Gameplay vs Story

Serious question Holla Forums:

Why do games now focus less on gameplay and more on storytelling?

Let's face it, motion capture technology struggles to cross the uncanny valley and is light-years behind films in capturing expressions. Cut scenes often break the flow of gameplay, and combat sequences do little in the way of character development.

In short, it seems like vidya is stuck in a limbo between the world of games like sports and table tops, and the world of stories like film and novels. Where should it be, where is it heading, and why?

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magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/bursting-flavor-2003-02-24
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The people with the dollars don't understand video games, but they understand movies. So they treat video games like movies that you have to press buttons while watching.

And you have the modern game era.

You are wrong. They focus on appeasing the lowest common denominator.
A lot of the additions in Fallout 4 is purely gameplay focused rather than story but it still sucked.

Casuals love their movies. Playing and mastering a game is too hard and time-consuming.

Personally I think in-game expressions and AI (like in Half-Life 2) is the better choice. I just tell myself the cinematics-craze is just an experimentation phase until we can finally develop real convincing AI that can react to the player in real-time. But that's probably just wishful thinking.

There is your answer. In the beginning, board games were composed primarily of games which tested the strategic ability of players. The prototypes to Chess and so forth. Then you had real Chess and other games, which tested only the ability to play. In time, games became more complicated. Where board games like Chess shifted into ones like Monopoly, to become more casual, they also expanded into more complicated games. War games and the like, generally of a historical basis.

Human beings are storytellers. It is our nature to tell stories. If we did not, we would not look to learn about the world around us, have a multitude of religions, or properly detail events which had transpired. We are the only animal truly capable of doing this. Ants and the like can bring back information to simulate this, but one ant cannot simply go back and say "Hey, there is food here, I saw a dead squirrel, let us go eat it". Humans alone can do this. So when we play games, we do exactly that. A particularly exciting thing happens, it is made memorable.

So table-top gaming began to shift. First, there was the addition of fantasy elements into what was once a historical genre. Then there was the revolutionary decision - a game where you made an individual character, rather than controlling entire units. With this, the win-lose scenario stopped. You simply played the role of a person. RPGs began to branch from there. Some games focused on the game itself, wishing to be as realistic as possible. Others focused on narrative, making the players into heroes. Others were simply adaptable, changing as was desired by the DM.

Video games have had a similar evolution, moving from games like Pong, to ones like Space Invaders or Gauntlet from the arcades, to the various genres today. There was constant innovation within the world of gaming to get to that point. The problem is that so few people today have the creativity to continue that innovation, while there are many people who wish to tell a story, but are not adept enough at it to do so in film or novels. So they resort instead to telling it within video games, because the standard is lower for what people expect out of writing quality. The highlight of what is meant to be a game becomes a shitty story of lower quality than the average mass-produced d20 Module. And you end up with The Order: 1886 or The Last of Us as the result.

There's also the other side: The games which went in the Monopoly direction, become more casual so others can play them. It's from those games that you wind up with Fallout 4 and the rest of the shit which plagues today.

In essence: gaming evolved as table-top did. However, as it is a different medium dependent upon technology rather than pure human imagination, its evolution has simply made it inferior.

You can summarize it with one word, it's a plural and starts with "c".

I don't go to Holla Forums but I feel like they'd have a fit over your statement. "They understand how to sell movies." is what you mean.


This.

RPGs are still games by their nature. Just because you have a more involved story doesn't mean the game underlying it suddenly stops existing, and rarely do they ever test anything beyond your ability to play the game to succeed, rather than how well you act like your character. The biggest difference between them and previous board games is game sessions being strung along a common narrative and a long-term goal to.

Don't birds tell stories though? Harper Lee was a bird.

Coconuts?

I thought you were going to talk about how the rise of modern videogaming has meant moving further away from that in videogaming than ever.

Because gameplay is stagnant with only a few patterns applied all over (called genres). Novelty makes people engaged and right now it's easier to come up with fresh story than fresh gameplay.

It really helps that most people don't really see tropes in stories so every new story is unexpected to them.

Mark Rosewater of Magic the Gathering used the flavor for things that explain mechanics in a game. The pieces in Chess are named that for a reason.
magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/bursting-flavor-2003-02-24

Not all RPGs are strong along by a common narrative and goal. Some are run in an episodic format, with different characters rolled up each session. It depends on the group.

However, you cannot lose. It's not PCs vs DM. It's the DM running the game so PCs can do things in it. Even death is easily corrected at higher levels, just as it can be remedied by having a binder of rolled up characters on standby.

