"good stories" in games

what games have good stories and/or storytelling?

what makes a good game story?

how important is a narrative to a game anyway?

I like the story in "Shadow of the Colossus" because there's only a scrap of it, and it's pretty mysterious.

ya, i kind of dig video game stories that you either have to piece together yourself (half-life 2 is a good example, any game where you have to hunt around for "audio logs" is NOT) or is more suggested than told

i guess with that type of game the actual storytelling is a game in itself, and not just something tacked on as a carrot for completing a level.

FFVII

why

metal gear solid

agree that HL2 had a great story.

I don't mind audiologs as long as they're short, means you can continue playing, its those godawful long 'letters' you have to read i hate. i'm thinking resident evil.

HL2 HL2!!

HL1, even more, now that i think of it, since there was slightly less emphasis on people talking to you. the moment where you rush down the hallway to the first group of soldiers and they gun down all the scientists you're with was just awesome.

show don't tell, people!

ya i'm less interested than a list of games than the reasons why they have "good stories."

are stories in games judged by different standards than other media?

another very well-written game story was star control 2... i don't know if it had something to do, again, with the free-form exposition involving talking to different races and hearing their little bits of information & theories and piecing it together yourself...

Agreed with the Half-Lives.

I'll stump for "Breakdown". First-person immersive ("Mirror's Edge" has a similar look) takes the standard "wakes up with amnesia" trope and makes the gradual accumulation of powers very rewarding. There are several moments that elevate it, though - one scripted (where you have the opportunity to reverse tragedy) and one decision left to you at the tail end of the game. Extremely satisfying conclusion, with a real vicarious sense of being the hero of the story.

Also, "Silent Hill 2" - man summoned to vacation town by message from dead wife encounters various monsters and situations related to his wife's passing. Various letter and cut scenes add depth, and you can psychoanalyze the various monsters to your heart's content.

In general, the less story to the game the better. So many games get bogged down / ruined / out-of-balance because of trying to tell a very average, or generic story. For me games work best with no story, or something where the story is extremely cut down / minimal, for instance, Portal. That's probably why I spend a lot more time playing shmups than rpgs. Looking at my shelf, I did enjoy the story parts to the original Katamari Damacy game almost as much as playing it (it's a good story because it's minimal, fun and completely unique). Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time integrated story and gameplay pretty well too. Maybe not the best, most original story there, but it didn't bog down the game, and it wasn't embarrassing. I still think of Super Mario Bros. as the game that got everything the most right - it's the ideal mix.

The story for "Planescape: Torment" had a very cool setting (an interdimensional limbo world filled with rejects and lost souls) and also took a bunch of really great turns as the plot unfolded (you play as an amnesiac and, as the game progresses and you accumulate companions, you learn a lot more about yourself, why you ended up in the position you're in, and who exactly all these goofy/sinister beings following you around are and, more importantly, WHY they are following you around). It does a very good job of unfolding to an epic scale after starting from extremely humble beginnings, and the choice you make at the end of the game directly impacts how everything turns out for reality as we know it. It's really incredible, especially considering when it came out and how the way you play the game directly impacts exactly how much of the final picture you will get.

i think the stories in the GTA games are bad and badly written, tbh. the dialogue is only intermittently good. i think they got a lot of credit for moving game narrative into the realm of movies, but once you get there, it should be a good movie, you know? san andreas was elevated by way better than average v/o

i agree with jeff that narrative minimalism tends to work the best (aside from immersive rpg type games). and ya, i always loved how abstracted the super mario stories were... basically a -> b. i love how you could never describe a mario level in any sort of narrative terms beyond that.

storytelling tends to involve character change. what games can you think of do that, as the character is usually... you?

hi dere's was a good example.

