a distinct lack of imagination. You make it sound the stories in games suck b/c they don't adhere to the taste of some elitist cultural snob. Which is kind of silly b/c movies and 99% of novels for that matter don't either.

As for Kojima, atleast the guy has an active imagination and I'm never bored with any of the stories in his games. With MGS2 he even made a deconstruction of videogame storytelling through a postmodern narrative using the interactive of the medium itself to communicate the message. With Snatcher, Policenauts, Zone of the Enders 2, MGS2, 3 and 5 I can't consider Kojima anything less than a creative visionary who pushed the medium forward in both storytelling, gameplay and technology.

Anyways from the last few years there were definitely a lot of games that had genuinely good stories. Deus Ex Human Revolution, the Arkham games, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Spec Ops The Line, Witcher all come to mind. Atleast they were all enjoyable which in the end is all that counts. And they all used the strength of the interactivity of the medium to tell its story.

Kojima dazzled everyone with MGS 1 & 2 back when 3D cutscenes and fully-voiced dialogue weren't a given, and I think he's been riding on that wave of awe ever since. I don't think the man can write plot, characters or dialogue. There is however a lot of navel-gazing, which seems to impress most gamers. Which leads me to this: most of the time, when a game is lauded for good writing, it's because it comments on its own medium. It lampshades it. It deconstructs it. It satirizes it. And so on.

So games are good in talking about themselves, at least that's what passes for daring these (i.e. the past 20 years) days. I don't think that, presently, most games have anything interesting to offer on any other subject - chief among them the human condition and its spiritual unrest, which has always been the subject matter of all the great Literary Classics. Antigone. The Divine Comedy. Paradise Lost. Hamlet. Moby-Dick. Ulysses. Crime and Punishment. War and Peace. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Blood Meridian.

Right now games have the narrative worth of pulp fiction: fast, uncomplicated and sensational.

 

[sXeth]

Well there's two schools of it

Either they really don't give a rat's backside about the story and focused on gameplay.
or the story will be subpar because of the player agency making it forcibly nebulous.

The latter is kind of like how Choose your own adventure books are generally mediocre tripe. Too many options to really flesh out.

Although we have the newer (well not really) version, as employed by Telltale/Bioware, where you get a choice that basically ends up having no actual effect on the story progression overall in the least. At most a minor character will die/live, but then probably have little further impact anyways, because they have to allow for them being dead.

 

[Cryselle]

You also really have to much further define what is 'bad' when it comes to writing in this context.

Because ultimately, very few people would actually legitimately list a good story as the top criteria for purchasing video games. It's not that they don't like a good story, or that they wouldn't appreciate it if they got one, but for the most part you pick up a video game in order to be entertained. And there are a LOT of ways to entertain a person, they don't all require a good story, and that's okay.

Hell, I heard the Super Smash Bros games have been a little bit popular from time to time, but I've /never/ heard anyone talking about how amazed they are by the deep and intricate story that unfolds as you play them.

Some games are about the story, and in those games the quality of writing directly impacts the quality of the game. I loved Planescape: Torment, and anyone who says that was a shit game I'll... think disapproving thoughts at through the internet before moving on with my life. But I also loved the Uncharted games, which had an intentionally action-flick style story. Was the story of Uncharted 'bad'? On a critical level, perhaps, but it was very well suited to the actual game, and frankly I didn't play Uncharted to get a detailed philosophical delve into man's inhumanity towards man. I could play Spec Ops for that, or even Papers Please.

 

[Denamic]

Designed by committee and a desire/obligation to appeal to as many people as possible, resulting in a shallow and bland by the numbers plot that you can accurately guess from a 1 minute teaser trailer.

 

[Cryselle]

So games are good in talking about themselves, at least that's what passes for daring these (i.e. the past 20 years) days. I don't think that, presently, most games have anything interesting to offer on any other subject - chief among them the human condition and its spiritual unrest, which has always been the subject matter of all the great Literary Classics. Antigone. The Divine Comedy. Paradise Lost. Hamlet. Moby-Dick. Ulysses. Crime and Punishment. War and Peace. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Blood Meridian.

Right now games have the narrative worth of pulp fiction: fast, uncomplicated and sensational.

I don't think many games have tried to be a great literary classic. They're not failing at it because it's not a goal that most ever had to begin with.

And frankly, I question if it's a goal that the vast majority /should/ ever have to begin with. The world of books is absolutely littered with works that aspired to be a Great Classic and failed, just like the world of paintings has millions of paintings by some amazingly talented people that will never be in a museum next to the Mona Lisa. And for all the value of a great literary masterpiece, I'm more likely to get on a bus and see someone reading a Harlequin Romance than War and Peace. Games can be art, but often the ones that try the hardest to be art seem to fail at being games, which just sucks.

