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[PATV] Wednesday, January 23, 2013 - Extra Credits Season 5, Ep. 20: How To Start Your Game Narrativ
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Or at least I hope so.
What I think they meant is that if your game requires certain game play mechanics for the narrative to work then you may have issues.
If your horror story requires that you be able to bust through walls, build platforms, and do other unique actions while inside the game... then yes, I'd agree, making the story first is a poor decision.
Being unable to flex on the story would also be a bad situation. As stated things change, maybe new ideas come up, sometimes they're better. Sometimes the best works of art required massive revisions and outside assistance before they came to be what we know today (Star Wars A New Hope).
But at the same time there is no reason one can't have an engaging story and still play it out across all sorts of video games.
Romeo and Juliet, for example, could be run through all sorts of game systems if you were willing to revise parts of the story to make it more engaging to the user while still keeping the core of the story the same.
It could be an RTS, or a first person shooter if it had to be, with a few tweaks in each setting without losing the plot.
On the other hand we have games like RAGE where it appears no story was considered beyond "Wake up in wasteland. Shoot stuff."
This appears to be a game where no effort was made, at all, to create a narrative or any engaging story. Why do these people help you? Why do you go and help them by charging into an enemy stronghold by yourself with nothing but a pistol?
How hard would it have been for them to have added in a companion to your sleep pod, throw in a quick refference to how you have to keep these monsters from getting a hold of your friend/love.
When the badguys come and take the pod suddenly you have a good reason to go chasing after it.
Most of the story could be told with voice overs if needed, flashbacks to old times brought around by the landscape and possibly old pictures your character carries with them.
Instead we get... nothing.
Personaly I think the biggest problem is that people come at games as though the mechanics are the defining aspect. Nothing else matters except the mechanics and... I disagree.
Yes a fun to play game will get much more play, but after it's done we'll probably forget about it entirely.
RAGE had pretty good mechanics, great graphics, but I'd never waste a cent on it again.
On the other hand I'd gladly consider slogging through Mass Effect (1) for the story again.
I'd play through Chrono Trigger just to see the different twist endings.
A little bit of story, when done well, can go a significant ways from taking an uninispired game or even a bad game, and making it fun and memorable.
Portal, while not exactly an example of plot or writing, took some mechanics which were interesting and brought it to life by creating an enemy who was the breakout star.
Do you remember Portal because of the cool teleportation effects... or because of GladOS?
i see your point, and i find it interesting and I'm glad you brought it up. I feel the need to point out a few things. Video games are different from film because of their interactivity. film is a medium of showing a series of events in a certain order, and in film, we've found that the best way to engage the audience is to have a good story/script. but video gaming is a medium of direct experience, you are part of what is happening. in film, you needed to see something happen to someone, and see them react to it, and you are engaged by relating yourself to what you're watching. but in video games, you can actually have that something happen to YOU, and then give YOUR response to it. instead of watching a soldier fight multiple gunmen after losing his own weapon, you can now actually experience that loss of power and be forced to overcome that disadvantage yourself (unless of course the designers use a quick-time event for this, but that's their fault). good game mechanics can, referring to the video, "explore an idea, or convey an emotion" better then a story. if you don't believe me, play that flash game 'loneliness' from the episodes from the videos about mechanics as metaphor. i know that for me, that game conveyed loneliness to me in a way that no movie or book or any other media has even come close to matching.
also, when you say things like, "The "author" is not subordinate to the mechanics of their medium. They need to understand and embrace their limitations." I have to inform you: mechanics are not a limitation on this medium, they are quite possibly the most fundamental part of this medium.
i agree with where you say "games have been stuck in the rut of starting with a gameplay mechanic or new technology and building from there for far too long", but i feel that this is only a bad thing because the mechanics should be based on the idea or emotion that the game is meant to explore, just like the story should.
P.S. i want to clarify that i am basing this on my interpretation that when you said things like 'story' and 'author' you were referring to the plot and it's writer.
Virtually all JRPGs are highly linear. Look at, say, every other final fantasy game ever. The only one with any real nonlinearity to it was FFVI. Every other FF game has been wholly linear - indeed, you could describe Final Fantasy X as "running down a long corridor". Indeed, I remember running along many, many roads in that game. Why didn't the linearity bother me? Because there was a clear destination and it made sense. Look at FFVII - again, linear. Look at FFIX - again, linear. Look at FFIV - again, linear. FFXII was linear too. Even Chrono Trigger is purely linear.
