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How FPS Storylines Are Written
Might E. Mouse writes "Cynics might say 'Who needs a storyline for an FPS game?' and if we're talking Quake or Doom then fair enough. But to brand the entire genre as lacking in story is to condemn gems like Half-Life 2 or Chronicles of Riddick. So what goes into writing a really compelling storyline for an FPS game? bit-tech has an article exploring this topic with the likes of Martin Lancaster, writer / designer for Crysis, Rob Yescombe, writer of Haze and more: 'There's nothing wrong with that of course, back in the day Quake was amazing in its own, essentially plotless, right. But it's interesting that only recently has a push for coherently told storylines appeared among FPS fans, bought on by another few years of maturity in what is an undeniably young medium. Paintings and music have both been around since time out of mind, but computer games have only been around for a couple of decades and only recently have they begun to be recognized for the artistic merit posed by their interactivity.'"
I've never played a FPS with a truly compelling story. Every FPS story feels totally contrived, like they were written by 12-year olds. It could be that there is a disconnect between what the writers have written and how that is implemented as the game itself, so maybe the stories are good and it's just bad execution. In any event, in my experience nobody has come very close to delivering a good compelling FPS story.
Both have excellent, immersive stories. Thief: Deadly Shadows has a super story but the game itself was a bit weak.
... solely for that reason.
... I think story lines are essential to a fun FPS even when (correction: especially when) the main activity is just pointing and shooting.
I love FPS games, but Quake and Quake II just seemed too pointless and lacking in any kind of reward.
Quake III Arena was much different because it was multi player and the point was more to compete and develop your "skills" (pardon the term, I just can't think of anything more appropriate) against other human players.
But Quake and Quake II had absolutely no rewards. The protagonist was not someone that you could relate to. The monsters seemed rather random. There was no hot chick waiting for you to save her at the end of the game. The game play didn't progress in any interesting fashion. Nothing really happened. It was just point, shoot, kill for absolutely no reason.
The graphics were better than Doom but I found Doom to be more fun. The levels were shorter, and I guess it was just new. With Quake/QuakeII it was like Doom but with better graphics and different weapons and aliens. Been there. Done that.
So yeah
Clive Barkers Undying springs to mind. And it was scary to boot.
Much underrated game to my mind. One of the few games that I have actually played all the way through.
Shadowman was another.
Map designer: "Hey, check out this really cool Gothic arch I made in worldcraft!"
Lead designer: "Nice, that really looks like a gateway to hell. I like the guys chained to the stone walls suspended above a pit of lava too. It looks like their souls have been sucked right out of them."
Resulting game story: "You must pass the gateway to hell, and descend into the depths to save the damned before their souls are harvested."
Dan East
Better known as 318230.
... could be a nice start.
I'd say FPS stories are written in the following manner:
1) various generic plot devices are written on a couple of hundred Post-It notes
2) post it-notes are stapled to a bulletin board in a random arrangement
3) fifteen darts are thrown at the bulletin board
4) ???
5) emergency all-nighter to write some crap based on 15 of those Post-Its
Honestly, even the "okay" stories in most games are, at best, not complete rubbish. It's just that, as with comic book stories, our standards are rock-bottom low.
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I'll save everyone some time from reading the article:
New games need story. Stories need writers. Writers need to think about the audience.
Some games already have stories.
There's a lot of plugs for the Haze game, for some reason.
And that's it... There's nothing else. They act all philosphical about how FPS's need story/etc, but it's absolutely no different than how other games need story, except in scale. RPGs need more, puzzle games need less.
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
Oh look, he's got a "kidnapped sidekick" story ball.
System Shock 2 doesn't fit neatly into the FPS genre (it's more of an FPS/RPG hybrid, though even that isn't quite accurate), but I think its story was very well done.
"Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important."
from wikiquotes...
