So what's the least badly written Biocuck series?

It's not Mass Effect (should have let the Reapers win or never let the hordes into the galaxy) or Tumblr Age. The others though?

Jade Empire is pretty good tbh as long as you can ignore that half of it assumes the path of the closed fist isn't evil while the other half assumes that it totally is

Gay Sex Empire

KotOR 2 had pretty good writing. I forget what it was about but you got to jedi and shit

KOTOR2 wasn't Bioware tho.

They're all shit.

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It's absolutely correct though. Name one game that eveyone can agree is good that emphasizes story over gameplay.

yeah but Bioware did the first one so it's their IP

Its actually really well written if you ignore Sera. You feel like building an actual inquisition crusade.

It's impossible to find one game that everyone can agree is good that emphasizes gameplay over story.
Nevertheless, I'll attempt it and say MGS3.

Good point, but for the "least badly written Biocuck series" award then the TORtanic would have to be less badly written than, for example, Mask Of The Betrayer. Highly doubt that's the case.

That alone is an impossible task.

No it isn't. Sure, some contrarians will pop up and say that the game is shit, but they're not people.

Get the fuck outta here.

Tetris is the perfect computer game. You have to be an utter faggot to disagree.

I'm not sure why you're providing your opposition with ammunition.

I mean you've just challenged us to name a game which everyone can agree is good, but then told us we're allowed to disregard anyone who doesn't agree.

and bull and gaymage and …

The quote isn't about putting story over gameplay though. The quote is saying that story in games is just a vehicle to give the player a reason and motivation to play it.

VNs and cRPGs would be good runners for your challenge though. Perhaps grand strategy as the gameplay and story are joined at the hip.

BioWare has repeatedly shown they aren't able to write a moral system that doesn't end up having one branch being a rude baby punter.


Go away Biocuck.

Any good classic RPG since their gameplay is all crap.

Jade Empire feels like they wanted to go with a sort of liberal vs conservative thing going, where open palm is welfare and safety nets and closed fits is free markets and individualism, but being leftist children themselves they were incapable of doing this and so made the conservatives into meany poopoo-heads.

I do disagree.
I know that it's low hanging fruit, but video games are a subjective medium. What's perfect to you isn't perfect to me. The end goal of any video game is to entertain you, for as long as it can. A perfect game would entertain you forever.
I would've agreed with you however if you said that Tetris was a flawless game. I know that flawless and perfect are synonyms, but I what I mean by flawless is that there is nothing you can change about Tetris that can make it any better than it is.

Then why measure what is good and what isn't? Why aren't there threads about absolutely garbage games? If there's no objectivity, then there's no point in anything.

What about adding a cute anime girl that loses clothing every time you get rid of a line?

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However that's really just saying "it's shit and can't be improved" since its gameplay is simplistic boring crap.

im not a fan of tetris, but i respect it

pretty sure that wasn't bioware though

Which version of Tetris? It's been released a thousand times over and we could argue endlessly over which particular edition is best.

(Gameboy is deprecated trash)

follow the fucking conversation you nigger

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Carmack said that in reference to why they tore Tom Hall's elaborate storyline out of Doom to make the game focused on being an FPS. It was made in an era where you played Pen and Paper rpgs to get a story and the majority of the time the story was printed in the game's manual and didn't appear in game. When the only way to tell a story was to stop everything and present a cutscene or just imply it. And he clearly thought the latter was a better option.

This wasn't the only time he simplified something to make it better and not bog down the experience. He also had the same mindset as to why they removed the stealth elements from Wolfenstein 3D. They slowed the game down and players just wanted to gun dudes down with the minigun so they focused on that instead.

Bare in mind the industry vastly changed in just a few years. After Doom there was games like Half-Life that completely told their story unabridged. Carmack apologetically copied Half-Life and even had an extensive story sequence at the start of Doom 3 and games like RAGE. Both games also featured cutscenes.

Carmack was also much more interested in video game engines than he was actual game design. While he did play games he was way more interested in designing worlds. It was to the point where he didn't want to license Doom's engine out because he thought it was a waste of time giving tech support to other companies when they should've focused on creating Quake's engine. John Romero was the one who was responsible for licensing Doom's engine.

I really dislike when people bring up this quote today because it was much more relevant before games like Half-Life came out.

The answer would depend upon who you ask. I like to round up my thoughts on games and try to help others by recommending games that I liked. Hopefully if I help games I like get more sales, then more games similar to the ones I like would get made.

Come on now.

There is objectivity in games, but its focused more on the technical side. Stable frame rates and bugs and glitches and stuff. I'm on the fence about whether or not game mechanics would be considered objective details.