The question is not whether or not the game is purely linear - it is whether or not the game is interesting enough that you don't care and therefore don't notice. Chrono Trigger is hilariously linear despite the fact that you actually TRAVEL THROUGH TIME in it. If you were to draw a line though, you could actually draw your path across the world maps over time, and the only "non-linear" section is at the very end of the game just before the final boss when there's a handful of sidequests you can do in any order.
Heck, most video games in general are purely linear. Only a very small number of them are not. Heck, even most "nonlinear" games are actually linear games - look at Fallout and Fallout 2. Can you do stuff in any order in those games? Sure. Should you? Probably not, there is an order to things.
Indeed, even many "western" RPGs are linear. Icewind Dale is purely linear, for instance.
You aren't actually a normal person at all. You're already a badass when the story starts, which was actually an interesting twist on this - you aren't Joe Schmoe from nowhere, you're Commander Shepherd, respected to the point where you become the first human Specter. You START THE GAME as a badass.
Except you actually don't really change the story much at all. Not only do you follow the same plotline, but if someone dies, then you get an understudy standing in for them. Your decisions really have very limited impact - save the Rachni queen or not in the first game, you still fight Rachni in the third game, and even if you go deal with the Rachni problem you're still fighting them the rest of the game. Save the collector base or destroy it? You're still fighting reaper-tech enhanced Cerberus the entire next game.
The game gives you the illusion of choice, and the third game is highly linear even as far as that goes - and in the end, all those decisions you made barely matter at all for the ending, merely giving you additional choices (and in the extreme case letting you survive) though you can get the golden ending just by playing multiplayer enough. The story is very similar, and helping Larry Potter instead of Harry Potter isn't that exciting.
Now, this is not to say that you can't affect the story in some ways - for instance, the Quarian vs Geth choice in the third game, curing the genophage - but it feels very isolated, and all the major events from the previous games, the chioces that were supposed to come back and matter, really didn't. I wanted to have my allies fighting alongside me in the final mission, and instead I was alone whenever I was wandering around shooting at things. Many of the significant decisions I made - sparing the council, for instance - really made no difference at all in the greater story, as they were peripheral characters who spurned me either way until they had no choice, and if I had let them die, in the third game I STILL would have had to save the new council.
At least in Dragon Age: Origins, when I made my decisions, at the end of the game I actually saw them really interact with my gameplay, as I had groups of allies running around helping me fight based on who I had sided with.
But if you want to talk about choices having impact, Mass Effect is actually a pretty terrible example of it mostly, because by and large, things don't really change. This isn't to say it isn't fun, and that it doesn't try to make you feel like your choices matter. But really, they don't.
Gameplay and story segregation is not necessarily a bad thing, but it can make the player feel disempowered if they feel like their actions don't actually have any real consequences.
While I agree with most of what you said, have you even played Chromo Trigger? This game is the least linear game ever, half of the game can be played in whatever order you want. You can literally fight the final boss 1/3 of the way in the game. You can kill the last boss with your *spoiler* main character dead *end spoiler*. I can't think of any game with a plot that is less linear than chrono trigger.
But yeah I do agree western RPG have the reputation of being non linear, which is absolutely not true there just trying to hide there linearity where JRPG don't. That just make them pretty big hypocrite imo.
Most of the people that I meet often tell me, they hav this awesome story to tell but when I ask them how to present in detail form, they had no idea how to do it, all they have is the story. It's like trying to draw a beautiful painting without knowing which color palette to use. So they end up trying to draw the painting while figure out which color to use ... and result is obvious.
Seriously, for those people who still want to tell an awesome story. There is 3 paths you can go, first, use RPGMaker, it may limit the way you express the story, but it get the job done. Second, Develop your own story telling tool, it might take lot of resource to develop such tool but you get the most flexibility out of it and it most probably cost you a bomb. Third, wait for a better story telling tool ( 3D RPGMaker? )
i see your point, and i find it interesting and I'm glad you brought it up. I feel the need to point out a few things. Video games are different from film because of their interactivity. film is a medium of showing a series of events in a certain order, and in film, we've found that the best way to engage the audience is to have a good story/script. but video gaming is a medium of direct experience, you are part of what is happening. in film, you needed to see something happen to someone, and see them react to it, and you are engaged by relating yourself to what you're watching. but in video games, you can actually have that something happen to YOU, and then give YOUR response to it. instead of watching a soldier fight multiple gunmen after losing his own weapon, you can now actually experience that loss of power and be forced to overcome that disadvantage yourself (unless of course the designers use a quick-time event for this, but that's their fault). good game mechanics can, referring to the video, "explore an idea, or convey an emotion" better then a story. if you don't believe me, play that flash game 'loneliness' from the episodes from the videos about mechanics as metaphor. i know that for me, that game conveyed loneliness to me in a way that no movie or book or any other media has even come close to matching.