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
The Marathon series was a mac-only creation written by Bungie (before they were bought by Microsoft - they went on to do Halo I think) and it was an example of a FPS with a seriously deep storyline. It was so complex and deep that I couldn't even follow it! But they put in loads of effort to make it consistent, a great game and practically an FPS novel. An oldie but a goodie.
--- Nick, hard at work
I think the original halflife had a good story behind it, and as they added mods for it the story was played through different angles, with specific points relating to the original story. Like in Opposing Forces, you played HL through the eyes of the marines involved, then in blue shift you go to go through the story as a black mesa gaurd. I even played a user made mod that had you play as a an alien and see their side of the story. With a basic plot line of Scientists cause a problem and open portal to another dimension, they did quite a lot with it to let you see it from many angles.
Another mod for HL1 was They Hunger, which had a pretty decent storyline, it had 3 installments and was a zombie based game. In all it had a good story to it.
So to sum up FPS games can have good story lines, but depending on what the game is a bout and when it is set matters and might limit what story can be conveyed.
Today's Tomorrow is Yesterday's Future! --- "Where Ever You Go, There You Are" -- Diablo 1
"Technology adds nothing to art. Two thousand years ago, I could tell you a story, and at any point during the story I could stop, and ask, Now do you want the hero to be kidnapped, or not? But that would, of course, have ruined the story. Part of the experience of being entertained is sitting back and plugging into someone else's vision. The fact of the matter is, since the beginning of time, you could buy a Picasso and change the colors. That's trivial. But you don't because you're buying a piece of Picasso's $&#**^% soul. That's the definition of art: Art is one person's ego trip."
- Penn Jillette
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Seriously. http://marathon.bungie.org/Story/
DeusEX, Thief and Chronicles of Riddick Butcher Bay are all grossly underrated as far as storyline goes. Compared to even most RPG's out there today they stand head and shoulders above 95% of the games out there. I'd go so far to say that the story of the Riddick game is actually better than the second movie. All three are completely different in genre and atmosphere and actually engage the player with a goal in mind far beyond getting to the next level. Prey was another that was fun to play and had a decent attempt at a story.
That was the first thing to pop into my mind as well. Excellent script, excellent atmosphere, effective sound.
The real weakness of the FPS has been the fact that, until relatively recently, you've been constrained on the GUI. I mean, think of the possible actions in your average RPG or other seriously story driven game, and then think of the FPS "actions" which are as follows: run, shoot, jump, action.
Some games make it work; Undying was great, not because of any imaginative action system, but because the scripting was so good. Same with Deus Ex, though Deus Ex added more in the form of implants, which gave the illusion of having more choices in actions.
Now we're starting to get more serious FPS/Storytelling crossovers with games like Oblivion. I think as the tech matures, and people are really able to have it both ways (e.g. fast paced gameplay with a rich action set), that we'll start seeing storytelling catch up in more of the FPS-style games.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I think the closest I've seen to a good plot in an FPS was the Thief series. Or maybe the plot wasn't so much good, as the game play was immersive, so you're more accepting of what plot there was. Another good one was the original Max Payne! The stuff with his baby being killed and the dream sequences that followed were a good plot that really "made you mad" and want. It is hard to write a plot line that involves "kills lots of stuff indiscriminately". I think the best way to get that effect is to do the RPG trick of "sub quests" so that you're running around "open endedly" and choosing different things to do, even though in the end you have to do X Y Z. There should also be an element of "Choose your own adventure", so that different plot lines can come out based on how you play. The problem with that is the production cost of levels and cut-scenes that some players will never see.
FPSs have stories? Seriously though, there's also continually increasing common ground between RPGs and FPSs. Case in point: Oblivion is first person, and while not a shooter in the traditional since, it sure has some strong FPS aspects. At the nexus of the two genres, I think there'll be a lot of plot development. FPS as a genre holds appeal similar to action movies - quick gratification of the id. As such, I've faced plots that did a great job facilitating the action (Halo, Goldeneye, both Half-lifes), but too much plot intricacy could easily tarnish the quick fun of the frag.
