| Mr. sickVisionz said: It's comparable to a song without lyrics. You have to really hit it out of the park to make that work. A game with no story needs to be like old school mario or sonic: by design, you will never be bored at any one part and the the stages are pretty short (10 minutes or less). With no story, it's 100% gameplay that motivates the player to keep playing. If that gameplay ever falters, you have nothing to fall back on to keep the player moving forward. |
Several ways here it works:
1. You develop a fun play mechanic (or set of play mechanics) that you put into good level design that ramps up well, and is executed well (think Tetris as an example).
2. You create a sandbox environment that is procedurally generated that the player jumps into and creates their own path. Sandboxes can be in the case of massive-multiplayer online RPGs with no set story to follow, sim/god games where you transform the world, or a dungeon crawl like Nethack where the goals are to level up your character. Borderlands woulod also fit into the last one.
3. Provide multiplayer games which have goals for the players to accomplish, even if it is something as simple as getting to a finish line first or fragging more opponents than you get fragged.
There may be others. In the former, you are in the area of arcade games, and you can give the players goals they try to accomplish, with fun play mechanics. In the later, you give the players a rich enough environment where they can chart their own path and make their own stories. The game doesn't come with a story, but players provide it. In the last one, it is based on human competition.
