I'm an artsy-fartsy type! I've always been fascinated by storytelling in games because I think this particular medium has an *immense* amount of potential, but it's definitely potential that is left largely unrealized in most games.
As I see it, most problems stem from the fact that video game narratives simply cannot work the same way that narratives in other mediums work, so trying to structure a game's story like a novel or a movie very seldom works well. Even these so-called "cinematic games" that chase after the prestige of Hollywood-style blockbusters wind up being 10-ish hours long or so, with the storytelling sharing a lot of space with the gameplay (if we're lucky), which is just utterly ruinous for the story's pacing. And that's the key word there, I think, that dooms so many video game stories: pacing. It's hard to get the pacing right even with older, conventional media, but with a game, where you're jockeying for your audience's attention alongside so many other flashier, more eye-drawing elements... it's even harder.
Anyway, maybe you've already spoken about this before (and given how often you talk about games, this seems likely, but I'm a fairly new Spiderweb fan so please forgive my potential ignorance here), but I'm curious about where, exactly, in the process of creating a new game do you start thinking about the story? Do you think of it as constructing RPG systems/mechanics in order to supplement your story concept, or do you come up with a story concept that complements the RPG systems/mechanics you're wanting to play around with?
For every series we've ever written, the story is the VERY FIRST thing.
I get an idea for a story, and I just stow it away in my brain for a few months. Then I pull it out again. If it still intrigues me, I design every element of the game around telling that story.
My next article is about pacing your game so that it can tell a story. And also structuring a story for the video game medium. It's difficult, but not impossible, and if it hits it really pays off.
IMHO the best storytelling that I have experienced in video games is in the rare games where all or at least most most of the small stories are potent, unexpectedly complex and perhaps emotional, joined with the interactive parts of those stories being mechanically varied (not just fetch stuff). Baldurs Gate 3 does that pretty well, but I think the best example for me is the Witcher 3. These small stories may be standalone or part of the overarching story.
I don't think it's too much of a hot take to say that the main quest of BG3 wasn't the most compelling. It serviced ferrying you around and let you enjoy its solid gameplay and great companions. It's very much a 'the sum of its parts is greater than you'd expect'. But also as you say, if the story didn't exist _at all_ BG3 wouldn't be particularly motivating. I think it did something very right by creating memorable and compelling characters in a variety of personalities so that the ones certain people hate other people love.
Mass Effect 2 remains one of my favorite games even though it's main plot is best described as 'and then nothing really happened and now Mass Effect 3 has to do all the heavy story lifting' because it was a fun 'assemble the team' game where you're showcased a lot of interesting characters and you can bring them along places and see them comment on things. Compelling characters can make you really interested in going along with an otherwise completely unremarkable plot.
To bring it to your own game series, a huge part of why I enjoyed Queen's Wish was because of 'my fantasy family'. You didn't interact with them all the time but they were a constant presence and they had personality and I wanted to feel like I could budge and influence them while still doing right by them. The overarching plot of the game isn't particularly complicated or twisty compared to Avadon, but the characters scattered in the world made it feel real and made me feel a lot more connected with the weight of the actions I was taking.
So in general I don't really care a ton about the story in and of itself, the world building and lore are pretty important but if a gameplay is good but the story is weak I'll probably still play it. If a game has a great story but mediocre gameplay, I would rather read or watch it than play it and will probably pass on that game.
I'm not saying a game shouldn't have a good story because when you combine good story, or world building with good gameplay that's how you get a truly great game. I think the thing you have to be really careful of with storytelling in video games is sometimes the player catches on to your plan and tries to do something different than what you want them to do and forcing the player to do that can really kill the motivation to play.
This happened to me with a spec ops the line. My friend kept harping on me to play it because its not just a normal "war shooter" I finally did, caught one plot hook part way through the game and tried doing everything I could to avoid it, but the game would absolutely not let you. So I do the thing, bad things happen, and the game comes at me like "how dare you." My guy I tried to not do the thing and you made me. Killed any enjoyment I was having up until that point and just abandoned the game. Being vague in case someone is still worried about spoilers for a 12 year old third person shooter.
As a final thought I just wanted to say how much I love the world building in Avernum. I still have incredibly fond memories of playing hundreds of hours of the Exile 2 shareware because I couldn't afford the full version and forcing my friends to play a ADnD campaign set in Exile. Good times, but that is a sign of a beautifully crafted world.
I think you’re right, but art of any kind always resists straightforward “all X is Y” stuff. There are always a huge number of important exceptions.
My favorite game of all time - or at least my favorite game before From Software started being awesome - is Planescape: Torment.
