4 ms·
I'd tend to agree. I think games need to be better about "picking a camp". Many games try to force a strong narrative into an open world design, and both quali
by 015a 5y ago
I'd tend to agree.
I think games need to be better about "picking a camp". Many games try to force a strong narrative into an open world design, and both qualities end up faltering because of it. Examples: Mass Effect, God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, most Ubisoft games.
The best open world games tell very light narrative. They may have tons of lore to fall upon and discover, but there's otherwise very little arc to the narrative you're progressing through during your time in the game. Examples: Dark Souls 1, Breath of the Wild.
The best narratively-focused games severely limit players' freedoms in how to approach the high-level narrative beats. Some great ones do give some freedoms in how to approach tactical situations (The Last of Us 2), but this doesn't impact the broader arc. Other examples: Bioshock/Infinite, Nier Automata, Portal 2.
There are vanishingly few examples of games which actually do both with high competence. I'd list: Witcher 3, Red Dead 2, Dragon Age Origins as examples. One quality shared among these games is how weak their high level narrative is allowed to be, in exchange for much stronger shorter side-narratives. When people say Witcher 3 has a great story, what they really mean is: It tells tons of very high quality short stories. Similarly with RDR2, the overarching "end of the cowboy" narrative is great, but its the ambient storytelling of the world that sells it as having great storytelling chops.
The bigger issue with narratively-focused games is how the game needs to convince the player that this was worth being a game, and not a TV Show. I feel games like those listed above (TLOU2, Bioshock, Nier, Portal) do this very well, because the beat-to-beat gameplay is compelling despite the strict world architecture. But, many other games which tell strong narratives falter too quickly in providing great gameplay (Telltale games, Firewatch, What Remains of Edith Finch) to justify it being a game. I don't generally hold this against the game, because ultimately if you want to tell a great narrative, and you know how to build games, you'll tell that narrative through a game, that ain't bad, its just one medium among many. But I also fully understand the counter-argument; its sold as a game. People have expectations going into a game, that it won't be a movie, yet that's basically all Telltale ever made, Bandersnatch-style clickable movies.
Discussions like this are one of the things I love about gaming; its such a nascent medium, its still trying to find its footing and what makes a game great. Why is Breath of the Wild so much better than Immortals: Fenyx Rising? I've played both a ton, I've thought about it a ton, and I still don't feel that I have a compelling answer which wouldn't be a 200 page essay. BotW copied a ton of gameplay elements from earlier Ubisoft games. Ubisoft then copied a ton of gameplay elements from BotW for Immortals. Yet, the Ubisoft products are never as good. What makes BotW special? Can Nintendo replicate it for BotW2? Do they even want to? Probably not; despite developing the same franchises for decades, Nintendo rarely retreads gameplay ground; so, follow-up question, how the hell is Nintendo so good at consistently creating new gameplay experiences? Why have so vanishingly few companies replicated their production success?
- megameter 5y agoNintendo has a different core business model, one which is hard to replicate in another public corporation because it goes against the norm of making the quarterly results look as good as possible: Instead of scoring a hit and immediately trying to line up out yearly sequels, or trying to greenlight productions based on a marketing pitch alone, Nintendo typically rotates out IPs to match with prototypes and marketing concepts that have been on the go for a while. Likewise, they tend not to go the route of filling the shelves with a checklisted set of SKUs(e.g. 1 action, 1 RPG, 1 sports game per business quarter) - they will jump on some trends and occasionally dabble in clones and sequels, but their bread and butter has come from a more gradual approach of making each product focused, coherent and unique versus making it incrementally better than a competitor. Ubisoft - and most of the publishers - can't do this because they're set up to make games that are large in scope, boast technical excellence(an ever-increasing bar) and are destined to be yearly franchises: quantities of assets and features are given precedence over coherence, which means that you get a trail of papercut discontinuities, dropped balls and lack of focus throughout the experience. Coherence has a degree of power over the game experience that is probably hundreds or thousands of times that of scope alone: it means that the software, assets and design work well together instead of creating "door problems" that dev time is spent solving. This means that a game built around a design that coheres well is automatically more polished since it never had to compromise the experience to solve problems. Nintendo regularly takes design shortcuts to this end, omitting entire categories of assets. The true polar opposite to a Nintendo-style approach is something more like Bethesda's open world games: the game that's launched is a simulation engine with a large sandbox scenario. It may work and be playable to completion by itself, but the underlying product focus is to use it in a way supportive of tinkering, modding and exploitative gaming - to let the player bring a complicated system "off the rails". This tendency towards simulationism goes all the way back to Bethesda's origins in making stat-heavy sports sims. It makes for a less immediately digestible product, but one that can garner a devoted fanbase because it promises to give you most of the scope of a certain kind of role-playing fantasy, and then you can mod in the last little bit that will make that fantasy complete. So they don't have to worry so much about making it cohere, because the player is using it as a design tool.
- BashiBazouk 5y agoIt's funny you mention RDR2. For me it's the best example of why I hate fixed characters in open world video games. The protagonist in RDR2 is a perfect representation of my uncle. Looks like him, sounds like him, dresses pretty close. Now I like my uncle and all but have no desire to spend 40 hours or so playing him in a video game. I did not last long in single player. Multiplayer was cool but it turned in to the same as the first: a Texas hold-um simulator with a very involved character customization mini game...