Story Telling in Video Games

Neither do I. I'm not asking for Tolstoy, I'm asking for better than freaking Michael Bay.

And yet what you're saying seems to belie this.

Especially this:

People liked the new villain stories because they did a decent job of representing the player as a villain. I'm not sure what you were looking for, but you seem to be getting story mixed up with new mission mechanics and technology(both of which I agree we could use more of).

The new missions mostly presented the player with some dialogue options that we've never had before and did some cool stuff in terms of linking the story and setting of the missions and the enemies you fight. In short, they flowed better than the arcs we've been getting.

From what I've been seeing here, people who play this game(and pay attention to the storylines) are a bit more concerned with getting a chance to represent their character in more ways than costume, bio and powers.

Since the new missions seem to be pushing in this direction, it's a no-brainer that people would like them. No one is calling them literary masterpieces. And at the same time, can you please name me a popular comic where the superhero hasn't had to deal with a clone or double at some point in time?

Somewhat as an aside, and it's possible I'm misreading you here as I'm a little tired, but wasn't Revelations for CO just level 37-40 content? I was thinking it was more like Issue 3 than CoV.

Of course, you could have been meaning zone-size, in which case don't mind me at all.

You mean like how over in the Comics etc. forum I posted about liking The A-Team movie?

According to who? The villain arcs make assumptions about the PC's motives that are just as bad as the ones made in the rest of the redside content (who said I want a cloning lab?). The second villain arc throws the Idiot Ball (hey, why don't you let some guys you don't know move troops into your new lab and then check them out! Wait....) Both the hero and villain arcs make the assumption that cloning the PC would accomplish anything, which it would not in three out of five origins and probably wouldn't in a fourth (and might not even be possible at all, e.g. robotic or undead characters). Both sets of arcs ultimately play the PC for a sap as both are eventually revealed to be elaborate plots by Mysterious Letter Writer Guy to get Protean and Ajax under his control.

Whether or not they "flowed better", they were about essentially nothing.

While "literary masterpieces" might be too strong a term, people have been gushing over the stories in them despite the fact that there really isn't one, just a narrative of events.

Watchmen.

Whether or not varieties of the Evil Twin trope have been used in comics (largely in the past, you don't see too much of it these days) is irrelevant. A lot of what has been done in comics, particularly in the past, is cliched trash. A lot of it doesn't really play in interactive fiction where you can't make certain assumptions about the player.

I did. Vibora Bay is fairly large and has a lot of new missions and mobs in it. It's really very well-done graphically, unfortunately the writing is complete garbage. Its precipitating event, the "Crisis" arc that introduces the zone, requires catching a gargantuan Idiot Ball. It just goes downhill from there, devolving into an Idiot Plot revolving around a Jerkass Anti Sue.

I don't mind arcs that assume my motivation as long as the motivation it assumes is self-serving.

Sometimes that's all you need. City of Heroes is such a way as to not really lend itself to literature and narrative very much, and to be honest, story arcs that get too narratively heavy rather than letting events speak for themselves become cumbersome.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

There is no shortage of arcs in MA that prove otherwise, even counting ones I didn't write myself.

My experience with the Architect seems to disagree with this, but I'll take your word for it as I haven't done too many.

I suspect you and I just don't see eye to eye on what makes a good story, though.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

Until the 'big guys' buy them. Or do you think EA got as large as it is through organic growth?

CoH's graphics look dated....because they are. They were done what, in 2000/2001, on an engine that was made or current in that time period? Ultra Mode in the CoH/CoV areas is like putting MAC lipstick on a pig. It doesn't make the old, dated graphics look 'cutting edge', it just adds details (that are largely superfluous). Ultra Mode doesn't give you detailed character models that are 'present day' quality (quick! What color are your characters' eyes? How many fingers does your character have?), it sharpens what has always existed. I'm an enthusiast (with a couple of rigs that cost obscene amounts) so graphics are important to me and hardware requirements don't bother me one bit. But the assertion that Ultra Mode did anything but slightly freshen up the existing areas in CoH/V (we're not talking GR areas that were built on Ultra Mode) to me is misguided.

Story is important but so is presentation. You must have one or the other and preferably (but rarely) both. If the former is most important, then, as you mentioned, Zork is still out there. If graphics are a much lesser consideration than story, the Ultima series still exists as well.

How so? Is every villain a blind and stupid individual who trusts anyone who says they're a friend? Does every villain give perfect strangers access to their stash?

Honestly, that's not saying much. When the previous dialogue options were 'accept this mission' and 'talk about something else', adding a new dialogue option or two isn't revolutionary (it's evolutionary, as it should be).

