Slashdot Mirror
Twisted Metal Designer Rails Against Storytelling Games
eldavojohn writes "Twisted Metal designer David Jaffe gave a DICE Summit presentation in which he argued against 'games that have been intentionally made from the ground up with the intent and purpose of telling a story or expressing a philosophy or giving a designer's narrative.' He went on to say essentially that it's a waste of time and resources when the focus should be on gameplay, not story. While some parts of his presentation are warmly welcomed by the gaming community (like his instructions for game execs to get a BS filter), this particular point has some unsurprising opponents. His argument against a 'cinematic narrative' was probably strongest with his comparison to the movie Saving Private Ryan, where Spielberg made the Normandy Beach invasion scene as close to a documentary as possible. The audience could sit back and appreciate that. But if you made a game where the player is in that position of the soldier then that historically accurate imagery and top shelf voice acting doesn't really matter, the only thing the player should be thinking is 'How the **** do I get to that rock? How do I get to the exit?' Is Jaffe right? Have game makers been 'seduced by the power and language of film' at the expense of gameplay?"
Most of what he's railing against seems to be the heavily cutscene-driven stories in games like the Final Fantasy's and Metal Gear Solid's. He says he actually likes games like Skyrim, by contrast, where the player becomes the story. I personally sympathize with him on that. There have been a few games I've liked that were more cutscene dependent (like the Mass Effect series), but mostly I like to feel that *I'm* the one driving the game, not that I'm just taking occasional control to set up the next long cutscene.
But this love of cutscenes seems to have gotten crazy-prevalent among Japanese developers in particular since the 90's. Maybe that's just a cultural thing (everything out of Japan seems to be more on-the-rails than their Western counterparts, even the non-cutscene stuff). But those developers are also incredibly stubborn about changing their style. Good luck if you can get through to them. Maybe they'll be more inclined to listen to a guy who mainly develops for Sony. I will say that a few, like Capcom, do seem to have gotten a little more "modern" of late.
Someone had to say it, though. The cutscenes have gotten way out of hand on a lot of games. At some point you need to decide if you're making a videogame or a movie.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Jaffee is wrong. Some of the bet games in the past two year have been emotionally engaging narrative-driven. If you ignore the arc of characters and plot, and only focus on gameplay, then you end up in the same box as angry birds. And that box is worth $.99.
Sure game play is important but so is story. There have been games that had a story I liked so much that I kept playing despite poor or boring game play mechanics. I'm not talking about final fantasy xlvi or what ever either.
Valve was able to do gameplay AND storyline, and with a silent protagonist, to boot! Nothing's wrong with a great storyline, and developing one is NOT a waste of time and resources.
... because there's no going back. No one is going to un-seduce an entire industry. Well... except for consumers refusing to buy and that doesn't seem to be happening. Jaffe was bitching to the wrong audience; if he really wanted to change this, he needs to persuade consumers of his better way.
Nothing personal but I easily recognize that there is a difference in what some gamers want. Some love intricate storylines, deep characters and that kind of thing (Skyrim, Final Fantasy... etc). Others like straight unbridled action (Modern Warfare, Battlefield... etc). I think he has a very narrow view of things to be honest.
Make a cinematic game with horrible gameplay, you have a horrible game. Having a fun game with no plot, and you still have a fun game.
If your point is to make a game which will sell well, guess which you should focus on?
That said, I don't think making a fun game cinematic is a waste of resources, because they certainly fill a niche... just make sure you've got the gameplay down, first.
...ask IW or Activision to release "percentage of cutscenes watched" figures...
Story is good, but it has to be worked into the game appropriately. It's very hard to have a game ride on its gameplay alone; you need to give the player a reason to keep playing, a reason to care about the characters involved, a reason to be interested in the world they're playing in. And this can be done well regardless of the ratio of story to gameplay in a game.
On one extreme, you have a game like Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors: being a visual novel/puzzle game, it's 95% story. But it received rave reviews and was loved by gamers of all sorts, even those who hadn't really played adventure games before. On the other extreme you have games like Portal, which have no cutscenes, few characters, and tell their story entirely through the game as you play it -- and they work too. What doesn't work is shoehorning the story in, as if it was some kind of thing the designers reluctantly had to check off on the list of required features.
Games swayed way too much to the 'long narrative' side. Every other game is a narrative now. in between the narrative, either a platform game mechanic, a fps mechanic, or a mmo mechanic is squeezed in. yes, there are good games in between these, that work. like swtor. or kotor. but, most do not cut it.
first of all, almost all potential narratives that can be told have been told in almost all of the genres. really, how many times you can save a fantasy medieval land from dragons. or, what kind of different world-shattering dangers can a fantasy medieval world can have. they all started repetition.
what was lost was the sandboxing. ie, games in which you created a narrative, as opposed to your game being a 'trigger flag' in between narratives the developer told. like sid meier's pirates.
these games have infinite replay value. pirates was able to virtually create 16-17th centuries spanish main with all the limitations of commodore 64. and its gameplay and replay value was greater than wow. ( i played 5 years, and i dont remember anything from its story ) i still can fire up pirates (in its sid meier's pirates pc incarnation) and play it without getting bored for hours occasionally, but, to make me replay wow from level 1 again, no amount of money could be enough. well, maybe if you paid REAL good, i would do it.
now we come to the sad part. pirates accomplished SO much depth and replay value with the limitations of 64 kb memory and a tape recorder. imagine how huge it would be, if it was done today, with the excessive power our current gaming setups have. (pc and console - even if pc is stronger, console still could do wonders for a game like a proper pirates remake).
so in that respect, he is right. what the industry has forgotten, has been games that allow YOU to tell the narrative, with infinite replay value.
Read radical news here
I would say that his advice applies in some circumstances, and not in others.
For instance, I refuse to play a "serious" game that doesn't have a compelling story. I avoid FPS for that reason, for the most part.
Better suggestion: don't overspecialize. Don't overexert one part of the game's development to permit somebody on the team to produce "their opus".
