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Comments
^Now that's actually a very good point. I suppose Objectivism does kinda fit the overall theme of free will best.
On the WRPG note...
Yeah, Arcanum is an excellent game. Buggy as hell without the unofficial patch (because Troika), and a couple of niggly flaws, like how the camera stops scrolling if your character is too far away, but that's about it. Also one of the few games I've seen where they got modern steampunk technology and magic coexisting (read, wrecking each other) in the same world right.
Yeah... Jagged Alliance 2 requires me to turn my troops into The Predator.
Welp, time to grab the last three or four artifacts.
Actually, what you're saying is the same thing, just from a different perspective.
Usually, with a game whose gameplay sucks, I don't play enough of it to get into it in the first place, even if the story's awesome. I just don't have the patience to sit through completely crappy gameplay to discover a story--and it's just not possible to convince me to play a game based on story alone when I haven't even played it.
So a game's gotta have drawn me into the story in the first place, with decent-enough gameplay, for me to make it past a "point of initial commitment" to make me want to keep seeing the story. This is usually an early turning point in the story that makes me really care about the story and characters and want to see more.
After that point, I already want to keep playing. I'm saying that, when the gameplay gets tedious at this point, this is usually mid-game already, and if the story is enough of a driving force then, it might keep me interested, as opposed to making me drop the game out of lack of interest after a while.
My apologies, actually, because Sequence is not a good example of what I was talking about. Sequence's problem I think is that it slaps an excuse plot (as far as I can tell, albeit with some pretty nice voice work, I'll admit) onto what seems like an interesting gameplay mechanic, rather than the other way around.
On the other hand, I get that feeling from some JRPGs. For example, I got that feeling from Final Fantasy VII--the motorcycle minigame seemed to be "let's stick a minigame in here because it seems cool", rather than something that flowed naturally from the game itself.
I am not exactly sure what you mean by this, but I think that, if your game's focus is presenting a story, you should be asking how the story can inform the design of gameplay mechanics. You want the player to feel what the characters feel, through the gameplay mechanics--for instance, you want them to feel the joy of starting to get the hang of things as the characters themselves are starting to get the hang of things, and you want them to feel the difficulty and pressure of dealing with a difficult challenge when the characters are fighting a difficult opponent.
At least, that's what I think.
That said, it seems that our ideal result is the same--a game whose story and gameplay mechanics are intertwined with each other.
Now you're making me curious about this game.
Yeah, this definitely is another biggie. If you're walking into a story-heavy game expecting it to be a fun time-waster, you'll be disappointed or annoyed.
Heard of it, and I once confused it with Avernum. In fact, both are on Good Old Games.
Oh?
Does the GOG version have it patched to work on modern systems?
@Saigy
I haven't actually played it with the Unoffical patch
Yeah, it works. Or at least, did for me.
please respond
To expand on what Alex said, the game has exactly as much plot as you want to look for. People who are in it for just killing monsters will get that out of it. But if you stop and pay attention a little, you'll notice a surprisingly large amount of backstory, almost all of which is never outright stated, but plainly obvious after inspection.
It meshes with the developers' overall intent to never break the flow. The world, for example, is all one map, unlike in Demon's Souls where there were five areas you teleported to from a hub. If you can see something, you can get there, and with only one exception, you can get there on foot. The closest things to interruption of the experience are leveling your character, changing your equipment and buying stuff. And for the latter two, if you do them while enemies are around, you will be killed in the middle of it.
It really is one of the best-constructed AAA games I've played.
Sure thing. I kind of forgot about that. I'll be there shortly. Got my FC?
I'm not sure what you did to make him your bitch, I remember having trouble with him.
He'll be back though. Nintendo villains are persistent as all hell.
EDIT: I've been thinking. Should we have a thread for general online gaming info? Like FCs, gamertags and what not, so I don't have to dive into the thread in case it gets too big.
Final boss time. Aww yeah.
Wow, that lag was baaad.
DOWN YOU GO
Okay, Nick, I think I'm done for now. The lag is just getting to me. Sorry.
No worries. I think it's my fault,I have quite a crappy Internet connection.
Still, it was fun. You really were the best player. The few times I've won was because of good luck. (Except when I played as Kirby)
Damn it, why can't I earn points to unlock stuff in Multiplayer in F-Zero GX? ;_;
Oh, how I missed it...
After I get some food.