2bn debt btw

What the fuck? No, DOOM 3 was clearly taking from System Shock with the voicelogs and such.

Jade Empire and Mass Effect 1 had a very interesting lore and writing


yes it's really great

The game literally starts identically to half-life with a non-combat story segment where you explore a section of the map before a big catastrophic event occurs and you start corridor shooting. There was also clear influence from System Shock but the Half-Life comparison is the most noticeable. Even back when Doom 3 came out people used it as an example as to why it "wasn't like Doom" since it was more like Half-Life.

The quote still applies, even if the man who said it has recanted. You can't have a good game with good story, if you try you'll fail at either one. If you focus entirely on story, you get a Walking Sim/Visual Novel/non-game, an interactive movie. But if you focus entirely on gameplay you get a game, which is what you were trying to make in the first place. It helps that the people who really care about story in games are such complete faggots.

God damn why don't these stupid things reset after posts

Oasis may be known for being heavy drinkers but that's a bar tab that impresses me. Guess keeping the salt flowing needs more lubrication than I thought.

they can always try

Nigga what

There's a huge gradient between "walking simulator" and "action game". I'd even argue there's a huge gradient between "walking simulator" and "story driven game" because it's extremely hard to actually care about a story if you can't influence it or in the case of Gone Home/Dear Esther you're not actually witnessing it first hand.

why did you bite the bait user?
i mean he had the bait flag

Read his next post.

Because I've heard this shit constantly on Holla Forums

excuse me?

The stories in those games aren't what I would call good. To even have a story in a video game you need to draw from the cinematic or literary. Games that are more cinematic or literary lose when it comes to gameplay. The more cutscenes, dialogue sections and false player choice you add onto the game, the more it drags down the gameplay.

15fps makes this game unplayable.

what

I'm sorry but to me that sounds extremely pretentious. Like just because a story isn't the Great Gatsby or Citizen Kane that means it's not "good". Something's chosen medium doesn't matter when you're creating a story.

To me good storytelling is effective, makes you remember things about it and makes you actually feel invested in what's going on. A lot of the time the plot itself isn't actually what's the most gripping aspect of it but rather the way it's told. It's why Star Wars was so notable when it originally released despite having a generic fantasy plot, it was told exceedingly well for it's time as a science fiction story since most sci-fi was really slow and dry.

I put Metal Gear Rising Revengeance on there because while people wouldn't normally say the storyline is "good" it does things most "good" stories people bring up don't even really do that well. It has an extremely memorable cast of characters. It has a villain that is so memorable he is quoted and referenced years after the game came out. It is an adaptation of a series of earlier works that manages to stand out and its storyline is interesting enough that it keeps the player interested in what's going on. And it does that without ever subtracting from the gameplay, it's a brilliant game to S rank and people generally enjoy it more for the gameplay.

Like I said you don't even need cutscenes to tell a story. That's just the superficial you're focusing on. You can tell a game's storyline without ever removing control from the player, Half-Life being an excellent example. You can also tell a game's storyline without even telling it directly. Like how Dark Souls tells most of it's storyline through item descriptions and subtle things in the world you explore without ever giving you the full picture.

For example by your definition something like the Order 1886 would be considered "good storytelling". Can anyone even remember what goes on in that game? Who you play as? What the point of the story is? Who the villain is? It is cinematic and draws upon history, films and literature with it's art design and the way the story is told and next to nobody cares about what the actual story is.

Focusing on things that other mediums has done as examples of good storytelling to me is regressive. It puts things like films and books on a pedestal and treats it like it's the only valid form of expression. When in reality when films originally started being made they weren't considered high art, and most "high art" films weren't even well liked until long before they released. The same with animation, before Walt Disney it wasn't even really associated with children's programming and was generally very vulgar. Now you'd be hard pressed to find someone who would disagree there are good examples of storytelling in animation.

I think it's only really a mater of time that people start recognizing that you can tell a good story in a game and do it entirely with gameplay. And I can't wait til it happens. Because it's annoying to me that people put so much stock into cutscenes and things being "cinematic" to excuse lame characters and pointless storylines.

Why should there be good story in games? Why can't games just be games? The people pushing for more story in games just want their bullshit legitimized. They want video games to be a serious medium. Why the fuck should they be? What's wrong with games without story?

Because you can have both


Games are still games. There's room for all kinds of games. I'm not saying you even need a story to have a good game. What I'm saying is that a game can have a great story and it doesn't need to rip off a film or have hundreds of cutscenes to do it.


I don't really give a shit if games are taken seriously. I just care about seeing more innovative ways to tell stories and currently I think video games are doing that pretty well.