Another great thing about P:T is that if you chose to pump more points into intellect, you got WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY more dialogue choices that really explained exactly what was going on, whereas if you took points away from intelligence, your character was a grunting brute who had to smash his way through every situation. It was the same story, but the insight you had into it was directly dependent on how you decided to play the game; if you play an exceptionally dumb character, you will never have certain things revealed to you and all you know at the end is that you have to beat the last guy.

i had a idle daydream once about an rpg that slowly turned into a civ-type game as you gained more and more political power. but i'm sure that would turn out badly if someone made it.

baldur's gate 2 was "good" in that it crammed in just about everything you could want in an epic d&d story. totally great v/o performances there too.

xp yeah P:T showing love on the lowly Wisdom score was good stuff

storytelling tends to involve character change. what games can you think of do that, as the character is usually... you?

generally videogames do this by widening perspective, you go along and do your thing but then you run into the third act and there's a reverse trombone shot and OH NOES YOU WERE THE BAD GUY ALL ALONG. So you have to hurry up and solve the problems you caused before your own actions become the fulcrum by which evil prevails. There's also the typical "oh I just wanted to save my girlfriend, but now it turns out I have to save THE WORLD" perspective shift, and a few others in that vein.

i had a idle daydream once about an rpg that slowly turned into a civ-type game as you gained more and more political power. but i'm sure that would turn out badly if someone made it.

you could do this, but it would have to be turn-based in order to scale from 1-1 monster battles to marching armies, I would think. The polygon budget would also be a problem like it is in Katamari, small scale and large scale would either have to look similarly stripped-down/iconic or you'd have to just take it on faith that the game would start to look less shitty the further you got

but spore tackles a few of those problems head-on and almost gets away with it

it is cliche as cliche gets, but i am always a fan of the "oh gnoes captured and lost all my sweet gear must escape" trope.

I really liked the story in Super Paper Mario. Along with your progression as Mario, there were the mysterious dialogue screens that turned out to be between the butterfly thing and the final bad guy. These dialogue screens begin extremely cryptically, where you don't know who's saying them or why they're relevant to what's going on. And as you progress you start to figure out more and more what they have to do with the main story, until by the end these dialogue screens and the main plot are fused. Plus I'm a sucker for a doomed love affair story and was genuinely moved by the whole thing, yes, by a fucking Mario game.

it is cliche as cliche gets, but i am always a fan of the "oh gnoes captured and lost all my sweet gear must escape" trope.

i mean, in games where your 'character' is essentially a hand holding a gun, this is some chastening shit

generally videogames do this by widening perspective, you go along and do your thing but then you run into the third act and there's a reverse trombone shot and OH NOES YOU WERE THE BAD GUY ALL ALONG. So you have to hurry up and solve the problems you caused before your own actions become the fulcrum by which evil prevails. There's also the typical "oh I just wanted to save my girlfriend, but now it turns out I have to save THE WORLD" perspective shift, and a few others in that vein.

― El Tomboto, Monday, November 17, 2008 8:05 PM (24 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

but does the character actually change, or does s/he just go through a bunch of incidents?

is it possible for the main character of a game to change w/o you changing?

is it possible for the main character of a game to change w/o you changing?

Knights of the Old Republic? or am I misunderstanding the question?

The story in Baldur's Gate II is great because the portion where you find out that you are megapowerful demigod who had to confront his powermad half-brother was already taken care of in the original Baldur's Gate and the second one could make itself about how you made a big splash with the events of the first one, so now powerful people are attempting to capture and dissect you so that they can become immortal. There are also a couple of great subplots for the companion characters as well, particularly some things where folks you're running around with now have relationships or direct conflict with folks you ran around with in the original game, plus the whole "romance" thing and the ultimate payoff of that is kind of great.

yes, the main character of the game can turn into a wolf, yet you stay a person holding a remote.

KOTOR is like the poster child for "...and the bad guy was YOU ALL ALONG!" storytelling, as much as I love it.

it was the expansion pack to BG2 (what was that called?) that got me thinking about a mythical rpg-to-civ game. cos in that, there's a full on war you are supposed to be directing, and yet the game is still six people walking around killing shit.

yes, the main character of the game can turn into a wolf, yet you stay a person holding a remote.

― El Tomboto, Monday, November 17, 2008 8:35 PM (17 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

haha you know what i mean. by character change i mean personality change--the choices you make etc.

THE THRONE OF BAAHL

by character change i mean personality change--the choices you make etc.

no, because most games with a "story" are "on rails" so any choice is illusory - and "sandbox" games that give you lots of choices usually do so to maximize "replay value" meaning any central narrative doesn't really drive the character's progress as much as what kind of shit you feel like doing.