I agree with all these goals, but I don't think it begins with the concept of expressing a particular story. It begins with the concept of expressing a particular experience, of which the story is one factor, be it more or less prevalent. For instance, one of the issues concerning FFVII is that something like a bike minigame is a diversion from the core gameplay and bears no relationship to it -- the rest of the game is spent walking around in third person or having side-on, turn-based battles. Something like a bike minigame is useless unless it relates to those things and shows up from time to time.
A good example of a minigame is the steak cooking in Monster Hunter Tri. It's a timing game with musical cues and visual feedback, except the visual feedback and the music don't quite sync up. It's very clever in that the best way to get the best result in the minigame is to wait for the music to stop and then complete it the instant your steak changes to a darker colour, netting you the best possible stamina boost item. So it's a minigame and a diversion from regular gameplay, but it can be entered or exited at the will of the player and provides them with a very useful item. And it's even narrative -- eating a good steak makes you more energetic, ergo the stamina boost.
So you're right when you say we're arguing for the same thing; a point where gameplay and narrative aren't truly separate entities. But I believe you have to begin with gameplay and a strong system before you consider the story (but not the narrative). Obviously, the gameplay will be influenced by the type of narrative you're trying to express; a survival horror will have limited combat and visibility, a strategy game will have resource allocation, and so on and so forth. But narrative and story aren't the same thing, even though they're closely related. Narrative is about how the game narrates itself to the player, so a game that strongly ties gameplay to a logical experience (where "logical" doesn't counteract the term "silly") probably has strong narrative to begin with, even if its story is as bare and sparse as humanly possible.
Space Invaders would be a good example of the above. The whole story is "aliens are invading earth, shoot them down". But it's still a strongly narrative experience, because everything you need is there. You can shoot alien spacecraft, get shot, hide behind your shields and the aliens speed up their advance as you whittle their numbers down. And even though it's an 8-bit game, it really racks up the tension once those aliens gain momentum -- despite all its limitations, Space Invaders is a strong narrative experience because it delivers on its premise and a way that is logical and sensible to us while providing challenge and tension. The fact that it's silly has nothing to do with it, really, and the aforementioned Monster Hunter Tri works on exactly the same technical premise, if not the same conceptual one. For instance, when the aliens speed up after a certain point? In Monster Hunter, boss monsters enter a berserk rage after you deal enough damage to them, speeding up their general movement and all their attack animations. Exactly the same premise -- the player is doing well, so let's kick this into a higher gear. And that becomes a part of the overall experience and core narrative, even though they aren't exactly "story" elements in terms of plot hooks or character interactions or major events or whatever else.
I think the best potential story-driven game will essentially be Space Invaders or Pac-man in principle with a great story that meshes with the gameplay narrative on top of that. This is what I mean about allowing the player to experience the world first -- if the core gameplay is strong and fun, and if the game is self-generating moments of true tension for the player, then they'll have a great time without a story. A compelling story on top of all those things that already exist can potentially make a strong game stronger, but without that, this potential game is still a great game.
Basically, here's the way I "test" games along these lines. It's just one question:
Would I play this game and like it if it had no story?
A game that gets a "yes" to that question and has a strong story will be amongst the strongest story-based games, because it succeeds as a game with a logical, manipulatory system as well as a story. And that's what the gaming medium has to do when it tried to deliver a story-based experience, otherwise it might as well have been a film -- lookin' at you, Kojima.
Bought Akrham City off a Steam sale.
So far, it's good but I think I like Arkham Asylum slightly better.
Oh, wow, thanks for telling me about that. I'd been meaning to get it sometime.
@MadassAlex
I see your point about how story is just an example of narrative (as in a sequential flow of experiences encountered by the player), one possible means of giving narrative.
I also agree with your point that what I was going for is that a game needs a strong narrative to keep the player's "interest momentum" going, and that story is one, but not the only, way of delivering that narrative.
Your Monster Hunter Tri example sounds like a great design idea, and I like your take on Space Invaders.
That said, I disagree with your "test question". I agree that a game that gets a yes to that question and has a strong story is likely to be great. However, I don't believe that it's fair to take away the story from games that are story-focused and compare them to games that are not story-focused. If you believe this comparison to be fair it would seem that you believe that story should be an optional "luxury", whereas I believe it can fairly be a core part of the game's "narrative" experience, one that cannot be divorced fairly from the game as a whole.