Reactive Storytelling

ID:2034004
 
Feb 10 2016, 9:57 am
This one might end up being pretty long, and it also hopefully will end up 100% less deleted.

A few pre-face notes, I'm going to be talking in some-what depth about the following games, so if you don't want any spoilers, you might want to stop now; Life is Strange, Metal Gear Solid V, Undertale, Heavy Rain, The Walking Dead and Beyond: Two Souls. All these games share (or attempt to share) a theme regarding reactive storytelling, and I'll be using random key moments from them as examples to display how it is used, and why. I'll also be splitting this into three major categories, the first will be more of an introduction and introspective look into storytelling through various mediums, the second will be the meat of the post, discussing video games and how it is used/how I believe it should be used/how it could currently be improved in the industry, and finally some closing notes and questions for anyone interested.



Stories and why we love them



Stories have been a thing since before we had the cognitive ability to understand why we were even creating them. They're a world that anyone can conjure up, be it real or as far from real as possible, that someone can actually create, and try to make you believe. As human beings we love to try to believe them, though it might not always succeed, we can always hope that what we're reading, watching or playing will result in us getting at least some of an emotional reaction out. Drama, action and emotion all result in the difference between what creates a simple telling, and a fantasy in which we can truly put ourselves in.

Historically stories came in the form of books (Or theater, but I'm going to leave that out for now). Then we moved into movies, and then we progressed into video games. But why? What's the difference. How can you, given a medium, create the best experience that plays off the best aspects that each of those three options can give. Well first of all let's look at the limitations of each. Books give little to no visual feedback, aside from perhaps a few illustrations. They're left up to the person engaging to design and create the world in their head, a task that some people find easy, and some find difficult. In addition to that reading is a quiet, and somewhat time consuming act, in which very little ultimately happens outside of your head. It's a personal (sometimes father-son) endeavor, the author has written about what his grand design was, but it is up to you to paint it within your mind. Movies, unlike books, very clearly give you a visual (duh?). They show you what the director wants you to see, and I don't believe this is necessarily a good thing, depending on the skill of said director. A wrong image, a wrong portrayal. A wrong casting. When moving from a book to a movie there's so many new things that can possibly go wrong and break the illusion attempting to come to fruition. In addition to that it's a very static operation. Whereas reading a book can be done practically anywhere, at any time, watching a movie requires a little more preparation, a better setting and the right mood, all things which can end up detracting from the experience you feel. Finally video games. They (basically) share all the same negative points as a movie, however they add a few new ones into the mix. Gameplay has to not be a chore, the visuals are suddenly far harder to create (CGI vs Realtime rendering), and probably most importantly, everything has to work in tandem, else you'll result in a game which feels half-assed around a certain part, and polished in others. I'm sure you can list a bunch of games with strong stories but weak gameplay, or visa versa. How many can you list that manage to keep both up at the same pace? I can only truly think of a very few (Red Dead Redemption is certainly at the top of that list).

A lot of these points have obvious counterpoints which create the benefits of these mediums, with a book you're free to let the reader design the world, with a movie you can create awe-inspiring set pieces, and with a game you can truly immerse the player via projection and character attachment. Only once you manage to understand why something is bad, can you push it to become better. Enough waffle for now, let's start to focus entirely on video games!

Reactive Storytelling



Videogames as a medium is fantastic in which it can give us a method of storytelling that is (almost, Goosebumps choose your own adventures I'm looking at you) basically unviable in any other medium. It allows us to create our own story, it allows us to truly connect with our character, due to the fact that we've made the decisions that have put him into the situation that he's in. No other medium can effectively do that, and yet so far no game has (in my opinion) truly properly taken advantage of such an amazingly incredible possibility. Of course I understand the technological limits that are imposed, but in this day and age it's more that viable to create such a game. Just incase you missed it, reactive storytelling is where (quite literally as the name states) the story of the game, reacts to the decisions you made during the game. Still don't get it? Okay, let's use an example. The Walking Dead (By Telltale games) is the best and probably most critically acclaimed example of this kind of storytelling. You can (by choice or by failing to do certain things) completely write characters out of the story, completely change the path from A to B, you can play the game a dozen times over and get a different(ish) experience every time. Reactive storytelling is literally the future of video games, as soon as video games stop squabbling over gameplay vs story and finally come to cohesively co-exist.

