When a studio says it invested tens of millions of dollars in a game, you can bet the story was the one driving the spending. The studio hired an experience script writer which wrote the most amazing story ever written. Then the artists kicked in and started making the assets to support the story. Problem is, there are loads of them, and because the game is “next-gen”, every asset requires many man-days to complete. And so most of the spending and years of work go for something that they believe should drive the gaming experience for their game. Is this the right thing to do?

Well, yes and no!

Yes if you are making an “interactive drama” game. The last I’ve played (watched?) was Heavy Rain, but I know there are other similar titles out there. Basically you got this movie like game with multiple characters deeply developed, multiple story lines and multiple possible endings, in which your choices decide which path the action will take. Also the game is spiced up with a some controller action and that’s it. You got yourself the most immersive movie ever made, because you are part of it, playing the role of one character of another.

No if you are developing any other kind of game except “interactive drama”. Now you will say the most successful games out there are story based. You have the Mass Effect series, Dragon Age (and pretty much any Bio Ware title), Call of Duty series, Red Dead Redemption, Grand Theft Auto series and so on. Or you will say one cannot have an RPG game without a story to develop. While all this is true, I will give you a few arguments for why this shouldn’t be the case.

First, it is unfair for the player. If the player spends sixty bucks on a game but for some reason it has very little time to play it, at some point it will get bored. It will feel fine about the experience he got so far with the game, but it will feel cheated that he never saw the end of the story, and everything in that game screams the story is the main thing in it. You never saw the end of it, you haven’t played the game, even if you sunk twenty hours in it and you are bored to death with the mechanics.

Second reason, it kills imagination and the freedom of movement. It locks the player in a specific pattern in which it feels captive. There are a number of predefined “destinies” and you can’t escape at least one, even if you don’t like neither of them. Red Dead Redemption has some great mechanics. It is a shooter in the first place, a vehicle driving (horse) game in the second place, and full with mini-games in the third. And it features a nice story. The problem with it is that the story is so long that the last six hours I’ve played were pushed by inertia just to see the end of the story, which made the game look worst in my eyes than it actually is. Same with Dragon Age, I remember the first half of the game, but fail to remember the last, because I pushed through it without too much involvement, just to see how the story ends.

Third, it breaks game-play flow. You have this game where the main fun stuff is to shoot people (or slash them with that big golden sword), but every now and then you must take a break from the game itself and speak with all the characters around, spending more than an hour if you are serious about it, just to get that part of the game down too. Or you have to play a stupid mini-game you don’t enjoy. Any AAA developer would say now: “well, it is all optional”. But I would ask in response: “why spending tens of millions of dollars on optional content? Why not spending those funds for making main content?”. Again, the player feels cheated. It payed the money for the game and now it has the right to play the game as it sees fit. But the game is full of optional non fun stuff that he/she feels bad for not completing, so he/she either plays the game feeling bad, stops playing the game and feels bad about it, or sinks three times more time into it just to complete everything and die of boredom. It feels like a chore. Why should I feel like I’m working while playing a game, after I also spent money on it? Why should I feel bad while doing something I paid to be able to do in the first place? None of these are right.

Why interactive drama is so good and the others are not that good, while all have the common trait of having the story as their main element/goal? Well, interactive drama succeeds because it focuses on the story, and the story only. The story doesn’t feel like an add-on that you are forced to do between your shooting episodes, nor you feel like you have to spend hours on doing the same stuff, like shooting, to see the story progressing bit by bit. The genre is all about pure story with just decision making in its simpler form, and some very basic game-play elements that don’t distract the user from the it.

A game should make the player happy about playing it, no matter it is two hours or one hundred hours of game-play. Games that have too many things stuffed inside don’t reward the player in either situation. If the player plays too few hours, it misses on story and other optional content. On the other side, if it plays enough to see the end of the story, get all achievements and completes all optional content, it is bored to death.

