| (Pages: 1, 2) | |
There's a Red Box (which is the same thing as this but for movies) in my store, it's usually cheaper then renting from a blockbuster as long as you don't keep it for too long. An Xbox360 game from Blockbuster is probably... what, $10 a week? So this would be cheaper as long as you only keep the game for 4 days. SONOFABITCH IT CHANGED AGAIN! The biggest hurdle they have to get over is hour long cutscenes and formulaic stale gameplay. | |
they just have to make it so people just dont skip the cut scenes... | |
Films clearly don't have enough belts on the characters. | |
But see then they alienate hardcores like myself who love stale(i.e. turnbased?)gameplay and long cutscenes. | |
Sorry to say this but: No shit sherlock. Seriously, i thought this was common knowledge amongst gamers? :S | |
Whilst this may be a huge call I could potentially see it happening. Sqaure-Enix is a company noted for putting a lot of effort and thought into characters and storyline though, so whilst their stories might be better than the average films and their characters much deeper than most others it can't just be up to them to tow the line. A lot of other gaming companies do also try very hard to make their characters deep (Valve, Konami with the MGS series spring to mind here) with involving storylines, but in order for games to truly take over movies as a form of interactive storytelling all games will have to follow these trends, and making original plots (which a lot of gaming companies struggle with even nowadays) as well as characters the audience is able to sympathise with (also a massive ask) is a steep hill to climb. Basically the idea is theoretically possible, but Sqaure-Enix are seeing it from behind their own deep storylines and characters. The rest of the industry has quite some way to go before they all reach that same level. | |
I think putting a good storyline into a game is somewhat easier than in a movie, because you can have a game that lasts ten hours or forty hours or over a hundred hours, whereas films have to be short enough for the bladderically-challenged to be able to sit through it without pissing themselves in the theater. | |
I only agree about games because you can have an effect on the story, and let you feel like you're a part of the action. SE, ironically, seems to have the most disconnecting player-to-character experiences out there. MGS did some of the same, but at least in that you could slit someone's throat, rather than have 5 drop down menus that lead to watching Snake hop around, slit a throat which does like 1/16 of their health down, then jumps 10 feet back. | |
Having an effect on the story isn't really the important thing. The important thing is that the player's actions in uncovering the story mean that it progresses at the pace and level of detail they set for themselves, and make even the act of playing through an unchanging storyline an interactive process under the control of the player. As noted though, long cutscenes where the player is not in control of uncovering the story break that interactive process, and reduce games to the level of movies and TV at best, and frequently far lower, because there's not quite the money invested in game narrative. The trick, therefore, is to tell more of the story through the actions of characters and interactive components of the game, and flesh out the side details by the player's interaction with NPCs and investigation of the world. I think that Star Ocean games have generally been quite good at this, they don't tend to have monstrously long cutscenes, and even when there are sections where the player is constrained in movements somewhat, usually at the start, like in SO1 and SO3, there are plenty of NPCs to talk to and non-critical places to explore to flesh out the areas, world, and story, and actual storytelling tends to occur because Stuff Is Happening, rather than because a cutscene kicks in and you wander off to get a coke and have a piss. (Yes, Eternal Sonata, I am looking at you, fucking cutscenes so long your controller powers down to save batteries) | |
I believe the guy from Square is right, games have the potential to be as rich as movies or books. However, I think the current trend of telling stories through the medium of JRPGs is going wholly in the wrong direction. JRPG are examples of railroading in the absolute worst form (Tabletop gamers know what I'm talking about). They are taking a unique medium (videogames in general) known for its interactibility, and reducing it to where the player has no choice but go along with the story. You might as well read a book or watch a movie for all the interacting you do. However, a story can only go in so many directions and a developer would never be able to try to account for every decision a player might make. The key is, of course, immersion. With immersion you can make the player belive they are playing a game at their own pace. Until developers get immersion down, they will never even approach the richness of literature or film. | |
No. It's all fine and dandy if I'm into the story, but if I don't want to sit through half an hour of boring and badly acted exposition then I really should not have to do so.
