> There are ~~absolutely~~ fantastic stories in video games.
Not really, not compared to books and movies. If you're in the mood for a good story, you would not look to games.
But it stands to reason, the medium is not well suited for it. Books and movies are excellent vehicles to tell a story. You have full and precise control over timing, pacing, what the end user is experiencing at all times, etc. Plus they've been honed for generations. Additionally, if your goal is to tell a story, you wouldn't make a game to do it (generally).
Maybe we just haven't figured it out yet with games. It's a young medium.
> There are plenty of games that you play for the story and the gameplay is just meh.
Right, but that doesn't mean it's a good story. The desire to want to know what's next is just that strong. That's why there are cliffhangers before every commercial break in a TV show. Think about how many times you've been disappointed by the result, but kept sticking around to see what happens.
Story is often just a tool in game design toolbox that is used to get players to play beyond the point they otherwise would. It works, even with bad stories.
The old Goosebump novels were great at this. Every chapter, some sort of cliffhanger. Most of the time it was the character overreacting or mis-seeing something.
But eventually one of them leads into the heart of the story.
The first Mass Effect honestly felt like playing through an interactive movie for me.
How well it would do as a movie is beyond me but it couldn't be any worse plot wise than that terrible Valerian and the whatever 1000 movie that got released last year.
I would say that the looking glass games (thief, systemshock, etc), and the games that they inspired are a good place to start (deus ex and its sequels, the bioshock games, everything by Arkane right now [Prey is great]). The witcher games are incredibly rich, but since they do have books as source material I don't know if I would include them as much. I always thought the Psychonauts story and writing was great and an example of something that didn't have to be gritty, dark and dramatic.
I think games with the best stories often allow a lot of freedom to the player and just like in books, we all put some piece of ourselves into the protagonist. No movie will ever quite do justice to the character take part in creating. Add to that the fact that a lot of great story based games allow for choices that reflect our version of the character and it becomes impossible to have one vision that encompasses all of that.
That Dragon, Cancer; Portal 2; Grim Fandango; Her Story; What Remains of Edith Finch; The Vanishing of Ethan Carter; Papers, Please
And just to make the point: the only games on this list I have played and finished are Portal 2 and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. The others, I either know of the story because people liked it so much I learned it second-hand, or the gameplay was so boring that I just quit halfway through but I put it on this list for the story anyway.
Edit: I gotta throw Paratopic in here. Played that one through twice, it's less than an hour.
Papers, Please doesn't have a story per se, only a setting. You don't really beat the game, you just get one of several different endings which depend on more than just making mistakes and playing "badly". Getting a "bad" ending doesn't count as losing the game.
But that's what makes it perfect for an adaptation (for a different reason you were arguing about). Its movie script won't break a plot that doesn't exist, won't mess up any character development because there isn't one (recurring characters are secondary), and all it has to do is get the setting right. Writers can go anywhere from there.
Yeah, but the incident that interrupts you early on (level 3?) in Papers, Please is pretty famous. You're right that "story" is not the only interesting criterion, because some games make scenarios where lots of interesting stories can play out, and others just evoke make a mood/vibe without much of a story going on. Those would also be good options for movie adaptations.
IMO it's an example of how to do a game-movie adaptation right: it gets both the mechanics and the themes of the game across effectively, and it uses the medium to set up scenes that would be hard to convey in the original game (e.g. the moment after Elisa leaves)
The Witcher 3. Part of the problem is that often your story-heavy games are really telling dozens of different stories. In TW3 for example, the main story is good but not amazing, yet several of its "secondary" stories are fantastic.
Many of the Witcher 3 substories seem to be reincarnations of the various stories told in the original books - I mean, Witcher is not a "game story" but an adaptation of novels, and these novels have also been adapted into movies and IIRC a TV series some decades ago;
Oof. Which ones? After the ten thousandth person recommended the game to me, I recently played through it and never found a plot that I didn't find pretty flat. Plus, I couldn't tell if the terrible dialog and gratuitous cringe-worthy softcore CGI porn sequences were supposed to be a self-aware in-joke.
