Writing, voice acting and bloat

[Girth Certificate]

Play it Again (Serious) Sam (and Max)

[Flanders]

3 minutes ago, JamesC said:

Here's lookin' at Ryu kid.

Play it, Samus.

[JoeK]

Constant, incessant people talking to you as if you are a fucking moron is an absolute bane of this generation it would appear.

 

If people are genuinely in need of help all the time then I’ve no problem with this, but for the love of god let me have the facility to turn it off. 

[Fry Crayola]

3 hours ago, JamesC said:

Storytelling in games has improved hugely in the last 10-15 years so, while there's currently no video game equivalent of Casablanca, perhaps one day there will be

 

Press L to Play As Time Goes By.

[easilydone]

5 hours ago, Garwoofoo said:

 

I'm a huge fan of the Yakuza games but there's no getting away from the fact that the most recent entry, Like A Dragon, started with about three straight hours of cut-scenes. If I hadn't already been invested in the series, I'm not sure I'd have persevered, great cut-scenes though they undoubtedly are.

 

Game Pass has made me impatient. If I'm still watching an intro sequence ten minutes after starting a game, more often than not it gets binned.

Yeah, this is pretty much the exact yardstick I use to judge if I can be arsed with something, though 5 minutes is it for me. 
 

Unskippable tutorial - gone

in-engine exposition that cuts half the controls - gone

30 minutes in and still stopping to chat to my pointless sidekick - gone

 

Ive never liked voiced cutscenes, I can read much quicker than I can listen so why waste my time? 

[James Lyon]

I love a good cutscene. Give me something to watch to set up the next bit of the story or give me a break from the action. The only thing I ask is that you make it completely skippable so I don't have to go through it multiple times. 

 

I guess with some games, though, the cutscenes are the game. It's a long time in Bioshock Infinite, for instance, before you get to the proper action. I guess there's probably level skips but it's not the same.

[Unofficial Who]

7 hours ago, peeveen said:

I would love it if all games had an "Unnecessary guff: on/off" setting.

 

Return to Monkey Island has this where you can turn on or off the "writer's" setting. I've played both, it's punchier with it off pace wise but you miss out on a few jokes.

[Fry Crayola]

I can't see that being a regular thing. It'd be like having a separate print of films that skips straight to the action scenes. 

 

But certainly, don't dump all your lore on me through endless cutscenes and logs just because you worked so hard on it. I worked really hard on my spectacular butt cheeks, but I don't stick them in your face before I serve you dinner.

[Thor]

Here's an idea: If you don't want to play a game with loads of cut scenes and voice acting, don't. buy. the. fuck. ing. game. 

 

There are plenty of games for everyone. Just play something else. You don't see me starting a thread moaning about all the various card games (hello Marvel Snap as the latest) coming out these days. 

 

What a lot of you see as bloat, I see as enriching. Horses for courses. 

[thesnwmn]

14 minutes ago, Thor said:

Here's an idea: If you don't want to play a game with loads of cut scenes and voice acting, don't. buy. the. fuck. ing. game. 

 

There are plenty of games for everyone. Just play something else. You don't see me starting a thread moaning about all the various card games (hello Marvel Snap as the latest) coming out these days. 

 

What a lot of you see as bloat, I see as enriching. Horses for courses. 

 

But a game can be designed to be about it's story and voice acting and still be flabby and shit because it's poorly written and edited. There is skill in a developer delivering a story well (or even making a good story in the first place). More doesn't mean it's richer. At all sometimes. A wonderful story could be told with no words at all. Adding words doesn't necessarily make it a better experience.

 

Just like films.

 

The fun of this stuff for many (myself included) is discussing the how something is done. Is it done well.

[Gabe]

9 hours ago, Wiper said:

I mean, the evident thing here (outwith the occasional hardline "no story in my games at all please and thank you" stance) is that it's whether you're enjoying the writing that matters, not whether there's a lot of it or not — hence e.g. several people specifying not liking it in most games, but enjoying it in Naughty Dog's games (which I personally find insufferable). If you're enjoying the characters and story then exposition is generally welcome! 

Hard disagree on that.