Ultimately, I'd rather games try and be the best games they can be, rather than the best books or best movies. And there are many routes to becoming a great game, masterful writing is but one path, and a path that is reasonably unlikely to carry the game on it's own. I've played several games where I concluded "Story was interesting, wish it had been in a better game", and those always land in my 'mediocre' pile.

 

[Drops a Sweet Katana]

A lot of the time, it's because the gameplay and story are mostly separate in a lot of AAA games and thus nothing really gels together. It doesn't help that most games writers seem like they would rather be writing for films. Naturally, games should focus on gameplay first, so in those situations the narrative only really exists to string together a bunch of encounters and is thus one of the later things to add in.

It seems like writers aren't really utilising gameplay to help tell their story, and designers aren't really utilising narrative choices to inform mechanics. In examples of good video game storytelling, narrative and gameplay choices inform and augment each other early on, which allows for a better specification of the end product, and thus a more focused and effective whole.

 

[MysticSlayer]

Because most stories aren't that good in any medium. Add in many games where story is just context for gameplay, troubles with telling stories in interactive medium, and new storytelling structures around that interaction that completely fly over people's heads, and you're just adding to an already common problem.

 

[MASTACHIEFPWN]

Probably because the story is molded to fit into the game, and not the other way around.

Also, they'd probably have to pay someone who is good at script writing more. Another perspective of this is why do you play AAA games? Is it for the story? Because I can't think of one recent AAA game that has a story that I'd consider good. I mean, the scale pretty much ranges from Alright (Witcher 3), to Trash (Call of Duty yearly title, Battlefield yearly title, Fallout 4, etc) We play these games to dazzle our eyes and bring us fun, at least that's what I think. A lot of people will just skip the story to get straight to the gameplay, so cutting cost in this sector isn't that foreign of an idea.

 

[Ambient_Malice]

"Good writing" is a highly subjective concept. As for videogames stories, I find the sheer ignorance about who is writing the games people play to be rather odd. (The people who write Call of Duty games, for example.)

Let's focus on the FPS genre.

Crysis 2 was written by science fiction novelist Richard K. Morgan.

Call of Duty: Black Ops and Black Ops 2 were written by "Dark City" and "The Dark Knight"-penner David S. Goyer.

Call of Duty: Ghosts was written by Emmy, Golden Globe, and Academy Award winner Stephen Gaghan.

Cold Winter was written by somewhat famous comic author Warren Ellis.

The 2012 Syndicate game was also written by Richard K. Morgan.

Basically every James Bond game between 2004 and 2012 was written by Bruce Feirstein. I don't like his writing, and his "Bond then proceeds to solve all his problems with his mobile phone" tropes. But he's a reasonably respected writer who did work on the screenplay of the almost peerless GoldenEye film.

I thought Black Ops and Black Ops 2 had great writing. I thought Crysis 2 and Syndicate had good writing. I thought Call of Duty: Ghosts was a masterpiece, albeit a mashed up remix of existing ideas. When David Goyer wasn't hired for Black Ops 3, I anticipated a massive drop in writing quality, and I wasn't surprised to discover my expectations were met.

Orson Scott Card, who helped write Monkey Island, and co-wrote Advent Rising and The Dig, had some harsh words of wisdom on the subject. I'm someone who plays games for the story, and he does have a somewhat impossible to avoid point.

Games CAN'T have the kind of storylines that movies and books have, or they wouldn't be playable. You are correct to skip the tedious, badly written "scenes" that are usually a pathetic job of trying to paste story on top of a game. What makes a game work is the opposite of what makes a story work. In a story, you are seeking to find out what really happened -- why people do what they do, what the results of their choices are. You identify with the character(s) but you do not control them. Instead, the author has the ultimate authority. When a movie is made from a book and the script changes key events, the readers are usually furious. Why? Since the original events weren't real, why not change them? The answer is simple: Even in fiction, what the author put down on paper is "the truth" and anyone who fiddles with it is "lying" or "wrecking it."

In a game, the opposite illusion must be created. Even though most games absolutely force you to follow preset paths, the gamewrights try to give you the illusion that you are making free choices (even though you are actually, in almost all games, still being channeled through certain puzzles with fixed solutions).

There is no question about character motivation. The lead character is you, and your motivation is to beat the enemy and win.

It's like golf. Sure, you could put on a World War II uniform and pretend that each ball was a bomb that needed to be dropped down into the underground bunker of some Nazi generals, and call it "Golf: The Dirty Dozen," but the GAME is about you and your contest with the obstacles placed in your way by the course designer. You can compare your score with other players, but the things they do are completely irrelevant to your game. It's just you against the golf course designer (and, of course, the groundskeepers).