Let's talk about Life is Strange. If you're in the BYOND Skype Group you almost certainly know how much I utterly despise Life is Strange. I make no quams about it, I openly admit it, I am horribly biast against this 'game'. That is because it fails so ridiculously hard at that first vital gate to being a 'game'. It is not a game. It is more like a choose-your-own-adventure movie. Press button, get different story. This is a clear and exact diversion of the two concepts I above mentioned. There is very, very little substance to the actual game, however it's received (much to my dismay) incredible amounts of critical acclaim, soley because it's using reactive storytelling in an honestly very effective way. I wouldn't say that you should follow the lead of Life is Strange, but if the topic interests you, I'd recommend giving it a play just to get a feel for how they tried to accomplish the formula.

Let's talk about Undertale. Again I'll openly state, I'm very biast here, because I absolutely adore this game. If you haven't played it, stop reading, and go play it. I'll wait, no really. It's like, $5 on Steam. It's worth it, it just fucking is. Undertale is my second best example of how to use reactive storytelling. There are many, many points in which you can change the outcome of a varied number of things, and they managed to make it so that all of those things actually had an emotional impact on the player. I'm trying to remain as relatively spoiler free as possible for this one, so take for example the two snoopy dogs. You can choose to kill them, or not to kill them, doing so changes where they appear later in the game, and if you chose to kill them, the game WILL make you feel like a total dick for doing it. It's fantastic, and it turned this otherwise ordinary (relatively funny) indie game, into an absolute masterpiece. Here's a fun fact, did you know that Undertale actually reads your other savefiles, specifically previous play throughs, and changes subsequent ones to reflect that? Takes it to a whole 'nother level, that does. Fantastic stuff.

Let's talk about Heavy Rain. To my knowledge, Heavy Rain was one of the very first games that pioneered this method of storytelling. And I have very good feelings towards it, I enjoyed Heavy Rain, despite what many people think of it. It didn't have 'too' much gameplay in it, which is disappointing, since it suffers from it in the same way Life is Strange does, but what it did game in gameplay was just enough to engage me, and make me want to keep playing. The story, on the other hand, was marvelous. Whether or not it was particularly realistic, or believable, is a discussion for a different post, but anyone who has played Heavy Rain and ended with the ending where Ethan hangs himself in prison, you all know the guilt you felt. This was what made me play this game over and over, to find out every possible ending for all the characters. This is also one of the very few instances, where the decisions actually effected the ending of the game. Most of my examples have branching paths, but a very clear start and end point that is mostly unchangeable. Not Heavy Rain, Heavy Rain instead has a relatively few branching paths in between the start and the ending, but it has a very very large multitude of endings. Something to take note of, it's a quality that is most important and that most of these story driven games seem to just leave behind.

Let's talk about Metal Gear Solid V. "What?" I hear you say. Yes, MGSV actually has quite a lot of reactive storytelling in it, contrary to popular belief. And that, is a fact which I adore. Kojima's magnum opus made players take the choices which humanity would always want to take, which is why so few people know, you CAN actually kill Quiet. You CAN actually leave that dog behind. You CAN actually leave Skullface alive. All of these things change or take out or add huge chunks of the story to be or not be played. This is my best example though, because until you play the game again, you would have never known that. This is reactive storytelling at its current best. You can find cassette tapes throughout the world, as I'm sure you know. Did you know they change the dialog, and even some story options, depending on what you do or don't know? All whilst having some of the most fantastic gameplay I've had the pleasure of enjoying in a long, long time. This game manages to be a game first, whilst also being a story first. This is what you should be taking notes from, if it interests you.

Let's talk about The Walking Dead. This game, or series of games I suppose, effectively brought the concept to the popular masses, and that cannot be disrespected, and it has more gameplay than Heavy Rain or Life is Strange, but it suffers from what I touched on with Heavy Rain, in that whilst it has many branches in the middle, the start and end is relatively unchanged. Having said that, the emotional attatchment the game ends up making you feel towards a lot of the characters is quite interesting. Most of the time (Not all of it) when a character dies, its your choice, and you chose to remove that character because you had negative opinions of them. Isn't that fantastic? A video game, made you spite a fictional character so much that you removed them from the rest of the experience. I guess you could consider it the opposite of MGSV, in which you'll almost always take the moral high ground, but in TWD you're not above getting down and dirty. That's some masterful world depiction right there, drawing you into the character in a world so bleak and void of hope that you'll make tough choices that are otherwise ridiculous.

Let's not talk about Beyond: Two Souls. It's just shit, lol. Gameplay is poo, story is poo, branches are poo, ending is poo. I regretted buying it after Heavy Rain.

