Gaming's two biggest obstacles when telling a story

champ, can you please play Pathologic and tell me what you think. It's a Russian game, make sure to get the Classic HD version cause the original has a butchered translation.

Basically three different "healers" come to some obscure unnamed village on the Russian steppe. The rulers of the village seem to have found a way to become immortal, but at the same time, must deal with a deadly secret the town possesses, one of them being a terrible form of bacteria.

Each character arrives for their own reasons, and you can play as all three for different perspectives. Meaning, three separate campaigns. No switching between each three. But each character still acts on their own accord in the story, even if you are not playing as them.

Game is weird as hell. Maybe not in a bad way, but it will be a turn off for many. Also, the game one-ups itself. It doesn't lose steam, but gets better, introduces more characters, more perspectives.

It's also hard. Not just in gameplay, but it challenges your mentality. Supposedly it was created as a stress simulator. Yeah...it's not fun in a traditional sense. But still satisfying in that you feel apart of the world and story.

@jg4xchamp: i beg to disagree with many of your opinions ( i couldnt quote properly , dunno wtf )

I think each game should be judged for the whole packet rather than what and each individual here think as good based on his taste while focusing in a single area any game might not be top notch and leaving behind everything the very same game has no equal.

I wont go into specifics for each game , i really think its not necessary. We all know what TLOU or UC2 or even ME titles praised for again and again. And on their strong points under their respective genres , very few games can even think to challenge them , let alone surpass what these games offer as a whole ( keyword ).

With that being said , its your opinion on things , its not about your high standards vs my low ones. Because as i said to you personally before , your high standards are not that high if you dissing all those games for doing great then declaring Resident evil 4 , which game introduced in a way all the things you dont like in lets say UC ( quick events ) or stupid AI , cheesy story , broken mechanics etc etc , one of the best games ever made. So lets not speak again for high standards and gameplay.

On the other hand , i agree with you. Yes , many games are nothing special but they getting special when you see the whole picture. The whole package. Does UC4 for example excels in gameplay ? No it doesnt. But it does it with style , blends elements other than shooting , offers apparel technical and graphical design , amazing jaw dropping scenes , QTEs and cutscenes , epic voice acting and the list goes on and on .

So all in all , its just your opinion on things and nothing more like its mine when it comes to RE4. And if you want to compare one of your best games ever , RE4 vs UC4 or TLOU and compare them in every single aspect from story to characters , from voice acting to gameplay and from action pace to cutscenes , feel free. ( wont be fair i know , because of the generation gap but its a fine example. ) just to compare the high standards you speaking of.

Sure, doesn't make their short comings less significant. I never said they were poor games (well maybe the mass effect games), but I am not of the opinion that gaming stories must be held to the low ass fucking standards of video game standards. For the amount of time, effort, and energy is wasted in throwing those stories in a game, and asking their audience to sit through it. It should be a lot better, and not in a manner that completely undermines the whole point of this medium.

This thread wasn't "gameplay is king" the way you might be misjudging it, this thread is that there are 2 fundamentally flawed aspects about a video game telling a story, and how devs go about telling a story.

1. It's not an organic medium: That one isn't even opinion, no other story telling medium is at the mercy of something so systematically counter intuitive to the act of telling a story: ie gaming's responsibility to offer gameplay. Not the most elegant comparison, but even with a plot porn, you still need to get us to two or more people fucking. Games even with a story, eventually need to get us to some version of gameplay, and gameplay is inherently something that doesn't always tell a story. If the next logical story sequence in a book, a short story, a film, a tv show is a boring ass talking thing, it'll be a boring ass talking thing. Games need to be longer, games need to pad run time with routines, games need gameplay sequences. And sometimes if the next logical thing is a boring talking sequence, yeah but that hurts the pace of the game and puts the player on hold for way too long so here is this shoot shoot bang bang return of the gunnining segment. That is fundamentally different from any other medium.

2. Game devs have a tendency to ignore their gameplay as if it's not part of the story, which yes the gameplay would be part of the story.This medium's defining characteristic shouldn't be something that is completely ignored from a story being told in this medium. It can and frankly should play a role in the story. And ones that found the solution of "well what if we just has basically no gameplay", that's not a solution actually, that's sort of pointing out why the medium has issues in the first place.