also, when you say things like, "The "author" is not subordinate to the mechanics of their medium. They need to understand and embrace their limitations." I have to inform you: mechanics are not a limitation on this medium, they are quite possibly the most fundamental part of this medium.
i agree with where you say "games have been stuck in the rut of starting with a gameplay mechanic or new technology and building from there for far too long", but i feel that this is only a bad thing because the mechanics should be based on the idea or emotion that the game is meant to explore, just like the story should.
P.S. i want to clarify that i am basing this on my interpretation that when you said things like 'story' and 'author' you were referring to the plot and it's writer.
Tribes, Minecraft and Counterstrike are all games that I'd consider to have next to no story, but are still exceedingly good and memorable games. And with Portal, I remember Narbacular Drop for the cool teleportation effects. Portal builds on this base with a story that synergises extremely well with the mechanics. The core mechanic enhances freedom and makes otherwise impossible obstacles passable. The story is all about escaping and breaking free from GLaDOS. The mechanics build on the story and the story builds on the mechanics.
Still, that core mechanic is what drew me to the game and kept me loving it. I can't imagine how the game would have looked without it, because the mechanic is what made it stand out from all the other games. GLaDOS, on the other hand, could be swapped out. The minimalist design forced on the game by the Portal mechanic could have easily been retooled to depict a hospital or psych ward. And now instead of trying to escape from a malevolent AI, you could be trying to escape from the fears that haunt you as directed by some central voice-in-your-head. It would have been a much darker plot, but the same synergy would be there, and you could still have a charismatic voice-over directing you through chambers towards your eventual demise or escape.
If you want to look at the opposite direction, GLaDOS without the Portal mechanic, you can just look across to Portal 2. The largest difference I saw between Portal and the Portal 2 story is that suddenly all the chambers consisted of black tiles. Most puzzles were easy to solve because all the surfaces that weren't necessary for the solution were blacked out. There was far less self-direction here, and far less freedom. This plus the constant bloat of new puzzle elements led to the game feeling much less rewarding than its predecessor. There's no real challenge in completing the tutorial level for a new element as you're led through the solution, but 2/3rds of the puzzles are tutorials as the elements are drip-fed to us. In any case, the story was still very strong, and the whole thing was enjoyable still, but nowhere near the level of Portal. Portal 2 co-op is another thing entirely, and far better than the story mode IMO.
In any case, I believe that a good game is defined by good mechanics. You can have a good story in a game, and, like Portal, a good story can help make a game a great game. But without good mechanics, I don't think the game is much of a game at all, and you wind up left with a good story being told to you while you stand in lifts.
Thanks to Brian Herbert (Frank Herbert's son who wrote Dune.) Gave me a wonderful piece of advice. Don't write everything or include it in available informaton, let the imagination of the player flow. The mystery and imagination of your reader/player is a far better asset than they're given credit.
However, I think have an idea of a story ARC is nothing but beneficial to your game. Instead of designing games to fit a fully fleshed story like the Hobbit, designing the game to flesh out the bones of a story (ie I want to have an adventure with a hobbit and some dwarves, oh and a wizard), gives you the leeway to build a good GAME and have it service the story you want to tell.
I'm curious what EC would say about starting with well-form world to work in. Like having a mass effect style world before you design a game to tell a story from it.
Well, I just think that games are first and foremost an interactive medium. And so to make a good game the interactive parts have to be given prominence and be good in and of themselves.
Building a game around a good story is doable, but without good mechanics I don't think it fits my above definition of a game and instead would fit into some other media type, such as a movie, or even a digital book for games with huge slabs of text. And if this is the case, you either want to do what the Walking Dead did and choose mechanics that reinforce your story by increasing player engagement with the story without offering much gameplay value, or consider whether the mechanics are even necessary in the first place to tell your story. Trying to create good gameplay mechanics that also reinforce your story is going to be very hard, and I think it is more cost efficient to simply concentrate on your strong suit. But if you can pull off both, do so and make another Portal.
