The Age of "Half Games"

Anyone else getting sick of this? You buy a game, you begin playing, and about 20 hours later at what seems like the halfway point in the plot, *poof!* the credits start rolling.

2 games off the top of my head that play like this?

Assassins Creed
Crysis

Any others I should avoid? Am I alone in my opinion? I think it is a symptom of the Current Console lineups, and money hungry Publishers like EA. Thoughts?

Agreed. CoD4 was a great game, but come on, it doesn't even last you a damn quarter of a day in SP. There's an MP mode, but I don't have a connection powerful enough to play any FPS online.

The main problem is: graphics. Graphics are good, but at the rate they're progressing, it's getting harder and harder to make a game with up to date graphics. It takes longer to make them, and it's costlier. Result? Developers that try to meet a deadline often risk losing potential customers with delays, or releasing a game that did not turn out as intended.

You also sacrifice the scale of the game. Generally, as games look better, they get smaller. It's a good thing shooters like STALKER and Crysis haven't become puny 100 by 100 meter map games.

Higher costs also means that it's more risky, and you lose originality. Gaming is becoming less and less "newish" nowadays, mostly because developers can't afford the risk.

Games today focus so much on graphics, sounds, and some of the more complicated physical realism... I think it makes the games harder to produce for the same price they have been produced at in the past. Since people seem to refuse to pay for games higher than 50 or 60 bucks a piece, I think the publishers have just cut them short somewhere... and that is what you are seeing. Either that or they are just trying to rip people off and make more profit... you be the judge.

I remember old old games that you could play for hundreds of hours and they were average price and not multiplayer. It's cause the graphics were crap. The sounds were beeps, but the gameplay and storyline was amazing. Ever played AD&D the old old games? Like Curse of the Azure Bonds or Pools of Darkness. Sweet games.

If the gameplay is excellent and the lifespan is decent, I think the rest is highly circumstantial.

I mean, why does it really matter that Crysis ended on a cliffhanger? It's a FPS, if the story is a big issue for you, you're playing the wrong genre.

But that said, Crysis' story was well executed considering what it is. We have a reasonable and satisfying conclusion - the aliens on Earth are thwarted. That's a good end to part one if you ask me. That they lead into part 2 while also giving us that significant resolution to the initial major plot strand is pretty much exactly how a multiple-part story should be told.

If you look at any good novelist who writes multiple-part stories, that's what they all do. Resolution and cliffhanger. The overarching storyline continues into part two, but the major plot strands of part one are resolved such that the game can be taken as a standalone story, which Crysis can. Humans > aliens is pretty much the story. You should be able to leave it at that easily enough.

I don't think Crysis made any mistakes.

Assassin's Creed, on the other hand, was entirely terrible in almost every respect. But, again, it had a respectable lifespan. That the story is disjointed and awkward shouldn't really be a big deal. Games have never been about high storytelling, and while I don't think we should ever say it's okay to suck, I don't think we should be singling games out, either. They're pretty much all bad. And it's not exactly like a cliffhanger is a recent story device, and it's certainly not like it's exclusive to gaming.

I love great stories, and I love great storytelling even more, but if you're going to criticise an action game for having a less-than-great story, when it has excellent gameplay and a respectable lifespan, I think you're misguided.

I love great stories, and I love great storytelling even more, but if you're going to criticise an action game for having a less-than-great story, when it has excellent gameplay and a respectable lifespan, I think you're misguided.

Well, just for example, I was expecting Assassins Creed to fall more into a "Thief: The Dark Project", or "System Shock 2" line of story telling. Both of those are from a First Person pespective, both have their fair share of action. Instead (without giving away any plot devices.) I felt that both AC and Crysis ended without answering any major questions.

Also, I've moved away from the Multiplayer aspects of many of these games. ;) Story telling plays a major role in my purchase of a game.

Besides, I with the game crushing bugs at Crysis's release, it feels even more rushed. The ending to the game was just the iceing on the cake. (I had to wait until the most recent line of patches before the game was even playable on my system. I have a Core 2 6600, 2GB dual channel memory, and an ATI X1950XTX. It was a retardedly long wait for a playable game I purchased months ago.)

I think someone should make a game that has a anti-climactic ending like you guys are describing, but have it be even more blatant. Like for instance, for a FPS you could end the game by defeating a big boss and then when you go to go out the exit door, you find that the entire wall is just one giant texture (no actual door or objects) and you just walk right through the wall like you would when playing doom with no-clipping mode on. And then you go off the map and fall off into nothingness and then the credits roll.df853

Or in an RTS, say you have 10 missions in the mission list. After you complete mission 6, a black screen with white lettering should come up saying, "You win". And that's it. And it be better if it was right at the turning point of the storyline too.

Or in a Diablo-like game, right when you get to Diablo's hideout (or Baal's if you have the expansion), have a text box come up that says, "Diablo and/or Baal died from [a] congenital heart defect(s) before you arrived. Congrats." And then it goes to the start screen.