I mean BioShock really tried to do this but everybody knows there's only one "real ending." We already had that conversation, I think.

ya but just because the story is on rails (which i'm not against) doesn't mean your character can't make choices within that structure, just like characters in any novel or film or art where everything is even more pre-determined.

a video game could theoretically make you change the way you think or look at a situation in order to succeed at it.

Sort of a side-comment: I'm really sick of the stumble into a laboratory and discover some sort of evil genetic engineering was going on with creatures incubating in tubes and whatnot. Fallout 3 and Gears 2 both had one of these moments. I mean really guys? We're still doing this? Also reading/listening to "logs" is fucking tiresome. Especially the devolving a) "things are fine" b)"stuff is getting weird" c)"things are going to hell" d)"AAAHRGHH!" types.

Getting captured, knocked out, waking up in a room without your shit also NEEDS TO STOP.

didnt we have this thread already

yeah like twice I think

a video game could theoretically make you change the way you think or look at a situation in order to succeed at it.

in this room gravity is backwards!!!!

The funny thing about video game stories is that they are always secondary. As much as people play video games "for the story," NOBODY plays video games for the story. The other funny thing is that linear stories absolutely cannot fit into the context of a "game" because it requires win/loss scenarios, meaning that unless your game is so easy that no user ever loses (which means it's probably bad as a game) it will deviate form that "line"-- the more leeway you give the player for deviation the less impact the linear story can have.

I suppose this is another vote for a minimalist stories in games because I like filling in my own story. It seems to be the only way to make it work. Then again other stories are often really enjoyable, ie. MGS, BioShock, but due to their reference and study of the medium vs. any actual storytelling chops. The story's best when it's just a really good supporting part to the game itself.

This is WAAAAY xposted. Gonna write a new response re: "one ending" in BioShock

a video game could theoretically make you change the way you think or look at a situation in order to succeed at it.

I can't remember what it was called but there was a console game where the ending sequence involved a tense bomb disarmament sequence where you had to physically shut the machine off at the end of it otherwise the bomb would detonate.

Okay so the thing aobut "one ending" in BioShock is that... well, let's be honest; that game had a FANTASTIC game-story until about halfway through, where they got hopelessly derailed. I didn't need any of that Atlas stuff that happened after the Andrew stuff. I recognize that they couldn't have just ended the game there, but seriously I consider all that just stuff that shoulda been on the cutting room floor.

Furthermore, I recognize that an "ending" is important in any narrative, but I think if anything the game should be playing DOWN that importance. The middle is really the most important part, and that's what BioShock nails. The beginning and end are facile as hell, but they're also the things you have the smallest amount of control over (you don't get to pick to go on that plane, I mean, and yeah, there's only "one ending" as you said). It's when you feel in the driver's seat that it really shines, as it should be.

I think I'm rambling so I'l quit there, but all I am trying to say is that the bad parts of a game's story shouldn't discount the good parts so don't write BioShock off just cos the ending(s???) were kinda barf.

xpost was it x-men 2 for the genesis?!

I think so!

I think one thing that goes awry in most story-focused video games is the way they attempt to observe a typical narrative progression for a tragedy but always pull that hollywood bullshit and everything's ok once you kill the master bad guy. There are a very few exceptions. Everything gets worse and worse and worse from act one to act four, but instead of killing yourself, you win a prize.

Are you a book or are you a movie? Decide, new medium.

Ebert Video Game Commentary Hullabaloo

best plot twists in video games

The novelification of games

yeah, i wz playing the dangerous high school girls demo last night and will def be buying it at some point — looks interesting — altho the start menu icon of a girl's face marked 'DangerousHSGirls' does kind of make it seem like i've taken to hentai games

am currently finishing Valkyria Chronicles and thought of this thread. actually, the game deserves its own thread, which i will get round to at some point.

do because i wanna know if its good

are there any games where the story is different for everyone who plays it, depending on your choices? and i don't mean different endings, but a completely narrative per player?

is that what MMORPGs are all about?