Yes actually. The story is on equal footing with mechanics and aesthetics when it comes to game design. Video games are an interactive media that engage the player on levels beyond simply telling a story or and interesting visual or auditory experience, or even something that's addictive to play. Games that focus too much on aesthetics and story run the risk of being boring to play. Games that focus too much on mechanics and story can be destroyed by bad or distracting visuals. Games that have great visuals and mechanics can be beaten by the lack of story.
These aren't just idle thoughts, you can see them in many game designs and reactions to games. The best games are grand combinations of the three, and are as visually stunning and mentally engaging as they are fun to play.
Story, aesthetics, and mechanics have to work in concert until you can't tell the difference between the three. Your story should fit the mechanics and aesthetics, and in many way be told through them. Your aesthetics should enhance the actions you take with the mechanics and help the player engage with the story. Your mechanics should be a way you engage with the story and connect with the aesthetics of the environment. The game should come together all at the same time, with each approach adapting to the others and weaving within each other. It's a holistic approach to games, and you only put one above the others at your own risk.
The video isn't approaching the narrative like it's a lesser part of the game design, it's approaching it exactly as I did above, but as each episode focuses on different aspects of game design you'll have to watch this one with the episode on mechanics and the episode on aesthetics to understand.
Look at it this way, Chorno Trigger has a lot more choices than a game like Mass Effect but the choices that you can make are fleshed out in a way that feels meaningful.
No one has mentioned Visual Novels, a gene of games which are essentially books (the vast majority are choose your own adventure) in game form.
I also wish some examples had been given. ex: I'm thinking about Bastion, and can't think about how the mechanics tell the story? or the combat mechanics of any Final Fantasy game? :P
Sounds like what you really want is a novel or a movie. Narrative is typically a part games, but not nearly as important as gameplay, and other things that makes games fun. There seems to be many people posting here that have STRONG opinions on game design that clearly hasn't really tried to actually design games.
A game's core essence is interactivity.
A game doesn't need a narrative to be good.
For example, Pong, Tetris, Super Hexagon, Sokoban, Chip's Challenge and any other number of puzzle games.
Look at Tetris Attack/Pokemon Puzzle Quest which swaps the narrative and setting entirely. The fact that the scenery has changed didn't affect the underlying gameplay being great.
The only thing that narrative and mechanics should answer to are the experiences you're trying to build. If that's a box of lego which you want players to simply build from, narrative has no part.
So here's what I think they are saying. Don't start with the narrative--which doesn't just mean the story component vs. the gameplay component. The narrative is the characters, setting, and sequence of events. And honestly, you shouldn't start with that in any medium. It's become popular among my friends to start writing, but unfortunately most of them just want to write a fantasy story without having anything to say. If you want to write a book because you thought of this cool fantasy race, or this plotline revolving around a mystic sword being reforged, or these characters who have wacky personalities, that's fine. But you'll just end up with another stock fantasy swashbuckler and not a compelling epic. Use that race or that plotline or those characters, but use them to serve a concept. Deliver this concept and your story will actually have meaning. Is there an idea or emotion or thesis you want to explore? And do the events explore that idea? Don't put in a fight scene because you haven't in a while, make that fight scene tell us something about the characters or the world. Don't have a villain just to challenge the party, have him represent something.
So if this is what EC are getting at, the idea is not that gameplay is subservient to storyline or that storyline is subservient to gameplay. It's that both gameplay and storyline are subservient to whatever it is you wish to convey--be it an idea, emotion, philosophy, etc. The setting of Rapture and the character of Andrew Ryan were some of the best parts of Bioshock. And even though I may be in the minority here, I really liked the game feel too--I loved the plasmids and the look and feel of the weapons. But the game designers didn't start there. They started with wanting to explore the concept of free will. The gameplay, setting, characters, and plotline all rose out of that, and were more cohesive for it.
And actually in almost every way, the Final Fantasy genre of games, which some have misattributed as being the entire "JRPG" genre, start with mechanics first. Because the mechanics of the turn-based stand-in-a-line RPG haven't drastically changed since the first Final Fantasy. Also, there's a reason that the early Final Fantasy games have always been upheld as classics and not the later ones. They've failed to innovate on technology and gameplay that's evolved to allow more interactivity and tactical decision making with the player. While the rest of the world moved on from the static line fighting and evolved how to fight with a group, the Final Fantasy series has been stuck on a model that fit with the lack of technology 15 years ago. The stories of the game could be the most amazing things in the world, but the gameplay is stuck on an almost ancient model.