A good game is engrossing, and a good story helps with that. A good game is enjoyable, and good gameplay helps with that. Sacrificing one for the other does not improve the final product. If you focus too much on story, and your gameplay sucks, people will hate it. If you focus on gameplay and ship a terrible story, people will only play the multiplayer or freeplay modes.
Balance the work, and make a "good" story with "good" gameplay. Don't fixate on "epic story" or "rivetting gameplay", at the expense of the other. Similarly, don't forcefeed the player wasteful eyecandy. If you do, you end up making "the phantom menace: the game!", and people will hate it.
"Good" and "balanced" is the key.
There's nothing worse in a game that feeling like you're just something the developers had to deal with when trying to tell "their" story.
Stories in a game are great -- as long as the *player* is the one that drives the story. The player must be able to make choices that affect the story, and the gameplay should be where the story evolves, not in cut scenes.
I want to play an interactive game damnit, not watch a movie.
Those who play primarily for being part of an interactive story, and those who play primarily for the gameplay mechanic.
Neither is better or worse---they just are.
He's railing aginst what, in the industry, is called a "track ride". The player does A, then B, then C, with obstacles along the way. At one time, that was due to technical limitations; building a big free-play world was out of reach. That hasn't been the case for a long time now. Good large-scale free-play worlds like the GTA series have been very successful even as single user games. MMORPG games are big open worlds by necessity.
To some extent track rides are coming back, because of the tiny screens on mobile. Angry Birds is a track ride.
Big, open worlds are expensive to build, because a big, interesting world has to be built and populated. Track rides can be cheaper, because there's no need to build the parts of the world that aren't on the track. This may be more about economics than story.
Sorry I have to disagree with Mr. Jaffe. A good game is like a good movie. You become immersed in it for hours. And it should always have an excellent single player version which, in my experience, on many top titles is severly lacking. Too much "Call of Duty" and "Battlefield" type play is out there and it's primarily geared towards selling copies for multiplayer. As someone who really treasures the immersion and cinematic flavor of a good single-player shooter, I refuse to invest my money into something we used to call a "twitch game." It becomes boring as all you do is run and try not to die. You don't get to really experience the game.
The success of games like Mass Effect and Assassin's Creed (to name but a few) have shown that an immersive storyline works just fine. The fact that successive titles fixed up issues in gameplay also shows that game play is just as important (Assassin's Creed's debut version was tiresome). In the end though, do you remember the gameplay or the storyline more once you've set aside the controller? I think there's a market for both, if not more so for a game with a vivid and memorable story to tell.
I honestly don't see anything wrong with any of these games. I regard them as exceptionally good for the time.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
To me, he's crossing genres.
There are some that thrive on the hand given story. They don't want to be creative, they just want to blow some sh^%$ up! Twisted Metal was one of those games, and at the time was an exceptionally made one. Similar to Unreal Tournament, you get things designed for you and play on maps designed for you. That's not to say no skill is involved, but you don't have to be creative on solutions. Aim well, drive well, learn the maps, and get high scores. Those games are great, but also have limited life. Play for an hour and then go on to something else.
The other half of the gaming community though prefers to make things up as they go, and create their own game. This is the popularity of Skyrim and World of Warcraft. (One may argue that WoW's content is all hand picked, which it is, but the quests one does and which realm they play on and what armor and weapons they choose, etc.. are all up to the player.). Milestones still need to be marked, and a cut-scene is the best way of marking those milestones. These kind of games really don't end, at least in story line. Content can be added, players can go do old quests they missed, or start a new character and see the world from a different angle.
So I agree with him for the more arcade type games. Disagree with him when it comes to story based games.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
This was a theme plundered by ID software and Epic when they produced Quake III arena and Unreal Tournament in the late 90s. They both went back to narrative based plots after very rapidly ...
The purpose of existence is to make money.
That tends to be the solution I see most often to narrative boring crap. He has a point, how many of you skip ahead?
"Have you ever thought about just turning off the TV, sitting down with your politician, and hitting them?"
There's been a few very interesting takes on this really old (in terms of how long games have been a field with discussion) argument in the past few weeks:
My favorites:
http://www.raphkoster.com/2012/01/20/narrative-is-not-a-game-mechanic/
http://whatgamesare.com/2012/02/the-narrative-vs-mechanics-circus.html
My personal take? I'm a grad student working on procedural narrative, hacking the cognitive loop of story building players go through during play. So... I agree with Jaffe? It's really much more of a slider than a dichotomy. In fact...
http://whatgamesare.com/2011/12/the-four-lenses-of-game-making.html
It's a way more broad than even a single slider. I'm not even sure that Kelly's 2d graph comes close to the rich diversity of experience that can be created though video games.
I am become
Go play Breakout. Or Super Breakout, if you need the flashbang. Want an audiovisual literary development with some level of interactivity? Play Planescape, Dragon Age, Bioshock, Fallout 2, KOTOR, etc. You can hate cut-scene-heavy games and still get great narrative. My personal opinion is that cut-scene segments are a bit of a cheat to get there if you're using them for all the heavy story lifting.
Jaffee is wrong. Some of the bet games in the past two year have been emotionally engaging narrative-driven. If you ignore the arc of characters and plot, and only focus on gameplay, then you end up in the same box as angry birds. And that box is worth $.99.
Disclaimer: I submitted the story and I am 100% in disagreement with Jaffe and I hope I did his argument some justice in my summarizing. However, nor do I entirely agree with your assertion. Angry birds has turned out much more money (probably) than one of my favorite long running RPG series "Tales of (Symphonia|Vesperia|Xilia|etc)" So by that measure, he's giving sound advice. Angry Birds didn't need cinematic or great voice acting (which he cites to be high budget features of games) so it didn't need to cost more than 99 cents.
... huh, it really could have done without "the story."