In most videogames, you're still just playing golf. The story exists only to justify cool new gameplay features. Yes, we respond to greater and greater realism; yes, there's an element of escapism and power fantasy and all that crap that we hear about from psychologists -- but lousy games have those just as much as good ones. What makes a difference is the degree of challenge and freshness in each new game. Everything else is window dressing. You've got to have it, but nobody should ever get confused and think that the window dressing IS the game.

The "story" elements of game are the window dressing. No wonder you skip them.

To the degree that the game is fixed -- the outcome predetermined -- the game is a story. But to the degree that you SEE that the game is fixed, it becomes less fun to play! You want to have the feeling that you can also explore the world a little, maybe find stuff that has nothing to do with gameplay. Since when do you do that in a novel or movie? You can do that on a golf course, because the world is just a little bigger than the fairways and greens. But when you're choosing weapons in a shooter, you're just telling the caddy to give you a nine-iron instead of a wood.

 

[Cowabungaa]

Riddle me this: if the journey by itself is already a story, why would you need another story on top of it? And does it really matter if it is good?
There are already strong gameplay moments in most of the games. These make up the personal experience. These are the journey. The stuff that happens or being told around these moments is just an idle background chatter, no matter how you look.
It's like books in Skyrim. It's good to have them, but the idea that they need to be longer and much more complex is ridiculous.

If you're referring to the self-made moments like, for instance, what comes out of EVE Online then yes those are great.

But to limit it to only that is just a waste of the medium's possibilities. I never understand why people are so against pluralism, especially when the medium in question is capable of so much wonderful diversity and especially when different types of stories in games don't have to be mutually exclusive. For instance, it's like saying that in film there should only be the action-packed summer blockbuster. That's just plain silly.

Games can be so much, from The Stanley Parable and Undertale to EVE Online and No Man's Sky. Why aren't we celebrating that awesome fact? I don't understand why people keep saying "Games have to be this!" instead of "Games can be this." It doesn't have to be Brothers: A Tale of Two Son's weaving of gameplay and story or the sheer player-made insanity the boils out of Dwarf Fortress, it can be both!

snip

Card makes one wrongful assumption though, on which his entire argument hinges; videogames are fundamentally about winning. And that's not true at all. They can be, and they traditionally are, but developers have been exploring past that more and more.

He does also show that you can't just copy-paste the kind of writing you see in other genres on videogames. That's very true, thanks to the fundamentally different nature of how involved the consumer is. That's why big name Hollywood writers can still easily crash when it comes to videogame writing.

 

[Ambient_Malice]

Card makes one wrongful assumption though, on which his entire argument hinges; videogames are fundamentally about winning. And that's not true at all. They can be, and they traditionally are, but developers have been exploring past that more and more.

That opens a whole other can of worms. "If a game can't be "won", then it isn't a game, is it?" People will argue that particular point until the cows come home. Card's best videogame work, IMO, was the point and click adventure game The Dig, for reference. Games like The Dig are seen, in 2015, as a step above a "visual novel" by some naysayers.

Coincidentally, Visual Novels are not categorically videogames. The only reason they're conflated is because non-Japanese people insisted on lumping Adventure Games and Visual Novels together. They're completely different.

It's a messy kettle of dead sea critters because I struggle to think of a game that isn't, at its core, about accomplishing some sort of task -- winning. Even losing can be a form of "winning". Making the numbers go up is "winning" in an abstract way.

 

[Casual Shinji]

So games are good in talking about themselves, at least that's what passes for daring these (i.e. the past 20 years) days. I don't think that, presently, most games have anything interesting to offer on any other subject - chief among them the human condition and its spiritual unrest, which has always been the subject matter of all the great Literary Classics. Antigone. The Divine Comedy. Paradise Lost. Hamlet. Moby-Dick. Ulysses. Crime and Punishment. War and Peace. One Hundred Years of Solitude. Blood Meridian.

The last couple of years has seen one of the biggest booms of games about the human condition; Spec-Ops: The Line, Bioshock: Infinite, The Last of Us. Whether you think these games succeed at adressing their subject matter is debateable, but they do adress it. They're not just 'look how quirky we are about games as a medium', which seems to be mostly an indie thing.

And comparing games to books is an unfair one. The writing in most highly acclaimed movies can't even compare favorably to books, since writing is all a book consists of. That doesn't mean all movies suck narratively. A game like Journey doesn't even have any writing or dialoge at all, and it still had me reflect on myself and the human condition. And all of this through gameplay, music, and visuals.

 

[DoPo]

I struggle to think of a game that isn't, at its core, about accomplishing some sort of task -- winning.

Dwarf Fortress comes easily to mind. Sure, we could say it's about a task - making the titular fortress, but there is no winning, there is no score, either. It's just the amusement and fun you get from reaching the end of the game, which is a loss. Your "task" is playing the game which, I don't think should really count as a "task" to be accomplished - as with pretty much anything, there needs to be a sense of purpose to doing it.