 

Case in point: I was really enjoying the mood, the characters and setting of Vampyr. I spoke to everybody about everything at first and the writing wasn't bad at all - but by the last third I just skipped through every conversation because each character had so much superfluous stuff they just had to share with you. Completely dragged the experience down. Cut out a lot of that and I would've continued to enjoy the game. Greedfall is another - loved the setting, the politics and the drama, but again everybody just had so much to say, often in the most verbose way they could and so skippity-skip I went for the last quarter of the game.

 

And I'm easily pleased, so my standards for decent writing are probably lower than most - but even so, there was just too much for no good reason and those games suffered as a result.

[MarkN]

1 hour ago, Thor said:

Here's an idea: If you don't want to play a game with loads of cut scenes and voice acting, don't. buy. the. fuck. ing. game. 

 

There are plenty of games for everyone. Just play something else. You don't see me starting a thread moaning about all the various card games (hello Marvel Snap as the latest) coming out these days. 

 

What a lot of you see as bloat, I see as enriching. Horses for courses. 

The problem is that the games I REALLY enjoy playing are often full of the shit I hate. I don't want to play anything else - I want to play this - just without the awfullly written bollocks. I played through Hardspace: Shipbreaker twice, and then played on some more (I think I'm finally done now, mind). I hated the dialogue the first time, I hated it more the second time, knowing it was coming), but I really enjoyed the game. I play games to play games, not to listen to badly-written nonsense (I almost wrote badly-voiced, but the voice acting was fine - it was just what they had to read that was banal at best, and dreadful at worst). 

[b00dles]

The nonary games nail it again. VLR is essentially a visual novel but if it didn't have all that text and exposition the KERBLAMMO moments wouldn't hit nearly as hard.

 

I can read very quickly though, so I often resort to just reading than listen to VO.

[Garibaldi]

With how much games cost to create now, they simply don’t want to go the expense of hiring a proper writer. I remember Dreamweb, waaaay back when, actually came with a mini novella which was written as if it was your character’s journal. That was a great touch and really helped immerse me in the game. 
 

Thing is, writing for games is a very niche skill set. As in, to do it properly you’d need to have someone who was closer to a screenwriter. I remember Crytek hired a sci-fi novelist to write Crysis 2, but the result was still a nonsensical hodgepodge of narrative. I think for most developers it’s not worth stressing over for something that, unless they’re a high-tier ‘story’ studio like Naughty Dog, they believe most people just pay cursory attention to. 

[Scribblor]

27 minutes ago, Garibaldi said:

With how much games cost to create now, they simply don’t want to go the expense of hiring a proper writer. I remember Dreamweb, waaaay back when, actually came with a mini novella which was written as if it was your character’s journal. That was a great touch and really helped immerse me in the game. 
 

Thing is, writing for games is a very niche skill set. As in, to do it properly you’d need to have someone who was closer to a screenwriter. I remember Crytek hired a sci-fi novelist to write Crysis 2, but the result was still a nonsensical hodgepodge of narrative. I think for most developers it’s not worth stressing over for something that, unless they’re a high-tier ‘story’ studio like Naughty Dog, they believe most people just pay cursory attention to. 

This isn't really accurate.

 

Most games that are heavily story focussed do spend the money to hire 'proper' (as in, dedicated) writers these days. In the last decade I haven't worked on a single one that hasn't.

 

A lot of writers are hired in from other media though, and they don't understand the difference between, say, comics writing and games writing. So you end up with writing that might be good, but isn't a good fit for the medium.

 

Another big problem is that story is often still seen as something that's really only there to support other game pillars. So a designer will come up with a system or a mechanic that they really like but which goes against a lot of the narrative pillars, but the assumption is that the writing will change to accommodate the designer's idea.

 

A third big problem is that everyone thinks they know how narrative works, when actually most people don't really understand why it works. So the writer will come up with a plot for a quest that works really well, but a non-specialist will start demanding changes to the macguffin or the payoff or how a character behaves in a plot beat without understanding that the changes will make everything worse, and even when they're told this by their narrative specialist they'll want the changes anyway because they don't like rubber ducks, even though the inclusion of the rubber duck is actually important.