You people focus way too much on the examples, and not the underlying point. I actually quite dig Uncharted 2 and The Last of Us as video games, doesn't change the fact that Uncharted's story and characterizations are at odds with its gameplay. Pretending otherwise is choosing not to pay attention, and whole "shut your brain off", sorry, already had that convo with Sushi, I thought it was BS. You don't need to make to shut your brain off for The Wire's story to work, you don't need to shut your brain off to get what Mullholand Drive is doing. You basically have to shut your brain off to accept that Nathan Drake more or less piling on a kill count in the 1000s, and surviving crazy death defying scenarios isn't completely at odds with how the game intends to present him as a normal dude.

Me enjoying a game, doesn't mean I am not self aware of a valid criticism that can be made against the game. Especially the story of a video game no less lol.

Installing, will play after Metroid Prime or Bayonetta, not sure yet.

@jg4xchamp:

But Storytelling is Passive. Thats just how telling a Story Works (Regardless of how its told).

You and Mark Brown have the right idea.... the problem is the term used to describe it simply doesn't fit.

Mark Brown's channel is ace.

Agree with most of what you said, however I would say Hotline Miami was much more subversive in a real sense than spec ops which IMO leaned a bit more towards that 'oh look at how subversive we are being' wankery. I would also say it did a better overall job with integrating the story and the gameplay. The music in the game in particular is really something that really drives home that starting-to-go-bonkers feel. How you have the hazy, slow sun drenched synths when you're in the non gameplay 'weird ' sections which really give me that sort of post drunkenness stupor/hangover vibe and the confusion that accompanies it (not to mention the crazy visions). In contrast when you are in the gameplay you get the fast paced repetitive beats, to indicate how you're actually thinking clearly now and 'in the zone'. So much information provided by sheer tonal difference.

I honestly feel that there is a limit to the complexity of the kind of story that can be properly enmeshed in a game, and I think that is something that only time will be able to fix. However I would also say that simple stories mixed better with the gameplay are a much stronger and memorable experience than a sort of game bit---story bit---game with a good, complex story can provide. I think that basically boils down to how movies and books are basically fancy versions of guy telling story at a campfire, and how games (ideally) are -- or are atleast trying (should try?) to be a simulation of experiences. The story of an experience comes after the fact of the experience, and it is this that basically lends to that elusive 'water-cooler discussion' quality of a game.

Walking dead, visual novels are CYOAs, which are fine I guess, but not games, and personally I think they are rather limited in what they can ever be. Games are much better than that but are limited by the stupidity, greed and short-sightedness of people in the industry. I think the paucity of true auteurs as such is probably a big thing that contributes towards it. We need people who are great designers AND writers, as the other guy said.

@jg4xchamp:

When Extra Credits went off on tangent to talk about some random joke I got annoyed...... in my despair I discovered Mark Brown's Playlist.... I watched every episide except "How her Story Works" and the new one.

He described how the game works and I became interested..... however this is the first time I couldn't finish the Episode because he said he was going to Spoil much of how the game works. :( Hopefully this time it pays off.... I did the samething with an AntiChamber Review and it Totally Backfired in my face..... I should have watched that Video.... spoilers and all. :(

That worked really great because it's in first person perspective. For other game genres though that aren't in first person perspective such as adventure, point & click, RTS, top-down ARPG, etc. cutscenes feel natural. When you finish a campaign mission in an RTS one would always expect a cutscene.

Oh Hotline Miami is great, it's also a much better game than Spec Ops. But in case you missed the rest of this thread, this forum gets really butthurt on the examples shit, so you have to go with ones that are easier for digestion, and Spec Ops isn't exactly subtle. Hotline Miami is so much about it's stellar gameplay, it's kind of easy to ignore the story they are telling, and how they subvert your expectation there.

The only thing I don't just dismiss it as lazyness, stupidity, or straight up greed. Sometimes you just get conditioned to be safe, there are just flat out less risk takers than there are trend followers.

Dark Souls is third person, and top down rpgs did fine before the abusive nature of cutscenes. Shadow of the Colossus and Ico are a thing, and their story is primarily through their systems and environmental story telling, and not through a cutscene. The reason there is an impression that "those genres need cutscenes" is a belief, is because not enough devs have even bothered to try.

Once again, like my OP said, I'm not anti-cutscene, but the argument that games need cutscenes is nonsense. Given how young and how little this mediums interactive elements for story telling are explored, I'd say a lot of these are myths than fact right now.

Her Story is neat, one of the more unique experiences from last year. Personally enjoyed it a shit load more than Silent Hill: Shattered Memories (Sam's previous game), which I thought was tripe.

to me its the limitation of video gaming on the platforms we play. For instance not being able to jump a small fence or swim, invisible walls ect. Its hard to go for a story when those things pop up.