MMORPGs are all about acquiring stuff moreso than differing storylines, although there's some aspect of what you're talking about to them since everyone generally has access to the same quests but not everyone does all of them (also, for games with factions like WoW, there may be faction-specific content).

ya, and i think what i'm getting that is that in single-player games interactions with other characters are by necessity always going to be quite limited, whereas if you're interacting with real people it can go off into many more directions.

left 4 dead, maybe? every experience is different in a variety of minor ways each time due to the procedurally generated AI enemies and bosses

"if you're interacting with real people it can go off into many more directions"

But it doesn't have to be this way. Most games are limited enough in what you can do that we ought to be able to have artificial characters that can pass a Turing-like test---except for dialogue. I don't see us getting artificial characters that can talk like a human character any time soon.

These were matters I dreamed of solving when I was a CS student in college.

the thing is, you can't have one story that is different for different players. you can have superficial variations, but you are actually talking about having multiple possible exclusive storylines. it would be great to have a GTA-style sandbox game where the story branched off from your interaction with the characters rather than the characters branching off from the story. so you would need a bunch of different (if related) stories that are compelling on their own, which is obviously the first thing that would put developers off, and either: a point at which a decision you make determines which story you follow; or better, several successive points that narrow down the stories until you reach the one conclusion; or most difficult, interweaving potential storylines, with choices all along, and the possibility of doing different parts of the different storylines and those parts having a difference emphasis and outcome depending on what came before.

ya but will you be able to team up with an NPC and then get in a minor squabble with them and make up after dinner and then they get jealous of your new friend and go behind your back etc etc etc
xp

that was poorly articulated, but hopefully i made my point. for the last scenario there, you would have a whole host of different individual episodes(like GTA missions) but the ones you have done dictate the ones you go on to do and some aspects of each are altered by what came before, all the while in the context of one of a number of compelling storylines.

xp to me

yeah I was thinking interactions within the game
xp

because when I mudded it was usually with kids from singapore or wherever and whatever shit we talked about was made-up, on my end (I told everyone that I was a black Muslim, but I am neither). Did those kinds of interactions change the story of the game? Not really, within the game we were just teaming up and killing things and getting gear. It's getting artificial characters to get good at that, so good that they're indistinguishable from human characters, that I'm talking about.

In my dream mud (and maybe they do this in WoW), I wanted a whole artificial world that had factions waging war and making alliances within it, completely undriven by humans but doing things in a way that would look like humans were doing it---this would be the story. And humans could participate in those wars and maybe rise to lead them, but just like any other character, artificial or not, could. Dreams.

wasn't there a star wars MMORPG where a bunch of players overthrew some other players' empire?

That was EVE Online. Shit that goes on in that game is pretty nuts. Search for posts about it on Massively or wherever, half of them are about one corporation or another getting totally blowed up by a the CEO's player having a snit or some long drawn out masterplan by a gang of assassins

are there any games where the story is different for everyone who plays it, depending on your choices?

NETHACK

slocki have you played any of the persona series? they try to do some of what your talking about e.g. in persona 3 you can make small choices that effect the path of the game each day but there aren't an infinite # of choices... the course the game follows is still proscribed. also i think the "non-superficial" point is important. most of choices are still cosmetic or incidental. even in some borges-designed GTA there would be a qn of how much 'choice' is just a subset of the same overarcing story. infinte branches leading back to the same starting place. how much can a game mutate before its not really a game any more?

the only thing i can think of that allows a completely different and unique narrative (but maybe not story?) per player is something like Civ where even if seven or ten or n players are playing the same map and the same civ from the same starting point they can all experience the game differently.

lol jw
Rogueism

The ROGUE-LIKE Thread

when i see that i think of the "AWHOOGA" sound effect

btw slocki you are fired
"good stories" in games

you think i read any of this stuff?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karakoncolos

Black, the answer is black.

"merely troublesome and rather harmless, but sometimes truly evil"

totally awesome monster name btw

severe deperession resulting from an inadvertant zing

haw

The idea of Bending Stories consists in considering the story as a sort of elastic band that the player is free to stretch depending on his actions. The story retains its structure but the player can modify its length and form and thus participate in the narration. In reality the story does not change diametrically from one game to the next, all that changes is the way it is told. However, the player can see parts of scenes and obtain different information depending on the particular path he follows.

