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

[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

[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..

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.

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.

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.

Um...

[morari]

They're not.

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.