Why is story teling so rubbish in video games?.

[QUOTE="da_illest101"]

someone never played a final fantasy

nmaharg

[QUOTE="nmaharg"][QUOTE="da_illest101"]

someone never played a final fantasy

Drakes_Fortune

If you want a story, then I suggest you investigate a library. The best stories in the world are found in libraries. The literary medium is still the greatest story-telling format in the world. It's isn't limited by resolution, clock-speed, or how many pixels can be pushed. It's only limitation is human imagination.

Because they're not novels. If I want a good story, I read some Russian literature or some other classics (Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Chekhov, etc.).

TREY_FOR_LI4E

Bingo! I agree.

Although personally, I'm a big fan of Spanish literature of the Golden Century. Cervantez puts Shakespeare to shame.

[QUOTE="TREY_FOR_LI4E"]

Because they're not novels. If I want a good story, I read some Russian literature or some other classics (Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Chekhov, etc.).

dkrustyklown

Bingo! I agree.

Although personally, I'm a big fan of Spanish literature of the Golden Century. Cervantez puts Shakespeare to shame.

Uncharted series

Mass Effect (if you can get through all the dialogues)

GTA

MGS has a great story, Bioshock had a good one. Gears has an average story but I guess I do care about the characters. Apart from that I can't think of another game or series that has a deep and involving story. Someone care to prove me wrong?.

LiquidSnake1001

MGS has an ok story, that is told in a horrible fashion. 30 minute cutscenes are not a good idea, not matter how you slice it. Bioshock's was good, but Gear's story is a sin against good writing. Especially the dialogue.

It's just plain hard to balance making a good game, and telling a really good story, because it's an interactive medium. Look at books or movies. You don't interact with the story at all. It's presented to you, exactly the way the writer/director wants you to see it.

In games, you really can't do that, because the playing is moving the story along. Unless, of course, you take all of the control away from the player, and drop them into a pre-rendered movie.

Games also require that you be doing something fun in that game, like killing aliens, or hijacking cars, or jumping on mushrooms, or assassinating people in the middle ages. You have to balance a good story making the game fun to play, and it's very hard to tell a great story and keep the player involved in an interesting activity.

And we're judging it a aginst other mediums as well. Most great stories from books and movies would make awful games. Can you imagine playing a game based on Crime and Punishment, Apocalypse Now, Hamlet, or Moby Dick, for example?

[QUOTE="dkrustyklown"]

[QUOTE="TREY_FOR_LI4E"]

Because they're not novels. If I want a good story, I read some Russian literature or some other classics (Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Chekhov, etc.).

Drakes_Fortune

Bingo! I agree.

Although personally, I'm a big fan of Spanish literature of the Golden Century. Cervantez puts Shakespeare to shame.

There is nothing wrong with a good story in a game, but to expect a game to have as good of a story as a literary masterwork is to expect too much and to set oneself up for dissapointment. The written word drives the reader to render the story's world in one's imagination. Movies and videogames don't even come close to this level. I doubt that they ever will.

someone never played a final fantasy

[QUOTE="LiquidSnake1001"]

MGS has a great story, Bioshock had a good one. Gears has an average story but I guess I do care about the characters. Apart from that I can't think of another game or series that has a deep and involving story. Someone care to prove me wrong?.

ZIMdoom

I disagree that it is "rubbish", but to answer your question - A couple reasons:

1) Story telling involves taking time away from the gamer actually playing the game. The better and more complicated the story you want to have, the more time you have to have the audience sitting there doing nothing. This can alienate a whole group of gamers who don't care about movies or story and only want to play the game.

2) Some genres tend to be easier to add in a story than others. RPGs are obviously the easiest, and it seems like FPS are the hardest. The way I see it, the closer your game gets to being a shooter/FPS, the tougher it gets to have a real story because it would mean having to add too much movie/reading. And really, people playing shooters just want the action of shooting and blowing stuff up. So why bother spending money on something your target audience doesn't care about?

3) Personal opinion. One person's Lord of the Rings is another person's Twilight. Not everyone likes the same things when it comes to story.

I think once developers find a way to tell a story without using cutscenes, games will develope into better storytelling mediums. A story works best when the player uses the gameplay to live and feel the story, not watch it like a movie, or read it like a book, but to use both and become completely ingrossed in the world and actually become the player they are playing as. Having cutscenes ruins that because it pulls you away from your character and your control over his actions.

Gaming is still a very young form of entertainment. Only within the last 10 years have games started to tell complex stories beyond just text. Just keep playing games, within another 10 years great stories will be a common place in gamming.

Some of the JRPG's that I've played in the past have had some pretty impressive stories. Xenogears, for example. I almost cried at the end.