Another important decision was the option to work with small, closed sets rather than trying to model all of Manhattan. This decision was no doubt the hardest of all to make. However, my choice was based on solid conclusions: above all else I wanted to offer the player a sustained paced, brisk action, short scenes and frequent changes of location and context. The last thing I wanted was to have the player wandering about for hours in sets that had actions every hundred meters.

I therefore decided to opt for smaller, more closed sets but with a higher action ratio per square meter.

...

One of the key points in Indigo Prophecy was the idea of getting interactivity and narration to work together. Most games oppose these two concepts or rather, they develop them in turn: a cut scene to advance the narration, then an action scene, then another cut scene for the narration. The structure of this narrative process is very close to that of porn movies.

The greater part of my work consisted in reconciling these two, first of all by eliminating the dichotomy from the design. More often than not a game is designed by a game designer who establishes the game play mechanics. A screenwriter is then called in to find a story to make the link between the levels.

More than anything else I wanted to break with this logic by designing the story and the interactivity simultaneously. My aim was to allow the player to "play" the story, to enable it to progress directly through player actions rather than jumping from cut scene to cut scene.

It was very difficult to find a solution to this problem, particularly because it demanded that each scene contain an interesting proposition in terms of the scenario and game play.

One scene in particular was a veritable revelation for me, the one where Tyler wakes up in his apartment at the start of the game. The player shares in Tyler's personal life in the morning before he goes to work: showering, getting dressed, drinking coffee, putting on some music, having a serious discussion with his wife, then kissing her before taking his coat and setting out for work.

When I wrote the scene on paper I spent whole nights in a cold sweat: what was the player going to play in the scene? Where were the mechanics, why should such a scene have even the slightest interest in terms of game play?

After months of soul searching I was very surprised when I finally saw the scene assembled, with dialog, animation, music and directing. And to my great surprise, the scene worked. It wasn't based on the traditional mechanics of video games (objective, obstacle, ramping, reward) but on something else that I still find hard to define.

I believe the scene is based entirely on the interest of sharing in the character's personal life, developing an attachment for him, becoming slowly immersed in his story.

In my opinion this is one of the most interesting scenes in Indigo Prophecy. No stunts, no artifice, just "being" a character in a simple context.

That scene finally convinced me that it is possible to create an interesting experience without weapons or cars.

http://gamasutra.com/features/20060620/cage_01.shtml

huh!

the porn movie analogy is so appropriate, i can't believe i've never seen that before...

great read thx dude

I'm a big fan of what Cage does in that game overall, but it is kind of laughable that he uses Tyler as an example for good storytelling when he's such a caricatured ethnic stereotype. The story goes completely off the rails! Don't get me wrong, his ideas are good and I'm really glad he's trying so hard in these gaming implementations, but Indigo Prophecy's basic storytelling was very hit and miss. Even Metal Gear Solid, which has incredibly unbelievable plots, has a much grasp cinematically about character, plot, setting, and so on, though Cage's "story gameplay" is much more interesting and forward looking.

And even though he didn't fire weapons or drive cars in the game, they were replaced by bizarre quick time response sequences of Matrix-esque kung fu that went on forever and you could barely even watch because the arrows were covering up the screen!

(yeah, this sounds like I wasn't a fan of the game, but I was, really)

i think the stories in the GTA games are bad and badly written, tbh. the dialogue is only intermittently good. i think they got a lot of credit for moving game narrative into the realm of movies, but once you get there, it should be a good movie, you know? san andreas was elevated by way better than average v/o

― goole, Monday, November 17, 2008 2:24 PM (2 weeks ago)

Totally agree - I was surprised how much story and character development actually happened in San Andreas, to talk about another game that uses plenty of caricature. (Though at least San Andreas it felt more appropriate given the setting and timeframe - in Indigo Prophecy it just felt like laziness in part of the writer).

which actually I think it was mentioned here there's the quasi-generative story that you get with something like nethack - which also works for SimGames, and I guess Spore, and stuff like Weird Worlds: Return To Infinite Space - the story really does kinda branch from a combination of the random circumstances and the player's actions, and can be relatively unique every time. The upshot is that, like real life (which is a generated narrative of your decisions vs. chaos lol pass the bong), epic FF7 Chrono Trigger Ultimate Drama Climactic Event System Time Battle doesn't happen very often, and if it does, you don't get the shared experience factor that makes books and movies so awesome.

