The level of storytelling that goes into a game can have a real impact. Some games need no story at all, Tetris would not benefit from a plot in any way, whatever it might involve. Other games get incredibly plot heavy, which can work fine, Hotel Dusk for example is basically you actually playing out the plot, rather than the plot being something driving gameplay. A few developers really screw up and appear to set out to destroy a game with their plot. Yes, I am looking at you Hideo Kojima, I can see you at the back there.
As I said, I loved Metal Gear Solid, it was a truly brilliant piece. It made MEtal Gear Solid 4 all the more bitter. I could hardly believe the crap that game threw around. *spoiler alert* Ocelot has been possessed by Liquid’s arm? Are you *&^%$ kidding me? What makes it worse, is that some supposedly intelligent people, like Otacon, go along with this. A largely real world style setting, yet nobody seems surprised that the villain has an evil possessing arm. Then, what truly kicks is the ending, when it is revealed, ‘oh, he didn’t really get possessed by an arm, we just made that up.’ I would consider it by far the worst story ever made, and I challenge everyone to find a worse example. I am fairly certain Kojima only actually made that game in order to see just how much he can get away with. I bet he laughs for hours every time he sees the game get a high, or even perfect, score on sites like this. It is a tragedy really, the game play was very solid, and highly entertaining, it is just such a waste that it was constantly broken up by utter bull. I mean, Snake is nearly dead from old age and too many cigarettes. When it was announced they would use catapults to board the enemy ship, I thought that must be some kind of code for a military device. Nope, it is an actual catapult. The practically dead pensioner Snake gets physically catapulted 30 feet or more into the air onto another ship. At the very least he would break his legs, if not just die altogether. This game must be some sort of parody. At every turn idiotic plot ideas ruin some good gameplay sections. How is it, for example, that when every soldier has nanomachines in their body beaming out their physical and mental state 24 hours a day, does nobody notice that the thin geeky soldier hasn’t actually got any? Surely some administrator somewhere watching the squad in action must have realised they had one less nano data feed that they had squad members? The other team members each know where the other squad members are, and how they are, at any given time, surely one of them noticed they got no data from this other member? The level of ineptitude on display was truly catastrophic.
Haven’t they heard of ladders?
Many games do very well with some pretty basic stories. Bad Company had a simple but excellent story wherein the squad were going AWOL to steal gold. It was an ideal mechanic to drive the plot without placing too many constraints on wacky explosive fun, and provided the opportunity for great one liners and conversations from the brilliantly characterised misfits. Lylat Wars (Starfox 64) likewise had a very simple story, Andross is evil, go kill Andross. But that was all it needed, anything more complex would have gotten in the way.
Simple stories can still be incredibly moving, Limbo is a great example (see my previous blog on that) in which a small boy seeks out his sister in a grim and dangerous world. That is all there is to it, yet you cannot help but be drawn in, desperate to save the little guy and find his sibling. Portal too has a very simple story, survive and get out. Yet it is told and delivered with such style, and such comedy, it is far more than it might otherwise seem.
Shooters often have fairly basic stories, and focus around a few basic themes, there is invasion, and there is a super villain, or there is personal revenge. Like Mario, people don’t play shooters by and large for their storytelling. The gameplay is the reward, and the story just pushes it along. Even here however a bad story can really ruin things. Modern Warfare 2 had good action sequences, it was largely well made and exciting, yet the story is beyond ridiculous. The Russians get hold of a device to hack into american satellites, special ops steal it back, and then they just assume the russians never managed to hack it, and go back to whatever they were doing before. Then the Russians invade out of the blue, unseen because they bypassed satellite defenses. This annoyed me for several reasons. Firstly, Russia does not have anything like the military force necessary to stage an invasion of that magnitude. The American army is both larger, better trained, and better equipped. Secondly, there are many layers of observational defense in play, bypassing one does not make the approach of hundreds of fighter jets invisible. Did nobody on the west coast of the US at any point simply look up? Japan probably noticed too, did nobody think to maybe give the US a ring? Neither could you gather any kind of large force anywhere in the world without being observed. Quite aside from anything else, the pretence for the war is incredibly flimsy and also rather nonsensical. Many games have really over the top stories, but to have something so stupid in an otherwise very serious real world shooter is totally at odds, and really gets in the way of the rest of the game. Much as I love Bad Company 2, that also ends with the Russians invading, why, I have no idea. Having seen stuff about the upcoming Homefront, I very much doubt I will buy it. The Koreans invading is even more stupid than the Russians and I would be far too annoyed to enjoy the game.
