Now, before we get too deep into this discussion, or more accurately me rambling and ranting to my heart’s content and you sitting there nearly falling asleep from reading this stuff, let me first clear something up. When I say “narrative” throughout this writing I am thinking mostly along the lines of story and how it integrates within the gameplay to form a complete experience, rather than simply a game of pong with someone standing behind a curtain narrating the eternal struggle between these two fierce competitors... er paddles.
Of course, narrative comes in several forms, and I am totally cool with that. But to keep everyone on track, including myself, let’s settle on the possibly flawed definition I mentioned above.
This whole topic is somewhat of a continuation of my recent rants regarding stories and gameplay in games these days not really offering the player anything other than a distraction... not taking the opportunity to open the player’s mind to other issues, ideas, or events that affect us, not only as gamers but as humans. So if you found that previous piece to be boring or ridiculous I advise that you turn around, head back to the ticket booth and demand a refund. The rest of you, please be seated, the main attraction is about to begin...
I have been playing a ton of games again lately... had slowed down for a bit while Mass Effect 1 and subsequent DLC and PC version came out over the last year... but I am back to my usual self playing games pretty much every night again...
One thing I have noticed recently... well noticed again, recently... is that a lot of the games that I enjoy the gameplay in are brutally lacking in story to drive that game forward... The narrative isn’t complete without the story and gameplay firing on all cylinders and in sync with each other for me.
Games like Halo, Gears of War, Resistance, God of War, Metroid, and countless others are all amazing games and their gameplay is some of the best out there... but I always walk away from them and feel like something is missing... there is often a disconnect between the story and the gameplay, or even worse... lately they all rely on brutally predictable cliffhangers to keep the player wondering, rather than having a strong enough story to get the player wanting to play the next one anyway.
I generally finish the game then find myself having to replay the whole thing again just to actually make sense of the usually completely broken plot and story continuity... think I am exaggerating? Try to tell me the plot of Gears of War 1 and how it makes sense... especially if you only played through the story once, and didn’t read someone else’s dissection of what everything was and how it was all connected. How did I get on that train? How about any of the Halo games... can you honestly remember anything beyond “Covenant are bad, I shoot them” and “Rings are weapons of mass destruction”? If you really paid attention you would probably throw in a third part about “Forerunners have some role in all of this”. Otherwise, I challenge most anyone to give me a proper recap of those stories...
Now, I could easily make a comparison to movies in this case... and I was going to... right there... but I held off when I realized I was about to Michael Moore all of you reading this right now... I would have inevitably made some comparison to a movie with an amazing story like Philadelphia, or Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Matrix, Lord of the Rings, Marley and Me, Wall-E, The Dark Knight, Seven, etc (some of those were chosen by Tia... I’ll let you guess which ones, you’ll probably get a couple wrong J)... The problem with making that comparison fair actually comes down to 2 major issues... The games I mentioned kinda fall closer to the “Summer Blockbuster” or as it’s now called “Michael Bay” tree in terms of their movie equivalent... meaning that the story and plot take back seat to awesome explosions and amazing effects. A closer, but still not accurate comparison would be something like Lord of the Rings == Baldur’s Gate or Oblivion (less Oblivion due to its more sandbox-like structure rather than a linear story path), or Star Wars == Mass Effect... but then I get into the whole issue of I am talking about the shooters rather than the epic long RPG’s. Conversely, the closer and again inaccurate comparison for something like Gears is probably something like Bad Boys 2 (shudder... sorry Cliff if you ever see this...), Halo is maybe something like Star Ship Troopers (minus the cheesy but awesome dialogue) Now that I think about it, it was unfair for me to compare some games to movies in previous posts given certain limitations for each format... but maybe that is the issue... we need to find ways to make those limitations disappear. The other is that the whole issue I mentioned at the start of this rant is that I was looking for story and gameplay in one place... movies don’t have that interaction element that games have, so they only really need to deliver on the one front... (don’t you dare try to tell me “but Blu-Ray has interactive features...”, that’s a cop out and you know it) effects and explosions can be done across both so they kinda cancel each other out.
So I guess when you think about it, movies are just as “guilty” of this “crime” if you really look at it as “fairly” as possible... also, I need to stop using quotations in rants...
The difference for me I guess is that if you look at a movie that falls under that “Michael Bay” tree (sorry, I already failed myself), you’re probably watching that movie for about 90 minutes, in rare cases maybe 120, whereas those games are generally in the 6-10 hour range. Games have to fit gameplay into that time frame so they don’t have all of that time for story exposition and minute details... or do they???
Thinking back to a recent gem, a little title called “BioShock”, Ken Levine and the team at 2K Boston put together found some cool ways to keep the story flowing even during combats and wandering lost among the undersea tunnels of Rapture. Recordings. I know these aren’t new to BioShock... in fact they appeared in older games from the studio, but BioShock took it a step further and brought it into the present. BioShock was a little longer than Gears or Halo, at about double the length, but offered similar shooter style gameplay (with RPG elements... so again, not a perfect comparison).
This rant is kinda losing its steam and I actually have chosen to not do my usual proof reading this time around, mostly because I am trying to get a bunch of articles out that I have been working on for a few weeks... so I apologize for it being even more all over the place and unfocused than my usual stuff... but I am going to end on this one point...
I want games to evolve a little in the future... and not a huge thing, but it will have a huge effect, at least on a guy like me...
My idea of the perfect game?? A story mode that lasts about 6-10 hours, consisting of a story that I actually can recall at the end, that opens my eyes to something new or an issue I may have been ignorant about in the past, obviously has to have exciting and progressive gameplay, and should have a multiplayer component, preferably both co-op and adversarial...
Will this game ever happen? ABSOLUTELY! Why? Because people are so busy with other things in life these days they don’t have time for 100 hour epic games anymore (or at least a smaller percentage of the population still has the luxury of that much free time than in the past... I might be saying that because I have run into the fact that I can’t sit down with a game like Final Fantasy VII and devote the hours I did when I was 16 in high school with no major responsibilities). And the other reason it will happen? Because I am making it right now... and it’s not the project at work that everyone is dying to know about... This is something I have been working on for a while from home... and with some luck will be pitched to the powers that be in the very near future.
So my “perfect” game (I used quotations here because perfect doesn’t exist, and likely never will with games) is on the way... from someone else or me... but it’s going to happen, just going to take some time.
Over n Oot,
b
Oh, I should say.... one game that has come SOOOO close to nailing my description of the perfect game that is already on store shelves and hits a lot of the issues mentioned throughout this rant... Call of Duty 4... Not only is it the best multiplayer shooter of all time on the consoles in my opinion, it has a story that pushed some boundaries few have even thought to talk about let alone actually have in a game. The intro alone should get you pumped just at the thought of what is to come after you see the mature issues tackled during the driving sequence. And the final mission with the American soldier should seriously be commended as one of the best moments I have seen in a game in decades. So, as I mentioned at the end of the “actual” post, there is hope.
Pay careful attention at about the 40 second mark to see what I am talking about regarding the mature content in the opening.
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