Conclusion



I hope my examples and descriptions have helped you to understand what reactive storytelling is. And I hope you have some sort of understanding as to why it can be a powerful tool used in your games, and how if you use it wrong you can result in some real duds. The age old question "Story or gameplay?" was always a resounding "gameplay" from me, but now that there's a third option, "Story or gameplay or story==gameplay?", I can safely say that the newcomer is the winner every time. It needs to be done right, MGSV has its own share of issues that it has, and again it suffers from a lack of ending options. Perhaps sometime soon someone will make a game with the gameplay qualities of Dark Souls, the journey branches of TWD, the story absorption of Undertale, and the ending branches of Heavy Rain. Perhaps that person could be you, if you put your mind to it. It's certainly a behemoth of a task. But I don't pretend to be the do-all end-all of the topic, so I do have a few questions for anyone interested.

1: What do you think is more important, attachment to characters through progression (Levels, dedication, roleplay), or through story decisions? I can't decide, why would either be better than the other, or even why or how both could work together.
2: Did I miss any forefront games that have the same qualities? I left out a few duds here and there, but I'd love to know if you think I should have mentioned something in particular.
3: Why aren't you playing Undertale, fgt?
Feb 10 2016, 2:10 pm
TBH, I really don't think videogames are a good medium for storytelling in a conventional sense.

Videogames are a good avenue for allowing the player to explore a single philosophical problem.

The trouble with storytelling is that when choice is involved, you must either hamstring the player's ability to truly explore and comprehend the choices they are making by limiting the scope or variety of their choices, or you are forced to give the player the illusion of choice by making either option more or less the same minus some surface details.

Skyrim, Fallout 4, Mass Effect, and Fable are great examples of the illusion of choice. And by great, I mean good examples of bad storytelling.


One of the best examples of videogame storytelling I can think of is Dark Souls. Dark Souls doesn't really tell a story. It allows you to explore the consequence of a single choice.

1) What is the curse of the undead?

2) How does it relate to the lords of flame?

3) What exactly does an age of darkness entail?

4) What of man's destiny?

5) What will happen to the world once the lords have passed on from it?

All of these questions aren't answered at all by Dark Souls. But we explore the world of Dark Souls and slowly come to understand that the questions are the important part. Not the answers. Not the exposition. Not the characters. What matters are that we understand that these are issues and that they are worthy of our consideration. In fact, we are forced to confront these issues.

Novels and Movies are great at storytelling in a conventional sense because they have direct control over the pacing, the character development, and the plot. Games that try to control the pacing, character development and plot ultimately wrest control from the player. A game can very quickly turn into a boring slog if the story attempts to take too much direction away from the player, and can become incoherent and unfocused if it takes too little direction from the story.

Another wonderful example of storytelling in games is Dwarf Fortress. Dwarf Fortress gives you just enough detail to piece together the significance of each character and each artifact's living history in your world without giving you so much that you notice that the story is randomly generated adlibs. Players fill in the missing details themselves and manage to create entire personalities and rich histories of their fortresses without any semblance of plot, narrative, or significant character development.

Can games tell compelling stories? Absolutely. Are games good for telling stories? Absolutely not.
Feb 10 2016, 7:59 pm
In response to Ter13
I do have to disagree with most of this and honestly I think it fundamentally comes down to exactly what you want out of the story and why the story is present in the game in the first place.

Games like Mario, Doom and Candy Crush Saga don't really have a story to them, they rely on the gameplay experience to drive the plot forward, which is perfectly fine. But my personal belief is that a story should fundamentally drive the emotional experience for the player. The aforementioned games don't really provoke any vivid emotions other than casual pass-time satiation or visceral point-stacking. Then you have games like Silent Hill where the story directly adds to the emotional experience the player has; it adds to the overarching sense of hopelessness, anxiety and powerlessness that the gameplay already provides.

If you're adding in a story to your game, you have to understand what kind of emotions you want to evoke from the player, as well as the pacing of those emotions and understanding differences in kind and how to implement them effectively. With all of these factors, it makes a compelling narrative very difficult to implement without feeling forced or clunky.

The best advice for budding developers is to create games like Mario, Doom and Candy Crush. If you're not experienced with writing stories for games, then it's in your best interest to not get too complicated with them when you're just starting out. Start small and work your way up the ladder of storytelling as you progress.

The important thing to remember is that compelling storylines and choice are almost intrinsically opposed. Unless a game is designed to build upon choices dynamically to make up a storyline on the spot and be able to carry it through effectively, it just leads to a sub par experience.

