Story is something that many games try to skirt around or throw in as an afterthought, and therefore they are poorly delivered, and are often just excuses to make the player interact with the game, what is your opinion of storytelling in a game, note I do not mean the quality of story I'm talking about its delivery and how the player is involved.

I beta-tested Fable 1 when it was in development, and I saw a bit of the story telling delivery in progress. When I arrived, there was the sequence at the start where you where picked up by a member of the guild as your town was burning and your family dead. The sequence looked really simple and wasn't dramatic at all. Then at the end of the week, the animations of the guild member saving your butt from an attacking bandit where in, and it just looked so much better, because of one ingredient. Now, often when I look at stories in games, one or more of those ingredients are not done right. Most of the time it's either the voice acting or the animation, less often it's the script and graphics, but almost always it's the game design... The problem is that story and gameplay are quite hard to mix. Look at Word of Warcraft for instance, they have an absolutely huge amount of background story with great detail, but their idea of mixing it in with the gameplay is "Gather 10 wolf skins". The problem usually is the actions a player's character can perform. If you look at movies, the thing that puts characters in their place in a story is the choices they make, but in games that'd mean that the story needs to adapt to the choices the player makes, which is really really REALLY hard to implement. Smaller scale projects have done it, quite successfully. Take a look at Masq by Alteraction for instance, a comic-book styled game about choice making. They have a truly adaptable story, which they could pull off because their graphics where low key so they had time and resources left for their adaptive story mechanics. Try doing that with a directx 10 optimized graphical masterpiece... Some high-profile games do however seem to pull it off. Deus Ex 1 for instance managed to create choice making which didn't change the overall story to a massive degree as it can in Masq, but still changed things enough to flesh out your role in the story in a realistic way you can identify with as a player. Their story delivery was also quite good on other aspects of the game. They had a great script, good background story, diverse characters and they managed to create interesting moral dilemmas. Their animation and facial expressions where left to be desired, but the technology they had available at the time simply didn't allow for it. Half Life 2 did those things much better, but they in turn didn't manage to create the freedom of choice, the moral dilemma or a background story that brought you forth as an interesting character. You're the legendary Freeman who kicks ass, but other than that... not a clue who he was. In Max Payne one the reason for Max doing what he did where quite well thought out and it seemed natural that he'd do what he did, but that in turn distanced the player from him a bit since his choice was set and the player might have done something different altogether. Come to think of it, if you look at all the individual ingredients... background story, believable convincing characters with proper facial expressions, choice making and the actual actions that a player can do to affect the story, I'd say Masq did it better than any other of the examples I used, and Masq only cost a fraction of what the other games cost to make. Makes me wonder about the future of games...

Masq sounds interesting I'm starting to play it right now....

I really liked Fahrenheit (Or Indigo Prophecy, depending on where you live) - I thought it was one of the stand-out games of the past few years, although it did go a bit mental during the last third. But curiously, the biggest reason people didn't like it was that it was 'all story and no game' (although I'd dispute that, personally). Certainly the closest anyhting has came to being an interactive movie in a way that has some real 'interactive' value. I think Quantic Dream understand story presentation far better than most, though - for example last year they produced the 'Heavy Rain' tech demo which may or may not become part of a game. But for a 4 or 5 minute short vignette generated on a gaming machine, it was completely captivating. Brilliant stuff.

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One of our favorite games around here has always been "Bladerunner" by Westwood studios. Great story, similar to the movie, only different.

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- OcelotFilms

 Quoting: sova

Masq sounds interesting I'm starting to play it right now....

Whatever I do, the secretary woman just says "mmm" with varying amounts of clevage showing. I don't get it.

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of5
Iso.114
Bot

The effects of what you tell the secretary are not always appearent but when you replay the game a few times you'll see it certainly has an impact later in the story.

I love RPGs and adventure games, so I think storyline is essential. The problem I think is that since games need you to learn how to play them often hero has to start at square 1, and there are only so many ways you can do this: wake up on the beach with amnesia, village burned down, find magic amulet etc. I've worked on a few games projects and I have to say it's tricky stuff especially when it's multipath. Love to do more though.

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shonen.co.uk

 Quoting: Aynen

The effects of what you tell the secretary are not always appearent but when you replay the game a few times you'll see it certainly has an impact later in the story.

Yes, it did have an impact. Nothing else happened, that's what. It just sits there with her saying "Mmmm". Nothing to click on, nowhere to go but Back.

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of5
Iso.114
Bot

weird, I never got any glitches like that, you might want to report it to the guy who made it, I'm sure he'll be eager to know and work out all the bugs.