 

Another issue is that the rule of cool is usually actively damaging to the narrative, but no-one other than the writer or narrative designer will accept this, so something cool goes in the game that then requires the writer to justify it in a very unnatural way.

 

You also still have the problem that writers are often brought in too late to properly integrate the narrative with the rest of the game, or that they're used as a triage service for when something's not quite working: "the writer will come up with a way to justify this" is really common, because it's cheaper and usually faster to get a writer to rewrite something than to get designers and coders to change a system, or multiple artists and animators to change art assets.

And writing for games is only tangentially similar to screenplay writing. There's so much more you need to keep track of that you'll be spending more time in a spreadsheet than you will in Final Draft or other screenwriting software. 

[Garibaldi]

1 hour ago, Scribblor said:

Wisdom. 

Well, that’s me told. Thank you for taking the time to explain it all. I should’ve expected interference from those who don’t understand narrative was a key factor. 

[stir fry]

Lots of big budget productions tend to go for a very broad style of game writing, you can really feel it in GoW Ragnarok I think. It's the most MCU-ish game I've played in a while (aside from literal Marvel games like GOTG, which I quite liked actually). I do also think that motion capture and voice acting leads to a lack of flexibility these days with games writing, but that has been a thing since the PS2 at this point.

 

Where games can be weak imo tho isn't with regard to how broad they are, it's to do with a lack of stuff that integrates gameplay cohesively within narrative. Where design of one gives direction to the other. In AAA it often feels like one ends up being subservient to the other (walk and talk in ND games, endless cutscenes in MGS). But there's some that do it right imo. Games that stand out in this regard imo are Morrowind, which is less about a story than it is about a land's history and culture, with you as a sort of pilgrim/immigrant trying to assimilate it as you go and doing so with a degree of player agency. Another is Pathologic 2, an absolutely incredible game which introduces new gameplay obstacles that are designed for the player to fuck up on to convince them of how bad the situation is getting, as the plague and resultant supply crises lead to a falling of civil society. Games like that are like a dialogue between mechanics and narrative intent. The narrative is not happening in endless cutscenes, it's happening to you and you are involved.

 

You've also got something like Disco Elysium, which turns things like substance abuse, anxiety and fight or flight response into literal party members in a battle system that takes place within dialogue, which is an incredibly effective way of delivering the themes of that game as you fight your way through a fog of substance-induced amnesia to find out who you are and how the world works. 

 

So I think imo it's a good idea to see a lot of AAA as being in the MCU camp, or sometimes the HBO premium TV camp, but largely emulating other forms. But there are a few gems of narrative design that are doing things that only this medium is capable of, if you look for them. Not enough though imo

[Scribblor]

@Garibaldi Your points weren't entirely wrong, but the studios who think they can get away with the designer or producer knocking out the story and writing are getting fewer and fewer. These days, in my experience, it's generally down to the studio valuing the writing/narrative enough to hire a specialist, but not internalising that the specialist actually has a skillset that isn't just something anyone can do without experience or training.

 

It's odd, because I haven't really noticed people doing the same thing with other disciplines - when I was a level or systems designer, people would offer opinions but be far more willing to accept that I knew what I was talking about and to accept my decisions as a discipline specialist. And they wouldn't usually offer 'solutions'.

 

But now I'm a writer, I'm getting so many more suggestions about why (for example) we don't need to bother setting up something that'll later be a payoff, then digging their heels in when I tell them why the setup is there.

 

Just today I had the comment of "this seems unnecessary" for something that characterises an NPC who's being a shit to the main character but who will later on need your help. I pointed out that we're trying to make the player genuinely consider whether or not to help this NPC later on (in a situation where the intention is that you don't want to help this person because they're such a shit and deserve to have a bad ending to their storyline, but the player will then lose out on a good bit of loot), and that without these bits of characterisation the decision about whether to help will be far less impactful as it's essentially going to be someone you feel neutral towards, who you've met once for two minutes asking for help. And in that situation the player's likely to help, because they'll get the good loot and they've got no desire to see the NPC get their comeuppance.

 

The resolution? "We should make them more of an asshole earlier and cut the other bits." So now I'm arguing that doing this will make the story strand feel clumsy, unearned and unsatisfying structurally, and having to explain the concept of tripling to someone who's not actually interested in why things have to work in a certain way for the story, and just wants any of the narrative stuff over as quickly as possible.