That's not to say that linear plot games without much divergent choices makes for a bad game, not at all, it's just a tradeoff of narrative vs replay value. Taking Bethesda titles as an example you see this clearly. We understand that their stories aren't the greatest, they feel like superficial conflicts that are overlapped onto a sandbox game. They were designed with replay value and man have they captured that, even if the storylines are a bit mediocre.

All in all, I mostly think pandering to too wide of an audience causes the whole game to drag because of it. In the Skyrim example, the narrative lacked because of the focus on the exploration-based action-adventure it was intended to be, and in that respect, it was a raving success which, in all honestly, only hyper-critical, purist snobs fail to see how well it actually delivered on that.

Stories in games are perfectly alright, amazing even, it's just about knowing how to deliver it properly to not water down the gameplay experience as a whole. That's something that just comes with practice.
Feb 10 2016, 8:03 pm
In response to Kats
Kats wrote:
In the Skyrim example, the narrative lacked because of the focus on the exploration-based action-adventure it was intended to be, and in that respect, it was a raving success which, in all honestly, only hyper-critical, purist snobs fail to see how well it actually delivered on that.

Oh you know how to press my fucking buttons. I might go writeup another one on why everything you said there is basically wrong. Skyrim is objectively shit, and I can literally prove it. It was just a fantastically deployed marketing stunt.
Feb 10 2016, 8:06 pm
I think video games are fine for storytelling :D
Feb 10 2016, 8:09 pm
In response to Rushnut
Millions of people enjoy playing Skyrim to this day. People don't dump hundreds of hours into a game where they're not having fun, even if much of that fun is being rekindled with mods. The mod community can only do so much in a given time and it's the base of Bethesda titles that give them the platform to be amazing.

While you might not like Skyrim, calling it a bad game just makes it feel like its opinions from Morrowind and Oblivion purists. Yes, comparatively, no one who has played Oblivion and Morrowind are going to say that Skyrim is better than either of those two games in a 1-to-1 comparison, but when you don't let nostalgia goggles block your outside-in viewpoint, you can see that Skyrim still stands head-over-heels beyond the majority of games like it on the market. That's what makes it a good game: how it stands against the rest of the games in the genre; not how it stands against games within its own series.
Feb 10 2016, 9:04 pm
In response to Kats
I honestly disagree with every point you raised. It doesn't stand above any game. It's got a very shallow number of enemies with a very shallow number of mechanics, the combat itself is some of the worst I've seen in an RPG (See Witcher), it lacks all kinds of depth in all areas. It doesn't stand head-over-heels above nearly any game.

I didn't even play Oblivion until after I played Skyrim, and I didn't even like it before then, but after then, not pretending to be any sort of 'purist' I was aghast at just how much they stripped and peeled away from their own game to dumb it down for the masses.

It's bad comparatively to both games from its own franchise, games in its own genre, and just games in general. It's horrible. I hate it because it was succesful, which I guess makes me a hipster, because it pioneered the idea of "Make shit game, market it a bunch, make money". Destiny, Battlefront, Hardline, Fallout 4, all these games followed suit and are hailed as some masterpieces of videogames. It's a stain on the current industry. It's disgusting practice.

I hope Todd Howard literally chokes on his lifetime award.
Feb 10 2016, 9:25 pm (Edited on Feb 10 2016, 9:36 pm)
For the record, I'm an Ultima/Morrowind purist. My reasons are not nostalgia-related. My reasons for liking Morrowind hinge on this very discussion and it's incredibly insulting to argue that someone who preferred Morrowind over Skyrim is some kind of hipster.

Skyrim was a step up from Oblivion in most areas. Oblivion is pretty well the worst elder scrolls game ever made, though Skyrim made many, many more sacrifices than Oblivion in a lot of areas that I was quite fond of. Skryim to me bespeaks the problem of voice acting, where it further detracts from a designer's ability to tell a story in an already bleak opportunity for storytelling. That's just my two cents.

Kats wrote:
I do have to disagree with most of this

Sorry to be a bugbear here, but your post, I don't feel was a disagreement with mine. You contradicted my conclusion while supporting each of my premises.

Ter13 wrote:
The trouble with storytelling is that when choice is involved, you must either hamstring the player's ability to truly explore and comprehend the choices they are making by limiting the scope or variety of their choices, or you are forced to give the player the illusion of choice by making either option more or less the same minus some surface details.

