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Old 08-17-2010, 04:39 PM   #4207 (permalink)
standardman
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Join Date: Oct 2007
Location: Manchester, England
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Chmpy View Post
I think this conversation is really about why each of us play games. I like having a story in a game, but that's not why I'm playing it. As soon as the story oversteps it's bounds and interferes with the gameplay, I lose patience. If the story is engaging enough for me to play along with it then it has done it's job.

But standardman, or junkenstein, maybe you have more tolerance for the story than medium brumski or I do. Maybe it's even WHY you are playing the game to begin with. Dragon Age has a fairly engaging story, but after a few hours I got tired of the gameplay and as soon as the story slowed down a little bit I didn't feel compelled to play it anymore (even though I knew there was a great story ahead).

This kind of attitude has made it hard for me to play most RPGs in the past few years, but games with great gameplay can tell their story while I play my also-fun-to-play game. (Mass Effect 2 is a good example of this.) In any case I think it's more about the reason each of us likes to play games, rather than specific games being good or bad...
It's about how interesting the story is and how it's told, really. I love a good story in a game but I loathe it when the game stops to deliver the story, which is why most Japanese games bore me to death. A good story in a game should be delivered using the medium.

Story isn't necessarily delivered in dialogue or walls of text, I think the best modern examples of storytelling in videogames are Half-Life 2 and Bioshock. Both used the environment to tell the story and rarely wrestled control from the player.

In Bioware games, in addition to giving the gameplay weight and meaning, the storytelling itself playable thanks to dialogue choices and consequences. If you want to go deeper, they even slowly unfold a literal encyclopaedia that makes you feel part of an existent world, rather than a series of levels.
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