And yet, there are still tons of assumptions made about characters that don't necessarily add up (villains are stupid (or the Joe Mauer of the Idiot Ball), heroes are sickeningly selfless, etc)

Dealing with a clone is one thing. Turning my streetwise, heavy in the game character into a mark with completely uncharacteristic choices, is a whole other ball o' wax.

Seriously. You cop a cloning lab. Just jacked it by force. Some dude you don't know from a can of paint says "Hey, we're this company you've never heard of and we can do security for you."....so you give them access to it?!? Just like that? "Okay!" (more like dee-dee-dee).

I would much prefer if it assumed my character isn't a moron.


As for the topic, it's a difficult balance in today's environment. From what I understand, it's more difficult (and expensive, which is the same thing in developer speak) to design a game around a story than vice versa. Many games (and especially MMO expansions) are designed first and the story is tacked on to fit it. The other way has the story as paramount and the game is designed around that story, which often means a slew of new assets (art, zones, etc) which tax a development budget.

The example that was given/shown to me was the Secrets of Faydwer expansion for EverQuest. The zones were largely created well before the expansion (along the time the Steamfont revamp was being done) and the assets were either already budgeted for previously (minotaurs, clockworks, etc) as part of that revamp or reskinned versions of existing models (much of Crystallos, the end zone) or just straight up renamed old models (goos, drakes, wind nymphs, brownies, etc). The story was then created to fit what they already had (and Kerafyrm's return was decided years prior).

Single player games have the edge, because their designers control the main character. But games with good to great stories (see the aforementioned Mass Effect, Dragon Age, maybe (MAYBE) the Elder Scrolls from Daggerfall on forward) cost lots if they're done right. Or, they take a lot of time from conception to release (which is six of one, half a dozen of the other, really).

My stance is Screw Graphics. One of my favorite games I've discovered recently is rendered in ASCII, and I still actively play and enjoy SNES games that I haven't played before. Did all old games have better plots or gameplay than the current generation? Hell no. But they were more willing to try new and interesting things, probably in part due to not having ten zillion dollar graphics budgets, and I'd sure rather have another batch of games like we got in the late 90s/early 00s (Deus Ex, Total Annihilation, Alpha Centauri, Arcanum, Diablo II, Metal Gear Solid, Baldur's Gate II, Ocarina of Time, Planescape: Torment, and Fallout were all released in about a 4-year period) than the current generation of first-person shooters with 90% of their budget in graphics. Yeah, that's not the entire current generation, but very few recent games have engaged me like those... and it's not just nostalgia, since I played some of those for the first time last year.

I'm sorry, Venture, but after trying some of what you suggested, two facts became clear:

1. You and I have VERY different views on what constitutes good stories.

2. My reasons for swearing off the Architect are still just as valid now as they were before.

*edit*
Interestingly, and with no relation to the post I'm editing, Bennett the Sage seems to have something to say about this topic.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

I hope Deus Ex 3 isn't generic shootan. I smirked when I saw some interview where their idea of stealth isn't going to be just sneaking behind the guard while he patrols and bonking him on the head. Likewise, I hope Thief 4 reboots the series well (and the guards aren't so dumb. MUSTA BEEN THE WIND I GUESS).
Thief 1 and 2...I replayed them awhile back but man was it a pain in the butt to get them to work on a modern computer. Had to spelunk some forums to get fixes. ...and heard thief 3 was dumbed down for the xbox so I never wasted money on it, and it was like just Garrett wandering around The City stealing junk instead of having a story driving him along. Invisible War's tiny maps and gameplay cut-backs were bad enough...I didn't want to see Garrett have his coolness stolen too.

Elder Scrolls, good stories? Daggerfall only had like 5 plot missions and the rest was just a giant world to meander around in doing whatever struck your fancy. Want to kill every person in an entire town? Go ahead, you had thousands of towns to pick from! Morrowind was the same except a much smaller handcrafted world. Never played Oblivion. A lot of background lore they've developed over many years but the games themselves have nearly no story, generic NPCs with generic dialogue tree, grinding in obtuse ways to maximize level-up benefits or you gimp yourself..ugh. Elder Scrolls suck. Those games are popular because people produce so many mods for them. Same reason Neverwinter Nights 1 had such staying power (good mod kit supplied to mod builders--huge community built up) but NWN2 seems to have fallen flat on its face (better, but much harder to use, mod kit supplied to mod builders--virtually no modding community built up aside from a few professionals).

Good AI is about the one thing I think the original Deus Ex really, really needed, too. It was entirely too easy to jump onto a guard, hack him to bits with a glowing nano sword, then hide for thirty seconds just to have all the other guards shrug and go, "Must have been a cat." Or get a group of highly-trained special operatives to charge into a hall full of blinking proximity mines. Or... well, you get the idea. Of course, parts of the game would have been near impossible with the wrong augs if the guards actually were smart, but still.

