Games That Are Loved For Their Story... Have Terrible Stories?

[dyre]

It's been awhile since I've played it, but wasn't it something about the bad guy stealing my sister (or was it best friend? the annoying girl with the pink hair, anyway), and then he ran off with her soul, but it eventually led to us saving the elves or some such?

Pretty much ya but the whole saving the elves thing was merely a byproduct of killing his ass and getting your soul back. Once you finally caught up with him he was in the middle of destroying their city so you kind of had to go through it in order to get to him.

Its actually kind of a running trend in the Baldurs Gate games. In the end you "save the world" but its always just a side effect of something you were doing. It was never actually your purpose or anything.

Oh right, now I remember. Or rather, I remember a little more than I did before. That's pretty funny, actually.

 

[Rooster Cogburn]

Yes, there are only a few types of stories if you really boil them down to their most basic elements, but that's not a good excuse for a story that seems tired or by the book. If a story seems simplistic or derivative it's not because it shares some core elements with others. If that was how it worked, we wouldnt bother writing fiction. The reason people didn't quit writing stories in the bronze age is a good work of fiction has a lot more going on than you can sum up in a twenty word synopsis.

Pointing out that stories can be reduced to a few basic forms is just an excuse for boring, by the numbers writing and a misunderstanding of what the writer's job should be. Several games I really like could benefit from creative ideas to make the story more their own and stave off the feeling of treading old ground.

 

[Irridium]

Bioware have very rarely moved away from their favourite plot - a previously unknown peasant is sent on a quest motivated by revenge after the destruction of his/her home town.

Except from DA:Origins, where you could choose from several backstories. Peasants or nobles, dwarves or elves, it's up to you and the vast majority of them didn't have a destroyed home town.

Or DA2, where you were a previously unknown peasant with no interest in revenge for a doomed home town, just in building a new life somewhere else.

Or Mass Effect, where you can pick from several backgrounds, only one of which (as far as I can recall) was a doomed home town/colony story and revenge was never really a factor.

Or KoTOR, where you were a brainwashed Sith lord gradually regaining your memories, which is about as far from "previously unknown peasant" as they come.

Now, I admit to not having played much of their early stuff, but those are BW's biggest and most recognisable games or franchises, and none of them match up to what you've said there.

Yeah, true, the intro differs based on game. But not the overall plot.

You get introduced to the main villain, get into a prestigious order, go out to various locations, gather companions, then start the endgame where you battle the big bad.

That is your standard Bioware game. Of your list, only DA 2 is the one that deviated from this.

Villain: Logain, Saren, Malek.

Prestigious order: Grey Wardens, Spectre, Jedi

Locations: The "hub worlds" in ME/Kotor. Self-contained areas. Instead of worlds in Origins they're different areas on the world map. Same thing mechanically.

Companions: Pretty obvious. All also more or less have the same archetype. The "charming" male lead[footnote]female love interest[/footnote] (Alistair, Kaiden, Carth), the naive girl[footnote]male love interest[/footnote] (Leliana, Liara, Mission Vao), the *****[footnote]another male love interest[/footnote] (Morrigan, Ashley, Bastila), the honorable mercenary (Sten, Wrex, Canderous), and the non-human awesome character (Shale, HK-47. ME1 didn't have one, but ME2 did with Legion). Of course, there are some variations between the games, but I can pretty much guarantee these will be characters in a Bioware game.

And then the final fight with the big bad. Archedemon, Saren (or Sovereign, whichever works for you), Darth Malek.

So yeah, the plot for Bioware's arguably three biggest games. Pretty much the same across all three.

 

[The Madman]

As numerous others have said there's more to a great story-telling experience than just the basic plot, this is the same for every medium. A movie for example could have the most elaborate and complex plot ever conceived but if the director fails to convey that story in a meaningful or compelling way, to make the audience care, then it's a failure as no ones going to both to take the time to try and navigate or understand that now stupidly overwrought plot.

A good story is the sum of its parts. The pacing, the characterization, how it interacts with the audience as well as the actual plot itself along with a whole slew of other elements.

It's easy to dismiss a work like Baldur's Gate for example by just summarizing the plot, but that's to dismiss the elements of the game which make it compelling. I think most people who've played the series will agree Baldur's Gate is a character-driven series. Minsc, Imoen, Viconia, Jaheira, Jan Jan, Keldorn, even the main antagonist and protagonist; Sarevok, Irenicus, the Bhallspawn.