In Firewatch I remember the story coming to a fucking stop, because this one asshole had to back track because he wasn't ready to hop this fence at the moment. It was so fucking stupid to sit there and be like...really? Hoping a fence is the struggle? Shit destroyed my suspension of disbelief so fast.

@Heil68:

This is something Christopher Giles talked about once.... unfortunately all I have to offer you is a Quote:

" The more real it looks, the more real I expect it to act. This is important to remember, an increase in graphical realism changes player expectations. " - Christopher Gile

Ofcourse this could be to your Benefit.... you can read the Quote and Explore its implications on your own rather than have an Article rob you of that oppertunity only to forget it anyway.

Plus its Catchy. :)

If you're interested I can find the full Article for you.... its got examples in it.

to me is enemies that set back story telling.

You most of all games have enemies in which you have to beat/kill throught the whole game, right?

Think of Uncharted and TLoU.... great stories and presentatons of the story, but it break the emersion the fact that you are endlessly and easily killing hundred of enemies throughout the story. Going from a nice lovely seen to straight murdering people... or coming from just mudering 30 people willy nilly, to then go into a cutscene where a person gets shot and the characters get all dramatic about as if they never seen one get shot.

Even in Ethan Carter, where all you do is walk, you cant jump or even step over that little fence. Early Ac games he couldn't jump in water, Skyrim finding invisible walls. Not to mention numerous graphical glitches or general software errors that snap you out of game.

Like me in The witcher 3, which I loved, but going into a building, there was 1/2 a guy walking through the roof 12' off the ground? I enjoy that game as a whole, but that one little instance is what you are talking about, or the 2 times I was stuck and couldn't move and had to start game over from check point.

Why do we put up with it Champ? :P

I'm willing to accept some of that shit, plenty of people can't swim, and making a game that complicated inherently has its tech issues. A mother fucking firewatch guy doesn't know how to hop a fence? I do accounting for a living, I know how to climb a fence. I expect a god damn firewatch jabroni to climb a damn fence.

OMG The part in uncharted 3 when you have to accept that the wall blocking you off is a fence, all of a sudden Nathan Drake can't climb shit. So fucking dumb lol

Greatness of stories aside, something we discussed earlier, this medium is to convinced that the only thing it can make gameplay for is "kill a mother fucker". Reality is that they have needed to look for more diverse gameplay idea for ages, and simply didn't.

It's really stupid that there are forced action sequences in LA Noire that just come out of nowhere, one of my podcast mates told me that it's one thing when they show up on a case and make logical sense in the story, but it's another when you're just randomly going from place to place and the game comes to a screeching halt to have you respond to some random shoot out, because the dev/pub didn't trust that an audience was there for a detective game. Tomb Raider has become more action centric, I'm not one of those people that is high on old tomb raider (old tomb raider is actually a pretty bad video game), but while fixing the combat was something necessary, they didn't need to become combat centric necessarily. I just wanted the combat to not be shit, I also wanted the platforming and adventure elements, and the fucking camera (IE the big thing that was usually lame about old tomb raider) to be a lot better, and instead it's a tertiary element of the new Tomb Raider games.

Admittedly Rise fleshes out more than the 2013 reboot, but it's still an action game.

Point being yeah you are sort of right, part of the issue is systemic, the triple A space for instance only really knows how to market and sell the action stuff. The bombastic kind, to boot.

@Heil68:

Well to defend The First Assassin's Creed game they did put in a clever Contrivance for all kinds of things in order to get you to abide by the Rules..... "[INSERT ANCESTOR] Did not [INSERT THING YOU DON'T WANT THE PLAYER TO DO]." This contrivance is the game's Alternate History. Its a clever system but it has its limitations.

When you murder an Innocent Civillian then you can accept when the game/animus says "Ancestor did not kill Innocent Civallians" or "Killing innocent victims causes Desynchronization" but when the Game tries to do the same thing with Swimming it Puts such a huge Strain on immersion that the Contrivance Snaps into a million pieces. Because it implies Altair never ever Swam.... not once.

Its the same thing with Superman... a Dude that can do completely unrealistic things like Flying and Shooting Lazers out of his Eyes doesn't even put a Strain on Immersion but when he successfully hides his True identity by putting on a Pair of Glasses immediately Shatters it.

At first I found immersion to be confusing..... I thought what people did or didn't find immersive was just Dumb Randomness..... but theres an underlying theme here. And its very simple. You can create or change just about anything and hand have it with things like Magic or Science and it won't break Immersion..... however.... what you cannot do is pretend that People can't be People..... what I mean is the manner in which people interact with whatever artificial world you create must be perfectly consistent with the world we live in...... there isn't a single secenario you can use something like using a simple pair of Glasses as an elaborate disguise for a well know figure in any context, this is always going to break People's immersion.... or at the very least its going to put an enormous strain on it. As human beings we can accept anything except if other Human Beings, even fictional ones, don't behave like human beings are suppose to.