[Scribblor]

29 minutes ago, stir fry said:

 

 

Where games can be weak imo tho isn't with regard to how broad they are, it's to do with a lack of stuff that integrates gameplay cohesively within narrative. Where design of one gives direction to the other. In AAA it often feels like one ends up being subservient to the other (walk and talk in ND games, endless cutscenes in MGS). But there's some that do it right imo. Games that stand out in this regard imo are Morrowind, which is less about a story than it is about a land's history and culture, with you as a sort of pilgrim/immigrant trying to assimilate it as you go and doing so with a degree of player agency. Another is Pathologic 2, an absolutely incredible game which introduces new gameplay obstacles that are designed for the player to fuck up on to convince them of how bad the situation is getting, as the plague and resultant supply crises lead to a falling of civil society. Games like that are like a dialogue between mechanics and narrative intent. The narrative is not happening in endless cutscenes, it's happening to you and you are involved.

 

Yeah, you're absolutely right. And this is often down to narrative not being as involved as necessary during the game concept phase. By the time a writer's brought on, the game is often pretty firmly conceived in terms of setting, tone, genre, (very general) mechanics. And then later on a writer comes in and has to try to fit narrative themes into stuff that's not going to change to help make things feel cohesively integrated.

[Majora]

It'll be interesting to see what they do with Ashley in the Resi 4 remake. One of the ways in which Resi 4 shows its age now is the fact that Ashley is essentially a mute companion outside of cutscenes. If Resi 4 was being made today, you'd imagine that Leon and Ashley would be quipping and chatting their way through all the sequences in which you escort her. 

 

It's unlikely Ashley will be as quiet in the remake but she's a really thin character. Barely even a character to be honest, she's just an excuse to visit the village and get the game going. They're going to have to try and flesh her out a fair bit beyond 'president's daughter'. Will it actually make the game any better though?

[easilydone]

On 14/11/2022 at 19:20, easilydone said:

Yeah, this is pretty much the exact yardstick I use to judge if I can be arsed with something, though 5 minutes is it for me. 
 

Unskippable tutorial - gone

in-engine exposition that cuts half the controls - gone

30 minutes in and still stopping to chat to my pointless sidekick - gone

 

Ive never liked voiced cutscenes, I can read much quicker than I can listen so why waste my time? 

 
Funnily enough I was playing portal 2 the other week for the first time since its release and that’s a game that got all this right for me. 
 

The tutorial was completely integrated into the flow of the game and made sense the way it built up my abilities, it was very much just part of the game. 
The sidekick I quite enjoy listening to him witter on and the fact I can just carry on doing stuff at the same time he does means I’m quite happy to entertain it. 

Ultimately it’s a puzzle game where the story bumps you from one puzzle to the next but those puzzles are so well integrated into the theme of the game and the storyline that one enhances the other and creates something greater than it’s parts. 

We’re well over a decade on from its release and games have become even bigger business in that time yet it feels the vast majority never learned anything from how seamlessly integrated portal was. 

[Broker]

I’ve lost count of the number of games I’ve stopped playing because the characters blather on inanely all the time. Critical darlings like God of War, games which on paper have a bunch of things I enjoy like Red Dead 2, even games I was actually enjoying like Horizon: Terrible Name. I was having fun in that game, wandering about, fighting robots and shit, but Aloy never shuts the fuck up and they didn’t even have the decency to give her someone to wander about with to justify it. She’s a character that I felt quite invested in, until her tedious habit of describing what’s happening on the fucking screen I’m looking at like she’s a 5 year old made me hate her. 
 

I think a major issue is pacing. Pacing is an incredibly important tool in all narrative forms and in games the writer essentially has no control over it. You can feel them kind of trying to wrestle it back with cutscenes and endless walking sections where people talk, but the overall pacing of the game is out of the writers hands. Rockstar games have (as I’m pretty sure I read someone on here say) a very bizarre structure where they have a basic three act structure but the first act lasts about an hour, the third act lasts about an hour and the second act lasts about forty hours. You’re in this weird limbo where often the parts you have least control over are the ones where the most interesting stuff is happening, and the majority of your actual play time lives in a kind of meandering filler part in between.

