Story and Games

[OB1]

Of course... it woudn't work any other way. If you want a game to actually tell a story, you've got to script what could happen. But the more choice -- and interactivity -- you can include, the better. The player is doing something, not watching something. For a game, that's an important thing.

And reading hundreds of pages worth of text is better?

First, marking down games because they didn't do something that was impossible for them at the time is absurd. That's what you're doing here.

Better is more than a comparison of technical details. It is a comparison of complete games. That means not just 'which game has more betterer graphics' but 'which game is more fun to play', etc...

Would Baldur's Gate II in 3D be better? Perhaps, perhaps not. If it ended up like KotOR or NWN, not. Saying "it is a worse game than it could be because it doesn't have emotions and movement and stuff in conversations" is ridiculous... sure, it doesn't. So? Games didn't, before just a couple of years ago! And yet games manage to tell really good stories... hmm, I wonder why?

Oh yeah, because quality -- and story -- is more than graphics. That's just one factor among many.

While facial animations and movement during conversations would make a game more realistic, when you've got interesting, well-written conversations going on, most people don't really care too much that it's not as cinematic as it could be... after all, these are games, not movies. They don't need to be like movies. Well-written text can do lots of wonderful things and game designers know it, so they use it. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

Sure, modern technology lets us replace some more of those words with pictures every year. But that does not degrade the accomplishments of the past because those games were done to the best of their ability... and as long as you can ignore little things like static conversations (something anyone who has played RPGs or adventure games should be able to do really, really quickly) and have a little imagination, it really doesn't matter. The addition is nice, but without it? Games can definitely be just as good. They're just different.

I don't care if it's 2D or 3D. 2D games can tell stories just fine. Using the "you need an imagination" speach to excuse lame methods of storytelling is, well, lame. BG is an example of poor storytelling. I don't care what you did to make it seem good, the fact remains that its storytelling method was very poor. Blame it on time or technology or whatever, but that doesn't change anything.