1st February 2005, 3:26 PM
(This post was last modified: 1st February 2005, 3:44 PM by A Black Falcon.)
Quote:And LL, I agree that the best way to tell a story in a game is during gameplay, but there are very few games that have been able to do that well, and they don't do it in a way that can be easily reproduced. ICO is really the best example out there. It uses very few cinemas and tells its emotionally complex story through the actual gameplay. It's difficult to describe so you'll just have to play it for yourself. But while game designers are still trying to figure out how to make a game tell a story, there are a few easy-to-copy methods that at least do the job, the best one being cut scenes. That is basically just putting a movie into a game which I do not believe is the best way to go about it, but it's still better than the other standard alternatives (putting emotionless pages of dialogue via text into a game--and no that was not an invitation to restart that argument, ABF). I have a few ideas of my own which I hope to implement into a future game, but it's certainly not going to be an easy task to accomplish, and will most likely take several tries before I get it somewhat right.
If you haven't done it before, read that Dreamfall interview, OB1. It directly talks about this issue.
And dialogue, of course, when done well is about as far from emotionless as you can get. The idea that you don't like it is just so baffling, still... so many great game stories have been told, and told well, through conversations that I definitely find it impossible to disagree with. Of course it gets even better when there's voice acting as well (or possibly, depending on the case, stuff with cutscenes showing images of what is being described like they do in OoT), but that isn't a necessity or something.
Quote:HL 1 & 2 tell their stories in a neat and innovative way, but the stories themselves are pretty crappy.
Coming from you that means that the stories are pretty good. :) Yeah, not the most innovative stories ever, but not all stories need to be to be good...
Quote:i like how much blizzard has changed the orcs between warcraft 2 and 3. and they were able to incorporate that into the story and have it make sense. it's really quite cool. and now you can see them evolving further in WoW where they're still not under demonic control, but they aren't getting along with any humans. thrall is still hoping for peace, but his influence on the people giving you quests seems to be waning. it's really cool.
the interesting thing is that WoW really has no story of its own, it's all implied. the only way for you to know why things are the way they are is by having played warcraft 2 and 3. and that works well for it.
I didn't like how WoW took the story because it seemed like peace was possible between the orcs and at least some of the humans (the ones on Kalimdor) and that they only broke it because Blizzard wanted to set another game right after WCIII... stupid. Given historic tensions some minor fighting is probably inevitable, but it just doesn't seem realistic to have it dissolve so fast... I don't think it really works from a story standpoint and I wish that they hadn't taken that route. WCIII had a pretty good story and the direction WoW takes... I know they had to create new crisises (crises?) for a new game, but still... so soon, so many, and so broad? It's stupid!
Before each new event a Blizz game adds (the second war in WCII, Draenor in the WCII expo, the demons in WCIII, the naga in TFT, the Zerg and Terran Imperium in BW...) has made sense, but I just don't feel that way about WoW. Oh, it's a fantastic game, but...
Quote:Even in the remake Chrono Trigger didn't have "hours" of CG footage. In fact, it has NO CG footage, those added movies were hand drawn.
It DID however have a LOT of cutscenes even before adding in the movies. However, I wouldn't change that for the world, because they were done very well and didn't subtract but rather added to gameplay. Honestly, games where the story is told VIA gameplay, (oh yeah, another great example of this is Myst, where the story of an area has already passed and your exploration of it is how you figure out exactly what happened) are great, but stories that need cutscenes to be told still have their place in the video game world.
ABF, the interactivity with the story CAN'T happen if MGS2 is to get it's point across. In any other game, you have a point. For example, MGS1 . However, MGS2 has a very specific point. I mean it, if you beat the game, I mean play the ENTIRE game, and if you only have gotten to the President, then you have no idea at all what turn the story will take (no you DON'T, seriously, you have NO idea, I can promise you that, no really, you don't! Listen, I mean it! It's as unpredictable as if Ronald McDonald showed up to take you to the Matrix, only a little different ), um, you will get that. MGS2 actually gave a point to the total lack of being able to control the cutscenes. I really don't want to spoil it, so just trust me on this and beat the game, you'll see what they were going for. It's out for PC you know, so not having a PS2 isn't an excuse .
So you think that MGS2 could never work if it had a conversation system like a PC adventure game (list of choices)? Even if that was just in the comlink sections (when you call people) and not cutscenes? I don't understand how any story could be so unique that it could not be told by the method of having normal conversations between characters (as opposed to major story sequences, which probably would work better as they are in MGS-style games)... but if there is some special circumstances in how the story goes that you learn in MGS2 that make it different from all other games, then whatever. I was talking more in general anyway, about what games should be doing as opposed to doing like MGS does... (for the most part, having a few games like MGS is fine and I was enjoying MGS2 when I was playing it a few years back)
Obviously you cannot do all story with full interactivity if you want to tell a good story. You need a narrative structure and some degree of a linear path... it would just be far too hard to design a non-linear story (which is why non-linear games either have mostly linear stories within them (possibly branching ones) or don't really have stories). But... do you really think that what that Dreamfall interview describes could never work in MGS2? I guess it's because MGS is trying to be a movie much more than it is trying to be a game so asking for more game/interactive features doesn't make sense when the game is not trying for that... some of the things I described could be bad for such a game, perhaps (a possibility I mentioned)... but I certainly think that games could have interactive 'cutscenes' (as described for Dreamfall, HL2, etc) and sometimes have more interactive conversation systems (yeah, it sometimes makes for less natural-sounding conversations, but I prefer it overall because it has choice involved which should be what games try to do.)
I'd rather, of course, talk about games I've played more than MGS2 (halfway) or Half-Life 2 (not at all), but no one wants to talk about, or hasn't played, most of the games I mention (or refer to by implication)... it's annoying to have to talk only about games I don't know well enough to talk about specifically.