Vapourware Story faggotry nuances

[Harry Easter]

The problem with exposition is that devs are so afraid of the player not knowing what is happening that they dumb all information to the player before the player is interested in knowing all of that. Competent writers treat exposition as the mystery and feed it to the player only when the player really wants to know the answers. Explanations should be more of a reward than an entry fee.

This. The first three Thief-Games did this extraordinary well. There the story was the reward for completing a level and you got just enough infos to keep playing. It did help though, that 2 and 3 actually had some good stories to tell (3 a bit less, but oh well).

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

I love the Piranha Bytes approach myself. Dialogue is so crisp in PB games. NPCs tell you exactly what you need to know and nothing more, in short one-liners, but over time, this dialogue still manages to build up a sense of the world, and provide a lot of information to the player.

 

[Ol' Willy]

Arx Fatalis - another convict

The first three Thief-Games did this extraordinary well.

There's only three Thief games

 

[Tigranes]

The problem with exposition is that devs are so afraid of the player not knowing what is happening that they dumb all information to the player before the player is interested in knowing all of that. Competent writers treat exposition as the mystery and feed it to the player only when the player really wants to know the answers. Explanations should be more of a reward than an entry fee.

Of course, in one sense, the devs are factually correct to be afraid - because 99% of their players really won't get it. (I would argue that we still shouldn't loredump spoonfeed, though.)

I mean, anybody who's ever worked on sending out a simple message to 500 or 5000 or 5 million people knows - turns out it's impossible to say something like "go to lane 3 for the apples" without tons of people failing to understand, young and old.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

That's why at some point, you have to have niche products, and niche companies creating them. Most movies are mass market crap, but sometimes, complex movies get released. Same with books, and everything else. We have something like that in video games, but a lot of these niche companies now are just too small and poor, so they make really budget stuff. We need more companies like Warhorse, Piranha Bytes, Logic Artists, Harebrained Schemes, etc, which create quality, intelligent games but at a professional level of production.

 

[Chippy]

In other words the OP is saying that you just need to hire competent people that can do their jobs, and a manager that can balance the entire thing so that the player doesn't burn out on too much of one or the other. Yep: totally agree. W3 is an example of this totally failing. The gamplay and combat felt like a point and click excercise to see flashy things and continue, and the story felt like watching several seasons of the latest fantasy series on TV.

And by the time I was burned out on the excessive 'quantity not quality' gameplay, I felt disconected from the story. I think they could have fixed this a bit by having a follower/companion system in place like Skyrim. And then halving the voice overs for every character in the game (maybe just have them speak the first sentence) and re-divert the money into follower voice over.

But that's just me. What the fuck do I know.

 

[deadmeme]

That's why at some point, you have to have niche products, and niche companies creating them. Most movies are mass market crap, but sometimes, complex movies get released. Same with books, and everything else. We have something like that in video games, but a lot of these niche companies now are just too small and poor, so they make really budget stuff. We need more companies like Warhorse, Piranha Bytes, Logic Artists, Harebrained Schemes, etc, which create quality, intelligent games but at a professional level of production.

Kickstarter helps as well. And look at what that Codex boomer did with low cash . He made Age of Decadence which is an RPG classic.

 

[Communist]

Thoughts?

The main question is what aspects are important to the game.
Chess lore is extremely interesting and exciting. This is the story of the battle between the Pandavas and the Kauravas, but most chess players don't even know about it. You don't need to read the Mahabharata to play chess, but if you read the Mahabharata, you don't need to play chess.
However, if you were born in a higher varna, they will explain to you that reading is important to read both the Mahabharata and play chess, and they will also explain to you that the morality of the Bhagavad Gita was created for the lower castes.
You belong to the ideology of the establishment, you are talking about games for the establishment. But you're forgetting that the establishment is only a small percentage of most other users.
So that...
If you studied Marxist dialectics, this would be understandable for you.

