Why I Hate Story Driven Games And You Should Too

[DJOGamer PT]

The art of story-telling requires a heavy handed and directed approach to create something excellent

That rule only applies for traditional mediums, not for videogames
Because story-telling in videogames is inherently distinct from the other mediums, so requires a complete different approach
The fact that most of the best "stories" in videogames, come from gaming titles that do put player agency over the "heavy hand" of story-telling, prove exactly that

 

[Morenatsu.]

Video games are adventure simulators! And the parts that you typically read or watch in book and film, are the parts that you play. It doesn't stop being a story because it isn't being told to you.

Though that thing pretentious retards say about random shit you do (in Minecraft) being ‘your own story’ or whatever is incredibly gay.

 

[Sarathiour]

story =/= narrative

He's right, but I can't suffer the fury to live.

 

[SlamDunk]

Are you John Carmack?

 

[Feyd Rautha]

There's loads of games with good stories and campaigns. A lot of good adventure games where you are playing for the story. There are games in all different genres that tell good stories.

 

[KogaClaws]

Story sucks. It ruined games, it ruined comics, it's ruining all entertainment, but especially games. Reason one: writers today are low IQ retards who think Marvel capeshit is the height of human achievement.

Reason two: games don't need deep story. Why in in the world does the latest God of War need 45 minutes to introduce everything? Just tell us who wronged Kratos and let us start killing. If your game has more cinematics than gameplay then it's just an interactive movie.

Also why is a Spartan voiced by a black guy? Isn't that against Clown World rules?

Haven't you heard? Games are an "art form" and "mature" now. Remember how the old God of War games had no story? And how immature and toxically masculine Kratos was? He needs to grow up! He NEEDS 45 minutes cutscenes which then lead to 60 minutes of doing nothing but walking! He NEEDS to not be able to jump, because that's not mature! He NEEDS to be a completely different character as old Kratos is bad! Can't you see? He NEEDS to grow up! Games NEED to have a fixed camera with 90% of the game being walking and cutscenes to tell a SERIOUS story! Games NEED to have millions of dollars in budget to be "cinematic experiences"! Games NEED to HAVE A SERIOUS STORY! Look at Until Dawn. Peak video games from the past millennium. Simple, with the gameplay only being choices of what the characters should do. You don't tire yourself by walking or jumping or whatever. No, you SHOULDN'T be able to do these things to have a cinematic experience and a serious story! WAKE UP AND APPRECIATE ART!

Spoiler

Or so I am told by Twitter, Reddit and gaming "journos".

 

[Dadd]

I love Dark Souls

 

[Dr1f7]

i've never seen a game with a good story. the best they seem capable of is hiding the story so far in the background that the player can basically ignore it (i.e souls, morrowind) and even then it's at best "passable", and more often than not cringe bullshit

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that whoever writes for games doesn't read as a hobby, and just vomits their uninspired crap onto paper which gets greenlit by a bunch of nerds who also don't read. They just haven't experienced good writing to compare with and their bars are set so low that everything they shit out is just bland banal crap.

That's not even to mention the artistry in sentence-craft, which game writers apparently are totally blind to. So you get reddit-tier text blocks of ugly writing as seen in obsidian games etc..

 

[LarryTyphoid]

i've never seen a game with a good story.

Half-Life has a good story.

 

[Morenatsu.]

story =/= writing

 

[Dr1f7]

story =/= writing

 

[Lyric Suite]

Should I remind you Planescape: Torment was voted best CRPG of all time here?

There's a lot of dialogue choices and consequences in Torment that should be classified as a form of interactivity.

Games with interactive dialogue systems are not in the same ballpark as games where you watch a retarded cinematic for 40 minutes.

I think people who bitch about story in games are barking off the wrong tree. The problem isn't the story, the problem is that games should be interactive and modern devs prefer to curtail and rail road what the player can do in every sense, whether its combat, exploration, gameplay mechanics and the way the story is presented to the player (where the player is invariably always a passive observer). If the "story" as such is the problem you would have to argue that Torment is less engaging as a game than something like Call of Duty, which is clearly not true. In Fallout, you can have a radically different experience if you decide to make your character really stupid. That's real interactivity, and it's something you can only get in a video game. Meanwhile, in a game like Call of Duty, nothing the player does has any actual impact on the experience,. You can die in combat if you suck and that's the extend of the interactivity of that game.

 

[Peacefriend]

In fact these games do not have protagonists in the traditional sense. In classic stories the protagonist have a predetermined course of action that never changes regardless of who is experiencing the story. In the aforementioned classic games you the player is the protagonist. Despite having some in universe avatar such as JC Denton, Garret, or Charname they are nothing but a digital puppet that you control the strings of.

