15th November 2004, 11:28 AM
Quote:If you can't explain yourself in understandable terms, why should I listen to you or take your points as serious?
"Information"? Huh? I have no idea how you cannot say that Baldur's Gate or Fallout (even just the first couple of hours (did you reach the first town?)) have storytelling. Seriously, it makes me wonder if you were paying any attention at all to the games...
Let's take Baldur's Gate. So, it starts. Opening cutscene, which when you first see it seems neat but doesn't make much sense. Later on of course you'll figure out exactly what was going on there, but at the start you don't know, just like your character has no idea of what is really going on. Bad storytelling? No, just a storytelling choice. Then the game starts and you explore the first area... learn a little bit but you have no idea why you are so special. You won't learn this for a long time in this game. Maybe the story looks better upon reflection when you notice all of the little touches and storyline elements they include from the very beginning that a new player will not see, but I think it definitely has effective storytelling from the start. Maybe it's a bit thin, with long stretches of gameplay between short elements of story at points, but overall... I think BG has a decent story and it tells it in a perfectly good way. It's deep, deeper than the new player realizes... relatively complex, especially later in the series... and allows for plenty of great adventures and events along the way (again especially in BGII/ToB). You explore lands, do quests, learn about your world (via conversations with NPCs and during side quests)...
Fallout is different in many ways (like the fact that it has a more unique story and the story element of the game is larger than in BG), but the basics in many ways are similar -- a main story you follow by going to the points given, learning things, and then doing things; choices you make along the way (though unlike BG you actually have choices that affect the game -- choosing between good and bad, killing people or not, etc); the option to just wander around in a large area and just explore or do quests (again in Fallout you can get to a greater percentage of the game this way, but BG has quite a large area you can explore from the beginning)...
Oh yeah, and Fallout has a much, much better CG intro video. BG's is cool once you know what it IS, but Fallout's is just great from the first time you see it...
Unless you can actually explain where the problem is in your eyes, I think I should just ignore you.
Most of the story in BG is told through boring conversations with NPCs and scrolls and crap. That's not good storytelling, as hard as you try to convince yourself otherwise.
Quote:I'd say it's more common to see games influenced by both... movies for cinema scenes and books for the depth and length that games have and movies lack... books especially for more verbose games like RPGs and adventure games.
I've already explained this in depth. Both can influence games but since games are a visual medium only movies can be recreated in them.
Quote:I don't know exactly how much it had, so I can't answer that... I've played quite a few games fully voice acted after all, and I don't know exactly where it fits in. It does havea lot however.
KOTOR has an insane amount of recorded dialogue in it, and the acting is done well for a video game.