[quote="fatshodan"]I love great stories, and I love great storytelling even more, but if you're going to criticise an action game for having a less-than-great story, when it has excellent gameplay and a respectable lifespan, I think you're misguided.GreatSageCorban

Well, just for example, I was expecting Assassins Creed to fall more into a "Thief: The Dark Project", or "System Shock 2" line of story telling. Both of those are from a First Person pespective, both have their fair share of action. Instead (without giving away any plot devices.) I felt that both AC and Crysis ended without answering any major questions.

I think it's very unfair to hold pretty much anything to the standards set by games like System Shock 2 and Thief. They are exceptional, and SS2 is a masterpiece.

This is just me making the best of a bad situation, but I think the best way to play games is with low expectations. That way, you can be pleasantly surprised. If you have high expectations, you;re just going to be disappointed time and time again when it comes to story.

But that said, I don't agree on Crysis. I think the major storyline was humans vs aliens, and that was resolved. We won. It's like Independence Day or pretty much any monster movie - that's the plot. We fight, we won. Everything else is just the overarching storyline that will carry on into part 2 and 3. Crysis is a trilogy, after all.

Story telling plays a major role in my purchase of a gameGreatSageCorban

I can relate to that but, again, I think so few games tell stories at even an adequate level that it's not something you should be basing purchases on - especially not FPS games. For around 97% of FPS games, the story exists simply to give the gunplay context. Very, very few FPS games are actually truly built around a story. That's why the ones that are good (like SS2) are so, so good.

Besides, I with the game crushing bugs at Crysis's release, it feels even more rushed. The ending to the game was just the iceing on the cake. (I had to wait until the most recent line of patches before the game was even playable on my system. I have a Core 2 6600, 2GB dual channel memory, and an ATI X1950XTX. It was a retardedly long wait for a playable game I purchased months ago.)GreatSageCorban

That's unfortunate. I had no issues with the game right from the get-go.

Or in an RTS, say you have 10 missions in the mission list. After you complete mission 6, a black screen with white lettering should come up saying, "You win". And that's it. And it be better if it was right at the turning point of the storyline too.

Or in a Diablo-like game, right when you get to Diablo's hideout (or Baal's if you have the expansion), have a text box come up that says, "Diablo and/or Baal died from [a] congenital heart defect(s) before you arrived. Congrats." And then it goes to the start screen.

It's more like, your half way down a dungeon to beat the first boss, you kill one of his minions, and a big "FIND OUT WHAT HAPPENS NEXT, $59.99 in 1 year pls! THXS" flashes on the screen.

An example of Episodic working correctly would be Half Life 2. Great beginning game, long, awesome plot, great final battle, and you feel like you completed something at the end. Then announce "the plot continues with our mini expansions planned for release every X months!"

"I think it's very unfair to hold pretty much anything to the standards set by games like System Shock 2 and Thief. They are exceptional, and SS2 is a masterpiece."

I have high standards, what can I say. :) btw, I can tell your a System Shock fan, so you'd probably be a good one to pose this to. Bioshock, live up to it's predicesor? Personal, SS2's ghosts and journals made the game for me. Bioshock, much like how many songs need more cow bell, needed more ghost and journal action. :)

(PS: God, Gamespots forums are horrible.

Gamespot forums: "Your HTML is not well -formed"

Me: "That's cause I'm not using any!!" )

Bioshock, live up to it's predicesor? Personal, SS2's ghosts and journals made the game for me. Bioshock, much like how many songs need more cow bell, needed more ghost and journal action. :)

GreatSageCorban

I despise BioShock. Here's why:

1. it has exactly the same story (including the twist around 4/6 in). All the core character archetypes are in, too. From The Many to Delacroix - albeit those character roles are filled by very different characters), meaning the story itself will be nothing new. The logs generally aren't as enthralling and the ghosts tend to serve more functional purposes in BioShock, so you never have any of the powerful scenes like the guy saying goodbye to his wife and kids before blowing his brains out. It's just meh.

System Shock 2 also had an excellent way of telling a story passively through the environment, with things like corpses and blood splatters. Some of these images were quite powerful and haunting, and that has all pretty much been swept away for BioShock. I don't know why, exactly, but it just doesn't affect me like SS2 did. Possibly because of the graphical style.

2. all the gameplay elements have been dumbed down. There's no real character development in the game any more. You have enough points for everything, and everything is interchangable, so you don't really have to make any choices, and you can't really build a unique character. You can use every weapon and every plasmid. This also means that the game environment has to cater to a generic non-specific character, instead of having particular a well balanced but diverse environment that caters to a variety of skill sets (like a guy with high tech skills vs a guy with no tech skills), which makes the environments pretty generic.

3. the game is painfully easy. You'll spend pretty much the entire game with full resources, even if you play at hard. The hacking screen now pauses the game, meaning there's no tension because you can't get ambushed while hacking. The security system has been trivialised to the point that it pretty much completely works in your favour, and weapon upgrade system is handled in such a way that you can upgrade pretty much every weapon completely (so, again, no need to make choices) and the regeneration-chambers no longer come with a cost, meaning you really lose nothing by dying.

BioShock is to System Shock 2 as R6:Vegas is to Rainbow Six: Rogue Spear, or as Oblivion is to Morrowind. It's a consolisation and a dumbing down.