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Interesting ways to buck the trends of game design and storytelling
UncleSporky
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
I've been playing Planescape Torment recently, and I know it's often praised for the things it did different at the time and still does different compared to many games.
For one, they made it a personal story rather than saving the world. This allowed for a relaxed pace most of the time, searching for clues and doing things for people for the sake of being nice or evil rather than because it will thwart the villain's plot to destroy such-and-such. It let us explore a living city as it is, rather than everyone worrying about its fate.
For another, as far as I can remember there are only three battles in the game that are absolutely required. Three! And this doesn't include the final boss! With high enough wisdom, intelligence and charisma, you can talk your way through almost anything. A thief can stealth his way past the rest, of which there isn't much. That's extremely cool.
One quest involves working to mess up an idyllic young relationship at the lady's request, which can actually have positive results. The woman is named Juliette and her lover Montague...Chris Avellone has stated that he was sick of all the Romeo and Juliet quests to help lovers get together, and he wanted to do the opposite for once.
I applaud stuff like that. He also gave us a floating talking skull as a party member (more novel at the time) and a chaste succubus.
It's got me thinking about game design/storytelling and atypical things you could do that might be fun or fresh. Not different just for the sake of different, but things that can add to the game.
I'm in the D&D mindset here but people should understand what I mean: I'd like to see a real lawful-good villain in a game. A guy who doesn't just believe he is doing the right thing, he truly is doing the right thing by the standards of the game world. A guy who is not clearly insane, but makes you question whether stopping him would be the right decision. This would be difficult to do, since we expect to see a character as the main antagonist. If they do anything we could consider antagonistic, we will identify them as such and won't usually stop to think whether they might be good. One game exemplifying this to an extent is Fallout New Vegas, which gives us multiple people we could side with, none of whom are blameless, but in my mind there is still a clear "good guy" choice. It's still a great example of an attempt at this, though.
I'd also like to see more games where explicitly not doing a quest can lead to better results/rewards than doing it. I thought about this while playing Deus Ex Human Revolution recently. There are lots of things people ask you to do and there's never any good reason to turn them down. They lead to mini-adventures with fun rewards and payoffs, why wouldn't you do them? While many games offer quests you might turn down due to their morality system, I'd like reasons not to do them other than "my character might get evil points." When you think about reasons a real person might not do these things for people, time limitations are always a big motivator...but people get stressed out by that in video games, so perhaps not. One way you could steer people away from accepting every quest under the sun would be quests with no reward at all other than the joy of doing it, not even good or evil points, but that will only serve to make people angry as they try to avoid doing all of these "waste of time" quests. Still, it's something to consider.
One thing that struck me in Planescape that I really enjoyed were the lore time sinks, by which I mean characters you could converse with at length about things that are not related to the game at all, just the overall setting. There are lectures in one building and you can question the speaker at length afterward. There's an art gallery and you can question the curator about everything inside. There's a building where you can experience recorded moments in others' lives for some experience points but generally just for the fun of it. You can trade a bunch of short stories with some characters. And above all, much of it is written in different voices and is accessible and engaging. I found this very enjoyable and would like to see more of it. Games like Oblivion and Skyrim have plenty of books, but I feel like that's the only method of fleshing out they use. Where are the storytellers who don't have a related quest for you? Where's the kitchen where you can talk to the chef about all his exotic ingredients and how he uses them in his meals?
Anyway. Just some things I've been thinking about. Anything that you want to see in games that we don't get a lot of?
For one, they made it a personal story rather than saving the world. This allowed for a relaxed pace most of the time, searching for clues and doing things for people for the sake of being nice or evil rather than because it will thwart the villain's plot to destroy such-and-such. It let us explore a living city as it is, rather than everyone worrying about its fate.
For another, as far as I can remember there are only three battles in the game that are absolutely required. Three! And this doesn't include the final boss! With high enough wisdom, intelligence and charisma, you can talk your way through almost anything. A thief can stealth his way past the rest, of which there isn't much. That's extremely cool.
One quest involves working to mess up an idyllic young relationship at the lady's request, which can actually have positive results. The woman is named Juliette and her lover Montague...Chris Avellone has stated that he was sick of all the Romeo and Juliet quests to help lovers get together, and he wanted to do the opposite for once.
I applaud stuff like that. He also gave us a floating talking skull as a party member (more novel at the time) and a chaste succubus.
It's got me thinking about game design/storytelling and atypical things you could do that might be fun or fresh. Not different just for the sake of different, but things that can add to the game.
I'm in the D&D mindset here but people should understand what I mean: I'd like to see a real lawful-good villain in a game. A guy who doesn't just believe he is doing the right thing, he truly is doing the right thing by the standards of the game world. A guy who is not clearly insane, but makes you question whether stopping him would be the right decision. This would be difficult to do, since we expect to see a character as the main antagonist. If they do anything we could consider antagonistic, we will identify them as such and won't usually stop to think whether they might be good. One game exemplifying this to an extent is Fallout New Vegas, which gives us multiple people we could side with, none of whom are blameless, but in my mind there is still a clear "good guy" choice. It's still a great example of an attempt at this, though.
