Why do people claim FPS have bad Story?

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B-Cell_v1legacy

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Hello

so my friends, recently i was researching about and comparing FPS games stories. but i never understand one thing that why people consider story in FPS games bad?

but then i saw the praise of storylines of mass effect and witcher. and i feel they are overrated. Games like Metro series, Half life, FEAR, System shock, Deus Ex has much better story than average RPG i have seen (elder scrolls/FF/mass effect etc).

for most recent, I can give the example of Prey. and i found its story very interesting too even thought main character do not speaks.

yes there are many FPS games which have forgattable story or no story focus at all but when they try to tell story. they tell incredibly well and mature story.

for example both Metro and Witcher based on Books. but imo Metro games tell much better story than witcher and im sure third game will follow same footstep.

Deus Ex 1 imo has best story second to Mafia 1 and its kinda FPS if not pure FPS.

I think FPS stories are as good and as bad as any other genres.

I think stories in most RPG are overrated. and some has really bad ones like skyrim/fallout.

what do you think?
 

Casual Shinji

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I sometimes also wonder why people claim first-person shooters can't cure cancer, when they clearly can. Meanwhile chemotherapy is totally overrated.
 

Hawki

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Um, okay...

Look, here's the thing. An RPG needs a good story/world/whatever to function most of the time, an FPS doesn't. If we're going back to the earliest days of both genres, RPGs have stuff like Ultima and Wizardry, the former of which was based around exploring a world in its first three games, and in its fourth, based around trying to be a good person, helping the land and its people, etc. Going back to the likes of Wolfenstein and Doom however, their stories are "shoot all the demons/Nazis." That's not to say an FPS can't have a good story, and an RPG is automatically going to have one, but from the outset they're usually selling you different experiences.

Also, your average FPS campaign is going to take around 10 hours, whereas an RPG can go for around 50-100 hours - even more if there's an emphasis on exploration ala Skyrim. An RPG usually has far more time to flesh out its story than an FPS.
 

Phoenixmgs_v1legacy

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Writing in games is so bad no genre should be known as having good stories, not even RPGs or adventure games. Most games regardless of genre have shit writing so what does it really matter if one such genre gets slightly more shit on for having bad stories?

Plus, pure FPSs are mainly "action" games where you just need a somewhat viable excuse / story premise for killing tons of baddies like most action movies. Stuff like immersive sims aren't really categorized as FPSs even though they are 1st-person.
 

sXeth

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Hawki said:
Um, okay...

Look, here's the thing. An RPG needs a good story/world/whatever to function most of the time, an FPS doesn't. If we're going back to the earliest days of both genres, RPGs have stuff like Ultima and Wizardry, the former of which was based around exploring a world in its first three games, and in its fourth, based around trying to be a good person, helping the land and its people, etc. Going back to the likes of Wolfenstein and Doom however, their stories are "shoot all the demons/Nazis." That's not to say an FPS can't have a good story, and an RPG is automatically going to have one, but from the outset they're usually selling you different experiences.

Also, your average FPS campaign is going to take around 10 hours, whereas an RPG can go for around 50-100 hours - even more if there's an emphasis on exploration ala Skyrim. An RPG usually has far more time to flesh out its story than an FPS.
I'm a big fan of the series, but I wouldn't pretend that Ultima 1 had a story beyond "Go kill the things so you can go kill the thing to go kill the bad guy". I'd be willing to bet that a decent amount of folks enjoyed Exodus through False Prophet (3-6) as a turn based strategy thing too. And actual writing that we'd qualify as such didn't start to really pop in until the 5th game, as novel as the broad concept of 4 was.

Though as a genre definer, Id was never particularly solid about story stuff. They really focus on their engine work to the point I'm surprised they didn't up and switch to being primarily an engine vendor. Their earliest ventures were not "Let's make a game about a kid going to Mars, or a guy escaping a Nazi prison" and such, but "Can we make a Mario-style side-scrolling thing on PC" and "Can we make a first person 3d game (or approximation thereof", with the stories and even the finer points of gameplay stapled on after.
 

CaitSeith

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The FPS you mention are pretty much the exception; the 10% of the Sturgeon's law. Meanwhile, in the rest of the FPS we have games like CoD series, Battlefield series and CoD clones that in general have worse story than the average RPG.

Yeah. It's difficult to see why people claim FPS have bad story if you ignore the bad ones, my friend.
 

Elvis Starburst

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CaitSeith said:
The FPS you mention are pretty much the exception; the 10% of the Sturgeon's law. Meanwhile, in the rest of the FPS we have games like CoD series, Battlefield series and CoD clones that in general have worse story than the average RPG.

