Yeah, they could need some new writers, at least in advisory function. I would recommend getting narratives who made TV-shows earlier. Bungie did that and since then the story narrative just became better in D2.
There is an entire Marcus series.
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Arguably they would be better with people who understands how to write for the video game format.
The closest thing I see to this type of media, would IMO be thater. Primarily because unlike movies, where the camera is “inside the scene” (although some clever stuff is possible), because a play has to take the viewer into account and adjust to dealing with the audience.
gl hf
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You may be surprised how close both areas of story writing lie together. Bungie hired screen writers for their game Destiny 2 and since Beyond Light the Story narrative has been awesome.
I am not surprised by how frequently there are games created (like Detrot: Become Human) as if video games are movies, and then fail in the process.
Even those that do this imitation fine, like Alan Wake, still struggle. (it had rather bad commercial performance)
It’s true that many people consider that if both kinds of media are based on visuals, then they can be build in a similar fashion. So it happens, this approach does not always work, to put it lightly.
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Hold up. Are you telling me Detroid Become Human is a bad game to you?
It started pretty cool. If it would end right after the hostage scene I’d call it great.
But it did not.
Felt like all “his” games since Indigo Prophecy (Omicron is just a too special game to put it among the rest of the works). Half of the game is the introduction of an interesting concept. But then the time comes to actually make use of them. And it feels like a random dog ran in during production and stole the script.
gl hf
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I guess it is just not your type of game. Metacritic shows that the game has very high ratings. I myself think it was one of the best story-mode games we had in a long time.
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“Interactive movie”? I would not say so. There are nice adventure games, like Dreamfall. Or recent Tex Murphey.
I’m glad they do. I saw how many people praised TLOU2. Does not mean it’s good for everyone.
Depends on the preferences. To me among “big budget” games the standouts would be Portal games and Bloodbourne.
Some other nice appear here and there too.
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Ok, not really an argument, but a few things to flesh out the direction I’m thinking in on that topic:
The episodic nature of patches does lend itself more to a episodic story style than a cinematic one.
Modern TV-shows aren’t that episodic anymore. Often as not they are made for streaming and won’t really care about ending their stories within their episode.
Be it a movie or a TV show, both make you part of the audience.
You can do that in a game, of course, but that’s a visual novel, not an RPG. You can have a visual novel within an MMORPG, but that’s not what the MMO genre is about.
RPG elements come in, when the player actually has some agency, and his decisions and actions have an impact on the world.
Since there is a massive number of players in an mmo, though, there is little room for that, since most changes you can do in the world, would change it for others as well.
Most MMOs that have a decent plot actually seperate the plot from the shared world. The player character can be a protagonist, he might even be able to make decisions that change how the characters around him react, or even which characters live or die, or what peoples are doomed or saved. But that’s a game within a game. The other players won’t ever be impacted. The story is still not an intrinsic part of the multiplayer game.
What players do necessarily share in an MMO, is the game world.
The shared world will never react to the decisions of the player.
The player will always react to changes in the world.
In an MMO the protagonist isn’t the player. It’s not the NPCs. It’s the world itself.
The character that needs to be most consistent is the world. That means every single change has to be made in a way that fits in with all the rest.
Any story arc in an MMO has to be a character arc for the world it plays in, and it can and should be measured by how well it does that.
World-building is everything in an mmo that actually tries to focus on what makes an mmo special.
TV shows and movies don’t tell that kind of story.
Getting TV writers can make for a better side-story, but it probably won’t make for a better MMO.
WoWs story needs meticulous world-builders, not crafters of grand narratives.
World-builders of note are rare. The best authors of any medium are great world-builders as well, but there aren’t many people focused on it.
I can only really think of P&P-creators that would be expert in that, and I’m not sure they usually have access to the best people.
Gnomes are cool.
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I agree. However, I think the main issue is when games attempt to mimic the storytelling of movies. Some directors have been involved in the creation of video games and in spite of their experience as movie directors they’ve managed to make some interesting games. Steven Spielberg worked on Medal of Honor (1999) and that game wasn’t praised for its narrative as much as it was praised for its gameplay design, with enemy AI that is probably more complex than the AI we see in most modern shooters. Josef Fares, a Swedish film director, created the games Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons and A Way Out – both are games that utilize gameplay mechanics in interesting ways to tell the narrative. They aren’t as filmic as many other game stories are that are created by veteran game developers. Perhaps because Spielberg and Fares were smart enough to realize the strengths of the interactive medium and utilized these strengths rather than inject filmic methods of storytelling.
Yes!
When World of Warcraft was released it streamlined many elements of other MMORPGs at the time. In earlier MMOs you could change the world, and that change would be visible to other players. Star Wars Galaxies was really interesting in that regard as players could create their own towns where actual players had to act the role as mayor and decide on taxes that players inhabiting these towns had to pay. On the back of the box of that game it reads: “Experience the greatest Star Wars saga ever told – yours.”
Now, World of Warcraft obviously did a lot of things right as it reached a popularity never before seen and it remains unchallenged to this day (although that may be changing?). World of Warcraft managed to capture the spirit of adventure much better than Star Wars Galaxies did. However, the change from telling the story through the world to telling the story through cinematic cutscenes has been gradual and a phenomenon that has occured throughout the industry as a whole. World of Warcraft was rather late to the whole “player as protagonist” thing, and in comparison to the competitors they’ve done this particular aspect worst of them all. You don’t have any agency over the story in World of Warcraft.
When BioWare released Star Wars: The Old Republic I praised them for their storytelling, but it did not take me long to realize that Blizzard had actually done story better than BioWare. Because BioWare didn’t make a story for an MMORPG, they made a story for a single player game, and as a result the world felt like a static background rather than, you know, a “place”.
… and “place” sounds like such a weak word, but it feels apt. A part of me wanted to write something more grandiose, like “living and breathing world” or somesuch, but such hyperbole isn’t necessary I think. The simplicity of World of Warcraft was its strength, and any attempt at something complex has not been particularly satisfying. It has been outright damaging.
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