That still is a great game, despite the older graphics. The story carries it. I feel like I'm Clint Eastwood every time I play it..
-- There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
1. Load rough drafts into shotgun 2. Fire shot gun into wall 3. Paste shreds randomly together 4. ??? 5. Profit!
Man is the lowest-cost, 150-pound, nonlinear, all-purpose computer system which can be mass-produced by unskilled labor.
Max Payne was also a great. Film Noir meets physics engine meets killing lots of stuff. The Cello accompaniment in the Max Payne 2 still haunts me.
import system.cool.Sig;
They're not.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." --Paul Atreides, Dune
Poorly.
... and save the en-tire planet.
While that is to some extent true, and insightful too, I'd say mods at least prove that it's more complex than that. E.g.,
1. There are people who actually enjoy being creative in their own right, and taking the story in their own direction
2. There are people who have strong feelings about what kind of characters they want or don't want to play. Since a game essentially requires you to be the lead actor in that story. And it has happened to me before (and to countless others) that a character was a major turn-off because that's not the kind of person or role I want to play.
And even before computers, that kind of thing has happened before too.
E.g., Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy's "The Gold Key, or Adventures of Buratino" is, by and large, the novel version of a "mod" of "Pinocchio".
E.g., the famous sixtine chapel ceiling was later "modded" by, basically, painting breeches on the originally nude characters. I'd say that's _exactly_ like buying a Picasso and then changing the colours. Except in this case it's a whole chapel painted by Michelangelo.
E.g., in theatre or opera or movies, the director (and sometimes actors) have a lot of room to subtly alter the story, and emphasize or de-emphasize various aspects regardless of what the author had in mind. Especially adaptations from novel to movie, or to opera or theatre long before such technology, things are often changed massively.
E.g., as an example of #2, in movies actors often play a major role in modifying the script. Harrison Ford, for example, is known to have had quire a bit of input in what Han Solo ended up like, or he's the reason for that famous Indiana Jones scene where Indy just draws a revolver and shoots the guy with the big sword. (The original script called for a lot of using the whip and stuff.) Plus actors routinely refuse roles they don't want to be associated with.
So, yes, in a sense he's right: technology doesn't add anything new. On the other hand he's wrong: people routinely made changes to someone else's vision, long before computers or movies.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
"You kill stuff. The End." :-)
Truely unique. And all the story I need for an FPS.
( http://cubeengine.com/ )
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
And just in case you want to see some of the storyline he's talking about. . .
http://marathon.bungie.org/Story/
The story was told through a series of terminals - sometimes in seemingly random snippets of logs, sometimes in direct communications from the various AIs on the ship. It's your basic "Boy meets AIs, Aliens invade AIs' ship, AI becomes self-aware, AI uses boy to overthrow both the shackles of the alien invaders and the other AIs running various systems of the ship" story. It's actually pretty engaging,. I found myself looking forward to the next terminal even more than the action itself at some points.
All three and major mods are available (Free with a capital F) for mac, linux and PC at http://source.bungie.org/ and Marathon 2: Durandal - arguably the best of the bunch - is coming to XBLA, courtesy of Freeverse.
If you're looking for well-crafted story in the FPS genre, an oft-overlooked and not-as-well-known entry has to be Undying, with backstory penned by (or under the direction of) Clive Barker. As a game it was somewhere between average and good, but the story was definitely solid.
Karma: Excellent, but still won't get you laid.
There is a push for story because most games and technology are focused on realism. This creates an inherent need for context.
ie: A human character as player -- Who is he? Where is he? Why? These questions naturally occur to us.
So then, the further you abstract the game, the less need for story, as the gameplay and the abstractions can hold their own context of abstraction (we "let go" and don't feel a need to rationalize what we see and do when it is abstracted beyond recognition or reality).
ie: PacMan is a geometric shape that "eats" dots. You must avoid opponents and are constrained to a maze. There is no "Why" to this other than the need for survival. There is no Who. We don't really care about the geometric shape's origins, motivations, or feelings.