No. I agree that the 'little guys' have trouble saying no when someone passes a multimillion dollar buyout under their noses. It's sad...but greed trumps all.


I agree. Adding Ultra Mode to the old zones doesn't really constitute a remake.

I'd like to see our character models get an update but I'm not going to hold my breath. They certainly haven't announced anything like that with GR.

It's not one OR the other in my mind. It's how much of one you have versus the other. And also how much of one better lends itself to the game experience than the other. There are some games where better graphics don't enhance the experience very much and others where they are almost a necessity.

No. Not EVERY villain. But there are plenty of villains who are driven by pure greed or just a lust for power. So much so that it blinds them to right and wrong and was the driving force behind them becoming villains in the first place. You can't honestly expect the devs to account for every villain type there is.

I liked them because they portray your character as actually being proactive and making some decisions instead of having them all made for them. That, to me, is an important first step in carrying mission design forward by the devs. Will they continue to build on that and do better in the future? I don't know.

So...you'd rather they started nowhere and did nothing instead? I never said the new arcs were 'perfect', but they are at least a bit better for villains than they have been. At least I'm not working with a bunch of heroes to 'save the day'. At least I'm not getting pushed and threatened by people with no powers of their own.

Did you expect everything to be addressed with one arc? People have simply said that they have enjoyed these more than previous arcs. I know I did. I'm sorry you didn't. You still have the choice to not do them if you think they don't represent your character. You can, of course, go have fun doing Kelly Uqua's arc. Which I think makes your villain look more idiotic than anything done in the new i17 stories by a good long way...but YMMV.

Because stuff like that has never happened in comic books before? I think I lost track of the number of times a mysterious entity pokes their nose in under false pretenses and fools people into thinking they have their interests at heart.

I think I'm tending to agree with Sam that you guys are expecting things based on the world you've created in your own head and forgetting that this is the devs' universe to direct as they would.


Lots of people get fooled every day by things you'd think they would see coming. Some villains in comics will knowingly work with another villain/group expecting to be betrayed at some point. Some of them don't take precautions and some do.

Not all my villains would fall for a 'helping hand from an unknown party', but some of them certainly might. Some of them are big brain masterminds and some are thuggish. Sorry if none of your toons fit this concept, but its a hazard of MMO storytelling. They are never going to give us 7 character choices like if this was Dragon Age or something.

The developers have to make hard choices, it's true. But even knowing that, it is mind-boggling to see developers focus on a single aspect of a game to the exclusion of so many other things in this day and age. And then that same developer will act all surprised when the game doesn't do well and blame something else entirely like piracy.

It's like the Crysis situation. They were surprised when a game that could only run well on(at the time) top end systems didn't sell as well as they expected.

There's a spectrum of problems between the two mediums. What I was getting at is that there are a some games out there that try too hard to be like movies that you also play sometimes, rather than true games.

The other issue I was getting at was big, loud explosions don't really do much for me, personally, in either movies or games, unless they have some emotional weight, even if it's very small. I'm especially unimpressed by pure graphical effects in games, because they're not real (and they're not necessarily real in the movies either).

And that's another thing. I'm okay with "mindless" action games (it's funny how often they're not mindless at all, but that's a different topic). I just dislike it when developers feel like their big, loud action-adventure spectacle needs a serious plot to bolster it. Doom kept things simple. Mario has mostly kept things simple. It's even more jarring when the plot is actually great, but the gameplay is completely incongruous with it.

Basically, my feelings are: Simple pretense > fully involved story, especially if it's a bad fully involved story. Games should be an interactive experience first, a story-telling medium second. That's not to say that games with elaborate writing are bad, far from it. Just that a developer doesn't necessarily have to go that far to make a good game.

I'm also on-board with the whole "screw graphics" thing. Especially if we can kill the horribleness that is blur, bloom, the colors brown and gunmetal, and anything else synonymous with "next gen" graphics.

Of course, when it comes to budgets and so on, I have a large stream of bile saved up in a specialized internal sac for the massive trainwreck that is the developer-publisher-retailer triangle, and where it has gone horribly, horribly wrong, especially in relation to the hype machine.

I'm curious as to why there is all this hate for graphical effects that can be turned on, off or adjusted in intensity at the whim of a player. I turned off blur in ME1 forced antialiasing and supersampling for both that and ME2 etc.

If you just leave your graphics set to whatever the game 'recommends' then I can see where you might get effects you don't like, but with a gajillion graphic settings to tweak and(with any decent graphics card) the ability to tweak and add things not even in the options in the first place, where is the problem?

Also...can you name me some games where 'brown' is used inappropriately and excessively? I'm not saying it doesn't happen...I'd just like some examples to get my head around the problem.

You're not wrong. Console graphics are 'as is' most of the time because everything is built to run at a given framerate with a specified look.