There are lots of great side quests in The Witcher 3. The wolfman one, the one with the ghost and the oven, the one that takes part in a tower in an island in a lake, the one where you finish tracking down some witches...
Not to mention, part of the appeal of the game is not knowing if those quests are going to end well or not. Some quests don't have good endings, while others depend on your choices, making you responsible for what happens.
And regarding "softcore porn", it's only simple bed scenes, like in any movie. It's totally normal, and given that there is a huge romance plot with 3 different endings, not counting the expansions, it would be silly to tell such a story without mention to sex. In any case, it tells a lot that people are so scandalized by sex, but not by the continous gore, violence, inequality and misery that The Witcher 3 portrays continously.
I’m not scandalized by the sex. I just find myself eye rolling at the hamfisted treatment of the topic. A couple of lame pickup lines and every woman you encounter practically impales herself on you.
Not to mention the tedium of the cut scenes where sex is depicted. But you’re right that I have a double standard in one regard: I’ll put up with lengthier cut scenes with magic explosions and plot advancements than I will put up with cut scenes that are herky CG sex.
>I’m not scandalized by the sex. I just find myself eye rolling at the hamfisted treatment of the topic. A couple of lame pickup lines and every woman you encounter practically impales herself on you.
Ah, I'd suggest you check the digit on your game install again. It appears you've played The Witcher (the 1st game of the trilogy). That was indeed a bit ridiculous. On the other hand, it's not like being strong, handsome, famous and famously infertile is a bad strategy for getting laid. That said, most of the sexuality/romance should probably be kept out of scene unless it contributes to the plot in some way, which is what Witcher 3 does. Whenever you can have sex with someone it is because this either advances the main romance plot or because it reveals an interesting facet of a person.
If you played through the entire game and didn't find any of the stories compelling, all I can really do is shrug and say apparently it wasn't the game for you. I'm curious what games you've felt were "non-flat" and well written?
If you do want examples of great stories from Witcher 3, they are (IMO):
* Main story from the Hearts of Stone expansion
* Bloody Baron sub-plot
* Main story from the Blood & Wine expansion
* Triss Merigold sub-plot regarding mages in Novigrad
* Haunted tower quest from Kiera Metz
* The first 75% or so of the base game's main story is good, but it's complex and hard to get invested in if you aren't familiar the characters and backstory
Hm, do you like any fantasy at all? It sounds like it might not be your genre. Hard sci-fi more your thing? In that case The Talos Principle is pretty good, if fairly gameplay heavy.
Loved The Talos Principle, but also enjoyed Skyrim. Skyrim’s quests and side quests felt a bit thing-collecty at times, but I feel like you could get into it as a nationalistic boy scout viking barbarian, or an angry lizard thief, or an elven mage and play three different games.
With the Witcher 3, I felt trapped in a character whose demeanor I found insufferable no matter what options I chose.
I wanted to like the game, and recognize the technical achievement, but it left me pretty blasé about quite a lot.
I'd even hesitate to put Transistor on the list because I liked the gameplay so much. I played it through 4 times to get a platinum trophy on PS4. But the story is pretty cool, and I dreaded that ending every time.
Not really, not compared to books and movies. If you're in the mood for a good story, you would not look to games.
But it stands to reason, the medium is not well suited for it. Books and movies are excellent vehicles to tell a story. You have full and precise control over timing, pacing, what the end user is experiencing at all times, etc. Plus they've been honed for generations. Additionally, if your goal is to tell a story, you wouldn't make a game to do it (generally).
Maybe we just haven't figured it out yet with games. It's a young medium.
> There are plenty of games that you play for the story and the gameplay is just meh.
Right, but that doesn't mean it's a good story. The desire to want to know what's next is just that strong. That's why there are cliffhangers before every commercial break in a TV show. Think about how many times you've been disappointed by the result, but kept sticking around to see what happens.
Story is often just a tool in game design toolbox that is used to get players to play beyond the point they otherwise would. It works, even with bad stories.