Though, not an RPG, I do love how valve delivered the story in the Half-Life series. You progressed simply by playing, and were never really disembodied from Freeman. In a way it contradicts what I stated above, but you're not static during exposition. Valve seemed to leave some toys around to play with while you wait for the game to progress. | |
Xenogears. End of discussion. I'm sure some are going to scoff at the fact that somebody who's responsible for making JRPGs is talking about storytelling of all things. Why? This makes no sense. | |
I hate to sound like a jackass here. But this is one of my biggest sticking points with the whole casual revolution. (I.E. Bejeweled, Wii Sports, Peggle) There's not a lot of room for story or interpretation in games of that nature. And with them becoming so huge on the market, it's difficult for more engrossing games to compete. It's kind of like watching Cowboy Bebop for a while and then when you want something equally engrossing you go to the store and find nothing but Spongebob DVDs. Admittedly, it's not as bad as all that. But it sure feels like that way at times with video games. | |
I love you. On a related note, absolutely nothing that Square-Enix has done has come anywhere close to the cream of the crop of film stories. Not that it isn't expected, what with video games being such a much younger medium than film, but we still have a long way to go even to be on the same level as film stories. | |
I think Square needs to take a page out of some of their other non-FF and non-DQ franchises as far as story goes. Like, say, Star Ocean. Or Chrono Trigger. Both better series than Final Fantasy in my opinion. At the very least Square could start implementing multiple endings in Final Fantasy and then not make any sequels, thus never declaring any specific ending to be canon. The player gets an ending based on their decisions/actions and can try again in a New Game+ if they're not happy with it or got a bad end. Of course, I highly doubt Square would ever do anything like this, but if Final Fantasy 13 has no sequels/prequels and alternate endings based on the player's choices then I will eat my hat. Thats not to say FF13 might not be good, I'll wait until it comes out for the PS4 before I decide that. As its been said, though, when it comes to games you can't just craft a story and try to make it something everyone will accept as there will always be some issue with it. The story might still be good, but not everyone is going to like it and many people will want the option to have done something differently. Maybe some people wanted to stab Aeris/Aerith themselves and save Sephiroth the trouble? Maybe we wanted to take a swipe at Sephiroth in the temple of the ancients instead of listening to his monologue? That last one in particular always bugged me... Of course, this isn't to say Square hasn't made a valiant effort to do better than films. They've taken two shots at a Final Fantasy version of Star Wars, afterall. | |
Last I checked some of the older RPGs like FF VI,VII,VIII, Star Ocean 2, Legaia, Legend of Dragoon and quite a number of others already surpassed damn near all modern movies story wise so that's not really a issue. Books are generally a tougher challenge but then hey, a lot of people are obsessed with that bullshit Twilight soo. | |
Hahaha, that was my bad, sorry for that. | |
I agree. Properly executed, a game can be essentially a novel or a movie, told in the second person. A perfect example is that scene from Chrono Trigger where Lucca relives her mum being crippled. It's not "Lucca runs out of the room, rushes downstairs, fumbles desperately with the machine." It's you doing the running. You're the one searching frantically for the off switch, you are fumbling with the controls while trying to remember the passcode to turn that damn machine off before it cripples your mother. No other medium can so completely immerse you in the story. The problem is that video games as a medium have evolved as... well, as games. As form entertainment first and foremost. It's not that it can't be done, it's that the audience's expectations tend to revolve more around the mechanics and graphics as opposed to how deeply it can pull you in, as well as that we haven't really had much practice in doing this with our games. | |
I think that if game devs started looking at story as an integral part of the gaming experience, game stories could very easily surpass movies and TV. The trick is integration. That's the thing that I don't think game devs have quite perfected yet, the integration between story and gameplay. | |
Here is what bugs me whenever the issue of "Great Games, Great Stories, Can They Co-Exist?" comes up: There almost always seems to be an emphasis that the story the developer wants to communicate is more important than the story the gamer wants to experience. The reduction of cut scenes in games has been one of the best developments in games in my own experience playing with games from the 80s till now. Sure, you might think I am saying all games should be of the 'sand box' style, but not so, I just ask that developers realize story is secondary to the gameplay or it ceases to be a game, IMHO. This has been a realization for myself since my first play through of Half-Life, I would never be able to put up with cut scenes as the only way to tell a story after that. | |
