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.'"

Comments

Never been done

[j00r0m4nc3r]

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.

Re:Never been done

[giorgiofr]

Holy cow, you have missed out big time. Get Deus Ex immediately. Later move on to Half-Life 1 and 2. And there are probably other ones that I don't remember.

Re:Never been done

[Dysfnctnl85]

Have you played Max Payne or Max Payne 2? Incredibly compelling storylines -- nothing has even come close since.

Re:Never been done

[XxtraLarGe]

Get Deus Ex immediately. Later move on to Half-Life 1 and 2. Deus Ex is a definite yes. HL has good cinematic elements to it in the form of scripted events, but I don't know that you can necessarily say it has a great story. I can't comment on HL2, as I haven't played it. Halo is so-so, but the crowning gem of FPS stories has to be Marathon.

Re:Never been done

[immcintosh]

I'm not sure I would describe any of those storylines as "truly compelling" in the sens in which the GP poster is speaking. Deux Ex, I would say, stepped above the level of contrived garbage written for a 12-year old to more of a trashy sci-fi fan-fic level of quality. Half-life 1 and 2 had great atmosphere, but their stories were really nothing special. Half-life 1 especially was just your run of the mill save-the-world-from-aliens bit. Half-life 2, while it had its good points along the way, I found was totally ruined by an absolutely absurd deus ex machina resolution; it really ruined the whole thing for me.

Re:Never been done

[east coast]

It would be nice for you to lend a bit of insight into what you have an have not played. To be honest, if you break down even the most epic of tales eventually everything sounds like it was written by 12 year olds. This actually works to the advantage games with storylines in general...

You ever played Alice or Undying? Fantastic games with great visuals in their day. The great thing about the story lines was that you could make it make as much of a difference in the game as you wanted. Didn't give a damn about poor Alice being in an institution and suicidal? Ok, just chop something up with this knife. Don't give a damn about the Covenant family and the Undying back story? The game still gladly leads you by the nose as long as you don't get sloppy and get yourself killed.

Of how about Thief? Potentially the most immersive atmosphere and story line to ever be pumped into on series. But does the story line make a big difference in achieving your goals on a mission by mission basis? Not really. Not unless you want to be Garrett.

You see, that's another thing about it all. If you don't want to be in the game it's not going to have an effect on you. Just like a book, if you read a book but put no life into the story itself you're just going to see strings of words. Maybe you don't have the type of imagination that it takes to put yourself in the shoes of the shooter. If you simply don't care enough that's fine too but don't act like someone didn't put effort into the end product other then yourself.

If you're going to walk around with your nose in the air to FPS story lines don't act like the game didn't do what it was suppose to do. There is no truely passive entertainment. Every medium for story telling requires at least a smidgen of effort from the spectator in order for it to work for everyone.

Re:Never been done

[morari]

Deus Ex is an RPG, thus the compelling story. Just because it has some shooting and is in a first person perspective doesn't make it any more a FPS than Morrowind is. And the Half-Life series barely has a story, it keeps everything vague and shrouded in mystery (which did NOT help the sequel).

Re:Never been done

[nomadic]

Get Deus Ex immediately. Later move on to Half-Life 1 and 2. And there are probably other ones that I don't remember.

Thief 1 and 2, and even 3 is decent, though not as good as the others. Extremely well-written fantasy, far better than most of the stuff that makes it to the fantasy section in the bookstores.

Re:Never been done

[Blakey Rat]

Ok, before you say ANYTHING about story in FPS games, you need to play Marathon, System Shock 2, Chronicles of Riddick, Thief, or anything more substantial than Half-Life and Halo. (To pre-empt the obvious question: the Chronicles of Riddick videogame is about 10 times better than the movie, which sucked.)

You're basically sitting here telling us that all movies are terrible, but all you've ever seen is Weekend At Bernie's. Watch some Kubrick films, then come back and tell me all movies are terrible, and I might lend your opinion a little weight.

Re:Never been done

[Anne_Nonymous]

Also try Minesweeper and Tetris.

Re:Never been done

[east coast]

That's another way of saying "they had no storyline". Do novels require input to have good storylines? No.

What bullshit. The input a novel requires is for the reader to put emotion into a bunch of words. Without that fiction is a meaningless waste of time. Or are you suggesting that any story telling can be successful regardless of the observer? If you think that you're even more full of shit then what I originally thought.

We identify with characters who are sympathetic even though we can't influence them in any way.

Yeah, the big difference is influence. That doesn't mean that there can't be a story line.

I think the whole "make your own story" is the reason that most FPS have the literary content of a "choose your own adventure" book.

Only if you want to look at it in that way. You, like the OP fit into my idea that you simply don't want more so you don't get more. No different then the types of people who choose the Cliff's Notes versions of books. Oh well, no loss to me.

Does anyone stop to realize why CYOA books never rose above 5th grade reading level? It's the same reason that "interactive" story lines won't either. The simplest explanation is this: Americans believe in character-driven stories (as oppose to plot-driven stories like the Illiad or the Odyssey).

Oh, so now this is an American problem. I just love the bashers.

It's also fantastic the the two toothpicks that you've used as legs for your argument are both over 2600 years old and most people today can't relate to the culture and history of the times. Do you ever stop to think that may be why they're kind of brushed off today and that it has nothing to do with the idea that it's "Americans" being the problem? While the Iliad and the Odyssey may be great they're also a large investment of time to read properly. Just like the video games being mentioned they take a bit of effort to enjoy fully. Given their age and the language barriers they're more pursuits instead of simple entertainment. That's not to say that there is anything wrong with that but you're talking about a different level of literature where it goes from leisure to a serious pastime. These video games, on the other hand, do not require as much of an investment and are often more interesting as they deal with subject matter that is easier for the play to recognize.

