the-pi-guy said:
richardhutnik said:
Anything that is driven by a game will undermine the ability of players to act. If the one driving things (storytelling, etc...) is competent, it can work well. However, when it isn't, it is pretty bad actually. The thing is that ic an work well. But often times, it will miss the mark, and you get people very irate over things that don't involve actual gameplay. What happened with the likes of Mass Effect 3 is a prime example of this. People were irate because Bioware apparently dropped the ball with the ending.
//Some people disliking the ending has little to do with the capability of storytelling. You could write the best story ever, and I might still be pissed due to the fact that I personally didn't like it. Games don't have to driven, the only reason they are today is because of limitations to hardware and to money. But as hardware improves, we'll be able to put more effort into making it cheaper. I'd suspect that at some point, we might be able to instead of creating a story and everything else, we could just create characters and the world, then have the characters make the story. (Assuming Strong AI is achieved of course.)
As I said, the issues are there isn't enough people working in the industry to pull it off sufficiently, the medium is harder than any other medium to do stories competently in, and the costs to get it to a place to where it ends up being on par with movies for immersion causes it to cost like a movie. The problem here is the business model for games is not the same as movies. You can't expect them to put out games like Enslaved and sell them for $60 a pop, no matter how good the story and acting is, and expect the studio to not lose money. And you can't do this when you don't have box office to be able to offset costs. Heck, games don't even have the ability to get distribution through cable or TV either.
//In a way the medium is easier than any other medium to tell a story, because there doesn't need to be much of a story to tell. Look at Mario, it has this story of a princess being kidnapped and a plumber has to save her. Video games can get away with simpler story telling because there is more in a game. There are more redeemable properties in a game. Movies and shows don't have to cost a lot. Just because there are $200 million movies doesn't mean that's the way all movies are. There are a few very small budget movies.
Look at where the videogame industry is, and why the are sucking up to Indies now. You have it being said the industry can only afford to do 10 AAA titles a year. And you are now seeing a push toward open world. Idea now is to create a platform to create content and let players end up exploring it and doing this, and sell them more and more content. This way, you can create a situation where players can put up with many NPCs getting arrows to the knee. I assure you, a movie with a lot of supporting cast talking about getting arrows to the knee would end up causing the movie to be panned.
// That's not why they are sucking up to Indies now. They are doing it, because they are able to. Just look at the app store,hundreds of thousands of apps that can be made cheaply and sold for small amounts. They now have a huge network to allow downloads. Indie has nothing to do with cost, you can have expensive and cheap games. A movie about that would be panned, but at the same time, a 400+ hour movie like that would also be panned and incredibly boring. Skyrim was never intended to be a story driven experience. If it was, it would've worked harder on pushing players to make decisions. I could put a ton of time into Skyrim without even doing any quests.
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Read above points.
A game with a story is possible, in fact video games can allow a story that movies and books could only dream of having. Interactivity means that instead of a character discovering something, it means I discover something. It means that the connection between a great video game character could be better than any movie, because I'm able to spend more time with them and the interactivity can mean something.
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Read the WIll Wright article I posted. Players create their own stories in games, and games have potential to generate stories. This is what I was talking about here.
I would have to ask you this here: Does the holodeck in Star Trek Next Generation put participants in stories they play out, or does it put into a game world where the players create their own stories? I could argue here also, that a game world can have a timeline that players interact with, but the best games don't have pre-canned stories, but give players potential to create their own. Even a good RPG would be like this, at least if you consider pen and paper variety it isn't. When players look back, they will see a story they created, BUT the story didn't come to be until they did it.
I also write this here say this is the proper way, becaus to try to fight against this is lead to the budget issues games have today at this point. Feeling a need to spell out all the game flow and narrative angles, and doing that with replayability means producing content players very likely will never see at all. And tons of lines never heard, and so on. And then you have something players play through once and trade in. Industry loses money on it, and then wants to end rentals because of this.
As for it getting cheaper, it isn't going to get cheaper, because what you are working on ends up being very labor intensive due to being handcrafted. It won't get cheaper, because actors will need to get paid, and handplacing everything in the world, and coming up with precanned missions, is going to be costly, likely more costly than other ways, and run into cost disease factors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol's_cost_disease
Overall, look for, when it is all said and done, players paying over $100 for a game, with the additional DLC added that people pay for.
Note, what I speak of here is crafted levels, and gameflow and so on. I am NOT talking about building dynamic worls players interact with. Dyanmic worlds are environments people interact with and create their own stories. It is not a game that is driven by a story. Open world games with dynamic missions would fit into this also.
