Story Versus Gameplay

[Anarchemitis]

Gameplay.
Revival, this is the true first one. Now let us await soon to come ripoff threads.

 

[Intellectual.Osmosis]

Hands down, games with great stories will draw me faster than ones with great gameplay. However, this is not to say I can play an utterly broken game just for a good plot. Yet to give some perspective, I played Halo because of the Book... actually, I bought an Xbox to play Halo, just because of the book Fall of Reach. Narrative and characters I can relate to are paramount to my experience with a game.

 

[Ibuki]

to be honest i wont play a game with a bad story, however i also wont play a game with bad gameplay. So to me they are both equaly important.

Agreed.

A good story is what hooks and draws the player in,
and can often motivate the player to cut swaths of destruction
through his enemies. Out of wanting to see the next bit or story, or because
of a story induced hateredfor them.

However Gameplay is what makes the game fun, and can turn people away from finishing
a game with an awsome story if they have to trudge through Crappy
level designs, bad gameplay mechanics or elements, or stupid NPC AI.

Lets take "God of war" for example, had a really great story, and
a fun combat system. I'v played through it serval times just for the combat alone
while the story treminded me as to why I'm sluaghtering the countless number of Greek Monsters adding to my overall drive of wanting to kill them.

Now, lets take the GOW Knock off , Ghost rider.
simular gameplay in terms of the "chain" combat but
it just was crapply executed, the story was crap, and
there is nothing to compel the player to beat it.

So often the story is usually the hook, and game play the "meat" of the exeperience.
Both are important.

However there are games, that really require no story to drive a player,
such as tetris, pac-man, etc. So another factor of it is also the genre off
the game, and also how addictive the gameplay is.

 

[Iori Branford]

Gameplay. Always gameplay.

I could putter around the same old level, shoot at the same nonsense shapes and turn their bullets into bonuses for hours upon hours, over and over again, simply because the game underneath is designed so perfectly, with just the right feel, just the right controls, just the right difficulty curve and just the right risk:reward ratio. [http://www.asahi-net.or.jp/~cs8k-cyu/windows/ttn_e.html]

It's a rare adventure game or RPG that's worth playing more than once.

 

[Unknower]

Gameplay, gameplay über alles
Über alles in der game...



Maybe I have too high standards, but I think games generally have pretty mediocre stories.

 

[Gxas]

They both rely on each other to make a great game. Kingdom Hearts is a great example of this. The gameplay was great and it was backed up by an amazing story.

 

[Caliostro]

Another one of these... Why should we settle for one? Why accept mediocrity? With a very few rare exceptions, the GOOD games aren't the ones with good story OR good gameplay,they're the ones with good story AND good gameplay, where both go hand and to hand to the point of almost merging.

Rare exceptions aside, a game with great gameplay but no story or bad story feels arbitrary and without context at best, and incongruous and discombobulated at worst, while a game with great story and shit gameplay feels like an exercise in masochism, like a book or movie that makes you suffer and grind to see the story through to the end.

 

[Strafe Mcgee]

Another one of these...

In my defence, this thread is OLD. I really didn't expect to see it ever again, and yet, here we are. Wierd.

 

[tobyornottoby]

I'm going for story. If the world doesn't intrigue me, I see no point in playing generally

All should see both points so no need to apologize/attack peeps

 

[mark_n_b]

Good story can compensate for bad or bland game-play (see the success of JRPG's) likewise good gameplay can more than make up for a lousy story (I don't know... Geometry Wars?)

For me I have played two games that have more than made up for truly horrible game-play with excellent story. Dreamfall: the longest Journey (although I am still pissed about the cliffhanger ending) and Rule of Rose (I hated playing that game a whole bunch, and yet I love it).

I made the comment about JRPG's but in all fairness, the game-play isn't really horrible or flawed in most, it's just particular in its way. But JRPG's are always gauged and carried on the basis of their story not the innovation and intensity of their turn based mechanics.

 

[TOGSolid]

Here's an interesting question: What game did you play through with the largest story vs. game play quality gap? As in, the story was frikkin magnificant, but the game play really kinda sucked.

Advent Rising

Fell victim to 'rush it out the door' gaming economics when it could have been a real asskicker of a game if left to bake long enough. The story however was superb, it's a damn shame we'll never get to see where it was going.

 

[SmugFrog]

I love a good story, and I love good gameplay.

How to solve this debate? Well, if you're not having FUN while you're playing a game, why are you going to want to play it? The excitement I get from reading a book is that I visualize it like it is a movie. That makes it exciting to me.

Here's how I think you can solve this debate:
If a game has an ourstanding story, but horrible gameplay that makes you want to jump up and slap your grandmother in the face, what is the point of your continued punishment in slogging through it? To see the outcome? You could look that up online.

Consider if one of her favorite games were a text based adventure where you have to type commands to proceed; but the commands are horrible broken and misunderstood, and they even change through the game because the developer was a jerk. Or a point and click adventure where you have to find just the right pixel to click and use item A on spot B (and they don't make any sense WHY you would use those 2 items together. I think horrible gameplay would make her put down the controller in frustration rather than motivate her to even "try" to get into the story. A person playing something incredible frustrating with horrible gameplay for even 10 minutes isn't going to continue to play it; and that's not enough time for them to be "into" the story.

If she would still slog through THAT to get to the wonderful story... wow, I don't know what to say. Perhaps to her the story IS more important.

 

[Caliostro]

Another one of these...

In my defence, this thread is OLD. I really didn't expect to see it ever again, and yet, here we are. Wierd.

Indeed it is, my bad, we both feel prey to thread Necromancing. But since I've seen a few of these "one OR the other" threads... Mea culpa.

The rest of the post remains valid however.

 

[Emperor Inferno]

Story and gameplay are both important, in some cases story is very important and in other cases not so much. Gameplay, however (at least as far as I'm concerned) is always the more important of the two. You can have all the story you want, but if you don't have the gameplay to go along with it, then the game is shit. I always love a good story, but I play a video game to play a video game. The ideal game, of course has both excellent story and super fun gameplay. KOTOR RULES!!!

 

[jamesworkshop]

Tetris does not need a story as it doesn't even feature people I mean people play card games both IRL and on a computer but they don't have a story so I think those types of games this question is not relevant to and thus can be ignored.
My belief is that gameplay > story it is a game we are playing afterall, if it is full of glitches/bugs or boring its going to be very offputting no matter how good the story is.
Story is for the most part just a vehicle for why the game is the way it is, a character pulling magical powers out of their ass halfway through with no explanation is very bad storywise but I doubt it ever caused anyone to become so outraged as to hurl the controller across the room but it does detract from the experience.
All RPGs focus on the story not just JRPGs, BG + IWD have bucket loads of story far more than their japanese counterparts IMO, which contain multiple dialogue strings whereas games such as FF have very linear stories which to be fair does not make them bad FF-X had a nice story although the characters did lack apart from Auron.
The gameplay of BG + IWD is the same across the board much like each FF and yet people don't seem to complain about some lack in gameplay so I think thoses JRPG haters are just idiots to be ignored.

 

[Corven]

If I had to choose between the two when picking a new game I'd have to go with gameplay,
why would I want to to sit through terrible gameplay to see a good story I'd rather see a movie or read a book.

 

[Cold Rival]

Game-play comes first on my list. This has been proven in CoD4 - I've racked up hundreds of hours of play-time on the multiplayer. The lack of story in MP shows that it was the game-play that kept me hooked.

 

[IndieRocker]

When you get the balance right you get games like Portal or KOTOR which proves that both matter