Is there a solution to this? Well, I personally think the best solution to this is the background story. This kind of story describes how things got to the point where they are at the beginning of the game, or various chapters of the game, without being too intrusive and without hindering the player from playing. After the player gets the background story, let him/her follow the game and let him/her make his/her own story in the given setting. There are many games that accomplish this. There are The Elder Scrolls series, Gothic series, Mount & Blade are some very few that come to my mind right now. I realize that many games, due to their genre constraints, don’t offer this kind of sandbox experience. However, that doesn’t mean those games should be plain and linear. There can be decisions to be made by the player in any game, just focused on the game-play and not on the story. The player can decide which region he should take on next, or which tactic should be adopted when fighting a certain boss and so on, but should not be encumbered with spending hours by browsing stupid dialog options. Take for example games like Demon’s Souls and Dark Souls. Those games are full of decisions without having a huge story and the need to stop killing monsters just to parse scripted dialogs with the NPCs.

I think the best way to find out if a certain game is more about game-play (and thus more fun) than about the story is to ask a player who is playing it about his/her progress. If the player would say “there I’ve made the decision X which made the story go that way, then I talked to NPC Y and got to this ending”, the game is just bad. The player does not describe his/her experience with “playing” the game, but how its story progressed, which is not an interactive element, no matter how many dialogs are scripted for it. However, if the player tells his/her own stories that happened in the game universe, how boss X was beaten or which tactic work when fighting a full platoon of enemy soldiers, stories that are unique to his style of play, then that one is a good game. It engages the player so much that in its suspension of disbelief its brain creates stories based on actions made within the game itself. This is the ultimate accomplishment in terms of interactivity a game can achieve.

What do you think about stories in games?

The reason it took me so long to discover this is because music is usually a more subtle element. It is not so “in your face” like graphics and gameplay are. It goes on in the background, giving you various emotions and feelings that you rarely acknowledge as being driven by the music. I started to realize this during my long career (5 years, now ended) of World of Warcraft. There were periods during those five years when I would stop playing, often saying it is for good. Then, something kept me going back. A few times it was the players I would spend time with in my game, other times new content, but most of the time, it all started with the music. I would just watch a machinima using music from the game, or stumble upon the soundtrack CD in my car and listen to it. The music reminded me of the epic moments I had in game, about glory and other feelings high fantasy games try to create.

Then I started to think of other games that had great music and tried to figure out how much the music in those games added to the general feel. Take for example The Elder Scrolls series, starting with Morrowind (the previous ones had some synthetized music only). Try to imagine the game without music. Does it feel that heroic as it did before? Think of the Skyrim main theme, does it make you want to play the game? Take the Baldur’s Gate music during menus, it makes me feel like I’m ready to take over the world! Have you tried one of the more recent Need4Speed games, like the Underground titles, imagine those without any music, would the player still feel like an underground pilot riding in illegal races?

In my case, I think great music helps to set the mood, the right atmosphere for the game, like a completion to the visual elements, and that its role is much bigger than we imagine, even if our brains tend to ignore it because often it is not so obvious as other elements of the game.

What do you think?

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HIT THE LIKE BUTTON of the Facebook page above TO ENTER THE CONTEST. On each “50 FANS” milestone (50, 100, 150 and so on) TWO of the LAST 50 FANS will be picked randomly and AWARDED WITH A COPY OF MY GAME UPON LAUNCH and EARLY BETA ACCESS when the game will reach beta stage.

CONTEST FACEBOOK PAGE:
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Jungle-Troll-Entertainment/174545129257773

HIT THE LIKE BUTTON TO ENTER THE CONTEST. On each “50 FANS” milestone (50, 100, 150 and so on) TWO of the LAST 50 FANS will be picked randomly and AWARDED WITH A COPY OF MY GAME UPON LAUNCH and EARLY BETA ACCESS when the game will reach beta stage.

Here are some screenshots also:

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