Other board games are generally different. Only one player can win Monopoly, Catan, and so forth, excluding possibilities not listed in the base rules. Video games also differ in that there is generally a "LOSE" possibility - death being the most common one, forcing you to go back and do what you were attempting over again.

When people talk about polish, they mean how similar it plays to other games.

Casualization.
Story focus means less interactivity, less skill requirement thus being more accessible & potentially having more sales.

Because making good gameplay takes some effort, as far as video games autists go they wouldn't be able to tell a good or bad story if it face fucked them.
You still see morons claiming that spec ops was deep.

Zing.
We have a winner.

Muh story ain't the boogeyman it used to be two years ago. Now it's no challenge.
And for 15 year now, it's been bad teams making bad games, good teams getting broken apart.

What RPGs are you playing - or rather, who are you playing with? There are clear lose and failure states in the design of most RPGs - success or failure in the campaign or session's goal, and the DM/GM is meant to be the arbiter of the rules that allow this and to challenge the players. If a player's character dies, they've lost - they need to start over at that or another campaign. If there's a TPK or some other failure to complete campaign's goal, they've all lost and will need to start a new game. If people choose to ignore the rules that define how the game is played and what constitutes as a win or loss then that's on the players, not the game.
If a death can be reversed, then it's not a loss, as the game allows for it to happen within its rules. There are plenty of video games where death can be reversed as well.
The player is starting up a new game at that point - they've lost and have left the game and are now rejoining the game with a new character.

I think that story games are just as worthwhile as gameplay games.

Silent Hill, LA Noire and To The Moon are great examples of games where the experience is most memorable because of the story, whereas games like Bayonetta, Just Cause 2 and DOOM are far more memorable for the gameplay.

Both have pros and cons, and neither one outweighs the other.

Because story telling is easy and most people are happy with mediocrity. Making a game that is fun to keep on playing once it has been beaten is a lot harder.

Gameplay

Let's face it 99% of all video games are fucking shit because the amount of great programmers that are also storyteller are scant and in between. Plus say it was a great story but an absolutely shit gameplay would you even play it, fuck no. Look how many shit stories there are but amazing gameplay.

Muh video games are art is honestly why, all these new "devs" can't make it in the film our tv industry but they know that video games are riddled with people like them that don't give a shit about the game aspect of video games, and with all the fanboyism in gaming culture new they can get away with it.

Simple explanation: It's easier to make trailers for
It's easy to make trailers for graphics, so graphics are the main development focus
It's easy to make a trailer for story, so writing is given more focus
Gameplay is merely something people are forced to make, the same people who failed film school.

But whats the point of story GAME if there is no/barely any of what makes it a game in the first place? I dont see why shit like gone home and the order 1886 had to be games aside from incredibly low standards. Why cant games be games and movies be movies and be done with it.

They had to be games because no other medium would accept quality as low as that, except comics.

Gameplay takes more effort.
Devs are lazy greedy fucks.

My usual approach is: I come for the gameplay and I stay for the story.

Storytelling is only good when they don't just TELL you everything but instead reveal things as you play the game. Movie games are barely games and barely movies so they're usually just overrated shit with bells and whistles that normalfags will laud as the greatest bowel movement since their last one.

Story is like salt, you need just enough or you ruin the dish. Some games need no salt or barely any. But a game that needs an entire salt mines worth of salt shouldnt be a game. Look at the smt games, they do story with gameplay real well, especially persona 3.

Sissy faggots want "games" that pat them in the back and tell them they are awesome, any game that doesnt do that is instantly shit. See Far Cry 1 MUH MUTANTS, Hotline Miami 2 MUH GLASS WINDOWS, etc

It ended up being a race to lower the standards so any retard could have that, so how else can you do it more easily than making an animated movie a letting the retards pretend to themselves that its a game?

Don't get your hopes up. In my experience AI, while more gratifying to work on, takes a lot of time and attention to detail to make in contrast to ingame cinematics programming.

And we all know how big companies feel about hard work

The people who majored in film got rejected by hollywood, they then went into video games and are now trying to live out their failed dreams

I blame kojima and the hordes of drooling fanbois who worshiped him like he's the second coming of christ

Trophies and achievements are more cancer.

Take off the nostalgia goggles.

Old games had plenty of cutscenes - although in their case it was mostly pre-rendered videos playing.

...

They were usually short and infrequent, though. They didn't feel the need to interrupt you every 10 minutes.

the faggots who act like a director does anything is even worse

it's like going to burger king and thanking the manager for making a good burger, not the cook