 

This also impacts events in game. Lots of movies rely too heavily on a character happening to turn up when something important is happening, but I think in games it’s more noticeable. When you’re in control of how long it takes to get somewhere, and it could be ten seconds or two minutes or you could put your controller down and go answer the door then pick it up five minutes later and still happen to arrive at the exact moment you need to the artifice is just slightly more palpable. Games are filled with a million little moments like this, which you might not notice in isolation but add up to make gaming’s reliance on movie cliches feel emptier than they did in their inspiration.

 

Then as @Scribblor says you seem to have numerous studios hiring great writers and then ignoring them, or cutting the stuff that makes their writing work because it’s not exciting enough, or saddling them with a terminally boring overarching plot that they’re fighting against to tell a good story. So many games commit the cardinal sins of bad writing, where they’re presenting us with characters that we’ve never been given a reason to care about and their next bit of narrative hinges on exactly that. Or they’re having people show up out of nowhere to Deus ex machina the plot along without laying the groundwork of who that character is or why they can do what they do.

 

I don’t think the writers are generally to blame, but what we end up with is a world where even the sacred cows are pretty average when compared to almost any other form of authored storytelling. The two last of us games are the only story based games I can think of that could stand up against good movies and tv, and even though they’re doing more than most games they’re still containing the majority of that narrative in non interactive cutscenes. 
 

Ultimately, my favourite game stories are the ones that couldn’t be told in any other way, like the aforementioned Portal games, or the games where the stories are mine and they’re created by my actions and told by me. I’ve thought in the past that maybe games aren’t a great storytelling medium, but I’ve come around to thinking that they’re really just hamstrung by a slavish desperation to imitate movies and a profound lack of respect for the art of writing. 

[MarkN]

30 minutes ago, Broker said:

Ultimately, my favourite game stories are the ones that couldn’t be told in any other way, like the aforementioned Portal games, or the games where the stories are mine and they’re created by my actions and told by me. I’ve thought in the past that maybe games aren’t a great storytelling medium, but I’ve come around to thinking that they’re really just hamstrung by a slavish desperation to imitate movies and a profound lack of respect for the art of writing. 

In my years in the industry the writing was often left to whoever came up with the idea, or given to someone on the team who could write a bit. It was only toward the end that actually getting a writer in was considered (this is a dozen years ago, mind). But still, most of the games I play now feel the same as those I worked on. The writers aren't writers. They're probably designers who think they can write.

 

Worse still they're probably designers who have a favourite game, and are trying to ape it. (Lots of designers are awful for having yardsticks that they will cling to - it's partly why games go through phases - somebody does something new and all the designers ears prick up, and suddenly you have a dozen cheap imitators of that thing and everyone gets sick of it).

 

This is partly why I'm happier working in a supermarket now, and working on my own game in my spare time. It'll be mine when it's (finally) done. All mine.

[Eighthours]

There's too much writing in newer AAA games. But not enough of it is smart writing. So much of it is background chitter-chatter that's not revealing character or particularly interesting. Also, there's too much 'not playing the cool moments', as someone mentioned earlier. And sometimes the part where you would like a hint is the very bit where there isn't anything! 

[AK Bell]

Tales of Arise has been terrible for this. I'm otherwise enjoying it but it keeps on trying to natter on at me rather than let me play. 

 

Some cutscenes are voiced, some aren't. Some you can skip lines on, others you have to sit through. 

They'll banter as you're running about but I've never seen one of them conversations end before hitting the next thing to do.

You have to keep pressing RB to bring up a comic looking cutscene or you're stuck with an RB message on your screen. These have stalled the game twice for me so far. 

There are loads of NPCs to talk to with next to nowt to say ... but some of them you should really talk to so you have to check. 

When you rest you need to have a chat too for stats. 

 

Can't be arsed. Just core story cutscenes and let me thump things please. 