To take the main character and just say "oh, that's the actual human playing the game" is to eviscerate the entire plot. The plot has to be advanced by that person, but if we let them choose "meh, save the girl" or "rape the girl" or "ignore the girl", etc. then we basically end up writing 3 stories. Per every major decision. It's combinatorial explosion.

If making decisions are that big of a deal to you perhaps you shouldn't be playing video games at all.

If you think that making yourself a participant in the action in some form "eviscerates the entire plot" perhaps you should be mingling with people in public either. It's really sad that you probably take it so hard that people putting themselves into a dialog somehow ruins it for you.

Instead the objective should be to show a protagonist who is sympathetic so that the player wants to participate in the action of the game. Sound impossible? It's what every novelist has to do to write an enjoyable novel.

Actually, it doesn't sound impossible. It doesn't even sound hard to be honest.

I let people participate on whatever level they choose. They don't have to follow my vision to every detail to make it rewarding for me. I don't think people ruin anything by seeing things they want to see it.

If anything it sucks that you can't let these things unfold for people on their own terms. Again, no loss to me.

Re:Never been done

[Broken scope]

Your comment about the human dungeon master something I have thought about.

Imagine a game world styled like EvE, just as large, and just as expansive. Now smash together EvE and planetside. Space ships in space, marines on the ground and fighters and bombers in air and space. Now of course the game should start off structured. You want to be a marine, you join your respective factions AI or possibly human/employee/game master controlled military. Your opening story denotes a time of peace, and thus your initial job as a player is to do thinks like eliminate a pirate base inside your factions space. Now you could be the only player within your group of 20 marines, or you could be leading a fire team of 9 other players or 4 players and 5 ai marines. So you get your "briefing" from an Ai mission dispenser who is a superior officer.

So you and your buddies or your men or you by yourself go towards the mission. Well you can't attack a pirate base with just your transport, so you get matched up with either some Ai fighter pilots or a mixture of players and Ai. The problem is, the pirate base is in an asteroid belt that is about 4Au away from your assigned station. Well you need a ship with jump drives to get there so you and your fighters get loaded onto a small corvette that might have an AI crew with some humans, or it could just be a single Ai Captain with an Ai crew.
Then you attack your target and hopefully win, if you lead enough successful operations, the men below, above, and beside you could also note you for leadership, thus allowing you to move up in the ranks.

Say you don't want to be part of the military, say you want to be a miner or an explorer, you would start out in your respective structure and work you way up. Slowly as players moved up in the structure, you would allow them to take over things to an extent. You wouldn't give complete control over a factions military to a single player, though you could allow them into the very upper echelons of power. There will be people who stay within their factions structure, and those that abandon it for their own structure of choice, they could even make their own.

Slowly let the players take control, then after say 2 month of play just long enough to let people get into it introduce some chaos using your game masters (Think of them as a race of loki like aliens, make them killable too, cause frankly the hunting them would be neat), have a major NPC leader get assassinated by what looks like the other faction, put another NPC in or let a player take those reins, then let the war begin.

Do what you think you need to do to keep the game going, assassinate, impersonate, and manipulate.

Let the players write the story. It's rather interesting what happens sometimes.

Now if only computers could do this now..

Re:Never been done

[2names]

You have just described a game that I would like to play. Please let me know when you start the BETA, as I would like to be a tester.

Re:Never been done

[Broken scope]

All I've got is the design document... and a dream... that one day..

Wait Im at work, I don't have time for the next part. With any luck I'll call you sometimes in the next 10 years.

I never liked Quake ...

[garett_spencley]

... solely for that reason.

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 ... I think story lines are essential to a fun FPS even when (correction: especially when) the main activity is just pointing and shooting.

Re:I never liked Quake ...

[Soul-Burn666]

Who needs storyline when you have co-op?

Doom, Quake and later SeriousSam were all games with pretty much no important story but fun fun fun in multiplayer co-op.

I don't know if I'm alone in this thought, but for me it was much funner to play jDoom in coop than Doom3 single. Simple graphics, simple levels and a whole lot of fun.

Only recently?

[sa1lnr]

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.

The good old days...

[Dan East]

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

System Shock 2

[zolf13]

... could be a nice start.

I'll save you some time...

[Aladrin]

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.

Manatees

[cerelib]

Oh look, he's got a "kidnapped sidekick" story ball.

As John Carmack (supposedly said)

[xtracto]

"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...

Don't forget the Marathon series...

[Wulfstan]

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.

Half life

[LordBafford]

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.

Re:System Shock 2 and the Thief series

[Applekid]

I wouldn't exactly call Thief an FPS... play it like one and you wind up dead pretty quick.

Penn Jillette on stories

[dazedNconfuzed]

"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

Re:Penn Jillette on stories

[moderatorrater]

By that definition, Daikatana was definitely art.

Mod parent up.

[MrFancyPants]

Seriously. http://marathon.bungie.org/Story/

Butcher Bay and other underrated games

[grapeape]

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.

Theif

[JeremyGNJ]

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.

Re:System Shock 2 and the Thief series

[The Ultimate Fartkno]

I would - First Person Sneaker. We need more of those, dangit. The Thief trilogy is one of my absolute favorites and needs to come back! That, and No One Lives Forever. Totally overlooked, IMO.

Duh!

[tbcpp]

1. Load rough drafts into shotgun 2. Fire shot gun into wall 3. Paste shreds randomly together 4. ??? 5. Profit!

Um...

[morari]

They're not.

Surely thou jest

[Moraelin]

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.

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?

Defending Half Life

[BeansBaxter]

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.