Lost Odyssey is one of the deepest games i have played. Go out and play it ;)

MGS has a great story, Bioshock had a good one. Gears has an average story but I guess I do care about the characters. Apart from that I can't think of another game or series that has a deep and involving story. Someone care to prove me wrong?.

LiquidSnake1001

I read somewhere about the bulk of the industry being made up of 30-something manboys who were obsessed with "epicness". That'd pretty much account for it. I personally think the word "epic" and all associated with it will be the eventual death of the video game industry as wel know it.

Devs need better writers, and I love to write.:D

Play a Bioware game.SparkyProtocol

ding ding ding DING!

We have a WINNER!! :D

[QUOTE="ZIMdoom"]

[QUOTE="LiquidSnake1001"]

MGS has a great story, Bioshock had a good one. Gears has an average story but I guess I do care about the characters. Apart from that I can't think of another game or series that has a deep and involving story. Someone care to prove me wrong?.

DarkGamer007

I disagree that it is "rubbish", but to answer your question - A couple reasons:

1) Story telling involves taking time away from the gamer actually playing the game. The better and more complicated the story you want to have, the more time you have to have the audience sitting there doing nothing. This can alienate a whole group of gamers who don't care about movies or story and only want to play the game.

2) Some genres tend to be easier to add in a story than others. RPGs are obviously the easiest, and it seems like FPS are the hardest. The way I see it, the closer your game gets to being a shooter/FPS, the tougher it gets to have a real story because it would mean having to add too much movie/reading. And really, people playing shooters just want the action of shooting and blowing stuff up. So why bother spending money on something your target audience doesn't care about?

3) Personal opinion. One person's Lord of the Rings is another person's Twilight. Not everyone likes the same things when it comes to story.

I think once developers find a way to tell a story without using cutscenes, games will develope into better storytelling mediums. A story works best when the player uses the gameplay to live and feel the story, not watch it like a movie, or read it like a book, but to use both and become completely ingrossed in the world and actually become the player they are playing as. Having cutscenes ruins that because it pulls you away from your character and your control over his actions.

MGS has a great story, Bioshock had a good one. Gears has an average story but I guess I do care about the characters. Apart from that I can't think of another game or series that has a deep and involving story. Someone care to prove me wrong?.

LiquidSnake1001

Going to get attacked for this but I think Halo3 had a great story based on what they had to work with. Gears2 has a decent story but that scene with Dom and Maria shows that they have potential. Kingdom hearts has a awesome story just some people don't like Disney characters. Also WWE SvsR10 cause you can make any epic story you want. :D

Yeah, most video games have poor stories, but does it really matter? I can think of tons of video games that have terrible stories but are still fun games. For instance, Devil May Cry 4. Fun game, but the story is mindblowingly stupid. As long as the story provides context, I couldn't care less. Sure, it's great when a game goes the extra mile to provide an engaging story (GTA4, MGS games), but its surely not neccesary.

Also, although MGS has a good story with good characters, the storytelling is not all that. I don't understand how someone can justify all that boring technical minutae. If Kojima would just remove some of that silly mumbo jumbo, it would allow the moving/epic/character development portions of the story to shine.

On a final note, I think GTA4 told its story in an excellent way. There were cutscenes, but they weren't too long and the game did a fantastic job of getting out of the players way. The dialogue is bursting with energy as well. It was brilliant how they handled so much of the character development through in car conversations and cellphone calls.

MGS has a great story, Bioshock had a good one. Gears has an average story but I guess I do care about the characters. Apart from that I can't think of another game or series that has a deep and involving story. Someone care to prove me wrong?.

LiquidSnake1001

There's so much I could say to dispute that, I almost don't know what to say.

1) Story telling involves taking time away from the gamer actually playing the game. The better and more complicated the story you want to have, the more time you have to have the audience sitting there doing nothing. This can alienate a whole group of gamers who don't care about movies or story and only want to play the game.

ZIMdoom

That's not entirely true. Prince of Persia: TsoT and Uncharted 2 are two perfect examples of great storytelling with very minimal interruption in gameplay. While cutscenes help, it's entirely possible to tell a deep, engaging story while playing.

it's not on par with movies or books, but it's definitely catching up to them, and lots of games have brilliant storyline behind them. my favourite so far is assassin's creed 2. that's one story i haven't heard or seen from a movie. quite original, they manage to create a mixture of sci-fi, history and conspiracy theory very well indeed. the characters in that game are great. so, storytelling in games is definitely not rubbish. i'm proud to be a gamer because of this. the quality of stories in movies are declining anyway, more people want to focus on money making in the movie industry these days.

MGS isn't a good example of good storytelling in a video game. Good storytelling in a video game shouldn't remove the player from the game to watch cutscenes for 30 minutes.AAllxxjjnn

Yeah...that's the bad thing about MGS4.