Why shouldn't there be?
Having a story be in a game does not prevent it from being a game.
And I think that they're stupid too, because the games that they decry as helping the medium grow usually try to emulate film and books when telling their story, and not using the inherent interactivity of games to tell their story. Pic related is basically my thoughts on that type of crowd.
Games have the unique opportunity to not tell the point a -> point b -> point c story.
Absolutely nothing, and lucky for you most of the most successful games of all time do not have a story.

You seemed to have fallen into the trap of believing that the only stories that can and are told in games comes from Naughty Dog movie games and Sony's dreadfully derivative upcoming line up of games.

There are books, movies, plays, musical compositions, even television shows with stories that far outshine anything that could possibly be done in video games. Why should game developers waste time with story when they can make the gameplay better, improve the graphics, or make the game run more efficiently? If you want the innovative story telling that video games supposedly bring, just stay with Dungeons and Dragons or some other Tabletop RPG, because that's what they're made for. The bare minimum for a video game is a game that has been digitized: can you tell a story with monopoly or snakes and ladders?

Either BG1&2, pre-beamdog, or Neverwinter Nights


I don't think you understand how intellectual properties work; KotOR never stopped belonging to Lucasarts and atari

That's really short sighted.

Like I said above movies weren't really considered to have "good storytelling" until decades after they came out. They were treated like simple entertainment and it wasn't until film historical societies and more complicated stories that actually took advantage of film as a medium started to come out that people considered it high art.

Like for instance the earliest films were just static and never had the camera move. They were just adaptations of plays and were entirely silent because it was well before audio was possible. Even when audio was possible you mostly had things like the Three Stooges. People didn't really care about film as an art form back then and didn't even think it was worth historically preserving until the 50s and 60s.

Films like Casablanca and Citizen Kane weren't well regarded until long, long after they came out. Casablanca was considered as just another movie the studio was churning out that year when it was being produced. And wasn't well recognized until after Bogart's death. Citizen Kane got negative reviews upon it's release and wasn't well liked until decades later.


You're assuming game development is like you're filling water in a bucket. Like if you get developers to solely focus on making more levels and more weapons in a game it'll make the game better.

When in reality that isn't the case. Most of the time the same developers aren't even working on that and players generally need some kind of story to grapple onto to care about anything that's going on. Even games like Serious Sam have an extremely loose and silly story that is just there because if it wasn't, the player would get bored and not understand what they need to do. Story also shapes the game in subtle ways. Like in Serious Sam the game builds towards the final level with how it's paced. You have more wide open and less urban environments at the start of the First Encounter and have more closed and city environments towards the end. And you approach the Great Pyramid at the very end of the game, which it was building to.

It's a very basic framework for a story and it needed to be there in order for the designers to even know what kind of levels to create.


again, regressive. "Just stay with the old shit" mentality. It's like saying "why bother owning a cell phone when you can just stay with a pager that fits in your pocket? Cell phones are even too large to carry"

There's also grade A dogshit stories that have featured in books, movies, plays, musical compositions, and television shows that are outclassed in story when comparing them to fucking Space Invaders.
Motion for the player, or framing for the actions that you are going to be doing.
RPGs are adaptations of those things. The Elder Scrolls without a story would be pretty difficult to play.

Definitely not Mass Effect. I put that shit down about 4 hours in. First of all, it wasn't even an RPG. Secondly, I don't remember the details, but I remember part of the first mission on some planet involved you trying to convince some guy that this other person is evil. Thing is, you don't single fact to back that up. If I recall correctly, it was just a vision you had. The game keeps asking you to act irrational and there was no option to not be a fucking retard so I just quit the game.

Can second Jade Empire. Most of it is nostalgia bias because I played it when I was 10 years old, but looking back the story was fucking great but the dialogue quality is very mediocre.

Pic related.

The classes were even more distinguished in the second game. The sniper class the Infiltrator for instance could turn invisible, the engineer could spawn a mobile decoy to draw fire, the vanguard could use an ability to phase through objects to attack an enemy through cover etc.


You watch a cutscene where you see him shoot a dude in the back of the head and have a witness who saw it.

But are told that it wasn't adequate proof and that you needed hard evidence to convince them. It's later revealed it's partially because or racism and partially because he's considered their best agent that they consider the witness too traumatized to give an accurate testimony. It's only when you give them an actual recording that proves he was to blame that they go after him.

It breaks one of the fundmental rules of an RPG. In fact, people on this board actually had a fun conversation about this for a few months before Fallout 4 was released:
You need to either have complete creative freedom or none when it comes to character creation. The reason for this is because if both you and the developers are making a character, then it's bound to be a character with compromises and not a complete, cohesive vision of someone's writing.