And I can easily cite counter examples to your rule. Every so often a really novel gameplay mechanic comes out. I remember the advent (or at least the advent to me) of real time strategy games like Age of Empires and Warcraft I & II. These were amazing and the plots were pretty much phoned in (hell, one was just history). And if you implement an old gameplay mechanic really well or come out with a novel new gameplay mechanic, you sort of get a free pass on story and cosmetics. Hell, look at Minecraft. Where's the story there? Or even amazing graphics? I beat a dragon at the end and was like
I sympathize with Jaffe but I don't think we should just have gameplay mechanics. In the end, there's probably a healthy balance and as a former Tetris addict turned RPG enthusiast, I see the benefits of both sides. When a game blends these two things together, that's when you get magic. Currently I'm obsessed with Star Wars: The Old Republic but I can see how that's just not for everybody. I think Jaffe was just pushing back after seeing a focus on gameplay taking a back seat to Hollywood for too long. But either extreme is bad for gaming.
I haven't written any games but if I had, I would be completely fine with being condemned to "the same box as angry birds."
My work here is dung.
The most amazing games not only do both, but make them interdependent. e.g.: ICO, The Legend of Zelda, SotC, Mario Bros ...
Flamer uses flamebait. It's highly effective.
Story is fine, rails are not. Unfortunately it's difficult to enforce your story if you don't have rails up. (Difficult doesn't mean impossible.) One of the things that story helps with is giving the character a goal.
On Omaha Beach, it helps to know WHY you're fighting this battle, and what you can expect on the other side. However, as soon as you tell me I can't walk "other there" instead then I could care less about your silly story.
--Welcome to the Realm of the Hawke--
I think that is precisely what I like about Twisted Metal is that it does not really tell a story. The violence is almost cartoonish. I really liked the original one with that clown van. It was hysterical.
It depends on what you're shooting for. Trying to cram a story onto a game is bad.
But, I do love games that strive to tell a good story - Metal Gear Solid 4 comes to mind. Great game, but practically a very long movie.
Why not use the tools you have available to you to tell the story you want? 3D is here to stay, and, as has been shown by increasing usage in film, it's certainly capable of telling a good story.
Maybe he should talk to Tim Schafer, Double Fine, et al. and tell all these people that they are having fun incorrectly.
Some games I play for the story, sometimes for the game play.
For example.. Call of Duty, I rarely play the story mode, just jump straight to multiplayer. However, Gears of War or Uncharted I play for the story. I don't think you generalize and say the focus should be entirely on gameplay.
"Thanks to the remote control I have the attention span of a gerbil."
Twisted Metal is one of my top games everyone else loves but I hate, not cause of story but because of its gameplay. Now granted I haven't been forced to play it since PS1 days but what I remember was for a car game it responded very poorly, and far as a fun factor unless you memorised the maps it was seriously aggravating to be bombed from somewhere, knocked into oblivion and stuck in a ditch or a tree.
Remember the old Sierra adventure games like King's Quest and Space Quest? Most of what made those games fun was the fact that you were being told a story. The puzzles were fun in their own right, but hardly ever had any deep relation to the plot at hand. The only real reason for completing them was to advance the storyline. Those games could have easily been published as printed stories, but they were more fun with the animated characters, beautiful scenery, and (in later games) voice acting.
Awww, you don't like the way other people are developing their games?
Tough shit, do things your own way and let the market decide; and stop whining.
Some of us aren't exactly serious gamers and spend less than 5 hours a week playing video games.
But that's the wonderful thing about the video games, if you don't like a game, you don't have to play it.
I don't have skyrim, and don't plan to get it.
And with conceited attitudes like that, don't expect me to play twisted metal either; there are plenty of other games out there.
If someone is passing you on the right, you are an asshole for driving in the wrong lane.
I think he's upset by the dominance of storytelling in games but they originally were two types of games. Storytelling games were separate from FPS games for a reason, they slowed gameplay if the story took over. I'm against bad storytelling and all but a small percentage wouldn't be fit for a SciFi Channel movie. Where I think his outrage comes from is the fact bad storytelling is being used to cover up for bad gameplay or in some rare cases good storytelling is covering up for bad gameplay. What drives me nuts is a minute or two of gameplay broken up by 5 minutes of cut scenes. Sometimes it's a minute or two of gameplay, 5 minutes of cut scene then 5 minutes of travel followed by another 5 minute cut scene finally leading to a minute or two of gameplay. I'm not against a few cut scenes here and there but a lot of games seem to be made by frustrated filmmakers who aren't good at making films or games.
Games without a plot are all basically Pacman, and wear out pretty quickly. If there's no sense of progression, it just becomes tedious.
Then again, maybe he has a point. Things with an actual story don't seem to sell these days. Just look at the biggest movies of any given week.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - Evelyn Beatrice Hall, re Voltaire
I'm not a gamer, but as a comics reader and creator, I often see this sort of issue raised in terms of comics, which is another medium that sometimes tries to emulate other media (especially film). Gaming is its own thing. It's fine for it to borrow from other media (including film and comics), but it shouldn't try to be the same thing. Just as comics draws from the visual language of film, the narrative language of prose, the expressive language of art, and so on, so can games. But they should always be free to do things that other media cannot, because... that's the point of it being its own medium.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Some games are interactive cinema, some are interactive worlds, some are freeform (i.e. sandbox), some are on rails.
You can't rail on super mario for being too linear. The whole point is that it's a linear experience. You can argue, correctly I think, that some games can be a bit too story, or a bit too open, or at least in some ways.
In Star wars, the old republic MMO you have this very concrete story line that runs *you* through all these planets and so on. That works well until the point where you hit level cap, and every other sith/jedi you see is a member of the small elite dark/jedi council, and you are into the actual business of an MMO which is the hampster wheel of gear progression and finding stuff to do every day. It's so linear to start, the entire thing, that when you get to level cap it's a jaring experience to not having 4 quests in your log for the next hub and somewhere to go.
Skyrim is an example of a bit too open. There *is* a plot there. But you can almost completely miss major portions of it, and you can't realistically see major plot differences without multiple play throughs of an easily 80 hour game. That *can* be good, but it's so big and vast that you have almost no sense of how alternate versions would play out (think the civil war story line that runs along with the rest of the game). And there's huge parts of the world you can easily miss (the giant underground area for example) even if you are spending a lot of time exploring. You might just find these little elevator you can't get into, which unlocks a whole other world, or just a room with a free sword, and you don't know differently, and you just move on, never knowing what you missed or what you could have done to find it.