Only when PacMan was transferred to a linear, non-interactive medium (Saturday morning cartoon) was it necessary to contextualize the geometric shape into a "character", with a life, motivations, needs, etc. Because that's what you need to tell a story.
The two mediums at extremes are very seperate. The problem is games today are way too focused on "reality" which brings such games into the side that necessitates a context.
The Tom Clancy Splinter Cells series. Now as far as story the Wing Commander series. The Homeworld series. Hell some adventure games revolve around a story. e.g. Dreamfall, Phantasmagoria, etc.
While I want some motivation or rational for things, if stories are going to be told through cut scenes then count me out. As far as I'm concerned most cut scenes are just lame cop-outs for games that either can't figure out a way to tell the story without them or have limitations in their game engine that prevent the player from doing it themselves and so they have to make a cut scene to show the character to something.
If that is how stories are going to be told in FPS then leave them out or at least make them skipable.
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Heh... reminds me of the high school days, when I'd occasionally be bored enough to imagine a whole touching story about such games and characters as Chucky Egg.
Admittedly, the whole was more or less part of reverse-engineering how to write a school essay. I could eventually write an essay on anything whatsoever, and put any spin whatsoever on it. (IIRC the Chucky Egg one was about the struggle of the working class against the corporate chickens. I'm not kidding.) I was all about that kind of finding the rules that work and (ab)using them.
I think I did one about Pac Man too, but I can't quite remember what it was about.
Still, there you go, even if for the somewhat disturbed reasons, someone did care about Chucky's or PacMan's life, motivations, needs, etc.
I don't think I'm the only one, though. You should see the kind of complex stories within stories that people imagine around such abstract games as Europa Universalis or Hearts Of Iron. And they're ultra-abstracted grand strategy games. You don't even command anything smaller than an army, and you don't even have access to the tactical details of a battle. It's actually more abstract than your average hex-based strategy game.
Yet people write whole stories about _why_ something happened. They don't just write "Army Group North pushed towards Berlin", they write a whole story about how that decision was taken, what the reactions were at the HQ meeting, and occasionally what happened to the ordinary soldiers in that battle. (Again, the ordinary soldiers exist only as an abstract number in the actual game.)
So what I'm getting at is: maybe it's not just blamable on "realism". I think many of us actually have a need for such stories. We can't be truly satisfied with "Knight takes Pawn at E4, check". We actually have to really know that Knight's personality, background, aspirations. What went through his head as he charged through the pikemen at E4 (a pawn) to try to capture the enemy King? Was he affraid? Did he do it for honour? For his own king and country? For some beautiful lady? (Quite a common thing in the middle ages.) Did he charge with a sword or with a lance? Etc. We have to really know that guy's story, you know?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
I am not sure why Half Life is getting the rap so badly. While the story might not be the strongest in the world as it leaves plenty for you to fill in. Like why the man in black is walking around and why he is at the end of the game. If you take your time going through the game there were some truly classic moments. One of my favorites was crawling through and air duct and listening to some of the soldiers complain about Freeman and why they wanted him dead. The game worked really well for me and made me feel like it was all about me and my actions had consequences. Obviously they were scripted but the game really pulled me in and made me care about trying to live to the next fight. The scripted sequences and the way that characters interacted with Freeman was exception in my opinion. Anyway just thought I'd lend some support to my favorite game of all time.
Call of Cthulhu anyone? Kick ass mashup of a bunch of Lovecraft stories? It's the only game besides 'Fatal Frame 2' that fills me with a terrifying sense of impending doom while I play it. Good story too.
FPS storylines are generally static.
RTS storylines, however, are dynamic as hell.