I'd also like to see more games where explicitly not doing a quest can lead to better results/rewards than doing it. I thought about this while playing Deus Ex Human Revolution recently. There are lots of things people ask you to do and there's never any good reason to turn them down. They lead to mini-adventures with fun rewards and payoffs, why wouldn't you do them? While many games offer quests you might turn down due to their morality system, I'd like reasons not to do them other than "my character might get evil points." When you think about reasons a real person might not do these things for people, time limitations are always a big motivator...but people get stressed out by that in video games, so perhaps not. One way you could steer people away from accepting every quest under the sun would be quests with no reward at all other than the joy of doing it, not even good or evil points, but that will only serve to make people angry as they try to avoid doing all of these "waste of time" quests. Still, it's something to consider.
One thing that struck me in Planescape that I really enjoyed were the lore time sinks, by which I mean characters you could converse with at length about things that are not related to the game at all, just the overall setting. There are lectures in one building and you can question the speaker at length afterward. There's an art gallery and you can question the curator about everything inside. There's a building where you can experience recorded moments in others' lives for some experience points but generally just for the fun of it. You can trade a bunch of short stories with some characters. And above all, much of it is written in different voices and is accessible and engaging. I found this very enjoyable and would like to see more of it. Games like Oblivion and Skyrim have plenty of books, but I feel like that's the only method of fleshing out they use. Where are the storytellers who don't have a related quest for you? Where's the kitchen where you can talk to the chef about all his exotic ingredients and how he uses them in his meals?
Anyway. Just some things I've been thinking about. Anything that you want to see in games that we don't get a lot of?
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I always appreciate stuff like that.
http://twofoldsilence.diogenes-lamp.info/2012/03/do-say-right-thing-choice-architecture.html
(Don't know if you have seen it)
A breakdown about choice architecture in games (by F:NV's project director) and additional narrative system mechanics.
Some of the best stories I experienced are driven by personal, selfish motivations.
I'd like to see a story where the Hero who's supposed to save the world ignores/abandons his quest for personal reasons. Even if it was something so simple as saving a family member instead while the world around him crumbles. The player would get to see what happens to a world when there is no Hero to save it.
Among Obsidian's many failed pitches, that was one of them.
(Well, a bit different)
That's one of the reasons I like Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter so much. The goal isn't to save the world; it's to save your small party of characters by escaping the horrible world that you live in.
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I really should have played that game a chance. I'm a huge fan of BoF but there was something about that game that just didn't appeal to me at the time it came out.
That's pretty interesting. I have to get around to playing Fallout 1 and 2 soon, though admittedly I will probably patch it.
One nice thing about having a personal, non-world-saving story is that it makes time limits optional in a logical sense. We're used to so many games with events occurring that you would assume are time critical but there isn't actually a time limit...well, in a personal story, it's easier to make it logical for the player to spend as much time as they want. Captain Evilman isn't casting his meteor spell as we speak, you've got all the time in the world. And you see this in Planescape where your party can sleep for 8 hours to regain their spells at just about any time and it's usually appropriate.
Every game has a 'lose' moment. You die or fail some critical mission objective or whatever and you get a GAME OVER screen. But what about an ending where you actually fail? I think that'd be interesting to see.
I've become super interested in having the save the world story but having the player character be a side-kick to the all powerful hero. Oddly enough, Oblivion sort of did this. Or like how in your created character worked in White Knight Chronicles.
One of the Phoenix Wrights has this, which I only remember for its notorious typo "the miracle never happen."
There are quite a few games with losing endings, some of them halfway through the game during special circumstances (you fail to disarm the bomb!). There just aren't enough with nicely fleshed out losses, where we see how things play out and maybe have a bit of gameplay under this loss state.
There was also the first Marvel Ultimate Alliance which had a segment at the end where it showed you the results of a bunch of minor choices you made along the game, some of which had terrible results. It was kind of clunky and heavy handed though, and was mostly ignored by the sequel.
As for a lawful-good antagonist, this would be an adaption of an anime, but the character of Zenigata from the Lupin III franchise seems to fit that, and that carries over to the games. Granted, Zenigata isn't usually the primary antagonist and will sometimes ally with Lupin against a bigger threat.
Then in regards to the thread title, there's the obvious stuff like Bioshock and Limbo, or the slightly less obvious Siren.
Ultima VII -- This game, from 1992, has simply the most amazing game world ever created. We're talking about a game where each NPC has their own daily routine based on a 24 hour clock, and if I recall correctly they even behave differently on weekends.
The Witcher -- I think this came out around 2008, it's an eastern European RPG. The game keeps on throwing out moral dilemmas at you, and the consequences of your choices all make sense, but at the same time it's totally unpredictable. Usually it's not so much of a good/bad choice so much as your choices simply have consequences.