What makes the story enjoyable and memorable are the players interaction with those characters. Learning about them, seeing what drives them and finally seeing how they also interact with one another. Even if the story was as simple as delivering a package from point A to B, if the cast of characters and the dialogue is compelling enough it can become an enjoyable and compelling experience...

Actually now that I think about that that's a pretty decent idea for a Mod. Hmmm...

But yeah, doesn't even have to be the characters. Half-Life's strength in story-telling is how it conveys the story to the player. Bastion is compelling because of the means through which the story is told. And so on!

Honestly I think developers should actually focus less on trying to create a complex story and instead focus on making their story interesting. All too many developers will have these annoyingly overdone plot that require a damned wiki just to comprehend. That's shit storytelling! If I have to rely on some third party means just to comprehend what the hell is going on then the developer has failed at telling a story, I'm looking at you Blizzard.

Simple does not mean bad. Simple is, if anything, good.

 

[gmergurl]

Bioware with it's same-plot, of "chosen one," well... who doesn't want to be the chosen one? Yes it gets overdone sometimes, but Bioware kinda hides it pretty well... well kinda, could care less about ME series and yet I'll play DA:O until kingdom come... >.>;; can't wait until I can get DA2 for pretty cheap on steam (college kid on a budget).

I hope your prepared to wait for a while. EA pulled DA2 off Steam a while ago and it's not coming back in the foreseeable future.

After all I've heard about it, a very very, very long while I haven't heard any nice things about Origin that Steam doesn't already do/provide, maxing at pretty much "it works."

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

Shin Megami Tensei is another one, particularly Persona 3. I can sum up the entire series more or less in one single word. "Tower". The plot is minimal in these games until the halfway or three-quarter way mark and before then really the plot is just a way to facilitate gameplay. The same applies to Etrian Odyssey too although I won't talk about that because I couldn't make any bloody sense of the storyline.

If you think the plot of persona 3 only starts about half way in you played the game with your eyes closed while listening to music. Persona 3 is about death and it starts being about death from the moment you sign the contract and enter the velvet room. Incidentally, your signing of the contract is the part where you choose your character's name.

 

[predatorpulse7]

The series has always felt thematically dead to me. The struggle is black and white, the Templars are evil because they just are, the Assassins are good because they just are, and we're fighting to save the world because we couldn't think of anything human to motivate us. Neither of the binary sides of this equation represent any kind of complex ideal, nor does the struggle itself have any dramatic weight. Why?, because one side is trying to save the world, and the other side is fighting because they're greedy, or aren't given any reason at all(Presumably because they're going to try and paint them sympathetic later). These are things that almost anyone would fight for, so they're things we've already figured out and they don't tell us shit about ourselves or anything else.

Tbh while the games did say pretty much say that assassin=good, templar=evil, various guys you killed in all the games didn't exactly sound like bad guys to me, they were just following an ideal pretty much like the assassin camp. The templars believed humans to be weak and sheep like and they needed direction(read:lack of freedom in exchange for "security") while the assassin believed that people should make their own choices, even going as far as to put this "creed" in the mission bonfire of the vanities, where ezio gives a little speech that they(the people) shouldn't follow him or anybody else, that they are free to follow their own path.

After playing all 4 games, the assassin and templar associations seem anything but black and white to me. In fact, the organizations are pretty damn similar. I don't think that a organization that has the creed "nothing is true everything is permitted" can be seen as definitely good(not to mention the fact that they don't even try to turn templars to the "good side", they simply kill them) and the templar ideal in the end is to create the perfect world, though the means by which they do so are questionable to say the least.

I don't know if this was intentional or not by Ubisoft but the two organizations seem anything but black and white.They have A LOT of things in common. In the end I guess you could say that templars want to steer the world in a certain direction whereas the assassins want the world to drift until it can find an adequate state through its own means.

And I have to say that AssCreed is one of the very few games that made me care about certain characters. In fact its characters and historical backdrops(dicking around on people's rooftops are yahtzee would say) are pretty much its only strengths cause the game gets pretty repetitive early on and you keep moving forward only to see what happens next. I actually felt pretty sad when you know who died in Brotherhood and I don't really get emotional as far as video games are concerned.

 

[nbamaniac]

When it comes to stories having a unique feel even when broken down to their most basic elements, I would say Planescape: Torment and Golden Sun would rise out. The basic idea of their stories aren't at all generic.