I totally agree to the potential, but it seems like noone is giving a shit about interactive storytelling these days. You just get cutscenes and gameplay seperately. Even if its as simple as killing Boss in MGS3 by actualy having to press R1, I am all over those little interactions. MGS 4 also had some good ideas but relied way too heavily on cutscenes and not enough on things like the famous "triangle pressing" scene. How about that: In gameplay rendered cutscenes give the player an option in which way to act more often. It could be as simple as quicktime events but atleast give the player some options instead of making him perform mindless reflexes. | |
I still haven't found a computer game with a story as fantastic and well-paced as certain movies, including The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. Frankly, I find the concept laughable with current computer game stories, even the best of the RPG (particularly JRPG) genre. | |
In games those ten or forty or so hours usually include grinding, traveling from one place to another and doing side-quests that don´t always have any relation to the main storyline, i.e. stuff that movies don´t show. If you strip a game of everything that isn´t directly related to the plot, you cut out the meat that makes a gameworld interesting and severely restrict player´s freedom. Also, long playing time doesn´t mean games can have infinitely long storyline. Eventually even a player will lose interest in the story if it does nothing but gone on and on without even a hint of an ending. Games need to have equally compact main story as movies have; the long hours come from exploration and generally doing things out of the main storyline. Well, this at least how I see it. Developing games´ narrative potential is a good aim, I support it wholeheartedly. | |
Oh, oh, I was, I was! Convoluted plot lines and constant character betrayals do not good story telling make. | |
Spongebob has his place, but something as engrossing as Cowboy Bebop he is not. Spongebob is good 2am insomnia coping strategy material, because the later at night it gets, the funnier it is. But Cowboy Bebop it is not. As for casual gaming like Peggle, casual gaming is making games for a different market. When developers keep chasing that market above all others, it gets ugly. However, even Nintendo, a brand now associated with shovelware, delivers good storytelling in its J-RPGs on DS (Chrono Trigger only came out THIS YEAR in Australia, hopefully a release bungle like that never happens again. Therefore it still counts as a recent game here). PS3 seems to be catching up with J-RPGs, as is Xbox 360. It's a matter of which console gets quality over quantity that the fanboys care about, or in some cases quality and quantity of J-RPGs at the same time. Also, I read the title of this post and thought "Square: Game Heros Can Surpass Traditional Standards of Gender And Manliness". Heh. | |
Phoenix Wright: Even Marylin Manson says the game is "Fucking Amazing". Go find it if you can. | |
Xenogears is one of the worst examples of storytelling in a videogame*. Almost every significant plot revelation occurs in a noninteractive cutscene in which the protagonist isn't even present (and later in walls of text where the player isn't involved in anything the protagonist does), which means that the key storytelling technique of a videogame, player discovery, is totally absent. The means of information delivery is also bad, being based almost entirely on ominous vagueness with absolutely no information presented to the player until the Big Shocking Twist! which you don't care about because you didn't care about the previous worldview either because it was vaguely explained and you had no hand in uncovering it, and the whole feel of the project is that of being a giant Neon Genesis Evangelion fanfiction, written with one hand whilst wanking furiously with the other. Also, because this is an NGE fanfic, Oh, and the translation's fucking abysmal, though I have it on good authority that the Japanese script wasn't up to much in the first place. * Xenosaga is probably worse. Especially since the game portion was rendered so irrelevant they actually decided to cut it out here and release only the cutscenes on a disc. How's that for player involvement in a story? | |
"But hey, he's trying." Is he? I guess we'll see when FF13 hits, but of what I've seen so far it's going to be another trip to clichée city. Now, I'm not saying it won't be enjoyable to play for the most part, but the idea that its story would even approach the greatest works of cinema and litterature is a quite ludicrous notion. | |
Xenosaga was an awesome game (Well Ep 1 anyway. Ep 2 the killed the franchise. Stupid marketing department.) If your complaint is a non interactive story, then try Persona 4. If you haven't been paying attention you can't get a good ending on that game. | |