There is nothing wrong with a good story in a game, but to expect a game to have as good of a story as a literary masterwork is to expect too much and to set oneself up for dissapointment. The written word drives the reader to render the story's world in one's imagination. Movies and videogames don't even come close to this level. I doubt that they ever will.

dkrustyklown

.

The medium of video gaming is very young, and in that infancy we are still seeing many signs of juvenile growth. With time, maybe, more mature stories will show up. Not convolution about nano machines, but actually developed narratives, with believable characters. I would like to think that Heavy Rain is a move in the right direction, but like MGS4 (based on known info of HR) it abandons many aspects of what makes a video game a "game" to tell its story....

.

We are seeing bad stories because the video game industry is young. Right now developers are just playing catch up on hardware, spending their time trying to pump out pretty visuals, bigger worlds, more enemies on screen and more realistic physics. Once this plateaus and we start having games that border graphically on real life, developers, may well start to (on average), focus more on story telling and character development...

Legacy of Kain Soul reaver has a very good story.

MGS has a great story.

LiquidSnake1001

No it didn't...

Dragon Age = amazing story

Lost Odysey = Fantastic Story

The Witcher = Good story

Mass Effect = good story to

There are not many great stories out there, but there are a few.

[QUOTE="LiquidSnake1001"]

MGS has a great story, Bioshock had a good one. Gears has an average story but I guess I do care about the characters. Apart from that I can't think of another game or series that has a deep and involving story. Someone care to prove me wrong?.

nmaharg

Play KOTOR

[QUOTE="nmaharg"][QUOTE="LiquidSnake1001"]

MGS has a great story, Bioshock had a good one. Gears has an average story but I guess I do care about the characters. Apart from that I can't think of another game or series that has a deep and involving story. Someone care to prove me wrong?.

cainetao11

Good and bad are not always subjective. Objective quality exists, otherwise a Pinto would be better than a Porsche because someone thinks so.

The storytelling in Braid is pure genious.

Like I said before, I believe part of the problem with story in videogames is that stories as we know them aren't interactive. Games are interactive, and this interactivity is not part of traditional storytelling. It's extremely difficult to picture a play in which the audience takes an active role; this is essentially the problem of storytelling in a game. It's even more of a problem if the player in, say, a less-than-linear game like a WRPG, doesn't follow a usual course of action.

GTAIV also has a great story. Tales of Vesperia is also a very story driven game.

But I strongly dissagree with anyone who says a video game shouldn't have a story because you buy a game to play it, not to watch it. A good story is only a plus and keeps you going.

GTAIV also has a great story. Tales of Vesperia is also a very story driven game.

But I strongly dissagree with anyone who says a video game shouldn't have a story because you buy a game to play it, not to watch it. A good story is only a plus and keeps you going.

GeoffZak

[QUOTE="GeoffZak"]

GTAIV also has a great story. Tales of Vesperia is also a very story driven game.

But I strongly dissagree with anyone who says a video game shouldn't have a story because you buy a game to play it, not to watch it. A good story is only a plus and keeps you going.

AAllxxjjnn

[QUOTE="AAllxxjjnn"][QUOTE="GeoffZak"]

GTAIV also has a great story. Tales of Vesperia is also a very story driven game.

But I strongly dissagree with anyone who says a video game shouldn't have a story because you buy a game to play it, not to watch it. A good story is only a plus and keeps you going.

Nintendo_Ownes7

Bioshock is another superb example of in-game and completely interactive story telling.

With Bioware's games, the story is driven at moments through cut scenes, but there you the player still has interactive feedback in how those scenes play out, and this how the story develops.

[QUOTE="cainetao11"][QUOTE="nmaharg"] Because they give you everything. The best stories keep you thinking and guessing. Most if not all videogames don't do this. Even games that some consider to have great stories, really don't. Because if you have half a brain you know whats going to happen. Last game I played with a truly great story was kotor, and I can't even remember the one before that.Rekunta

Good and bad are not always subjective. Objective quality exists, otherwise a Pinto would be better than a Porsche because someone thinks so.

[QUOTE="AAllxxjjnn"][QUOTE="GeoffZak"]

GTAIV also has a great story. Tales of Vesperia is also a very story driven game.

But I strongly dissagree with anyone who says a video game shouldn't have a story because you buy a game to play it, not to watch it. A good story is only a plus and keeps you going.

Nintendo_Ownes7

Uncharted 2 and Half-Life say hello.

Somewhere, out in the universe, a lone final fantasy fan weeps at this comment...

or any rpg fan for that matter. Expecting great plots from fps's? that's facepalm-worthy