Garret is the protagonist, and progresses through an entirely predetermined story. His character is set in stone. If Garret is not a protagonist you're just making up new definitions.
iirc the only difference the player could make that would affect the future course of the game, was how much gold you squeezed out of a mission.

 

[Denim Destroyer]

My original point was that video games allow for minor decisions with minor consequences, knock out this guard or simply wait for him to pass. This type of thing isn't allowed in traditional storytelling due to them lacking interactivity. Additionally I was focusing more on intra-level future actions than actions that affect future missions. My fault for trying to be brief.

 

[gaussgunner]

Over the near fifty year history of the video game medium there has been no greater challenge than trying to create a good story in fully interactive medium.

You can't. It's a fool's errand. It's like making a Hollywood action blockbuster with a good story, but it's not even a storytelling medium. That won't stop developers from making this shit as long as undiscriminating consumers lap it up.

 

[Ash]

There's nothing wrong with story driven games in themselves. Some are great. I just hate that their rise in popularity has led to fewer player agency focused games.

This. Tons of great story-driven games out there that still have great gameplay. I do think games that truly play to the mediums strength (like OP's Deus Ex example) show the most potential, but a good old fashioned director-driven story is, well, never going to get old now is it. And a lot of the time even these more rigid stories do at times present micro choices in the story, or have your actions influence it. Also it takes a shit ton of work/time/money to make a complex story dynamic. Lots of lines of dialogue and alternate takes based on the player's action.

There should be a special place in the halls of fame reserved for the devs that do attempt and succeed at player-driven stories though. (note, the core gameplay itself still needs to be good! storyfaggots GTFO)

And we should also never let story-driven games (player/director driven or otherwise) overshadow pure gameplay faggotry goodness; games with very basic or almost no story in favor of strong gameplay focus. Doom Eternal being a recent example (shhh, not the best example but it's the most recent suitable I could think of).

 

[gaussgunner]

Tons of great story-driven games out there that still have great gameplay.

Name them.

 

[Ash]

Umm ahh err...what can I say that won't make the codex butthurt....

System Shock 2. Player has almost zero influence over Ken Levine's pen, insect.

But I would list like 100 more if I had the inclination.

 

[kangaxx]

Depends on one's preferences, but what about the old Lucas Arts puzzle games? Great fun and 100% linear and story driven.

 

[Sigourn]

Eh.

I don't think a story-driven game is bad. It's just that 1) Sometimes the story is not good, and 2) Sometimes you spend more time watching the story unfold than playing the damn game. I would absolutely say Deus Ex is story-driven, it's what ties everything together. But the story is good and the dialogue is rather short and to the point, and always entertaining.

 

[Morenatsu.]

And we should also never let story-driven games (player/director driven or otherwise) overshadow pure gameplay faggotry goodness; games with very basic or almost no story in favor of strong gameplay focus. Doom Eternal being a recent example (shhh, not the best example but it's the most recent suitable I could think of).

Fucking nuDoom would infinitely superior with even less story. Besides, how the hell is this shit supposed to be some exclusive thing? Oh no we can either have cutscenes with no gameplay or gameplay with no story at all herp derp. What does that even mean? In reality something like Unreal is a story game, and it's literally all gameplay. Look at all those 90s games with cutscenes. I can play something like Radiant Silvergun and both experience a cool fun story and play a cool fun game and it's neither trying to be a cinematic literary masterpiece nor a turboautist's dream game. Every action game ever had a story once they had the technology. Even when there is ‘no story’ there's still care put into the art and setting that some modder who thinks he's tough shit for being a gameplayfag is never going to understand. The developers who made all your favourite games had experiences outside of gaming and were living in an era where there wasn't any need to be retarded about how much story or gameplay your game did or didn't have. The only thing that matters is whether they were any good, and they were. NO I don't care that video game stories are all pulpy comic book pseudocinema cartoon nonsense, they're still stories and they still matter. I mean in that regard anyway all the games with elaborate stories are no better than the ones with simple ones, so who cares.

 

[gaussgunner]

A Brief Opinionated History Of Story-Driven Gay-mes

Deus Ex gameplay follows a traditional level-driven structure like early FPS and arcade games. Because the level progression is driven by a story, it's mostly linear (with a few alternate paths) and that's one of its few shortcomings. It's a great FPS/ImSim/Action-Adventure game but it's not what we call the king of video games around here: an RPG. You only "play a role" in the story. Mercifully, it does not tell the whole (back)story in cutscenes and lore dumps like Decline Era "story-driven RPGs".

Bloodlines is more open-world, with new maps opened up as your progress through the story-driven main quest. It's an RPG - barely - and whatever you want to call it, it's great except for all the bugs. Gameplay isn't the strong point but this is one video game that actually stands out for its artwork and writing.

