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[Hawkfrost]

If you want story play a visual novel.

Most developers these days don't add incredible amounts of story because most people don't care about it and don't want it in the game.
If they added the ability to have a full conversation with every NPC in a FPS game, seriously how many people do you think would ever use that feature?

Every single JRPG. If you added up all the cutscenes in one of those, you'd realize you've spent more time watching the game than playing it.

I only play old JRPG games really, so I wouldn't know.
Finial Fantasy 1 has like two cutscenes.

[Ioric Kittencuddler]

If you want story play a visual novel.

Most developers these days don't add incredible amounts of story because most people don't care about it and don't want it in the game.
If they added the ability to have a full conversation with every NPC in a FPS game, seriously how many people do you think would ever use that feature?

I'd think allot of people would use the feature, and then the ones who weren't psychotic wouldn't want to shoot those people afterwards.  Of course a FPS isn't really the right kind of game to have a feature like that since it's all about shooting things.

[Jreengus]

I don't think you got it.  Take any particular game you think has a good story.  Do you spend more time experiencing the story or experiencing the death of countless mooks?  Any Bioware game is a perfect example of this.  They're all lauded for their stories, but the story is not really part of the gameplay.  It's just the thing that ties all the dead mooks together.  On the other hand all those dead mooks are the only thing that keep the game from being an action movie.  And when he talks about conversations he doesn't mean canned responses to selections in a dialogue tree.  He means actual conversations between the player character and NPCs.

The article also makes some not ironic at the time comments about Spore which I found almost painful to read.

Left 4 Dead, story is the game play. Ok it's not a massively deep plot but it's definitely an interactive zombie b-movie.

[Duke 2.0]

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

 The technical definition of a videogame is any game played using a computer/microchip controlled device. Game is a bit more subjective, but generally something used as a pastime mostly for fun. The name for the medium is really rather self-explanatory, and the age the name was created in has no bearing on how accurate it is.

 But yes, one can look at basically any most any game with cutscenes and see many times where the game just doesn't like the player playing it. Now if the story is well-paced then it is all fine and dandy, as the creators know proper flow control and the details one needs to know. An offender of this is the Xenosaga series, which had such droll cutscenes that I really lost taste for each game I played after a few hours. Or Star Ocean, Till the End of Time. Story bits forced down you at a slow pace in cutscenes that often have little bearing with what is going on.
 Alright, so let me clarify the idea I just learned typing this up: While stories themselves are nice, they are just another element of a game to make it a pastime. The problem I have comes from the iffy execution of story most of the time. Either it can be skipped entirely with no real drawback, or it tries too hard to get in everywhere, or it gets rid of the fun to make a point.

 Great, now I'm rambling. I'll admit I skimmed over the story in the link and focused mainly on the posts in this thread, resulting in specific attacks on my part on the idea I got that the article was attacking action games for their lack of stories. Such stories are really non-essential. If one can include one and keep things fun sure, but otherwise it is just another element that can and will get scrapped to make way for more important elements of the game.

[Sowelu]

Yeah, L4D does a great job.  Plot doesn't detract at all.

[Leonon]

I apologize for any incoherency, for I am falling asleep as I type this.

The key point of any commercial game is fun. A large part of making it fun is proper pacing. This goes for pen and paper games too, not just videogames. Imagine if you were playing DnD and suddenly the Gamemaster forced you to listen to a 10 minute monologue he gave. You'd probably think he'd gone mad. Cut scenes like this ruin the pacing because there's nothing you can do while the cut scene happens. You suddenly go from being an actor to being part of the audience.


Action games have set it up so the problem of cut scenes would be hard to remedy, because players are trained to try to kill anything that moves and are regularly punished for not doing so. So far the most used remedy seems to be to simply make vital characters immortal unless the plot demands they die. Players are rarely allowed to interact with hostiles in ways other than attacking them unless the action is handled through a break in the game where the plot takes over the character's actions. Many games also have it so nonhostiles can only be interacted with by dialogue, preventing the use of violence as a means to and end.

A good GM can react to player actions and react accordingly. Videogames attempt to form plots like movies where there are few, if any, plot changes the player can effect. You are regularly removed from a participating role when the plot demands it. You are not allowed options you would have if the game truly allowed improvisation.


Part of the reason for not allowing more options is that this discrepancy becomes more noticeable as games become more realistic. Suddenly you start to wonder why the game world doesn't allow you do do things you could conceivably do in the real world. Whether it be claiming you're pregnant in a social simulation to create drama, or to talk down or surrender to your enemies in an action game, or even to simply destroy a locked wooden door or jump a chest high fence. When the game doesn't pretend to allow options the invisible walls don't bother people as badly. They're still there, but they make sense with the game's logic. Imagine a DnD game where the GM only allows you to go to certain points in the world and chases your character back to those points with a T-Rex if you attempt to go elsewhere. You'd probably feel that you're not playing your story, you're playing his story. This is where Videogame stories are right now. You're not playing your story, you're playing Hideo Kojima's.

[Yanlin]

Ever heard of interactive cutscenes? Those solve the problem quite well. But story writers are quite pissy about letting every random faggot messing with the story.

HL2 and the episodes are GREAT examples of good cutscenes. There are VERY FEW cutscenes where you are not in control. Those would be the intros and outros plus the few Gman scenes in between. Especially the one in Ep 2.

Now most cutscenens in Half Life 2 involved you DOING stuff to advance the plot. Not just watching it happen. You had to do pretty much trivial tasks of plugging a plug or flipping a switch.

But I see the main argument here.

"But it's not REALLY a story because BLAH BLAH BLAH"

This is comparable to:

"Every military strategy ever devised is just shooting the enemy."

[Hawkfrost]

Anyone who has played at least as much Tales of Vesperia as me will agree that cutscenes are fine as long as you have a pissed off chick throwing fireballs at everyone.