The Story

Yahtzee: The thing about story in games is that people often consider it an inherently good thing, but I don’t agree. I look for games that balance the story and the gameplay; a story might be very well-written, but it’s more important that it enriches the gameplay, rather than interrupts it. Works with, not in spite of. Planescape Torment is often given as an example of a great story, but personally I found the actual gameplay rather dreary and wasn’t able to maintain my interest long enough for the story to get any hooks in.

For me, a great story game is one that weaves the narrative seamlessly into the interactive component, because interactivity is the one thing that makes games utterly unique. This is why film adaptations of games never work, because they’re totally different methods of establishing a story; taking the game aspect away cripples it unrecognizably, like subtracting a person’s torso…with a saw. My favorite story games are ones like Half-Life 2, where the story is told in the background and through implication rather than cutscene dump, and Silent Hill 2, where the bulk of the story experience is in the slow atmosphere building of the gameplay.

With that in mind, I do think video game storytelling is on a bit of a downward turn. On the one hand they’re achieving new levels of maturity every year – Assassin’s Creed is probably the standout of recent times, and the second game actually pulled off a non-gratuitous sex scene that no one tried to ban, miraculously. On the other hand, it’s really leaping out at me how often games overuse cut-scenes these days. Seems like you can’t move fifty yards without the game fading out and fading up on a non-interactive cinematic, often just to show you something in the room that you’d have to have been staring at the floor not to notice by yourself, and it really breaks the flow for me. Of my many unreasonable demands of game developers I have one that I absolutely stand by in every situation with no exceptions: never depict in a cutscene the main character performing actions we could have done within gameplay, whether it be gunning down enemies or running to catch a bus. Keep it interactive and it keeps the flow. Railroading isn’t helping anything evolve.

Yahtzee: Dead Space is one recent game I can think of that tends to keep its cutscenes within gameplay, as well as telling quite a bit of story in the background and ancillary details, but it still falls down for me because it lacks another vital component of storytelling, that is, effective pacing. The importance of that depends to some degree on what sort of game you’re making, and in horror it’s crucial.

As for dialogue trees, it depends how they’re done. The Bioware standard of having the characters stand woodenly across from each other running down a shopping list of options one by one like a job interview, I always find that slightly tortuous. I liked how Alpha Protocol did it, with a little timer and an analog stick selector to keep the discussion ticking along, I just wish it could be worked more organically into gameplay.

I’d like an NPC to start talking to me as soon as I come close to them, rather than staring mutely at me until I hit the context-sensitive prompt flashing over their heads. I’d then like to still be in control of my character throughout the conversation, walking around, fiddling with ornaments, hunting through drawers, shooting arrows at bunny rabbits, etc, with dialogue options being selected with some quick on-screen prompt using a button or control that is otherwise unoccupied. I don’t know if you guys saw the Plinkett review of Revenge of the Sith, but he makes a good point that all the dialogue scenes are just two people standing (or sitting) and gabbing at each other, and it’s incredibly dull. People do other things while they talk; it makes for more dynamic discourse and an opportunity for characterization.