Big ups for Weird Worlds shout out! But really this is quite OTM. Fallout is one of those great examples that straddles the line on both of these, though it does essentially have a structured narrative you eventually have to follow - but everyone who's played Fallout has some kind of (scripted, but not mandatory) story event where they pickpocketed the wrong guy or got into a firefight with a whole town, because the rules of the game allow it.

does the player's experience of the game necessarily map perfectly onto what the "story" of the game is? or rather, should it ideally?

like are/should you be tense when your character's tense?

a plumber is always intense

like are/should you be tense when your character's tense?

― Tracer Hand, Sunday, December 7, 2008 2:03 AM (2 days ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i mean like, if you go off on a killing spree between missions in GTA it doesn't affect the plot one bit. is that disconnect bad?

I tend to find people who complain about immersion a bit tedious. Yes, some immersion is great. But when you are complaining that jumping on tables in Fallout 3 doesn't elicit a reaction from NPCs, then you're going a bit over the top. Which is to say: I don't have any problem with going on killing sprees between missions of GTA. It doesn't take anything away from the immersion for me, and I am happy the feature exists.

i'm not saying its bad, it just sort of... i dunno.. raises some question about the storytelling.

I wonder if in the future you'll have settings for that in sandbox games like they already have in other simulators like racers where you can turn tire wear and collision damage on or off, sports games where you can change the depth to which you control each player on your team, or shooters where you can adjust the lethality of hits. Of course there's some novelty to getting fat in a video game because you drive everywhere (walking in LA lol) but it strikes me that this should be a gameplay option, not a mandate.

i mean like, if you go off on a killing spree between missions in GTA it doesn't affect the plot one bit. is that disconnect bad?

haha i dont know if yr ignoring this on purpose but seriously i think you should play persona 3. one of the interesting things about the game is that, in between the main point of the game (battling demons), you have a # of different choices about how you conduct yr waking life. so you can stay up all night partying or even studying and then find yrself weak and tired when you have to go battle some ridiculous looking robodemon.

i dont think this is ideal or that there really is an ideal way to construct a story w/in a game. but it made for an interesting and compelling experience. otoh i can also make for tedious gameplay and it distorts the relative importance of the game parts.

I wonder if in the future you'll have settings for that in sandbox games like they already have in other simulators like racers where you can turn tire wear and collision damage on or off

this is what i mean wrt to distorting gameplay. i mean sometimes all you want is to drive around shooting ppl or having magic battles with crystalline winged-lions and not worry about anything.

Good timing for this article

lol xenosaga

one of the foundational tenets of drama is that the protagonist shouldn't be bound by the rules that apply to normal citizens because otherwise he wouldn't have the freedom to carry out the actions that are required of him - this is partly why most shakespeare is about noblepersons and kings - and it's the main reason why most tv dramas and movie dramas are about people who are above the law in some way - mafiosos, cops, doctors, etc. the failure of npcs to react to your character's outrageous behavior is just an extension of that i think, though it could be handled in a more interesting way. jumping on a table provides an opportunity for some funny encounters! it's boring for nothing to happen.

haha yeah I'm thinking of NxNW or what's that other movie where Newman does it? evading capture by bad guys by acting the asshole in a crowded place + purposefully drawing a crowd's attention

Doctors are above the law?

yeah dude they hand out drugs for money and nobody fucks w/em

shit, if I go to med school now I can be doing my residency by 40...

doctors are allowed to do things nobody else would be allowed to, i.e. cut into someone's chest

even though it's not what s1ocki meant, one of the things i REALLY liked about indigo prophecy/fahrenheit is that in certain stages it forces a physiological/mental identification of you with the characters you play by requiring you to execute stamina/concentration challenges a la track and field, or wii fit. i.e. if a character is trying to hang onto a roof ledge, or walk across a narrow board, or not puke, your have to really hammer the keys without losing the rhythm.

which comes onto another interseting aspect of this game, which it shares with some others, that the protagonist really ISN'T you, though you play as them and identify with them. in fps games by contrast the protagonist is basically you inserted into this other reality.