Both of those are very nitpicky examples to try and be illustrative with current games. I think as an industry we have discovered that most of the time people want a compelling story or plot that they can play through, and that sort of sits on top of their playing in big open worlds. For every Skyrim or WoW or SWTOR that people have they also want some CoD's, some Uncharteds,and some Mass Effect's. There's room in the market for everything, and when you're competing for gamers time more than money you don't really want to sell them a game they can't play. You can bet big, and win, like skyrim, which is also the 5th in a series, but you could also bet big and have no one know who you are (Divinity II: Ego Draconis).
Games are meant to be played. Watching a cutscene is not playing a game. As one of several metrics, I judge the quality of a game by its level of interactivity. If I am not controlling the story, even if it is as simple as making story decisions like in the Mass Effect and Witcher games, then I am only an observer of the story. In that case, movies and books are much more effective mediums for telling a story. The whole point of automated games is that the level of interactivity can be increased without the player needing to worry about the implementation (such as you would need to do in pen-and-paper RPGs like DnD or GURPS). This is precisely the reason why I don't enjoy JRPGs - to me they simply feel like a very tedious and drawn-out way to watch an anime.
Apparently wizard is not a legitimate career path, so I chose programmer instead.
Medal of Honor was created by Steven Spielburg, who directed Saving Private Ryan. Accordingly, the assault on Omaha Beach in MoH:Allied Assault is the closest thing I've seen to Saving Private Ryan in game form. And you know what? It works extremely well. That is still one of the most compelling game sequences I've ever played, some 10 years after the fact.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
He said games have been enjoyed by people for millennia, and that there's no real history of injecting story and emotion into games with really successful results.
Of course, the history of virtual reality is only a few years. We make our VR entertainment game centric to give it purpose and structure, but it truly is a whole new area.
Check your premises.
In a word to Mr. Jaffe's point; "Rage"
Whiny that Mass Effect and Dragon Age games, each version outsell everything he has ever made in his life.
My problem is that ME1 and DA1 both were VERY GOOD in control and customization, then some idiots got their hands on the games and dumbed them down.
Twisted metal was a fun game but it was not a fantastic game that made me want to play it obsessively over a long period of time. Mass Effect and Dragon age as well as Rage, Etc... all give the player a very strong desire to keep playing it until they finish it.
twisted metal was only placed once in a while when friends were over.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
One of the reasons I stopped playing many games was because they started making me spend more time in cut-scenes than gameplay, and forcing my character to do things that I would never have done in order to advance the story in the direction they wanted to force me to go. Not only that, but the three-hour-long cut-scene would be created by frustrated wannabe movie director who was a wannabe because they had no clue about how to cut a movie scene, with random cuts between shots and dialog that gives me the same information six times before it moves on to something new.
So, please God, game developers listen to him and stop trying to force a story on top of a game that would otherwise be fun. I have a lot more fun in, say, the GTA games by just driving around doing stuff than playing the tedious story missions.
(or at least the advent to me) of real time strategy games like Age of Empires and Warcraft I & II
if you think rtses made their appearance with aoe or warcraft i, you are way too young.
rtses were there before dune 2. dune 2 made rts mainstream. you know dune 2 as command & conquer or red alert now. the franchise is basically the same as it was back in 1993 in dune 2 form.
Read radical news here
Small penis, big ego and can't take criticism: http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2007/05/jaffe_slams_joy/
Had to speak up here. Games that don't focus on plot become repetitive and thin. I like Gears of War, I like Vanquish, but at the end of the day you're repeating the same challenges that just increase the difficulty and put a spin or twist on the next level's boss.
I bought an Xbox the day Halo came out, played it all night and beat it by noon the next day. I was CONSUMED by the whole experience. There was a reason WHY I was there killing all those aliens, I felt I understood my character, but most of all, I felt like the days of repeating boring levels that just get a little harder and a little different were over.
The first game I ever beat was Zaxxon, flipped the score back when I was wearing wooden underwear and riding around on dinosaurs. It was fun, when I was 8 or 10. Then I grew up. And funny thing, the games that consumed me in junior high were the games that were all plot. Bards Tale, Wizardry, games that dropped me into a world of fantasy and told me a (good) story along the way.
Today, I have a family, job, other obligations and I only get to play games occasionally. What I choose to do with that time isn't about killing the next boss, it's about the journey through the whole world.
Right now, the few precious moments I spend on video games is in Fallout New Vegas. And while I'm sitting there in my comfy couch with my giant screen and my awesome sound system, the only thing I'm thinking is "What happens next?"
Without speculating which category Jaffe falls into, I've noticed that there seem to be two types of people - those who go through life looking for meaning in it and those who go through life just trying to figure out how to get to the next [fill in the blank]. While meaning may not be strictly necessary for a challenge/reward based game, it certainly is appealing for some.
This strikes me as something similar to what the Sims creator said. And I'll say the same thing I said to that one.
We get it, you lack a critical element to draw people into your game, just shut up and go back to your corner.
Personally? While I do like the more story-lighter games as opposed to the story-heavy games, games with little to no story drive me nuts.
Especially so with games which have the same "Go kill stuff" as the objective over. and over. and over.
I'm not a fan of mindless violence. I prefer my violence to have purpose.
What do I know, I'm just an idiot, right?
David Jaffe of all people is criticizing story-driven video games. Keep in mind that this is the guy who thinks that tits and ultraviolence are basically all you need to make a game compelling. Keep putting your closeted fratboy fantasies on display all you want, but don't bitch when the rest of us decide to keep playing in the big-boy pool, OK, David?
Rob
Obviously all of this is very subjective but main problem is not the stories or even the cutscenes. The problem with many modern games is that they make me lose control of the character and/or the camera.