As I'm a PC gamer exclusively, I thoughtlessly only took PC games into account. But I can see how it would suck on the console to not be able to turn motion blur off in ME 1.

Actually, if most of the people pissed off about overdone graphical effects in next gen games are talking about consoles, then I'm probably guilty of dismissing them wrongfully because I'm accustomed to never having to put up with an effect I don't like(most of the time).

You know, this is the kind of thing which actually kind of bugs me. Not that you don't like it, by all means - it's your opinion. But what bugs me is when developers decide that, since big explosions and flashy fights aren't "deep" enough, they just won't include them, ending up with games that look decidedly... I don't know. Tame? Low-key? Boring is probably the word I'm looking for, especially when it comes to an action game.

Put it like this - Final Fantasy VII is how old by now? Fifteen years? It's an old game, yet it still has combat moves that are more impressive and striking than a lot of modern-day games, simply because the game embraced the more ludicrous side of needlessly big explosions, needlessly large swords and needlessly unorthodox fighting styles and looked like it just had fun with it.

City of Heroes, by contrast, seems to be deathly afraid of big explosions and over-the-top action. Take for instance Inferno, the power which is supposed to be this huge, hearth-shattering explosion that just blows enemies up. It's not impressive! Not visually. Try it some time, preferably by yourself and you'll see what I mean. It's just a little fire and a little screen shake, and that's it. Even with enemies around, it just plays a low-key fire effect on them. Sure, enemies fall down, but the power itself just... Doesn't look all that great.

In my opinion, Inferno should be something so powerful and massive that, when you use it, EVERYONE should know something big just happened. Think of it like that moment in most cartoons or stories where something big blows up, and suddenly you cut to some hero half-way across town seeing a giant explosion in the distance and rushing over to see what happened. That's what I'd have ideally wanted. Instead, we get a slightly bigger Fireball.

I don't know what I'd have wanted, exactly. Something louder, probably, possibly with a pillar of flame that stretched up into the sky, with a clearly visible shockwave of flame and just... More bang.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

The game's FX are way over the top. As soon as there's more than one or two PCs around it's impossible to see what's going on without turning particles down to the floor (maybe not then either). At something like a mothership or Hamidon raid, forget it. FX design has to take into account the number of PCs and mobs that can be acting at any given time. Baysplosions that look good for a single player are too much in any group action.

I agree...with things that have continuous effects...like bubbles, sonic shields and the like. But if we're gonna talk about a tier 9 nuke with a super long recharge...then I can't see that turning up the 'impressive meter' a bit would hurt.

I personally think that Thunderous Blast looks weak...even though its effectiveness on enemies is great. I actually took some screenshots of its effect and the bolt coming from the player's hands is small. I'd rather a huge lightning blast fall from the sky and explode is brilliant glory than the current effect.

I hope that power effects get a look over by the devs at some point in the future.

Point for point:

1. We already have impressive powers in the game, and I don't mean the Statesman's Lightning. Something as simple as Electric Melee's Lightning Rod or your typical Peacebringer's Foot Stomp (what was that called? Solar Flare?) or, hell, even the REGULAR version of Foot Stomp are pretty dang impressive. Lightning Rod has that massive lightning effect and the Kheldian Foot Stomp shakes the ground, leaves a massive expanding crack on the ground and shoots jets of Kheldian energy into the air. That's cool! By Contrast, neither Nova nor Inferno nor even Rain of Arrows feel very impressive looking at them, and Full Auto is just underwhelming, thanks to its sound.

2. If many people's effects stacking is the problem, the solution is not to kneecap your game's graphics, but rather to institute effects scaling. Too many people covering the world in an impenetrable purple haze? Scale down maximal number of effects when many players gather together. Or, indeed, have the players who are bothered by this (I'm not) scale their settings. Essentially, if I want to see pretty lights and you want to see, period, we can both have our wish.

3. While a game's GRAPHICS are not the most important part, a game's VISUAL APPEAL always is. You don't need super-exclusive graphics for the future to make a game look good, because that's down to art design and artistic talent. The mere fact that I can look at 2001's Oni, which looks like it's using a 1995 graphics engine, and still gasp at the awesomeness despite the jagged polygons and low-res textures, means that you can have cool visuals even with poor graphics. In fact, Capcom's MegaMan X series actually got WORSE visuals when they switched to the superior graphics of the X7 and X8 games.

Basically, I want a game to impress me visually. It doesn't have to be with fancy graphics, but it usually HAS to be with good art and design.

Originally Posted by Arcanaville Samuel_Tow is the only poster that makes me want to punch him in the head more often when I'm agreeing with him than when I'm disagreeing with him.

The coolness to Thunderous Blast isn't the attack graphic itself, but when a huge mass of enemies spasm uncontrollably for three seconds before collapsing.