I played and finished that game about ten times before someone pointed out to me that combat - not an insignificant portion of the game - sucked. They also noted the game was on rails even though I thought of it as a sandbox. They were right on both counts. But even though gameplay was really bad in that game it was arguably the best ever.
Yeah that's fair, I was just giving a pretty broad generalization. I think one thing that helps differentiate Torment from being lumped into the bad game/good book format is that it allows the player to more or less put themselves in the place of the nameless one which is a little harder to do in books, but even then it was still a pretty rough play through for me and I LOVED the Planescape campaign setting.
The only thing that I will argue about though is that Fromsoft has ALWAYS been awesome. They have dropped the ball a few times but I still hold King's Field 2 and 3 as well as Armored Core 1 and 2 as some of my favorite games ever.
I think it's fair to assert that every CRPG owes its existence to D&D. So when it comes to storytelling in a CRPG, or any video game that claims to have a story, one can compare a video game designer to a D&D dungeon master.
Some DMs "railroad" their players through a pre-planned story. The players do not have agency in how the story turns out. Any activity they perform is a mechanical exercise (combat, skill checks) that prompts the DM to tell the next segment of the story they wrote. It's effectively a Choose Your Own Adventure book that the DM is reading to you.
On the other extreme, some DMs create "sandbox" environments. There may be pre-planned or ad-hoc events that present challenges, but the outcome, order, etc. of what happens is through player agency. There is essentially no story planned out at all. The players are creating their own story through their actions and reacting to events thrown in their path to keep them busy if they can't think of anything else better to do.
I think when gamers say they want a good story, they're saying they want to *feel* something in what they are doing. If there's no emotional or intellectual payoff, then the story is no good. If the events in the game tug at your emotions or reinforce how smart you are, then you'll have a positive opinion about it. The twists and turns of unexpected events or revelations and the payoff of seeing how they resolve are intellectually stimulating, and the tug of seeing places or characters you've invested in succeeding or failing is emotionally stimulating.
A good CRPG provides plenty of player agency while still throwing them a curveball with unexpected events or revelations. A bad CRPG either railroads the player through a predetermined sequence of events, or it dumps a "clean the map" job at their feet with no surprises or emotional investment.
I'm an artsy-fartsy type! I've always been fascinated by storytelling in games because I think this particular medium has an *immense* amount of potential, but it's definitely potential that is left largely unrealized in most games.
As I see it, most problems stem from the fact that video game narratives simply cannot work the same way that narratives in other mediums work, so trying to structure a game's story like a novel or a movie very seldom works well. Even these so-called "cinematic games" that chase after the prestige of Hollywood-style blockbusters wind up being 10-ish hours long or so, with the storytelling sharing a lot of space with the gameplay (if we're lucky), which is just utterly ruinous for the story's pacing. And that's the key word there, I think, that dooms so many video game stories: pacing. It's hard to get the pacing right even with older, conventional media, but with a game, where you're jockeying for your audience's attention alongside so many other flashier, more eye-drawing elements... it's even harder.
Anyway, maybe you've already spoken about this before (and given how often you talk about games, this seems likely, but I'm a fairly new Spiderweb fan so please forgive my potential ignorance here), but I'm curious about where, exactly, in the process of creating a new game do you start thinking about the story? Do you think of it as constructing RPG systems/mechanics in order to supplement your story concept, or do you come up with a story concept that complements the RPG systems/mechanics you're wanting to play around with?
For every series we've ever written, the story is the VERY FIRST thing.
I get an idea for a story, and I just stow it away in my brain for a few months. Then I pull it out again. If it still intrigues me, I design every element of the game around telling that story.
My next article is about pacing your game so that it can tell a story. And also structuring a story for the video game medium. It's difficult, but not impossible, and if it hits it really pays off.
IMHO the best storytelling that I have experienced in video games is in the rare games where all or at least most most of the small stories are potent, unexpectedly complex and perhaps emotional, joined with the interactive parts of those stories being mechanically varied (not just fetch stuff). Baldurs Gate 3 does that pretty well, but I think the best example for me is the Witcher 3. These small stories may be standalone or part of the overarching story.
I don't think it's too much of a hot take to say that the main quest of BG3 wasn't the most compelling. It serviced ferrying you around and let you enjoy its solid gameplay and great companions. It's very much a 'the sum of its parts is greater than you'd expect'. But also as you say, if the story didn't exist _at all_ BG3 wouldn't be particularly motivating. I think it did something very right by creating memorable and compelling characters in a variety of personalities so that the ones certain people hate other people love.