In Bastion I want you to think about how the level builds itself. The way each level gradually grows as you advance through it enhances the fact that the Kid doesn't know what's happened or what's coming next. Think about how after he takes the shard, how the level starts falling apart. It's so much easier to feel the panic of that than it is to have the left side of the screen push you forwards like in the early Mario games.
Think about how learning special attacks works, how you have to learn them before doing them. Think about how the Kid attacks with each weapon, and how that meshes with the game story itself.
Think about how the dynamic narration combines directly with the mechanics of the game. If you choose to start smashing everything, the narrator mentions it, if you don't he doesn't. The narrator mentions your skills with weapons when you do something with them, and hence the narrated story changes for each person and playthrough. There's also the option to fight waves of enemies, and only through fighting them and mastering the mechanics of the game will you learn the full story of the Kid. The mechanics and the story are interwoven in Bastion to an excellent degree.
If you actually listen to how the game itself was created, they started with mechanics of how the level would built itself, with an isometric viewpoint, and how they wanted to create something that wasn't often done with that. The story was created to enhance that mechanic and aesthetic, and to mesh with that.
The story is the that the Wigglewoggen who lived in Pludgerfat were immortal. They lived to the East of Bruyegfdn and were the opposite of the Migglewoggen. And the speendre did verfusl and ghjsned djhfn2wojiv4ojhrfho4gohngpp.
Basically if you set a game in a world with a rich story, and the only way you can tell it is shoving it in your throat or stick it on NPC conversation options, then you'll just get players who want to burn through the game to avoid it. Didn't help that Kingdoms of Amular had too much to do but very little worth doing. It was a game where you just ended up reading the plot on wikipedia and uninstalled.
The DLC was good though because it wasn't too long. The story was too the point and enigmatic. Just the main story I just really didn't care. Any enigmas in the main story felt forced and infuriating. How dare you game fishhook me in. I don't care about this dark elf lady's past with my character at all.
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The Vanilla Pokemon game series has a strange relationship with story. The narrative seems too convenient to run parallel with your character's personal story of getting all 8 badges to then challenge the Elite 4 and Champion. The Gamecube stories tore away from that structure and had just a Narrative, yet wasn't as well received.
I swear that "dynamic narration" is just another name for "scripted events". Whenever I played Bastion, it always seemed to me that ALL the narration was tied solely to my progress through the level and not anything I did (aside from dying). When it mentions how Kid is going crazy with his hammer, it's because there is an obstruction clear across the path and you had to use the weapon to progress. So it didn't even need to recognise that you'd hit anything, only that you'd moved through the area.
Eventually, this turned me off the game, because if you utterly fail at a level, you have to go through the exact same "dynamic narration" over and over and over. It got as bad to me as text boxes before a boss fight. "A A A A I've already heard this a billion times, just let me try and fail again already"
The point I took from it was that you can't go into game development with an entire story entirely created, all the characters named and described in detail, all of the settings finalized in your head with elaborate descriptions and little maps to be reproduced exactly as-is.
Putting all that effort into figuring out the minutae of the story before you start development is either:
a) a huge waste of time, because to make it into a game most of that is going to have to change based on the team creating it, feedback etc
or
b) a weight around your neck as you struggle valiently to NOT change details that should really be changed to make the game better
If you have the beginnings of a really good story, get rid of any sort of malleable detail and distill it down to its essence and use that to build the game. If you don't have a really good story you can build one organically by doing what James does, or some variation thereon.
Basically, when it comes to video games the most important thing is to make the game fun to play, period. Games that are technological marvels but not fun to play are doomed. Games that have an absolutely stunning story but are not fun to play are doomed. So you need to concentrate on making the game fun to play, and once you have that you can overlay some version of your story (one that makes sense in the context of the game mechanics, technology considerations, team make-up etc) on top of that, and polish the graphics up, and add on the other supporting elements that make a fun game really stand out.
I still remember a former roommate (who is a huge fan of technology as well as video games) several times showing me a new video game that had come out on his souped up gaming rig. He moved the character around, admiring the detail and realism the engine had rendered without a hint of choppiness... I asked him whether the game was any good and he would invariably say "it kinda sucks...but look at the graphics!" and I would shake my head and walk away. Story is like that too- there are a few people who are willing to buy your game and fight through horrible implementation to see your story through to the end, but most will just throw up their hands and move on to something that is fun to play AND tells some kind of story.
I think a lotta these points that're made speak to the inherent differences of games to other forms of art; both in the creation process, as well as 'consumption' by the end user.