 

[Drop Duck]

You belong to the ideology of the establishment, you are talking about games for the establishment. But you're forgetting that the establishment is only a small percentage of most other users.

So are you arguing for a Bhagavad Gita of video games or is there such a thing already? If so, what would that be?

 

[Communist]

You belong to the ideology of the establishment, you are talking about games for the establishment. But you're forgetting that the establishment is only a small percentage of most other users.

So are you arguing for a Bhagavad Gita of video games or is there such a thing already? If so, what would that be?

The Bhagavad Gita Games already exist.
This is called the misconception of game production. It's called high expectations for games.
This is the essence of the Bhagavad Gita of games.
If you have been initiated into the Hindu mysteries, then you should know that the highest varnas study according to the Vedas, where the moral is that you are a descendant of the gods, and if God challenges you, then you must destroy God, for this is what he is from awaits you. But he also expects you to understand the divine brotherhood, and after your victory, you will raise your divine friend and offer him a cup of mead.
The moral for the uninitiated is that every uninitiated should feel complete disagreement with the plan of creation, but he must serve it. The rebellion of the uninitiated is only his individual rebellion, it does not express specifics. Such rebels perish. This is similar to those people who claimed that Oblivion mods would be a better game than The Elder Scrolls 5.

 

[JarlFrank]

Some people somewhere may even argue the best game story of all time was Half-Life 2, and they didn't explain anything - hell, the main character doesn't even talk!

Actually Half-Life 2 has horrendous storytelling for a game. I know, because I replayed it recently, just finished Episode One last night.

Half Life 2 has pretty decent gameplay. Cool physics and graphics that still hold up, the shooting feels decent enough (but not the best in the genre), I don't like how linear the levels are (there are never any side-areas to explore, it's just forward forward forward in a straight line) but the gameplay itself is fun enough to carry the game along.

But then come the cutscenes which the game pretends are not cutscenes, but definitely are.
You enter a friendly area and people talk to you. Or more like at you because Gordon Freeman is a silent protagonist and never responds. That worked in the first game where your interactions with NPCs were limited to the first 10 minutes, in which every scientist responds to you with "Hey Gordon, aren't you late for work? You should have been in the test chamber 30 mins ago, no time for smalltalk!" And whenever you encounter friendlies later on, the interactions are also short and to the point: "Hey Gordon, could you go to the basement and switch on that generator so we can use this train to GTFO of this hellhole?"
They're short interactions where your character not responding makes sense, because realistically all he would respond is "Sure mate." The silent protagonist approach works for Half-Life.
But Half-Life 2? Oh boy.

You regularly get 5+ minute scenes of NPCs talking to you, while you just hop around and toss items through the room while everyone else is having conversations about really important things.
"Oh my God, Gordon, they abducted my father!" Alyx cries, looking at you with sad eyes.
I duckjumped on her head and teabagged her while combing her hair with my crowbar.
"Dr Freeman, I am so honored to meet you! I heard so much about you and admire your academic work!" says Dr Mossman while she rides the elevator with me. I duck down and pummel her cunt with my crowbar. Then I get up and pummel her tits. She keeps fawning over me and tells me how much she respects me as a scientist. I ignore her praises and keep violently sexually assaulting her.
"Hey Gordon, look at this research we've been doing," says Dr Kleiner. I take random items from the shelves in his lab and toss them against his head. He doesn't even react to half his lab equipment being thrown at him.

Yeah, this isn't good storytelling. This is retarded.

 

[mondblut]

Another example would be something like Mount & Blade: Warband, which has a lot of good gameplay, but due to an almost complete lack of overarching writing (or equivalent procedural elements), quickly gets bogged down in meaningless gameplay by mid-game, as you are just stuck doing castle sieges over and over, without much in the way of meaning.

That's why people on average clock more hours in Warband than in 20 storyfag rollercoasters combined - and that's before they start trying the mods.

The "meaning" is the fun you have along the way, retard.

 

[Ismaul]

Yet another reason why Gothic is the #1 GOAT.

Man, this game.