 

[Lochenvar]

On 15/11/2022 at 23:01, Broker said:

So many games commit the cardinal sins of bad writing, where they’re presenting us with characters that we’ve never been given a reason to care about and their next bit of narrative hinges on exactly that. Or they’re having people show up out of nowhere to Deus ex machina the plot along without laying the groundwork of who that character is or why they can do what they do.

 

That can also be a sign that this happened:

Producer - "We need to cut back the number of level\locations in the game. We don't have enough money for what we initially scoped out. Chop out the...ah...jungle level."

Writer - "But that's where we first meet the PC's brother, which will pay off in the finale."

Producer - "I'm sure you'll make it work."

 

@Scribblor has pretty much covered most of it. The main thing I'd add is that, in my experience, there's still a majority of studios who don't think they need dedicated writers\narrative staff. That's definitely changing, but we're not there yet. It's exactly like when I started as a game designer, in 2001: people didn't see the need to have someone solely dedicated to gameplay. They thought that kind of thing would just emerge from the various systems. That attitude changed, over time, (although not without some resistance...) and I'm sure that the same thing will happen with narrative too.

 

It's difficult though, as a lot of big narrative games are led by people who see themselves as auteurs, but who generally don't have the skill to do what they'd rather be doing, which is making films. So, when even the large games often don't have good narrative, you end up with the attitide that games aren't suited to anything other than emergent narratives.

 

The skills aren't there at the ground level either. I mentor young devs and I see a lot of people coming out of uni with almost no applicable skills - they're often great prose writers, but they don't know the specifics of game writing and narrative design. Not a failing on their part, but on the training they've gone through. Until that changes, you're relying on people like me passing on whatever skills we've managed to cobble together over the years.

[Floshenbarnical]

20 hours ago, Broker said:

I’ve lost count of the number of games I’ve stopped playing because the characters blather on inanely all the time. Critical darlings like God of War, games which on paper have a bunch of things I enjoy like Red Dead 2, even games I was actually enjoying like Horizon: Terrible Name. I was having fun in that game, wandering about, fighting robots and shit, but Aloy never shuts the fuck up and they didn’t even have the decency to give her someone to wander about with to justify it. She’s a character that I felt quite invested in, until her tedious habit of describing what’s happening on the fucking screen I’m looking at like she’s a 5 year old made me hate her. 
 

I think a major issue is pacing. Pacing is an incredibly important tool in all narrative forms and in games the writer essentially has no control over it. You can feel them kind of trying to wrestle it back with cutscenes and endless walking sections where people talk, but the overall pacing of the game is out of the writers hands. Rockstar games have (as I’m pretty sure I read someone on here say) a very bizarre structure where they have a basic three act structure but the first act lasts about an hour, the third act lasts about an hour and the second act lasts about forty hours. You’re in this weird limbo where often the parts you have least control over are the ones where the most interesting stuff is happening, and the majority of your actual play time lives in a kind of meandering filler part in between.

 

This also impacts events in game. Lots of movies rely too heavily on a character happening to turn up when something important is happening, but I think in games it’s more noticeable. When you’re in control of how long it takes to get somewhere, and it could be ten seconds or two minutes or you could put your controller down and go answer the door then pick it up five minutes later and still happen to arrive at the exact moment you need to the artifice is just slightly more palpable. Games are filled with a million little moments like this, which you might not notice in isolation but add up to make gaming’s reliance on movie cliches feel emptier than they did in their inspiration.

 

Then as @Scribblor says you seem to have numerous studios hiring great writers and then ignoring them, or cutting the stuff that makes their writing work because it’s not exciting enough, or saddling them with a terminally boring overarching plot that they’re fighting against to tell a good story. So many games commit the cardinal sins of bad writing, where they’re presenting us with characters that we’ve never been given a reason to care about and their next bit of narrative hinges on exactly that. Or they’re having people show up out of nowhere to Deus ex machina the plot along without laying the groundwork of who that character is or why they can do what they do.

 

I don’t think the writers are generally to blame, but what we end up with is a world where even the sacred cows are pretty average when compared to almost any other form of authored storytelling. The two last of us games are the only story based games I can think of that could stand up against good movies and tv, and even though they’re doing more than most games they’re still containing the majority of that narrative in non interactive cutscenes. 
 