I played it through once so far (to chapter 5) and its quite compelling game design. It's a pity its so scarce in games such as your common DnD based computer RPG.

 Quoting: azuresama

I love RPGs and adventure games, so I think storyline is essential. The problem I think is that since games need you to learn how to play them often hero has to start at square 1, and there are only so many ways you can do this: wake up on the beach with amnesia, village burned down, find magic amulet etc. I've worked on a few games projects and I have to say it's tricky stuff especially when it's multipath. Love to do more though.

Indeed, I like the approach some games take and use a section of game outside the main story to teach you how to play, for example in Lord of the Rings Online the "tutorial" section for the elf race is set hundreds of years before the game proper starts. The events are referenced obviously but you dont get that "go kill the rats in the cellar" feeling from those starting quests.

I get the impression that the basic idea of Masq is quite similar to the old 'Choose your own adventure' books (Mountain Survival FTW, for those who remember), where you used to read a bit of story, be presented with a decision, flick to the page corresponding to that bit and carry on. Is that a million miles off the mark?

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I had an Asterix version of that. Got to the stage where I stopped reading the story and just chased the numbers. Finished the adventure in about 20 minutes.

 Quoting: matneee

I get the impression that the basic idea of Masq is quite similar to the old 'Choose your own adventure' books (Mountain Survival FTW, for those who remember), where you used to read a bit of story, be presented with a decision, flick to the page corresponding to that bit and carry on. Is that a million miles off the mark?

Ohhh I just checked it out, it seems you're right. Though games like this are amazingly popular in Japan ( though some are a tad more advanced ) they call 'em " Visual novels" though.

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shonen.co.uk

I'm not saying that as a bad thing, btw - I liked them. I was just curious is all

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Masq was my first encounter with the digital version of the much older book-based counterpart. I'm not sure why it hasn't been very popular in the west, it seems like such an accessible type of game with limitless potential. People who read the little comic in the paper each day about the proverbial captain baseball bat of reality could just as easily go through an interactive version of it hosted by your average news blog. New episodes could be written weekly, or even daily depending on their size and the available production budget. They're easy to use, can be about any subject imaginable, addressing any market you can think of. Even people who normally don't play games at all might be swayed by it's simple nature.

Well, it's the old gaming paradox, you see - people always complain and bitch that there's no originality in gameplay or presentation, but when something original finally does turn up, nine times out of ten hardly anyone buys it because they don't recognise it as something 'safe' that they like. It's a massive pain in the bum.

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oh humans... irritating little species, aren't they?

I've been trying to look for Japanese graphic novels, but as of yet I have not found anything as interactive as Masq. Do any of you perhaps have any recommendations? I did find a rather interesting graphic novel about a dying girl who escapes a hospis, but it's not interactive at all, good story though. There seems to be a rather large list of these novels, and I have no idea how to find the good ones, I just browse at random. I've been thinking... Masq was able to provide it's interactive story due to it's low key graphical environment not costing huge amounts of resources, but this also means that to add to it, you'd need less demanding skills than AAA games. Does this make the Masq platform suitable for open source collective story"building"? We all know what it's like to play through a story made by someone else, but what about a story you can have a part in writing? I'd imagine a type of massively multiplayer environment where everyone might be in charge of a certain location of the story's world. The player can write new content as long as it plays out within his own location and has no impact on other locations. A player going through the story can then browse through writers by browsing through locations. Since what happens in one location does not have an impact on what happens in another, every writer has a very large amount of freedom as to what they write. If you as a player going through the story do not like what someone writes, leave the location in search of a location run by a writer more to your liking and play whatever story they have written for that location. This "patchwork" adventure would become rather similar to an Alice in Wonderland experience where you never know what might happen when you go to the next location.

Sadly most of the ones in English ATM are adult titles ( Mostly from J-list but I've not played them so I can't tell you what they are like). I really like Sakura Taisen originally for the Saturn you can get it for PSP , but it's Japanese only. Still it's pretty neat the battles are grid based tactical RPG style, and then that's interlaced with visual novel sequences. Those are either presented in a linear fashion or you have segments where you wander around the base so you can go look for interesting things. As for a meta-Masq it could work, like a modern MUD I guess.

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shonen.co.uk

Kotor did a vary similar thing to Masq, the conversations. In Kotor 1 every conversation you hade effected the game story but you couldn’t randomly kill people like you could in Fable. Im a sucker for a good story especially if the story adapts to the way you play the game, then you have a great connection to the game and the game has great replay value because everytime you play it, it's a new story.

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