Slashdot Mirror
Jaffe Ditches Games With Stories
1up reports on David Jaffe's latest post to his blog, where he rails against games with stories, claiming that moving forward he'll be all about play for the sake of play. From the article: "Jaffe goes onto explain his thesis, believing many modern cinematic games don't properly play upon the raw 'real' emotions videogames can elicit: tension and release, fear and anxiety, triumph and defeat, and confusion and joy over challenges. We're wondering how Jaffe intends to make us cry without playing up the story elements, but we're interested in seeing him try. Maybe Project HL will simply feature an extended Path of Hades sequence ripped from God of War. I simply loved climbing those spiked poles for over an hour."
Good luck. I normally lose interest and never finish games if they have no story.
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
After all, without a story you can do "sequels" (read: Count up the release year and sell it as a new game) more easily.
Games with a harebrained story are a thing of the 80s. Where you could come up with some lame excuse for a story that's not even thin enough for a B-movie and have the player pretend that his block is some kind of soldier shooting some other blocks that represent enemies with smaller blocks pretending to be bullets to free a block that's supposedly the prince... whoops, sorry Mario.
But seriously. What do you want to sell a game with if not story? Graphics? We're already past super realistic 100% accurate graphics. If anything, story is a seller. A good story that keeps you on your toes, making you demand to see what's next, even hard enough that you overcome the most annoying obstacle just to see how it will continue, who that stranger was, who fired that shot in the dark, who is Luke's father...
You can't even sell a beat-em-up anymore without a decent story. Simply because all the rest is, essentially, the same as every other game. What's the huge difference between Half Life and Doom if not the story?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
My favorite types of games lately are dungeon crawlers (Grandia Xtreme, Diablo 2, Dynasty Warriors sorta). I've tried Oblivion but the payoffs are simply too few and far between -- I can only finish maybe one quest a sitting for a grand total of like 43 gold and some rat meat.
For me, FF7 was a good blend of story and action (I've read several references to it being the first "boss rush" game). If only they'd let you skip cutscenes entirely (not just fast-read through 5 or 10 minutes worth) I'd be a happy camper.
Wouldn't a better response to the situation be "People aren't doing a good job with cinematic style games, so I'm going to write good ones?" It seems kind of non-intuitive to say "You guys suck at this type of game, so I'm going to focus on making the kind of game that you get right."
Personally, I don't think I would miss narrative being removed from games, as much of the time the stories in games just aren't very good. Maybe it's simply that I'm getting older (dangerously close to 30), but I have much greater expectations from the sorts of stories that games present now. However, much of what is released comes across as something intended for a gamer in their late teens or early 20s. That's all well and good, and if gamers in that age bracket are enjoying these narratives, kudos to them.
Nonetheless, with all of this talk about "graying gamers" I have to wonder how much of it is just lip service from publishers' spin doctors. If we're such an integral part of the future plans of the industry, as some pundits claim, why aren't there more stories that older gamers can get into? It seems that for every Planescape Torment that is released, there are a dozen games that feature banal, emo tales revolving around angsty teeny boppers.
Considering the state of most stories in games, I for one wouldn't necessarily miss them if they went away, as I have little faith that we're going to see a noticeable shift to better crafted stories in the foreseeable future. Sex and violence does not a mature story make, and I really wish people would abandon this 15-year-old, high school kid mentality on the matter.
I'm not sure I'm understanding him clearly... it sounds to me like he's not just making one game without a story, but sticking to an ideal that he's going to be different by making no games with stories. The way I see it, stories CAN be an integral part to a game -- it depends on the type of game though. Let's say you're playing DDR... it's not the type of game that would go well with a story ("Okay... uhm... street-toughs took your girl and you have to dance to free her!"). Now, take that same "story = bad" mentality and apply it to a game like Half-Life ("I have a gun... uh... I guess I'll go shoot some people. ...'nah, I'll just sit here at my desk and sip coffee -- a resonance cascade is only theoretical anyways"). Story can make or break a game, but it whole-heartedly falls on the game type.
I personally enjoy story games, particularly open-ended or multi-pathed ones where there is a good base story but your character doesn't stick to a script.
Stories in games are like stories in movies -- if the cinematography is a certain type, it's fine to not have a story... but it is not possible to apply a blanket policy of story/no story to every piece of film.
A computer once beat me at chess, but it was no match for me at kick boxing.
There isn't. Games that claim (or are claimed by others) to be cinematic consist of two parts, the cinematic and the game, and ne'er shall the twain meet. Yet anyways. I suppose the game that has gotten closest to this is Half-Life 2 (or just HL if your going to get pissy about HL2), but while they admirably did away with cut scenes, they still had to find artificial ways to lock the player into cinematics, effectively cutting the game into the two previously stated parts. They also had to make your character a mute, but that's neither here nor there.
http://www.cafepress.com/hikarudesigns/ http://www.bricklink.com/store.asp?p=hikaru
I think everyone is missing the point here. Jaffe is not talking specifically about just playing games with stories, but more so working on them. There is a difference between working on a long story driven game like God of War which could take years (3 years) to develop and lots of energy spent on fit the game play around a plot line. It could be fun to dream up a complex storyline for a game, but grafting numerous scripted sequences and event driven mechanics can be a real chore. Working on something more pure, more focused on game play can be quicker and the design, more spontaneous. Thus more fun for the developer. Sort of the difference between developing Quake and Halflife.