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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.""
It's sad that there are such a rare few number of games that do a good combination of narrative and interaction... If only more developers and designers thought like this maybe we wouldn't have people like Roger Ebert saying that games aren't an artform :/
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
... you get FFXII, where you have about 30 minutes of cut-scenes (in engine and otherwise) and then two hours of completely irrelevant to anything "travel to this location we'll mark on your map to get your next cutscene". Granted, its not the highlight of the FF series (FFVI, for example, keeps a *strong* narrative even with the player frequently losing control of the action -- well, OK, you sort of need to propel the story yourself after you get to the World of Ruin), but it was absolutely jarring when I'd get thrown out of the story and told to walk through a desert full of barely-disguised Tusken Raiders.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I played Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy) over 2 days, roughly half and half of the game each day. The first day the story was excellent, the second day, complete and utter cliched dross. It's like they got to the half way mark and just gave up.