I thought the plot for HL was awesome, then I later realized that while strong as far as FPS goes, they could have fed me anything they wanted, i was just drooling over the graphics when played on my canopus daughterboard... 12 megs of video goodness ; )
I play FPS to shoot stuff and see great graphics while doing it, plot is optional... less plot, the better the engine / graphics better be, likewise the better the plot the more I can ignore from crappy graphics and gameplay, but seriously, what kind of plot can you expect from a 3d choose your own adventure shoot'em up?
An I.T. motto in the hands of an idiot is a dangerous thing...
...I liked the puzzle-breaks and bits of dialogue in half-life, but one of my friends hated all that and "just wanted to shoot stuff". So some people would argue that "more plot" is a bad thing, anyway. I love how so many posters seem to consider "plot quality" to be something you can objectively measure. I think it is difficult to compare a static movie plot with an interactive game plot. A game has to have a fun interactive element or it might just as well BE a movie. When you watch a sword fight in a movie like "the Count of Monte Cristo" you might imagine yourself actually being there - well, a game can bring that experience to a whole new level. On the other hand, the part of that movie where the main character is studying in prison and plotting his revenge was interesting in the movie, but would be a big yawn in a game.
Prov 9:8 Do not rebuke mockers or they will hate you; rebuke the wise and they will love you.
Just because you are given a choice in a game doesnt mean you are all of a sudden not following the creators story anymore.
We havent reached a point where games have significant AI where everytime you play through a story the ending will be different. All your endings are already written and apart of the story, you just happen to choose which one you end up seeing. The story is already made and is apart of what the storyteller wants you to see.
You are still apart of the artists vision, its just that his vision includes more than one view.
So I have to call BULLSHIT on his statement.
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That is about the most dry game I have ever played. I never connected with any of the characters and the plot went nowhere. I'd rather play Half Life 1 which didn't try to pretend to tell a story... it let you make up your own mind.
You have to take Quake in the context of gaming at that point. It was still fun to just kill your friends online. And tactically, the 1-1 DM or 4-4 DM games are somewhat complex and did require a lot of "skill" to play. And that was the reward - You are better than another player. You win. How is that different than a lot of games or sports?
Also Quake singlehandly brought us:
- Full 3d environment
- Mods
- Custom Mapping
- OpenGL as a viable, marketable 3D standard over Direct3D (not terribly important to FPSes but a good market push against MS from Carmack)
I haven't played a lot of the current crop of FPSes but my guess is that FPS are stagnating. Even with a good plot, not many have strayed from this formula, which is the real reason people are bored with FPSes.
even if you didn't like the game, it's pretty influential in gaming history.
I notice there was mention of Quake not having much of a storyline... that wasn't such a bad thing really, the plot wasn't much more involved than DooM, it's true.
But the level design really was very good. Because the level design was part of the imagery, there were areas you didn't have to go to, areas you could go to if you wanted, areas that made you think, "How can I get there? Do I need to go there? It would be interesting to go there!". Areas you could rocket jump into just for fun. Areas that you had to think and work within the environment a little to get out of (not just point and shoot!)
We don't get that kind of fun level design anymore.
Nowadays, it's pipe design. They design a pipe with a few bends and a few scripted events that you plod through in a set, linear fashion (no shortcuts, no optional detours). Every time you play it, sure, the outcome is more or less the same, but the journey is the same too! That helps the storytelling process, maybe. Sure as heck wrecks the fun of actually "playing" in the game.
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.
That is all :-)
FPS games are all about immersion, suspension of disbelief. A good story line will not add anything significant to the game.
I have played HL 1 & 2, Deus Ex 1 & 2, System Shock, Max Payne 1 & 2, the Quake games, the Doom games, Duke Nuke Em 3d etc...in none of this games I would care about a good story line. Just a basic storyline is good enough.
What counts in these games is how immersive they are. Max Payne was a good game not because of its story line (who gives a dime about a cop having his family slaughtered by the bad guys - much worse things have happened in reality), but because the way it presented the world: dark, snowy, with police sirens going on every minute, it really gave you that cold feeling of a New York night.