The best way to do story is like in HL2. The game has some quite long dialogs but they don't force camera angles or player movement on me. This means that during the dialogs the player is free to jump and look around and of course hit stuff with a crowbar. This makes the game very immersive to me.
In the middle we have games that use the game engine to render cut-scenes like in GTA or in WoW. I am not a big fan of those but at least they usually look good and you can most of the time skip them. You can sometimes control camera angle but rarely the character.
The worst fo all is 720p full screen movies. Most of the time, because I play on a PC, the in game graphics are better than the pre-rendered video. Why the hell make the video in the first place? Most pre-rendered FMV look like crap. They will also obviously remove all freedom from the players. The absolute worst example I tried was Ghost Busters the video game. You can spend more time in this game watching movies than busting ghosts. It's not exactly surprising since it's based on a movie but why make a game in the first place if your scenario was made for the cinema?
While some games have good stories, it is very rare. Most of the time a story is put in because the designers feel they have to do some. Most games would, in fact, be better off if the effort was put into the actual gameplay. That doesn't mean games with stories are inherently bad, but shallow stories are all too often just disguises under which you are sold the exact same thing.
Well I would say if the person playing is having fun, the developers are doing it right.
Its like pitting SWTOR against Minecraft.
SWTOR is a story driven game taken up in large part with interactive cut scenes, sitting ontop of a standard MMO.
Minecraft is an endless world to explore and develop, relying on the player to simply enjoy and manipulate the enviorment.
I like them both, and twisted metal was fun, but I have spent more time player SWTOR.
.... is hardware power allowed computers to create graphics that allowed cinematic elements to take over and because we as gamers love both cinema and games we are now highly confused consumer base when it comes to games. I admit to being spoiled by the likes of Call of duty 4 and mass effect but even I know that the awesome hollywood cinematic aspects do detract and take away resources from the game. Where we are just playing the same games with different stories and the gameplay isn't going anwyhere.
I still look at high watermarks for gameplay in Quake 3 and UT2004 and see that gameplay has frozen in time, instead of explore new game modes. Gamers have become satisfied with a basic level of gameplay and just swapping out models and narrative. Lets be honest we are all guilty here to some extent. No one really escapes and Jaffe is correct that story should serve gameplay.
Just because computers now have the hardware power to render cinematics and hollywood special fx doesn't mean they should dominate. Let us remember games like civilization 1 for instance. A game you can come back to and play many times. Most modern games completely lack the replayability element anymore because they are so cinematic focused. We've come to substitute gaming with a cinematic experience and it has had negative effects on games since there are not enough resources to go around so publishers and developers have to pick what they think will get them the most sales (hollywood or gameplay?) most go for shoving story into the game and cutting back on gameplay since most gamers are now older and don't really like gameplay anymore (it's true lets face it, whenever you hear and old codger complain about 'grinding' in an RPG or repetitiveness in battle systems, that's you decrying gameplay).
Another real issue is many modern gamers don't want to be challenged. It's too easy for all of us (and we've all done it) to be passively awed by the audiovisuals for that brief moment of stimulation but then you never pick up the game again. How many modern games have you actually replayed or gone back to? After the cinematic experience and rush is over you rarely go back. I still go back to older retro games from time to time.
I remember when replayability used to be front and center. Older gamers prefer more story driven games and less gameplay because they have 1) less energy and 2) are time constrained so they perceive marathon sessions as a 'waste of time' and 'grinding' because now they are part of the rat race. But there is still an element of them having 'grown out of' gameplay.
I am one of those people for who the last 10 years of gaming has been complete creative loss. I'm gameplay guy first and I positively hate the dumbing down of games to insert story and narrative and "the awesome button" where challenge and interactivity has been stripped away. You can especially see this in Deus Ex human revolution. I went and replayed Deus Ex the original before playing HR and I really do miss the gameplay first approach. The world in the original DX was just so much more compelling as a game despite it's aged graphics.
Modern games try to cater to all audiences and the easiest way to do this is just copy/paste from hollywood given the expensive nature of modern game development.
I think most people misunderstand Jaffe's argument, he's not saying story can't be done well or that games shouldn't have stories. But the story of a game should be in service to the gameplay. What a player is doing 90% of the game should take precedence over passive elements that are one time only (story/cinematics). There are only so many times you can watch a cinematic, but you can always replay a game like Civilization or alpha centauri and be sucked right back in and that's totally missing from our modern AAA hollywood infested games.
They are entertaining no doubt about it, people get emotionally attached the properties and characters. But lets' be honest shall we? We won't be saying "just one more t
Half the reason I play Starcraft 1 & 2 is for the story line. Does that mean they compromised on gameplay?
Same goes for Diablo 2
A game needs both a story line and good gameplay. The problem is game developers compromise one/both of them for release dates and budgets.
When people who make a living providing entertainment start telling YOU what YOU should enjoy it's time to just stop feeding these idiots...and saving private ryan was a boring film...
I love both freeform games and story driven games, but let's not pretend that we haven't had fantastic story telling in games before. If we take the best of the best of video game and movie story telling, then the story-driven games beat the best movies hands down.
I for one love a good story that's well told in any medium and can't wait for tomorrow's release (well, re-release) of Dear Esther
http://dear-esther.com/
My favorites games lately: LA Noire, Deus Ex Human Revolution and Skyrim. Last year I really enjoyed Heavy Rain and the expansion packs for GTA4.
I think that in a gamer's collection there is room for more than one kind of game. And stuff that is clearly an hybrid (like RAGE) misses the point IMHO.
lucm, indeed.
Need for speed - story made me feel like I was being chased and a bad ass car driver. Gameplay was good, but the story really added to it. (Newer versions)
Mass effect 1 & 2 (I still dream of 3). When people are all oh..oh..it's shepard. I feel badass. Then when people shoot at me, I feel like I don't take shit from anyone, and I run up, beat them down with my gun, shoot the next guy, lift one up and toss him over a railing.
Game play is great, and the story really added to the atmosphere.
The ending with tali was very emotional, I *can't* wait to proceed further and get more story, and I love the gameplay still, but I MUST have more story.