Kats wrote:
The important thing to remember is that compelling storylines and choice are almost intrinsically opposed. Unless a game is designed to build upon choices dynamically to make up a storyline on the spot and be able to carry it through effectively, it just leads to a sub par experience.
...
In the Skyrim example, the narrative lacked because of the focus on the exploration-based action-adventure it was intended to be

Ter13 wrote:
Novels and Movies are great at storytelling in a conventional sense because they have direct control over the pacing, the character development, and the plot. Games that try to control the pacing, character development and plot ultimately wrest control from the player. A game can very quickly turn into a boring slog if the story attempts to take too much direction away from the player, and can become incoherent and unfocused if it takes too little direction from the story.

Kats wrote:
That's not to say that linear plot games without much divergent choices makes for a bad game, not at all, it's just a tradeoff of narrative vs replay value. Taking Bethesda titles as an example you see this clearly. We understand that their stories aren't the greatest, they feel like superficial conflicts that are overlapped onto a sandbox game.

I'm not arguing that they make for a bad game. They make for a bad story. The story is superficial and lends very little to the overall value of the experience, which we both agree is the sandbox.


I have difficulty reconciling your conclusion with how much of your post directly mirrors exactly what I said.

Kats wrote:
Stories in games are perfectly alright, amazing even, it's just about knowing how to deliver it properly to not water down the gameplay experience as a whole.

You see, what you've gone and done is sort of confused "game" with "story". Games inherently get in the way of story, because all of the parts of the game that you actually play in heavily story-driven games are the parts that a movie or a novel wouldn't write about. The places where you yourself are playing the game are actually breaks in the story to space out the exposition.

Like you said, choice (game) and story are almost completely opposed. Games aren't an ideal medium to tell stories. That's not to say that it can't be done, but doing it well requires quite a lot of sacrifice to the other aspects that actually make an engaging videogame.

That's not to say that you can't tell a story in a game at all. That's not to say you can't have character development or choice or narrative. In fact, I praised two specific games for having done some very unexpected storytelling without doing it conventionally. Sure, have there been games where storytelling has taken a front seat to the gameplay? Absolutely. Games like the Final Fantasy series are good examples of solid game storytelling... Oh wait... I lied. They aren't.

The reason that Final Fantasy games were successful and popular and seemed to tell good stories is because at the time, the size and cost of pressing cartridges was such that your average game was little better than a mindless romp through a scrolling background with waves of enemies running at you. You could beat these games in as little as an hour. Thanks to Final Fantasy's open world, grindy leveling system, tiered item cost structure, character customization, and repetitive minigames (combat, etc) to space out the actual meat of the game's text, a game could now take 20 hours to beat with little skill and just a lot of patience and dedication. Games of the era used to stretch the playtime of content by artificial difficulty and obscure (and frustrating) puzzle solutions.

Final Fantasy wasn't successful as a series because it told a particularly compelling story, but rather because they were epic games with a satisfying slow build that lasted for more than a single sitting. There was variety and the curiosity for what's at the end of the next cave, or what awesome items would be in the next town kept people coming back for more. Eventually, the games' boring diversions became less boring with more complex meta-development to micromanage and very specific one-off encounters and item drops that took a lot of knowledge or skill to acheive (I'm looking at you, Final Fantasy VII).

I just genuinely don't see games as a good medium for storytelling because like you said, interactivity and story are borderline opposed, where Novels, Plays, Movies, and Television have been honed over centuries of dramatic and literary tradition. Their mediums are highly suited for storytelling, and the experience of the play, movie and television involves intricate and carefully crafted fixed windows into the experience the author or director is creating and the experience of the viewer being actively moderated by the viewer's agreement to suspend disbelief. You can't do that as easily when you are interacting with a game. You cannot suspend disbelief with a game because the fourth wall has been opened up and a controller cable has been thrown out of it into the player's hands. You are asking the player to investigate and find the rails of the story and see the parameters the game developer has given them to explore. It just doesn't make a good environment for storytelling.

Again, am I saying it can't be done? No. It can be done. But saying games are a good means of telling stories in the conventional sense is like saying that radio is a good medium for the subtitled kung fu movie genre. It just isn't. I commend those that have pulled it off, but they are exception and not the rule by a long shot.
Feb 11 2016, 2:46 am
Everyone's gushing about how great Undertale is (and rightfully so, in many areas), and I'm still over here waving my cane around babbling about how Ultima V is one of the greatest games ever made. It's a shame that more people don't know about the compelling atmosphere that still remains unrivaled to this day!