Mass Effect 2 remains one of my favorite games even though it's main plot is best described as 'and then nothing really happened and now Mass Effect 3 has to do all the heavy story lifting' because it was a fun 'assemble the team' game where you're showcased a lot of interesting characters and you can bring them along places and see them comment on things. Compelling characters can make you really interested in going along with an otherwise completely unremarkable plot.
To bring it to your own game series, a huge part of why I enjoyed Queen's Wish was because of 'my fantasy family'. You didn't interact with them all the time but they were a constant presence and they had personality and I wanted to feel like I could budge and influence them while still doing right by them. The overarching plot of the game isn't particularly complicated or twisty compared to Avadon, but the characters scattered in the world made it feel real and made me feel a lot more connected with the weight of the actions I was taking.
So in general I don't really care a ton about the story in and of itself, the world building and lore are pretty important but if a gameplay is good but the story is weak I'll probably still play it. If a game has a great story but mediocre gameplay, I would rather read or watch it than play it and will probably pass on that game.
I'm not saying a game shouldn't have a good story because when you combine good story, or world building with good gameplay that's how you get a truly great game. I think the thing you have to be really careful of with storytelling in video games is sometimes the player catches on to your plan and tries to do something different than what you want them to do and forcing the player to do that can really kill the motivation to play.
This happened to me with a spec ops the line. My friend kept harping on me to play it because its not just a normal "war shooter" I finally did, caught one plot hook part way through the game and tried doing everything I could to avoid it, but the game would absolutely not let you. So I do the thing, bad things happen, and the game comes at me like "how dare you." My guy I tried to not do the thing and you made me. Killed any enjoyment I was having up until that point and just abandoned the game. Being vague in case someone is still worried about spoilers for a 12 year old third person shooter.
As a final thought I just wanted to say how much I love the world building in Avernum. I still have incredibly fond memories of playing hundreds of hours of the Exile 2 shareware because I couldn't afford the full version and forcing my friends to play a ADnD campaign set in Exile. Good times, but that is a sign of a beautifully crafted world.
I think you’re right, but art of any kind always resists straightforward “all X is Y” stuff. There are always a huge number of important exceptions.
My favorite game of all time - or at least my favorite game before From Software started being awesome - is Planescape: Torment.
I played and finished that game about ten times before someone pointed out to me that combat - not an insignificant portion of the game - sucked. They also noted the game was on rails even though I thought of it as a sandbox. They were right on both counts. But even though gameplay was really bad in that game it was arguably the best ever.
Yeah that's fair, I was just giving a pretty broad generalization. I think one thing that helps differentiate Torment from being lumped into the bad game/good book format is that it allows the player to more or less put themselves in the place of the nameless one which is a little harder to do in books, but even then it was still a pretty rough play through for me and I LOVED the Planescape campaign setting.
The only thing that I will argue about though is that Fromsoft has ALWAYS been awesome. They have dropped the ball a few times but I still hold King's Field 2 and 3 as well as Armored Core 1 and 2 as some of my favorite games ever.
Is there a way to play Kings Field now? I always wanted to give it a shot but only saw it on PS1 or whatever.
I think it's fair to assert that every CRPG owes its existence to D&D. So when it comes to storytelling in a CRPG, or any video game that claims to have a story, one can compare a video game designer to a D&D dungeon master.
Some DMs "railroad" their players through a pre-planned story. The players do not have agency in how the story turns out. Any activity they perform is a mechanical exercise (combat, skill checks) that prompts the DM to tell the next segment of the story they wrote. It's effectively a Choose Your Own Adventure book that the DM is reading to you.
On the other extreme, some DMs create "sandbox" environments. There may be pre-planned or ad-hoc events that present challenges, but the outcome, order, etc. of what happens is through player agency. There is essentially no story planned out at all. The players are creating their own story through their actions and reacting to events thrown in their path to keep them busy if they can't think of anything else better to do.
I think when gamers say they want a good story, they're saying they want to *feel* something in what they are doing. If there's no emotional or intellectual payoff, then the story is no good. If the events in the game tug at your emotions or reinforce how smart you are, then you'll have a positive opinion about it. The twists and turns of unexpected events or revelations and the payoff of seeing how they resolve are intellectually stimulating, and the tug of seeing places or characters you've invested in succeeding or failing is emotionally stimulating.
A good CRPG provides plenty of player agency while still throwing them a curveball with unexpected events or revelations. A bad CRPG either railroads the player through a predetermined sequence of events, or it dumps a "clean the map" job at their feet with no surprises or emotional investment.