It's increidlby epic and enriches games in untold ways.
Thank you bio. I did not pirate your games, I bought them, because I love you.
There are games out there that are more story than gameplay - those can start to suck. What it's all about is balance.
You need enough engaging story to get players fired up and paying attention, then toss the power into their hands to create the story and play.
and imagine that every game was like fallout 3, pirates !, simcity and so on.
you would have a game to pick depending on the mood you have at that time and day. sure, you couldnt take too much of simcity. but, you could switch to pirates !. or fallout 3. (even if it has narratives, its pretty much sandbox). or the other game 1, or 2, or 3 and so on.
instead, you are switching narratives today. like, books. you are always reading books, and you dont have the option of not reading a book.
Read radical news here
A game just has to be good. I don't care about storyline unless it's a bad story line. It shouldn't get in the way of a good game.
..however I did try Battlefield 3 when it came out. I remember right at the beginning of the game, my character fell off a train car and I was prompted to tap a button repeatedly to get him to climb back up. What kind of crap gameplay is that?
Different mediums provide different advantages.
Movies have the advantage of being able to show you a story the same way every time, and they can refine every piece. Thats a big advantage.
Videogames put you into situations and give you a practical connection to what is going on. Its an advantage, but its more difficult to utilize.
I'll never forget Final Fantasy VII, the first RPG where a party member dies. People die in movies all the time, but in a game, it actually effects you on a practical. You can't play that character any more. You won't get to use her future abilities, you won't be able to take advantage of her stats, and nothing you can do will change that. Sure, thats nothing compared to an actual person dying, but having even a small amount of actual loss gives you a different perspective, in a way non-interactive media cannot.
I mean, it is certainly the case that every person who plays video games is playing those games for the same reason! Seriously, name ONE SINGLE GAME game (other than Heavy Rain, Uncharted, Bioshock, MGS, Final Fantasy, Zelda, and most of the best games ever made) where the narrative is as important as the game-play. My theory is that he is jealous, because his games will never compare to most of the greats, which more or less center around exactly what he argues against.
Have game makers been 'seduced by the power and language of film' at the expense of gameplay?
The Dig
I like KOTOR, Dragon Age, and many others because they tell an interesting story. I love Dragon Age because I get to manipulate that story. I really could care less about the gameplay as long as the UI is polished and sensible. But that's me. Someone else may like game-play and not care about the story. Both of these viewpoints are fine. Both together is an awesome combination.
Why not do both?
Interactive Films aren't a new concept
They have been done as far back as the late 80s I believe (speaking of American Laser Games if anyone remembers), and all the way up to now with Heavy Rain.
And while Heavy Rain wasn't absolutely brilliant, it certainly showed the right way to go about things to some extent. (some bits were a little.. naff I guess, and walking was painful)
It had pure story sections, and then it had pure game sections, such as moving through those wires without being electrocuted to death.
Others were a mish-mash of the two using the QTE system to trigger certain events, such as the car scene.
Some games just plain cannot have any story and can only be game.
Likewise, some things can only be almost entirely story, in which case it is either a visual novel or a film with intelligent chapter selection.
There is space for all 3 of them in this town.
Why can't they all just... get along?
Jaffe has made two games in the last decade and a half (multiple versions of the same two games). God of War was basically a movie you pressed buttons to. The rest of his games are the same tired play mechanics from 1995 and all but one have the same name as that game from 1995.
When Jaffe becomes a game developer with actual contributions, I will value his words. Until then he's the same drunk dick head he's always been.
Seriously, this is a bit like somebody saying that all books that aren't written like a Stephen King novel are trash.
This guy harshes on story based games. Fine. HE doesn't have to play them. Some people enjoy differnt kinds of games.
Just because you have one sort of successful action game doesn't mean you can trash on all the other genres of games.
This guy is clearly a douche.
Jaffe thinks the main question is 'How the **** do I get to that rock? How do I get to the exit?'. I'm not interested unless I know why the f**k I want to get to that rock. This guy is a stooge.
Have been enjoying all kinds of computer or board games and toys - every form can be very successfully done, none can be put down as unsuitable. Of storytelling games, Shenmue for Dreamcast was one of the most impressive games to experience. It was epic thanks to the seriousness of approach to the story simulation and talented implementation.
Servant of karma
Disclaimer: I've been a game programmer during 25 years. My first games were done alone, and my last games were with teams of 40+ people. I quit 8 years ago.
What Jaffe says is totally true NOW.
Hollywood had always been jealous of the success of the games industry (a game costs a fraction of the price of a movie), and games companies always wanted to become like movies companies (because there is a real promotional network).
In France, the most famous example is Cryo, which was so much oriented towards movies that it finally disappeared.
In my opinion, these are totally wrong points of view.
Cinema cannot be games, and games cannot be cinema, because a movie and a game are not built the same way:
- a movie can be storyboarded from the beginning to the end, with every plan drawn to maximize the impact. There is no place for improvisation.
- games are software. You cannot plan software, it's a totally different way of thinking. A game evolves until it's finished.
I worked on heavily storyboarded games, and they were shitty, there was no sense of "freedom".
And I'm pretty sure that a movie will fail if it's not prepared enough before starting its filming.
Before, I explained that Jaffe was true NOW.
Around the year 2000, I witnessed an interesting game project, which was an adventure game where the ending was changing along with the hero's actions (at that time, I was working on Omikron the Nomad Soul). The project never appeared, because I think that people were too much focused on technology instead of concentrating on finishing the game.
So, now, I'm pretty sure that storytelling needs to be rethought to give a proper game.
Storytelling for cinema cannot be transposed to videogames, a new level of abstraction is required.
A few ideas appeared, but no formalisation has been done, so I guess storytelling for videogames is not enough mature.
In the future, I think that storytelling will evolve to match the challenge of designing games.
Currently, it's like creating games in 2D, and expecting that they will transpose in 3D without any effort.