 

[Ambient_Malice]

I struggle to think of a game that isn't, at its core, about accomplishing some sort of task -- winning.

Dwarf Fortress comes easily to mind. Sure, we could say it's about a task - making the titular fortress, but there is no winning, there is no score, either. It's just the amusement and fun you get from reaching the end of the game, which is a loss. Your "task" is playing the game which, I don't think should really count as a "task" to be accomplished - as with pretty much anything, there needs to be a sense of purpose to doing it.

The unspoken "goal" of Dwarf Fortress is to not die. The same could be said of something like juggling or a child's game such as jump rope. You keep jumping or juggling as long as you want until you fail or get bored.

Games that have "emergent" gameplay usually break down into smaller subgoals that occur moment to moment, whether the player is actively aware of them or not.

 

[Cowabungaa]

snip

DoPo already mentioned it, but Dwarf Fortress is one of them, or other builders ala Cities: Skylines, at least in free-form mode. Telltale-esque games (Telltale themselves, Life Is Strange, etc) as well, The Stanley Parable that wants to toy with tropes, in a way EVE Online could count, in a way This War Of Mine, you could say Undertale averts it too in a way. Etc.

The list in the end is definitely a lot smaller than the "winning" game, but that's because as I've said this way of looking at games is only recently somewhat coming to the foreground. Just like how film started out as a flat sideshow attraction, games started out as toys. But the medium is evolving to something a lot more plural. It's like as if movies are just about making the audience laugh, or just about being entertaining. But filmmakers moved beyond that (quite quickly even) to create a much wider arrange of experiences. In the same vein, more and more videogame developers are exploring the unique strengths of the medium to create new kinds of experiences.

And that's pretty awesome.

The unspoken "goal" of Dwarf Fortress is to not die. The same could be said of something like juggling or a child's game such as jump rope. You keep jumping or juggling as long as you want until you fail or get bored.

Games that have "emergent" gameplay usually break down into smaller subgoals that occur moment to moment, whether the player is actively aware of them or not.

Oh god no, within the community, failing hilariously is just as lauded as building something amazing.

The thing is that those things don't involve winning. When you win there has to be a loser as well, it has to be a contest. As Card put it, someone or something is defeated. In more and more games that is not the case. Yes, there's hurdles to overcome, but overcoming those hurdles isn't the same as winning. Just look at life itself. If you become a parent, or land an important job, or get a degree, did you suddenly win at life? Of course not.

 

[Mister K]

I thinks that is so because, for the most part, AAA titles are like summer blockbuster movies: they are made with an idea to show as many special effects and as global plot (not story, plot) as they can to create 3-6 hours long fun ride.

Good stories are left for classics that survived the test of time and those spring/autumn flicks with moderate budget (AA games).

 

[Mister K]

The Writer Will Do Something [http://mrwasteland.itch.io/twwds] can illustrate this much better than I ever can, but in short:

It's because the story almost always comes second to the gameplay. With the exception of say, a Bioware game, the story is usually the last thing created. Which means that the writers have to write around the gameplay, art style and quite possibly levels that have already been completed. And there is no way all that work will be scrapped for something as unimportant as good writing.
On top of that is the fact that in many projects, they don't even hire a dedicated writer. It's usually just some guy(s) from the pre-existing team. For example, the early Ratchet & Clank games were writting by a couple of animators. And that's one of the good stories.

It's off topic, but I must say that the story you've posted a link to is great.

 

[Cowabungaa]

snip

All that that illustrates is that there's different ways to do story in videogames, and that not all ways are effective for everyone, and that there's more to story and world building in videogames than straight-up exposition through cutscenes. That's all very true, but not relevant.

Do note as well that the examples I gave were not of the "fuck your journey here's our story" variety. Neither is that, rather nebulous, approach of storytelling (and approach it indeed is, as you say), and the examples of Dishonored and Deus Ex that go with it, relevant for the point I was trying to make. That point being that videogames can be a perfect medium for an author to tell his audience a story and that he can do so in novel ways that aren't available in other mediums. Videogames have strengths besides those wonderful emergent moments you describe, not instead of.

That doesn't mean that developers can't fuck up and completely misjudge the medium they're working with and end up with an approach to storytelling that doesn't really work, it's even the OP's question. Lord knows that happens often enough. But one shouldn't confuse certain methods of storytelling with storytelling as such. From the statement that storytelling isn't always done well it doesn't follow that storytelling can't be done at all. And to say that storytelling as such doesn't belong in videogames, well, that's just a wrongful waste of potential.

It's not an either/or kind of deal. Just like movies, videogames are becoming more and more plural. There's more than one way to do videogames.