In Games its alil similar but its also alil Different..... you're a human being controlling another human being..... but this human being is not necessarily you.... even though you're controlling them. Its kinda Fucked Up !!! :O

Don't want to bang on about Crysis 2, but that compared to the first game, that does throw game-play out the window for it's story, which is practically incomprehensible.

Original Crysis had a poor story, but it usually just shoved you on the map to go about business, so I didn't care.

Crysis 2 changes quick-saves to checkpoints and the checkpoints are placed at the start of the level, meaning whenever someone is blabbing shit you don't care about, or a cutscene you don't care about fires off, you are forced to watch repeatedly on the hardest setting, in which death is a certainty.

They also add lots of artificial barriers so they can tell the story. Kicking blocked off doors that will trigger a cut-scene. The players walking speed and gun lowered so you can listen to NPC talk about things you don't care about.

Probably the worst addition is the barely interactive "press X" while cut-scene happens.

When the game, like the first, chucks you into a little sandbox without any of this, it's fun. But for some reason, probably following the path of Call Of Duty, or EA guiding them, or whatever, they thought this made the game better.

When I did like the opening stretch of that game and realized maximum speed was turned into a fucking sprint, I said, it's not worth playing this game. So I stopped playing and just wrote the game off as garbage.

Ignoring everything and looking at the base shooting, it's still a fairly good FPS. The aliens in particular, while occasionally completely breaking down for the most part have fairly impressive AI that can be challenging if you aren't just being a dick and using stealth 90% of the time - which is probably what most players do in all Crysis games. The "bang bang" aspect, and balance of weapons and perks, is way better than competitors such as Far Cry 3 or 4 which always felt very clunky to me.

Game stories should mostly stick to providing a context that gives the action/gameplay meaning. When games try to portray an epic narrative it often falls flat on its face. I think 'intellectually dishonest' was a good way to put it in the OP. Another prime example of that is Niko Bellic in GTA IV. On a way to a mission he'll blurt out all tons of emo crap about his life during the war and just wanting a better life, and upon arrival he'll kill literally dozens of people. And we're supposed to connect with him on an emotional level? Please. I think Trevor in GTA V is a sign they realised that, as he's the biggest maniac in the series since Tommy Vercetti, and it matches the gameplay of the series much better.

Then there is the problem of interactivity and how much storytelling can get in the way of actually playing the game. Not a lot of games do that right, and I think I only managed to immerse myself in the Mass Effect trilogy and Cryostasis in that sense.

But games also have some advantages in regard to story, namely that there is much more space to elaborate upon certain ideas or plot lines than in a 90-minute movie. Elder Scrolls has always had bad storytelling, but the lore that surrounds the franchise still makes it a fascinating game world to walk around in. An additional advantage is that you are (mostly) free to ignore things you aren't interested in and focus on those that you do care about (which is an advantage it has over other media with bigger scopes, like books and television series).

In the end I don't see it as a real problem as long as developers remember why we play video games and don't go all Heavy Rain on us in a desperate attempt to not let the player interfere with their 'amazing' story. I'll read a book for that, thanks.

This thread is over a year old.

I'm not defending GTAIV, it's been such a long time since I played it, and I have no desire to play it again.

But for the love of me every time I see this it makes me want to die inside.

The whole point of Niko's character was to make him say that he wants to leave a life of crime from the old country to the new country, only to make you go on a murder spree for the next 30 or so hours. It was basic, bludgeoned-over-your-head irony. Whether you think the execution was terrible or not, any mature gamer should have got the memo within the first few missions: this was the Houser brothers trying to be clever on their first "serious" GTA.

Incidentally, this came out in the same year The Dark Knight was released. I remember this board circle jerking over that movie. It was a film where the characters spoon-fed you the plot and themes without needing you to think. Case in point, the whole Lamborghini joke:

Alfred: "Will you be wanting the Batpod, sir?"

Bruce Wayne: "In the middle of the day Alfred? Not very subtle."

Visual gag: Bruce drives a Lambo out of his garage

Unnecessary piece of dialogue in case no one got the joke: Alfred: "The Lamborghini then. Much more subtle."

Fanbois 2008: zomg hahahahaa so funny chris nolan so smart bestmovie ever!!!11

The plot of this thread is that it's a year old, so has to stay in retirement.