Mass Effect already has a backstory, voice, and personality for your character. All you can change is his looks, class, and gender. This is not a complete vision, therefore playing the role of the character would be pretty challenging considering there isn't really any character to play.

The best way to look at it is that there are 3 way to handle the PC in an RPG game

Not to mention how shallow as fuck Mass Effect is mechanically.

Here OP. It's a timeless classic.

In terms of mechanics it's hard to find similarities between all rpgs that don't follow into those categories

The Witcher doesn't even have classes and has less variety in your options (since you can't exclusively play a spellcaster or exclusively focus on alchemy.)


So does Geralt of Rivia. Does this mean the Witcher isn't an rpg? The same with JC Denton and Adam Jensen. Mass Effect even somewhat fits into that mould slightly more because one thing you forgot about the game is it also lets you pick your backstory. You get the option to pick where the main character was born (In space, on a colony or on Earth) and where he was stationed before the events of the game.

The former option is mentioned throughout the game (at the start, sprinkled throughout. Like on Noveria) but also adds a sidequest that doesn't exist in the others. Like the Earthborn origin adds a sidequest where a dude who runs in a gang you used to be in wants your help with something.

The latter option modifies some dialogue throughout the game (Like at one point a character mentions visiting the monument to you on a planet you were on) but also modifies a sidequest. Like the Major Kyle sidequest changes significantly if you picked the Ruthless background. The cult you have to negotiate with was actually driven into insanity by the player's actions prior to the game.

I actually somewhat preferred this compared to just coming up with a meaningless backstory because it actually impacted what went on in the game. And when Dragon Age Origins went even further with this I liked that even more.


To me this is also regressive because it focuses on superficial shit. Like for instance


This is just superficial. Like if the player can completely alter the looks and plays as a silent protagonist that makes it an rpg. By this definition the original Saints Row is an rpg because you play as a silent protagonist and you can change his appearance. Saints Row 3 even added stats but has a voiced protagonist so it isn't an rpg by this definition.

There are also very notable exceptions to this that completely throw a wrench into this idea. For instance. The game Arx Fatalis is a dungeon crawler rpg where you pick between 3 classes, the character's backstory is set and you can select stats to your leisure to play the game between multiple different builds. Almost nobody thinks it isn't an rpg. And it has a voiced protagonist. So by this extremely narrow definition it doesn't fit into being an rpg because it has a voiced protagonist.

This is going to be something people will eventually be forced to relax on in the next decade because almost every rpg in the future is going to have a voiced main character. And people can either relax on the idea that genres aren't set in stone or they can be stubborn and act like they're still living in 1998.

To me this is like thinking an FPS can only have the protagonist be a space marine. Forget about everything that matters mechanically, just cling to something superficial that really doesn't matter.


I used the example of the Witcher where you can only play a character who uses swords, and you essentially build the same character and embody the same playstyle as everyone else who plays the game. At least Mass Effect varies whether you can used a shotgun or a sniper rifle during a runthrough.

Silent Hill 2, but there's going to be someone that pretends it had a shit story just to be a faggot.

There's a default male shep and femshep for the game, though, and while I agree that this mixup of developer-made and player-made character traits dilutes the character, in this case, there is a default version of it that many people finished their first playthrough with. I myself, if playing male shep, just go with default character, because it feels the most appropriate.

I get it, you're not too keen on a story, but don't you think a good story would help?

MDK series. 1 & 2

I think the point the gameplay user is making is this: gaming is a zero sum endevour. You have Z money for a budget. If you put X into the story, that's X that isn't going to making the game. A good story is nice, but a good story (and graphics) are like the whipped cream and sprinkles on an ice-cream sundae with the gameplay being the ice-cream. If you have lots of ice-cream, the lack of cream and sprinkles can be a niggle but it's not the end of the world, it's still very yummy.
Order 1886 showed what happens when the ice-cream is forgotten about. A perfect ratio is great of course, but I'd rather have lots of ice-cream and not risk it cocking up.,

Bioware wasn't involved in the first game and second game sucked because Bioware

Fun Fact: It was planned for JC Denton's sex to be selectable. It, like other things (see the route where you stay with UNACTO) in DE was cut from the game.

To put your post another way, as far as I know, there are also four ways to handle an AFGNCAAP
character:

1. Have the antagonist drive the game's plot. Baldur's Gate 2 works this way. Jon Irenicus is driving your choices, you try to keep up.