Ultimately, my favourite game stories are the ones that couldn’t be told in any other way, like the aforementioned Portal games, or the games where the stories are mine and they’re created by my actions and told by me. I’ve thought in the past that maybe games aren’t a great storytelling medium, but I’ve come around to thinking that they’re really just hamstrung by a slavish desperation to imitate movies and a profound lack of respect for the art of writing. 

 

Some really great posts in this thread. I got GoW (2018) for free and was excited because everyone raves about it. Then I spent a hundred years being depressed with my son in the woods and I just gave up. Would be nice if the opening hour of an action game contained some action, rather than arduous bathetic world-building. For what it's worth, I don't mind it when it's done well. The opening hour of TLOU is kind of similar, but for some reason I was utterly gripped throughout.

 

@Lochenvar's post there really resonates with me also. I frequently get the impression while playing a game that the set-piece I'm playing was conceptualized first and then the story, motivation, and dialog were confected later to justify it, which given what you said, seems likely to be the case.

 

It does seem obvious that a non-interactive medium would use a different type of storytelling than an interactive one and that perhaps fiction/ screenwriting skills/ experience don't translate very well to an interactive medium like videogames.

[Scribblor]

I know we've had decades of games with stories, but I think we haven't yet really figured out the best way of telling stories in the medium yet.

 

You're absolutely right that a lot of games come up with set pieces and fit the narrative around them, rather than coming up with something that would work with the story. That's literally what Titanfall 2 did: come up with ideas for fun sequences that they called "action blocks", whittle them down to a game's worth of the best ones, combined them in the best way to make levels and then make a story around them. In that case it worked well, but that was mostly down to the characters. The plot was nothing especially wonderful. Most games aren't that lucky.

 

I think we tend to end up mostly with games that are "about" gameplay with narrative being less important, or games that are the other way around. It's rare that both those aspects of a game are valued equally and work in harmony, but I think that in the future these will become more common.

 

I hope so, anyway.

[BadgerFarmer]

On 15/11/2022 at 17:07, stir fry said:

Lots of big budget productions tend to go for a very broad style of game writing, you can really feel it in GoW Ragnarok I think. It's the most MCU-ish game I've played in a while (aside from literal Marvel games like GOTG, which I quite liked actually). I do also think that motion capture and voice acting leads to a lack of flexibility these days with games writing, but that has been a thing since the PS2 at this point.

One of the things that grates is how prolific that Joss Whedon/MCU style of conversation. There's a very singular sense of humour throughout things like GoW and Uncharted, and even TLOU to an extent, plus of course actual Marvel games, and it gives them a really homogenous feel.

 

I'm not keen on constant chatter generally, but I found A Plague Tale Requiem to be one of the better examples, in part because it doesn't keep forcing in that same type of humour, but also because it often does a better job of making it feel like characters trying to work through situations together.

[easilydone]

13 hours ago, Floshenbarnical said:

 

Some really great posts in this thread. I got GoW (2018) for free and was excited because everyone raves about it. Then I spent a hundred years being depressed with my son in the woods and I just gave up. Would be nice if the opening hour of an action game contained some action, rather than arduous bathetic world-building. For what it's worth, I don't mind it when it's done well. The opening hour of TLOU is kind of similar, but for some reason I was utterly gripped throughout.

 

@Lochenvar's post there really resonates with me also. I frequently get the impression while playing a game that the set-piece I'm playing was conceptualized first and then the story, motivation, and dialog were confected later to justify it, which given what you said, seems likely to be the case.

 

It does seem obvious that a non-interactive medium would use a different type of storytelling than an interactive one and that perhaps fiction/ screenwriting skills/ experience don't translate very well to an interactive medium like videogames.

I think this is a really good point and hits the nail on the head. Thinking back to the more narrative focussed games I do like, the thing they have in common is they are linear experiences. For these a more traditional form of story telling can be applied and pacing can be much tighter controlled. 
 

Open worlds and non-linear paths lead away from that older style of x->y story telling and need a new paradigm to present them. As suggested, maybe we just haven’t reached what that should look like yet? Maybe it’s not a bridgeable gap. In the future AI could generate believable story content to fill the gaps between more crafted big story beats but that feels a long way off.