The Rest of the Story

Yahtzee: Graham, on the subject of dialogue trees dictating the course of the plot, and of games letting us use our imaginations to fill in the gaps (and calm down, I don’t think I did make the same point in Zero Punctuation), I guess it all comes down to the age-old rule of ‘Show, don’t tell’. Some games with stories I hold in the highest esteem have very little dialogue at all, such as Ico or Metroid Prime, or restrict themselves to short conversations that seem to do their damnedest to make things even more confusing, like Silent Hill 2.

A very useful rule that I took to heart on the subject of writing books is that writing a novel is like engineering: you’re finished not when there’s nothing more to add, but when there’s nothing more to take away. I think it extends just as well to dialogue in games. Trouble is, AAA games these days have so many individual working on them (each very keen to show off their skills no matter how small or mundane their task) they become this bloated, amorphous mass with no real discipline, creating an attitude of ‘we’ve got it, might as well throw it in’.

Yahtzee: You’re only supposed to put a really small amount of it on your toast to just add a little flavor twang. You know, moderation. Remember that? That’s where you turn down your third helping of maple syrup and bacon.

I guess this question isn’t quite as inflammatory as PC vs. consoles. We all agree storytelling in games needs work, as ever. It’s also a pretty big subject and hard to come up with really controversial views on. Oh wait, I do think the intro sequence for Bioshock (meaning everything up to injecting your first plasmid, not just the cinematic at the start) is literally the best intro in the entire history of games. Anyone want to dispute that?

Yahtzee: Resident Evil 4 is still pretty much the only Resident Evil game I enjoyed. I’m not sure I agree that the intent was to be serious and tense and all that – the gameplay seemed to me like it was focusing on creating panicky back-to-the-wall action horror, what with the absurd monsters, fat chainsaw-wielding Spaniards with bags on their heads, and entire crowds of lurching peasants being downed with a single shotgun blast. I’d argue the intent was closer to some mix of Transylvania B-movie Hammer Horror and splatter schlock like the Jason or Evil Dead movies. The fact that it dances the cutscene-gameplay-cutscene tango I do not dispute, mind.

The worst thing RE5 did – besides the race relations issue – was try to crowbar in all the Resident Evil series backstory. By the time of RE4, it’d turned into a comic book situation, endlessly expanding on the plot of the first game with stupid retcons and improbable resurrections all over the shop. What I liked about RE4 was that it did something largely tangential and self-contained, which considering the drastic gameplay change was probably the right way to go.

In referring to KOTOR as your Sixth Sense, you’ve reminded me of another game whose story I quite liked – Second Sight, the PS2 action-adventure by Free Radical of TimeSplitters fame. It’s one of the few cases I can think of of a game story with a good solid twist, the kind that makes you reassess everything up to that point, not like the usual gaming twist wherein the person who was helping you suddenly turns out to be evil in the most completely illogical way. Must be said it doesn’t really do gameplay-story integration, but I do like how it went out of its way to include alternative game over sequences for a lot of the player’s potential asshole behavior (like shooting up your allies in the training level).