2. Have the player's party members and allies provide a major chunk of the character interaction and story direction with the player character providing a management role, being a "behind the scenes" authority or some kind of "unknown hero".

3. Have an apparent AFGNCAAP where the character looks to be ambiguous, but is actually a character with a set past, ties to other characters, etc. Planescape: Torment does this.

4. Be a sandbox game like Elder Scrolls.

i played jade empire when i was 12 and i was 100% immersed in that game, idk if it was because i was retarded or writing is good, but looking back i only see pleasant memories

I might be remembering it wrong, though.

Came into this thread to say this.

Not everybody has to like the story of SH2. And that's fine.
Also most people are retards and can't separate their subjective opinion from the objective standards. In other words, if they don't like the game they won't admit it has good things or that it's good.

The mass effect series had a pretty good story overall

Nigga get the fuck outta here
Ghost trick had a fucking unique gameplay and mechanics and artstyle which really stood out
That is what caught everybody's attention
The well written story was just a bonus

I'd like to say MDK but I'm not sure if they actually made the first one or not.

They're all horribly written.

Good prank bro

You can't have an RPG without a good narrative, otherwise your choices have no weight to them, they're worthless and empty, and you need choices to role play properly.

Now I know that you're either baiting really fucking hard, a massive fucking idiot, or just an invader from plebbit.

Yeah, you can, provided your rpg isn't shit mechanically.

stolen != bad

You can have a combat simulator then.

The trend towards a greater emphasis on narrative has come directly from the tabletop. The more established the genre became the more of a demand for a greater emphasis on (emergent) narrative there was.

It was stolen and bad.

Yes, and that's how we got "rpgs are about story" and "where's the skip combat button" idiots.

btw music anons could compare Star Control II & Gay Effect soundtracks, I get similar vibes, how much is stolen?

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no it aint, fight me bruh

Great argument.

Not an argument.
Also I got triple triplets, what's your excuse?

TGM obviously

Because yours was a marvel of logic, right?

Not being a dubs faggot.

It was trips, not dubs.

Same difference, you're all the same kind of subhuman shitters.

Don't be a sore loser.

Nigger.

There are fucking flash games which do that shit user. You might as well argue that Angry Birds is unique. And the artstyle is really just the classic cel-shaded stuff.

Not to say that stuff wasn't great or enjoyable, but you are fucking kidding yourself if your think it wasn't the mystery story really got people hooked to the game.

Jesus, have I gone back in time or something? Next you'll be telling me FF7 is the best RPG ever.

Swede.

That was uncalled for.

Talk shit, get hit.

If I'm a Swede you're a German.

Not as bad as Swede.

That's like saying one turd doesn't smell as bad as the other one. They're still both turds in the end.

The plot of Mass Effect is completely ripped off from Star Control 3. SC3 is a shit game, but holy shit the plot is the SAME.

SC3 is about an ancient race of aliens that every millions of years, it emerges, destroys all sentient life, then returns back to where it came from. There was a race that avoided this (the precursors), where they devolved themselves so they would be spared, but the machines that are supposed to revolve them after the danger passed, malfunctioned, leaving them in a De-evolved sate (space cows). ME1, completely rips this off, right to the point of finding that race that managed to survive the Reapers.

Zelda is weeb shit. It's always shit. You excuse the shitty gameplay because it's muh zooldas and you meme about it to your shitty friends. It's pleb tier shit for g4mer girlz. Fuck off.

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Go away Biocuck.

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I just wanted a videogame where I can be a secret agent in space and instead I got the average Bioware "ur da chosen one!" story

KoTOR 1 is the best written BioWare game there is, but its writing pales in comparison to Obsidian's KoTOR 2.
BioWare was never good at writing. It was okay at best, and it only got worse.

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Most overused excuse.

Despite what people say, the first installment of Dragon Age was not bad, the first Mass Effect was alright too (I'm not a fan of the second one and the third is complete shite).
From the release of those two games spelt the utter doom for the company as you know of course, they never released a decent title after that.
KotOR 1&2 are fairly decent games, do some reading about mods and bugs before you jump into them as there's a lot of cut content that can be modded back in.
NWN 1 is a classic, I still play it to this day and there's still mountains of content to do with it since the community for it was massive back in the day.
Jade Empire was never a particular favourite of mine but it gets good reception from nostalgiafags often.
Baulders Gate 1&2 are pretty decent, although you should look into their fan made remakes instead.
A lot of Bioware's games suffer from being P&P rules whilst being real time which can make them extremely frustrating to play so if you don't like playing them at first don't expect it to get better.

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Neverwinter Nights

did you forget the character setup in system shock 2?