Spoony did a video over it; check it out! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jI1GU73KxEg

Feb 11 2016, 3:02 am
The most important part of games like Skyrim is neither the story nor the gameplay. It is simply the elaborate simulation of the world. The world of Skyrim is so immersive, so reactive, and forms such a strong cohesion with the story that it presents, that it can become easy to overlook the many flaws in the gameplay. This can leave people wondering how to compare it with most other games, and the short answer is that you can't. This is because it has a whole other "dimension" to it that other games lack.

To actually break it down, Skyrim is an amazing, yet buggy world simulator, with a relatively poor action RPG disguised within it. The story just blends everything together on the surface, to make people take the whole game into consideration, rather than dissect it into its parts like this.

Games with a classic style, like Dark Souls, tend to focus mostly on the gameplay, and they try to perfect it. You might say that these games are much smaller and simpler "machines", and so they will automatically have less room for flaws. Classic games may have a higher level of quality, but the fact is that they are simply doing less than those with dynamic, open worlds. Skyrim is like a biplane from the early 1920s, while Dark Souls is like a brand new car. You can't really compare them.

I think we are seeing the beginning of a much greater separation between world simulation systems and gameplay systems. Once developers really start to figure this out, the "classic" games, with a more monolithic design, will be left behind. Using the machine analogy, this means we should end up with games that sacrifice neither the gameplay nor the world, and become more "complete" flying cars. I would expect that in the future, developers will start selling actual world engines, rather than just rendering and physics engines. This could be seen as a new form of art, and the actual game designing work will become much more simple.

Storytelling in games is a whole other issue that has to be considered on its own. You can most certainly have great storytelling in games. What other medium is better at throwing YOU into the story, or personally forcing you into someone else's "shoes"? This is a very powerful and unique concept that can only be found in video games. Sure, you can relate to other characters in books and movies, but no other form of entertainment can bring you as close to becoming a fictional character as a video game.

In games, a player's limited choices are presented as a deliberate, influential bias, in order to put the player into a certain contextual mindset. This is storytelling by proxy. This indirect storytelling is a major part of what makes games that use it so fun. These games don't feel like stories, and they have no set pace. When the stories are combined with procedurally generated content, you really have no idea what to expect. This makes games a far more surprising medium than movies or books. Things can happen that even the authors/developers won't expect. The same person can play the same game many times, and have completely different experiences on each playthrough. Video games allow the stories they tell to be shaped by random occurrences, and this gives them a great deal of realism that no other storytelling medium can have. What games are not good at is telling stories with a strict and well-defined plot line. This is a large part of why games based on movies tend to be really bad.

For now, games provide players with a limited number of choices, not just as a design decision, but because of the current limitations in artificial intelligence and computer processing power. I would say that the Scribblenauts games are the closest to the edge of these limitations. It would be interesting to see other types of games use similar methods for communicating with NPCs.

I have always found natural language processing to be an interesting subject, especially in terms of programming. I really don't know what is stopping developers from making programming languages that look like pseudocode, other than the fact that they would be several times more complex than existing languages.
Feb 11 2016, 4:27 am
Everyone's gushing about how great Undertale is (and rightfully so, in many areas), and I'm still over here waving my cane around babbling about how Ultima V is one of the greatest games ever made.

Ultima V honestly impressed the hell out of me. There's a part where you get interrogated by the enemy if you get caught... They keep giving you chances to sell out your friends. I figured I'd get away if I just kept refusing. Nope. Beheaded.
Feb 11 2016, 9:21 am
In response to Ter13
Ter13 wrote:
Everyone's gushing about how great Undertale is (and rightfully so, in many areas), and I'm still over here waving my cane around babbling about how Ultima V is one of the greatest games ever made.

Ultima V honestly impressed the hell out of me. There's a part where you get interrogated by the enemy if you get caught... They keep giving you chances to sell out your friends. I figured I'd get away if I just kept refusing. Nope. Beheaded.

Up until Ultima V, games and media conditioned you in that if you stay true to your beliefs, and to not give in to the evil guy, somebody will jump in at the last moment to save you. Not Ultima V. You get to watch your party members die one by one by the guillotine.

I loved how they took the seemingly perfect system set up in Ultima IV and turned it on its side for Ultima V by enforcing the teachings by law. Really makes you think about how just the mere implementation of an idea can turn a good idea into a bad one. Richard Garriott was/is a freakin' genius, man.
Feb 11 2016, 3:37 pm
In response to Ter13
Meh, I guess it was majorly just the conclusion we disagreed on. Sorry. Either way, stories in games become moot the moment the character says, "I don't care" and goes off to do something else, as is the case in Bethesda titles.
Feb 12 2016, 3:27 am (Edited on Feb 12 2016, 3:39 am)
I guess it was majorly just the conclusion we disagreed on.