Utterly disgusting is how I find this statement:
Did he use "strong IP" to refer to plot and characters? It doesn't surprise me that a person who refers to works of art as mere "IP" doesn't get games and won't get any respect from me. I'd make sure I never have to sufer playing one of his "IP".
But... the future refused to change.
A movie is just a game with a really crappy user interface. Games provide entertainment to people with enough disposable income to waste on them, just like movies. And just like movie studios, the game studios don't risk their money on unknown or untested content. Hollywood has figured out that it can raid your childhood memories, wrap them up with some eye-candy special effects, and sell them back to you at a tidy profit. If Hollywood could figure out how to make movies to be addictive like games, the gaming industry would be in trouble, and not vice-versa. Game studios can, unlike their Hollywood counterparts, addict their demographic targets, so once they find a profitable formula, they can stick with it forever. But Hollywood hasn't figured out how to create an addiction yet; they have to rely on farming each new generation's fantasies for next summer's releases. That's why Hollywood gives us serial iterations of the same formula every summer, hoping they can figure out the next childhood fantasy to exploit before people stop paying to see the current crop.
I'm sure he'd love it if the landscape were nothing but lame brainless games where the objective is to just blow stuff up, but some of us actually like having games with a story. Here is something he might not be aware of: There is room for all kinds of games, including ones he doesn't like playing.
My being a non-expert, decisively, about computer games, I know that I mostly like story-telling games. I like a compelling narrative in an alternate reality simulation, such that a game represents - for instance, Dragon Age Origins, and Half Life 2. In my opinion, HL2 itself makes the most superbly well crafted and well presented scifi narrative of any scifi game I've ever seen - and I've seen ...some few.
DAO, then, I think tops it in the playability-with-narrative field - by far, in contrast to the dragging storyline of Mass Effect.
Thinking of DAO, I like The Witcher 2 in its plot - I think it has a really intriguing plot - but to me, it's awkward in the playability (namely for player actions and player controls), and too heavy-handed on the graphics. (Granted, I'm not trying to impress anyone, when I say this.)
Heck, I even like the story-telling in Ur-Quan Masters - that, along with the planetary lander bits. Those are fun. It's a slow game, I know, and life is just so fast-paced, these days....?
I like Flatout Ultimate Carnage and Burnout: Paradise, also. Those are fun driving games, where crashing doesn't result in injury. In Flatout, it even results in "points."
I don't think FPS games without a notable narrative are so fun, though. That's my own view on the FPS genre. If there's no storyline, I start to ask myself, "Why am I here, playing this alternate reality simulation, again?" I'm more literary, though. Some fewer of us are, these days.
In order to get publishers to throw cash at a game, you need to impress them in some manner. In order for a high profile AAA game to sell, you need to be able to put together an effective commercial.
A 'Saving Private Ryan' intro is impressive. It can show off the graphics, and anyone seeing that can intuitively understand what is going on. But if you throw a controller / mouse + keyboard into the hands of a marketing executive to get them to play the game for 10 minutes, your going to have 10 minutes of an executive trying to figure out unfamiliar controls and getting killed.
Gameplay can be king, but in order to get the several million dollars needed to make the damn game, you need a strong visual element. It is easier to sell a damn good story then to sell a game description of "a deep and fast pace fighting game like Soul Calibur with better controls".
Basically, the bigger the budget, the more likely you are to be railroaded into a story.
The other side of it is that a wide open world with lots of branching in the story is cripplingly expensive to create. Do you really think they sat on Grand Theft Auto 5 so long because they had problems convincing the accountants it was a good plan? They needed the time to build the vast amount of content for that game. Same for Skyrim.
END COMMUNICATION
The devs of Amnesia are doing the opposite: removing traditional gameplay elements completely to drive the story better, and are having huge success. Emotional, story driven games are something we're only now learning how to do well, and the demographic for these games is huge and growing. Not everyone is into twitch gaming, and even gamers like variety in what they play. Like art and poetry, the developers that will be remembered and copied 10 years from now are the ones that have emotion and storytelling, and break the rules when doing it.
http://www.gdcvault.com/play/1014889/Evoking-Emotions-and-Achieving-Success
Spot on!
Democracy Now! - uncensored, anti-establishment news
Is Bioshock better than his game?
Excellent RPGs like The Witcher- for whom cutscenes are essential to the story.
All these differences in opinions between game developers can only lead to good things for us gamers.
Out of curiosity, I went over to metacritic (as an example) to see for myself what were the top three PS3 games between 2006-2011 and whether there is any evidence that suggests cinematic/story in games has fallen out of favour among gamers. I let you be the judge.
2006:
Resistance: Fall of Man
Fight Night Round 3
Gran Tourismo HD Concept
2007:
COD4: Modern Warfare
Elder Scrolls IV
Rock Band
2008:
GTA IV
LittleBigPlanet
Bioshock
2009:
Uncharted 2
COD: Modern Warfare 2
Street Fighter 4
2010:
Red Dead Redemption
God of War 3
Super Street Fighter IV
2011:
Batman: Arkham City
Portal 2
Mass Effect 2
If you want to know what a "good game" is, look at the top played games on Steam. They don't represent the whole market (since not everything is available on Steam), but are a much better indicator for games people actually play longer than a few hours.
Steam & Game Stats
The awesome storytelling of L4D2, CIV 5 and CS must be responsible for their staying power. ;-)
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
Played, and later worked (if you can call it that), at a LAN gaming centre for a good few years. I'm familiar with the mind-set of many gamers - that gameplay rules uber-alles. A lot of those guys tend towards disdain for anything that detracts from gameplay for even a millisecond, as well as anyone who tolerates those distractions.
There was one guy, a very unfortunate case, that I'll never forget. I was playing WoW a few weeks after it's release and he asked what class I was before. I blinked and asked "before what?". As our confused conversation continued, I realized he assumed I had previously been a Dark Age of Camelot player, the long-standing LAN centre favourite fantasy MMORPG. When I told him I'd never played it, he sneered at me and never shared a civil word with me again.