What games need is to have the right amount of story, not everything needs to be complex and convoluted. Part of the point of having different genres, in any medium, is to have different styles and different experiences. Many people criticise Michael Bay for the lack of plot in the Transformers films, but seriously, who actually went to see those for anything other than giant awesome robot fights? A plot as complex as the Usual Suspects would not benefit Optimus and co. one bit. It had all the story it needed to be tremendous fun. Likewise the big ‘blockbuster’ shooters, the likes of Modern Warfare, really ought to keep things simple. So decide how much story is necessary, and then whether or not you can do it well. The real issue then, and the one thing that all the above criticised games have in common, is that the bad story in each one is not consistent with the world in which they are located. For example, as I said, Modern Warfare is set in the real world. In the real world, Russia could not invade the US. As such the whole thing sticks out like a sore thumb.
When you build a universe, everything within that universe needs to work within it, overall coherency is vitally important in storytelling, and lack of coherence is what spoils it. That is why you need to decide how much plot to include, the more plot devices you have, the more work it takes to keep everything true to your world. The story must engage with the game, the two have to go hand in hand, each helping the other. This is where games like Metal Gear Solid 4 fail so badly, not only is the story hideous, it also interrupts the gameplay for half an hour or more at a time. Characters within the story need to have personality too. Each of the four people in Bad Company has a distinct personality, they are not massively deep or fleshed out, but you know where they come from, what they are like, and what they want. This basic level of characterisation allows the kind of banter Bad Company does so well, it is something the player can join in with. Blank characters work in RPG’s where the player projects their own character, otherwise, your key cast needs to be more than a bunch of fence posts.
So, decide what the story will be from the beginning, make it important so that it works with the game. Decide how much the two need to work together, and how much of each there needs to be. Striking the balance is what will make a good game classic.
As I said, I loved Metal Gear Solid, it was a truly brilliant piece. It made MEtal Gear Solid 4 all the more bitter. I could hardly believe the crap that game threw around. *spoiler alert* Ocelot has been possessed by Liquid’s arm? Are you *&^%$ kidding me? What makes it worse, is that some supposedly intelligent people, like Otacon, go along with this. A largely real world style setting, yet nobody seems surprised that the villain has an evil possessing arm. Then, what truly kicks is the ending, when it is revealed, ‘oh, he didn’t really get possessed by an arm, we just made that up.’ I would consider it by far the worst story ever made, and I challenge everyone to find a worse example. I am fairly certain Kojima only actually made that game in order to see just how much he can get away with. I bet he laughs for hours every time he sees the game get a high, or even perfect, score on sites like this. It is a tragedy really, the game play was very solid, and highly entertaining, it is just such a waste that it was constantly broken up by utter bull. I mean, Snake is nearly dead from old age and too many cigarettes. When it was announced they would use catapults to board the enemy ship, I thought that must be some kind of code for a military device. Nope, it is an actual catapult. The practically dead pensioner Snake gets physically catapulted 30 feet or more into the air onto another ship. At the very least he would break his legs, if not just die altogether. This game must be some sort of parody. At every turn idiotic plot ideas ruin some good gameplay sections. How is it, for example, that when every soldier has nanomachines in their body beaming out their physical and mental state 24 hours a day, does nobody notice that the thin geeky soldier hasn’t actually got any? Surely some administrator somewhere watching the squad in action must have realised they had one less nano data feed that they had squad members? The other team members each know where the other squad members are, and how they are, at any given time, surely one of them noticed they got no data from this other member? The level of ineptitude on display was truly catastrophic.
Haven’t they heard of ladders?
Many games do very well with some pretty basic stories. Bad Company had a simple but excellent story wherein the squad were going AWOL to steal gold. It was an ideal mechanic to drive the plot without placing too many constraints on wacky explosive fun, and provided the opportunity for great one liners and conversations from the brilliantly characterised misfits. Lylat Wars (Starfox 64) likewise had a very simple story, Andross is evil, go kill Andross. But that was all it needed, anything more complex would have gotten in the way.
nintendo crossovers...
love your cube
invading a living room near you?
When you build a universe, everything within that universe needs to work within it, overall coherency is vitally important in storytelling, and lack of coherence is what spoils it. That is why you need to decide how much plot to include, the more plot devices you have, the more work it takes to keep everything true to your world. The story must engage with the game, the two have to go hand in hand, each helping the other. This is where games like Metal Gear Solid 4 fail so badly, not only is the story hideous, it also interrupts the gameplay for half an hour or more at a time. Characters within the story need to have personality too. Each of the four people in Bad Company has a distinct personality, they are not massively deep or fleshed out, but you know where they come from, what they are like, and what they want. This basic level of characterisation allows the kind of banter Bad Company does so well, it is something the player can join in with. Blank characters work in RPG’s where the player projects their own character, otherwise, your key cast needs to be more than a bunch of fence posts.
No-one Lives Forever had really fantastic characters, hilarious throughout
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