Eh, that's good. We're allowed to have different opinions based on the same body of fact. It's just hard to reconcile differences of opinion when you are working from the same starting point.

Multiverse 7 wrote:
The world of Skyrim is so immersive, so reactive, and forms such a strong cohesion with the story that it presents, that it can become easy to overlook the many flaws in the gameplay.

I disagree here pretty heartily. I dumped about 200 hours into vanilla Skyrim. The game is most definitely not reactive in any meaningful sense, and it's really not a very strong world simulation.

For starters:

- Weather simulation has no effect on the character. It's purely visual.

- Enemy populations are based only on the character's level. You could call this reactive, yes, but it doesn't matter if you have experience with the enemies of the reach or not. No matter how many hagravens you kill, they just start spawning once you hit level 20. They have no purpose for being there other than providing an adequate challenge. Encounters simply are, regardless of the purpose of where they show up.

- Loot is bland and has very little tie-in with the area it's located. They are just peppered around the map and generate based on the character's level. There's no storytelling being done here. It's just: "You ran dungeon? Here's a bag of randomized shit."

- Characters follow a rigid schedule and don't deviate from it unless you kill them. Rarely do the players choices meaningfully impact the NPCs around them.

- Quests have very little choice. You can rarely fail them. You very seldom have an option to deviate from expected parameters.

- Radiant quests have no impact on the world. They are just momentary diversions while you kill 5 bears. Doesn't even matter which bears you kill, just kill bears.

I mean, I could go on, but the changes to the world from what the player does are purely cosmetic. You either get to pick whether a town has a red or a blue banner later on down the line. That's about it.

Meanwhile, back in 2000, Morrowind did everything that Skyrim tried to do story wise infinitely better. The choices you made established lasting impacts on what was available to you, and what consequences you faced later on down the road. Something as minor as one NPC disliking you could lead to a complete roadblock in a later quest. Some quests would force you to kill NPCs that would later have some impact on a quest that would leave it unable to be solved properly.

Sure, Skyrim's combat was a step up from Morrowind. Its graphics were pretty decent. Yeah, the game was more balanced and progression was much more fluid, but at the end of the day, when we're talking story and world, Skyrim can't hold a candle to what Bethesda achieved with Morrowind.

Everything that people rave about with Skyrim is fancy illusions projected on a blank wall. It lacks any real substance. Was it a good game? Yeah. But not because it has a particularly good story or simulated a world overall that well. It was simple, it was expansive, and it had very good methods of engaging the player and creating a variety of distinct activities for the player to engage themselves in across multiple plays. That much it deserves credit for, but acting like it's some kind of paragon for storytelling/simulation is somewhat naive in my opinion.

Skyrim's story in a nutshell:

"Dragons are back. Dragons are bad. Kill the dragons. Oh, also, these two idiots are having a political disagreement about whether we're allowed to be xenophobes or whether we should bend the knee to outside powers for mutual security despite being slowly dominated by opposing interests. Those dragons sure are scary, though..."

Morrowind's story in a nutshell:

"Hey, so, there was this living god that used Dwemer technology to raise some mortals to godhood, and he decided that this was probably a dick move, so he tried to put a stop to it with the help of an actual god. The other four guys didn't like that, so they may or may not have murdered him using psychically poisoned candles and then created a false religion based on lies and assassination. One of the four didn't like what the other three did to the fifth guy, so he chewed the other three out and disappeared after an insurrection. Meanwhile, all this bad stuff starts happening, and everybody is being told that it's because demon guy is back and trying to end the world. But... Yeah, turns out that the temple is lying to everyone and has no idea how to fix this. Oh, and also one of the three guys has disappeared and nobody's seen him. Oh, and another one of the three has gone insane. And also, the remaining guy may be lying about just how powerful he is, and may not possibly be a god. Also, you have to decide whether to kill these gods or kill the demon guy after uncovering one of four conflicting accounts of all of this, and then figure out who to side with and make choices that will ultimately potentially kill millions, ending an era."