Xenosaga was such an awesome "game" that it's European release consisted of a disc of cutscenes and no actual gameplay at all. It's as if they knew that the "game" they'd made was an irrelevant piece of padding to space out their interminable cutscenes. | |
I cried at the very end of FFVIII when Rinoa found Squall unconscious in that wasteland, and then her embrace caused the Sun to suddenly burst through and transform the environment into a grassy meadow full of flowers. Don't tell anyone though. | |
One word: melodrama. Okay, actually, two words: overwrought melodrama. That's certainly not the whole genre but it is a lot of it. -- Alex | |
Here in lies the problem with trying to tell a story on a videogame. No matter how good the story is it is not going to get to some of the audience. It is the same problem you get from the book versus movie debate or even the subtitle versus (insertLanguage) translation. Personally I will watch most movies that have an original soundtrack in the native language with subtitles. Mostly due to the fact that I want to hear and feel the original voices that went along with the characters. But some people just don't like subtitles and feel like it is pulling them away from the actual movie by making them focus on the text. Same way that some thing cut scenes pull them out of the story. Personally I like cutscenes and don't mind a gallon of text it gives me a chance to really read into the characters and understand them more. One game that comes to mind with one of the best stories was Valkyria Chronicles the gameplay was amazing but I don't know if they could have made the story what it was without the cutscenes and the amount of detail they had on each character in the backstories and such was amazing. | |
| (Pages: 1, 2) | |
Extra Punctuation
MovieBob: Intermission
Experienced Points
First Person
Exploding Barrels
Miracle of Sound: Encore
Special Attack
Loading Time
Backchat
Drinking Games
Escape to the Movies
Escapecraft
Escapist News Wrap - Premium
Escapist Podcast
Feed Dump
GinxTV
Jimquisition
LoadingReadyRun
Mahalo
Meatbag and Co
Media Sandwich
Miracle of Sound
No Right Answer
Pro-Gamer Gauntlet
Reviews
Space Janitors
Tales from the Table
The Big Picture
The Escapist Presents
The Retro Show
Trailers
Unskippable
Zero Punctuation
Max Payne 3 Review
Company of Heroes 2
XCOM Enemy Unknown
Black Ops 2
Diablo 3 Review
TERA Review
Firefall Beta Preview
Starhawk Review
Critical Miss
Name Game
Square: Game Stories Can Surpass Film
Square-Enix, the makers of some of the most story-heavy games around, think that the storytelling power of games can surpass that of film and drama, but there are a few hurdles to get past along the way.
Some people love games with strong stories. Some people think stories just get in the way. This debate, and let me use the fancy term, ludology vs. narratology, will probably be as eternal as the argument over whether or not Resident Evil 5 is racist. Square-Enix's Yoshinori Yamagishi, the producer of Star Ocean: The Last Hope, unsurprisingly, sits squarely in the narratology camp, but he thinks it'll still take some work to get game stories to where they ought to be.
"As opposed to films, books and TV, as a medium it is more of a challenge to produce a game in order to tell a story," Yamagishi told CVG. In TV, films and drama, the creator (or creators) has thorough control over how their story is told to the audience, so it's easy to pull heartstrings whenever they want to. For games, however, it's not as easy as that.
"In (a developer's) case we always have to think about how players might react to each depiction of a character or storyline, and that's the part we can't predict," Yamagishi explained. "Nevertheless we have to make these predictions to a certain degree, and incorporate this into our work. So it's more of a challenge."
I'm going to have to take issue with part of this argument. A novelist or playwright or film director really don't have some sort of god-like control over how their audience will react to their stories any more than a game developer does. An audience will do whatever they want with a story once it's theirs to consume, doesn't matter what the creator thinks.
Yamagishi could be talking about how in TV/books/movies, the story tells itself while in games the player advances the plot as they play - therein lies the risk of somebody just turning the game off if they don't like it. But I can stop reading a book or watching a movie if I don't like it either.
That aside, Yamagishi believes that if this obstacle can be overcome, game stories can deliver narrative experiences superior to any other storytelling medium. "But if we manage to get over this hurdle, then I regard videogames as a greater medium to provide people with deep emotional and exciting experiences," he said.
I'm sure some are going to scoff at the fact that somebody who's responsible for making JRPGs is talking about storytelling of all things. But hey, he's trying.
Permalink