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Indigo Prophecy Creator - No More 'Porn Narrative'
simoniker writes "There's a new postmortem for Quantic Dream's console title Indigo Prophecy, as described by creator David Cage, online, and one of the most interesting sections in the 8,000 word postmortem is how the game has tried to reshape storytelling for games away from the basic: "One of the key points in Indigo Prophecy was the idea of getting interactivity and narration to work together. Most games oppose these two concepts or rather, they develop them in turn: a cut scene to advance the narration, then an action scene, then another cut scene for the narration. The structure of this narrative process is very close to that of porn movies.""
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Watch the porn Pirates and you'll find that even porn can have good narrative strength. It's the first porn movie I ever watched where I was actually engaged by the plotline moreso than the actual sex.
I had the opportunity to see one of the developers talk about this game at the MIT "Innovation in Video Games: A French-American Dialogue" conference, and was quite impressed with the vision that the developers have for this game and for gaming in general. The main point that they wanted to make that was games (especially FPS) seem to spend most of the time appealing to what are very reflexive emotions (fear, anger, greed, etc.); while there's nothing wrong with this, they pointed out gamers can be involved just was well by more subtle emotions. A big draw of MMORPGS is the social interactions, and these developers wanted to try and bring a wider range of emotions to other gaming forms. They mentioned trying to incorporate things such as love, sympathy, and sadness, with the goal of creating a more immersive gaming environment. With so many games being rather weak in the plot department, it refreshes me to see people focusing more on story and emotional immersion.
You'll probably enjoy The Opening of Misty Beethoven. The Pygmalion storyline, some very good acting, actual humor, real breasts, sexy women.
Regards,
Ross
...that someone bitching about the narrative flow of a game had such stupid-ass things as 'button pumping endurance'.
Look, I understand the dichotomy between cutscreen and action, but plenty of adventure games manage to tell a pretty engrossing story with the player remaining in control 99% of the time. Look at the Broken Sword 1 and 2. (3 got a little consolely, but the problem wasn't the cutscreens.) Or The Longest Journey, where the only real cutscreens are speech and the few times the character herself is not in control. (And TLJ 2 did their little thing of controlling three characters, too, at one point at the end walking them all into the same cutscene. One character got there, you switched to the second, you walked them to where the first was, you had part of a cutscreen, you flipped to the third, you walked them in where the conversation continued from that point. That actually sounds kinda dumb when I said it, but it wasn't.)
Indigo Prophecy, on the other hand, was so annoying I ended up stopping it five minutes in.
And, incidently, their little 'bending the story' idea via emotions isn't that original. Tex Murphy: The Pandora Directive had that, too. Solely based on whether or not you acted like an ass, a normal guy, or a saint determined on how much and which of the three people at the end trusted you, which had a rather large effect on the final ending sequence. There were three 'paths' with eight(1) total endings, and six unique ones. (I.e, of the six, some you can reach via two different 'paths', and in some of them the most you could do in the final scene was save the world, but not yourself. (You could go back to a little before the last scene and make some choices that at least let live, but you couldn't switch paths at that point...if you'd been a jerk the whole game you'd never get the girl and probably get shot in the leg, just not killed.)
And it wasn't just the ending. Your dialog would come out more snarky, at once point someone would delay you a few seconds instead of trusting you as you're trying to save someone else and get her killed, people would fail to pass on an important clue and you'd have to do some extra work, etc. OTOH, if you acted like an ass, you had a lot more money. (You owed basically everyone in the game money, so part of the way to 'play nice' was to pay them back with the big fat advance you got on the case.)
1) Incidentally, you'll see all the reviews, and the original game material, say 'Seven endings'. It's known there are only six unique videos for ending, so the best guess is that Access Software meant seven endings total, and didn't realize you could reach one of the 'medium' endings by staying on the worst past until after some stuff happened (The girl I was talking about got killed, for one.), and then go back and do some of the good stuff you should have done earlier.
If corporations are people, aren't stockholders guilty of slavery?
Except it's not just the ending that's poorly done. The whole game is poorly written -- it's just that you don't realize it until the end when, instead of resolving any of the various questions raised, they just start pulling cyborgs out of their ass and saying "Oh, that happened cause a cyborg did it" or "Oh, that happened because the mysterious ancients controlling everything did it."
There never was a N64 Final Fantasy, only a SIGGRAPH technology demo that ran on Silicon Graphics hardware. That myth was debunked here some months ago.