At first I chalked it up to the clannish divide that was growing in the place between hardcore DAoC players and cute WoW players. Later on he told me that the only games he would ever need for the rest of his life were DAoC and Counterstrike. I don't think his claim was hyperbole, he genuinely believed that at the time. I later realised his only source of pleasure was triumph over other players. I could understand the attraction - I was a competitive Counterstrike player, Planetside lover and I've recently started playing Navy Field (retro trip!), all of them pure PvP games with no plot to get in the way of the action. Thing was, this guy didn't seem to enjoy any other aspect of gaming. He'd never played Half-Life 2 and turned his nose up at Darwinia.
How anyone chooses to spend their time is entirely up to them, but an inability to appreciate a story line in a game coupled with an intolerance of other people's preferences in that department does seem... I don't know, childish? Emotionally stunted?
And here I was thinking that games were a mature medium, catering to a broad selection of tastes. Personally, I haven't played any of Jaffe's games. Twisted Metal was stupid even for it's time, and nine thousand iterations haven't made it any more compelling to me. God of War is, I'm told, a big pile of fun, but I own no Playstation so haven't tried it. All his games though, are of a visceral, aggressive nature. That's something I am interested in playing, but such games make up maybe 5% of my library. to be fair, if we're going to start comparing games to films, David Jaffe is Steven Seagal.
...that we can choose which games we want to buy and play.
This seminal study in 1977 showed that kids who immerse themselves in the storylines of fantasy play outperform kids who play "real" games (like house or firefighters), kids who read and discuss fantasy, and kids who read and discuss "real" stories. I just talked to one of the co-authors, David Dixon, who now teaches at Missouri State, and he guessed that his study's results had something to do with helping kids both stretch their narrative imaginations and to disentangle the concepts "thought" from "action" (In young kids, thinking IS doing). So what I wonder is this: do video games WITHOUT storylines encourage kids to formulate their own? Or do games without storylines lose this narrative aspect altogether?
GeekDad, TED speaker, Wipeout loser, author of Brain Trust
I find cinematic driven games to be quite enjoyable. I do not like to read books but I love watching movies. I also love playing video games and love fantasy games. Games such as Final Fantasy satisfy my love for fantasy, games, and watching movies. It's a one stop shop for me. I love being able to "know" my characters and to get fully submersed into the story. Also, with FFXIII-2, you drive the cutscenes, which adds extra awesomeness. Don't get me wrong, I also love games like WoW and Rift. They have a story if you "read" it, but like I previously said, I don't really like to read books, so I'm there for the gameplay.
Why exactly can't a game have a lot of film in it? I don't remember receiving any rule book about what a game can or cannot have in it. If you don't like it, DONT BUY IT. This is like people bitching about the Jersey Shore. It exists because people tune in... if they stopped tuning in, I assure you it would get cancelled very, very fast. Now the fact that MTV doesn't play music videos hardly at all anymore is extremely sad, but again it's a ratings issue. If these games did not sell, they would not get produced in the volume and with the budget that they currently get.
This whole argument that people should not profit because the thing they are profiting from is stupid is itself a really stupid argument. News flash: lots of people are stupid. Stupid people like stupid things... thats what makes them stupid.
Just play whatever floats your boat.
Day of the Tentacle, Grim Fandango, Quest For Glory, Fallout, Wasteland, Space Quest, Zork, FFVII, FFVI (for those purists out there you nit-picky bastards), Syberia, Loom, Amnesia, Dragon's Lair, and Morrowind are all complete shit games and there's a reason why they don't have the same amazing replay value as space invaders or pac-man.
One game that really gets the balance between story and gameplay right is Limbo on xbox live. No dialogue, no cutscenes, very minimal intrusion of story into the actual gameplay. The player remains in control of the main character for 99% of the game - but the narrative is still rich.
I couldn't care LESS about "gameplay" in the sense he uses it. Sure, there are some games where story is just a framing device -- racing games, Street Fighter and its follow-ons, etc. -- but I play RPGs. I play games to be PART of the world. Fallout, without story, would be ... what? Nothing, really. Collect ammo, shoot things, collect more ammo, get bigger guns, shoot more things... I suppose some people would find that fun. Not me. One of the prior posters mentions Civilization and Alpha Centauri; for a long time I didn't know why I clearly preferred AlphaCent to Civ, and this discussion crystallizes it; AlphaCent felt more like there was a STORY to what you were doing. By not being generic pictures of semi-historical figures, but separate personalities and original characters, the "faces" put on AlphaCent's factions made it much more a LIVING game to me.
I think the focus on "new gameplay" is one of the least interesting parts of the gaming industry. I'd like more immersive gameplay and games with more STORY, thanks.
...Coming from Twisted Metal's creator. So all games should be like his? Just run around and blow stuff up in a clown car?
Sounds to me he is mad because his last games were crap and expects the next Twisted Metal game not to be crap (Which it will be).
I do agree to an extent that games need to veer away from being built around a story. The Final Fantasy series is notable for this problem. Ever since FF7, the game has slowly decayed as far as playing and has become "Battle - CGI Cutscene - Battle - CGI Cutscene - Lather - Rinse - Repeat". However games like TM have little incentive to play through it. An average gamer can probably do everything in TM in one day or two and it will find it's way to Gamestop within that week. That's not gameplay. That is lazy development. Considering that David Jaffe is head deep in Sony's rectum, it only makes his words seem more ridiculous.
The biggest load of crap was when he mentioned Gameplay. Any game designer can tell you they dislike that word. Why? There isn't a clear definition nor is there a concrete form for it. It makes the game fun? Not everybody finds TM fun. Not everybody finds Halo fun. Not everybody finds Star Wars fun. The word is ambiguous and has so many definitions that there isn't a unanimous agreement.
To me: Either David Jaffe is trolling in order to hype up the next TM game (which won't work), or he has needs to get his head out of Sony's rectum before he asphyxiates himself.
Jon CJ Graham pretty much predicted this a year ago in the form of satire, with his series "Arby 'n' The Chief", with an douchebag game studio CEO named Trent Donovich