^And that's only one of the four interpretations and basic plotlines.
Feb 12 2016, 12:05 pm
Fairly well said Ter. I don't just 'dislike' Skyrim because it's not Morrowind or Oblivion, it was one of the first games I ever let myself get bought into the hype, I bought it early, I pulled a 48 hour stretch, and after that I just never wanted to play it again. It's so, so, so very shallow. Like I said earlier, it's nothing more than a minimum viable product which has been fleshed out to attract the largest amount of lowest common denominators. I don't dislike games like Skyrim, infact I quite love them, but Skyrim was basically my first, or close to my first, that I played in the genre of 'generic fantasy medieval RPG', and every one I've played since has stood to prove to me nothing more than how terrible Skyrim is.
Feb 12 2016, 12:31 pm
I just want to reiterate. I called Skyrim a good enough game. So we're definitely in disagreement there, I just think it's overrated in certain very specific areas and people often don't realize just how badly they are overrating/misrepresenting what the game is especially when compared to other titles made by the same company much earlier.

Oblivion was shit, though. Your opinion on that one is bad and you should feel bad. Holy good lord was Oblivion awful. ;P

Everything I said bad about Skyrim was also wrong with Oblivion, and everything I said that was good about Skyrim was also done poorly in Oblivion.
Feb 12 2016, 12:43 pm
I recently got Skyrim (two days ago), and I've been enjoying it quite a bit, but definitely not like I enjoyed Morrowind all those years ago, that game was mind blowing, especially when you really stopped to really do things out of the normal.

I've never really finished Oblivion, I played and got distracted by side quests and DLC content since I started off with all the DLC just like I am with Skyrim. It wasn't terrible as far as an RPG to dive into goes, but when comparing it to Morrowind I wasn't too impressed.

Skyrim so far is a bit conflicting for me, I miss all of the stat depth from earlier games at the same time I'm liking the simplified way it handles stats and trees. I do miss acrobatics and athletics though, as broken as they got in higher levels I always loved jumping from rooftop to rooftop and ledges and stuff as a nimble character. At higher levels it was terrible though.

Fun side-story on this note, my first experience with Morrowind after leaving the starter scene was walking out of town, hearing a scream from the sky and a guy falling to his death in front of me, on his corpse was a book about acrobatics and jumping really high plus a bunch of equipment to buff your agility and acrobatics, unfortunately he jumped too high and died. So I literally started Morrowind with the ability to run really fast and jump really high... made my first go-through really interesting.
Feb 14 2016, 7:18 pm
In response to Ter13
I won't argue if you think Morrowind is a better game. I have never played it, but I have heard many great things about it. I was mostly using Skyrim as an example of the whole dynamic, open world RPG "genre" in general. I was comparing these types of games with those that have a much more linear style.

I do think that Skyrim is overrated. I really hate the combat. It almost feels like the developers were actually trying not to focus on combat. There are basically no combos, and no cool moves. It's all just bash and slash, and no, the random cinematic kills do not count.

Also, the AI is just terrible. I have to admit though, that it was kind of amusing when an enemy was standing on the other end of a bookshelf, asking me if I'm there. Enemies should never give up chase; especially not draugr deathlords. You can kill many things that should be way beyond your level just by repeatedly attacking and and running away. These enemies shouldn't just sit there and let you torment them like that. They should go to the ends of the world to make you pay.

Skyrim does have plenty of story to it though, not to mention lore. Skyrim is overflowing with lore, and that's a great thing. The books alone add a great deal of character and realism to the world. The random items are way too generic though. They should have fancy descriptions like in Dark Souls. That game understood that books are not the only things that tell stories.

Where Skyrim really excels is in random encounters, and the countless personalized stories that they can create. It's a spooky feeling to know that different types of enemies can fight amongst themselves, and choose targets that they consider to be a higher priority than you. This is a strong point in Skyrim's AI. It's a simple feature with amazing results.

Another great thing that adds to Skyrim's world is the fact that NPCs will actually acknowledge your existence BEFORE you try talking to them yourself. The only problem is that their limited dialogue eventually makes them sound like a broken record, but overall, it still adds realism to the world.

Also, Skyrim's towns have laws to a certain degree, and there are guards that will actively try to enforce those laws upon you. Do something bad and you will be confronted by guards, who will react differently depending on whether or not your weapon is drawn. You may then have the option to fight or flee, bribe the guards, or be sent to jail. You might even be able to persuade them.

Sure, the "main" story may not be that great but that's just a chunk of the much larger game. The important part of Skyrim is the journey, not the end goal, unlike so many other games. I think the developers understood that there is more to fun than just games, so they made the world itself a fun experience on its own. The concept has some things in common with Minecraft. Minecraft can have stories without really having a story.