The game is very linear, actually - as linear as any other JRPG. You travel through space and time, but its actually very linear - the plot progresses from one point to another to another. Yeah, you can theoretically fight the boss a third of the way through the game, but you die horribly if you try. The main story is entirely linear until you're at the very, very end. You can theorectically do the other side quests before you bring back Crono I suppose, or even beat the game without him, but you're not encouraged to do so - you're encouraged to go bring him back to life, and do the side quests (you don't have to), and beat your way through the black omen to fight the final boss. Sure, you can skip that, but the sidequests are not hugely long and while you don't have to do them in any particular order, the entire game up to that point is linear - the "main story" basically ends with Crono's ressurection, at which point you get the five or so sidequests you can do in any order and the final assault on Lavos, which you can do in three different ways (one of which is the end of the Black Omen sidequest).
But the game is hugely linear. Linearity isn't a bad thing.
Ehhhhh... that isn't the problem really.
Honestly, if you really look at it, the "good" Final Fantasy games (and that is to say genuinely good ones, not "good for their time") were all in the FFVI to FFX era; the games before that were "good for their time" but not particularly good in general (I can't speak to FFV, but FFIV is not particularly amazing; the writing is pretty minimalistic and while it does try, the dialogue hurts the delivery of the story, though the story itself is fine). FFVI was an amazing game, one of the few RPGs of any sort which didn't have a main character (indeed, the only other example of that was Chrono Trigger; I can't think of any other RPG that doesn't have a main character). Chrono Trigger is still argued to be one of the best if not the single best RPG of all time, and deservedly so; it is kind of ironic that many of its mechanics, which were very good, never got copied. SMRPG is a great game, and while it is lighthearted, it was interesting and different to play. FFVII is still widely regarded as iconic of the genre, even though I feel that FFVI was a better game overall - it was still great. FFVIII was a low point, primarily because the mechanical system in it was completely awful and the story confused a lot of people (though I didn't find it particularly terrible). FFIX was a great game, had a very iconic and fun cast, and did a lot of fun things. FFX was the only FF game that actually had an outright good combat system, one of the best intro sequences of any game ever, and the game itself was fairly decent and interesting; its biggest flaw was a few of the characters, particularly Yuna, were a bit flat, and Tidus and Yuna's voice acting was a bit awkward at times. Still, it was a very good game, and the best at the actual -game- part of any FF game.
FFXII tried to go with modern gameplay and it was completely awful as a result. In the older games, the story was continuous - they were purely linear affairs but whatever, it meant the story got delivered. FFXII tried to add in more random stuff and as a result it was godawful. Even if you look at FFVI, the least linear FF game (and in many ways one of the least linear RPGs ever, because of the second half of the game being ENTIRELY nonlinear and yet STILL delivering the story very well because you had spent so much time with the characters you cared about them, and you cared about recovering them and rebuilding and saving the world, meaning that it didn't sacrifice story for that non-linearity) the sidequests weren't really like FFXII sidequests or really any modern RPG's sidequests - they were basically main story quests that you could do in a different order. There wasn't much side content which was just -there- like there is in modern games - you were in a dungeon or a town or whatever for a reason, you weren't just wandering around looking for the ! over someone's head, or trying to hunt 999 rare animals or whatever. More games need to do that. If you put in content, you need a REASON for it, but its fine to come up with the fun game and then figure out how the story works with it - indeed, that can help you even develop the story to be better represented.
Others are much less clumsy. Blitzball in FF10 is still pretty clear, but the Golden Saucer in FF7....could actually have easily been designed because the story writers said, "Go build us some minigames. We want a theme park." (Or it may have been a memo to them that said, "We have all these minigames we built, and only used once. Go find a way to reuse them.")
Others are much less clumsy. Blitzball in FF10 is still pretty clear, but the Golden Saucer in FF7....could actually have easily been designed because the story writers said, "Go build us some minigames. We want a theme park." (Or it may have been a memo to them that said, "We have all these minigames we built, and only used once. Go find a way to reuse them.")
The Darkness II was pretty good, and the first game wasn't bad either. The constraint from being based off a comic book would put in a lot of the limits James was talking about, yet it was actually not at all bad.
There aren't many titles based on non-gaming properties that can say that, but I think that might be more to do with the nature of cash-ins rather than restrictions born of story coming first.
FF style games also suffer glaring disconnects between their story and the mechanics, like when a character dies to getting shot in a cutscene after surviving rockets and machine guns in combats earlier.