Jade Empire came out a year later and follows the old formula like Deus Ex. Not really an RPG but it's kinda good for what it is, by Bioware standards. Not a good story, but gameplay is decent for an action-RPG, and it's a notable influence on the Witcher sequels.

Braid comes out in 2008. I'm not picking on Braid, but it was often held up as an example by game journos, professors, indie devs, writers, artists, and other such hivemind trash who had developed a collective obsession with transforming video games from crass sexist violent male power fantasies into a high art storytelling medium...

A few years later we see the fruits of this movement in big-budget blockbusters like The Last Of Us and Witcher 2+3, hailed as breakthroughs in "interactive storytelling" or some such shit. These games jarringly interrupt gameplay with long cutscenes in which the player is frequently and ham-handedly forced into a retarded nonsensical course of action preordained by some fucking writer, even in the full open-world Witcher 3. They're hardly the first video games to do this - it was common in the 90's, died out for good reason, and should have stayed dead. But they're still crass sexist violent male power fantasies, so at least the have some decent gameplay.

Around 2015 we see the first actual RPGs infected with this "story-driven" shit, like Pillars of Eternity. In fairness, the 90's games that inspired committed similar sins; that's already been beaten to death in this thread.

And the decline continues with the demise of decent gameplay, and shit like Disco Elysium.

 

[DJOGamer PT]

The problem isn't the story, the problem is that games should be interactive and modern devs prefer to curtail and rail road what the player can do in every sense, whether its combat, exploration, gameplay mechanics and the way the story is presented to the player

The thing is, not every game needs and/or benefits from a high degree of non-linearity and interactivity+reactivity (even if the devs had resources for it)
Games like CoD are meant to be rollercoasters and games like Fallout are meant to be sandboxes

My original point was that video games allow for minor decisions with minor consequences, knock out this guard or simply wait for him to pass.

The extent of the consequences for player actions depends on the quality of the mechanics

For a good stealth game knocking out a sentinel would mean removing an obstacle, but would mean the risk of an alarm state should his body be found (or when he eventually awakens up) - while not knocking him out would keep the current risk, but wouldn't change the current alarm state and would translate in better rewards for the player

Now for something like an RPG, such actions could be tied to a reputation/karma mechanic, as well as NPC reactions - making sure those small actions would contribute to future events and the overall storytelling of the current campaign

 

[LarryTyphoid]

I think a game has a great start to having a good story if the protagonist has agency. Not that the player necessarily has agency over the story, but that the hero is making his own decisions without being constantly directed or ordered around by someone else. This is why classic Doom has a better story than Doom 3 or nuDoom: the marine acts entirely on his own. Maybe there's like one mention of "Earth Command" in Doom 2, but overall he's on his own. Compare this to Doom 3, where you have some faggot sergeant barking orders at you all the time, or Zoom Eternal, where the Doomslayer can't tie his own shoes without VEGA or Samuel Hayden telling him how to do so.

Your protagonist can be under the orders of someone else, sure: in Ultima 6, Lord British tells the Avatar to fight the gargoyles, and that's what you're going to be doing throughout most of the game. But how the Avatar does so (and so, how you do so) is up to him, and at the end of the story the Avatar takes authority over Lord British and forces him and the gargoyles into peace. So even though forcing Britannia and the gargoyles into peace is not necessarily the decision of the player (because it is the only way to complete the game's story), it still works because the protagonist of the story had agency and didn't complete his journey by being led around the nose by people who were more informed than him.

Games often fail to give the protagonist agency, even when they try. Bioshock's whole story theme was about how the player didn't have agency, and how the protagonist was a slave to Atlas/Fontaine. But even when the protagonist "breaks free" of Fontaine's control, he still has to be led around the nose by some other bitch telling him exactly what to do in his ear. So the protagonist was just forced to switch masters, instead of ever truly becoming his own man.

The whole bit with characters giving you directions from a radio is the worst cliche to ever make its way into gaming. Imagine System Shock, but instead of only occasionally getting an email from Rebecca Lansing, she droned on and on in your ear the entire time so you could never feel like you were sabotaging SHODAN's plans by your own volition, and so you could never feel like you were truly alone. System Shock 2 kind of did this, but it was subverted with a plot twist that robbed the player of any feeling of companionship, and at the game's ending you straight up kill the bitch who was ordering you around the whole time. The feeling of being "ordered around" was totally intentional and most of the game you still get to feel alone and like an active agent within the story. Bioshock completely misunderstood SS2 in this regard.

 

[Sarathiour]

Jade Empire came out a year later and follows the old formula like Deus Ex.

"story-driven" shit, like Pillars of Eternity.