Yeah. It's difficult to see why people claim FPS have bad story if you ignore the bad ones, my friend.
Oh my fuck, completely this. I sure wouldn't call most of the FPS titles I've scene recently to actually stand up in terms of story. Only the rare exception actually stands out. But it's a B-Cell thread, so it's gonna get ignored cause screw actually listening to people and learning things
 

Silentpony_v1legacy

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CaitSeith said:
The FPS you mention are pretty much the exception; the 10% of the Sturgeon's law. Meanwhile, in the rest of the FPS we have games like CoD series, Battlefield series and CoD clones that in general have worse story than the average RPG.

Yeah. It's difficult to see why people claim FPS have bad story if you ignore the bad ones, my friend.
Can't the same be said about any genre? RPGs are great, if you ignore all the shitty old-world Elves/Dwarves/Dragons/Magic LoTR clone every other western RPG is.

Same with RTS. Chances are you're either an old world empire or future space empire fighting swarms of either undead or bug aliens.

Just saying, it seems like a poor dismissal if it can be applied equally to every other game type.
 
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Phoenixmgs said:
Writing in games is so bad no genre should be known as having good stories, not even RPGs or adventure games. Most games regardless of genre have shit writing so what does it really matter if one such genre gets slightly more shit on for having bad stories?

Plus, pure FPSs are mainly "action" games where you just need a somewhat viable excuse / story premise for killing tons of baddies like most action movies. Stuff like immersive sims aren't really categorized as FPSs even though they are 1st-person.
My words. You took them right outta my mouth. Give them back.

Game writing tends to be pretty mediocre across the board because it's often the last thing developers consider, and this goes double for games where the main draw is the gameplay. I mean, granted, you can have standouts like Prey (2017), the Deus Ex series, and Doom 2016 which all have damn good writing, but in general, FPS games don't get much love in the story department.

Not excusing some of the crap that RPGs do though. GOD, the Last Remnant's main character was so unbearable I couldn't keep playing... But on average, they have to at least TRY to have a half decent story, as that's a good part of the appeal of the genre.

B-Cell said:
I think stories in most RPG are overrated. and some has really bad ones like skyrim/fallout.
You got some cred from me for liking Prey, but you lose a little cred here.

Skyrim and the fallout are open world and have to account for a lot of player interaction. Not to mention that they are, ultimately, player-driven sandboxes for role playing or gameplay-breaking, and not quite as story driven.

Like, take it from me, I actually wrote for a more story-driven open world game for an indie studio. It wasn't anywhere near skyrim levels of NPCs and quests or world interaction, but still...Hoooo boy there was a massive ton of stuff to write (and player actions to take into consideration) in a not-very-long period of time. I mean, I'm happy with the result, but still, the sheer amount of content I had to wrangle was intense.

Finally, just to cap all of this off...Writing in general is hard. Like, anyone can slap together a story, but writing a good story is no easy feat. And in a medium like video games where you have to take into account the player's actions and where that really awesome set-piece moment you wrote up that is CENTRAL to the entire plot can be slapped down by the words "The engine can't handle that" or "That would take too much time or budget to implement" and you have to scramble to find a workaround makes the task of writing even HARDER.

Writing in general is hard. Writing for games is even harder. And it's one of the parts of development that's most ignored. You do the math why we get so many mediocre stories and characters.
 

Neurotic Void Melody

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Far Cry Primal has a deeply riveting story about the harsh realities of a savage world surviving through tribal behaviour. It explores the gritty repercussions of riding sabre-tooth tigers, bears and mammoths into battle as your highly trained owls drop bee grenades upon your equally deserving and amusingly horny enemies, all accompanied by a crazed scream that you initially think is a part of the game until you get a knock at your door that turns out to be the police asking if everything's alright because your neighbors feared terrible crimes were taking place at 3am while their kids were trying to sleep

People claim lots of things. But as my mysteriously missing mother used to say; "they can't claim shit if they be dead, you utter failure of a child!" [small]not sure how much of that is relevant upon retrospect [/small]
 

Hawki

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aegix drakan said:
I mean, granted, you can have standouts like Prey (2017), the Deus Ex series, and Doom 2016 which all have damn good writing,
Wait...Doom 2016 had "good writing?"

I mean, maybe by the standards of the early Doom games, but apart from that...huh? Even by the standards of FPS games of the current day, Doom 2016's writing is lacklustre.

Like, take it from me, I actually wrote for a more story-driven open world game for an indie studio. It wasn't anywhere near skyrim levels of NPCs and quests or world interaction, but still...Hoooo boy there was a massive ton of stuff to write (and player actions to take into consideration) in a not-very-long period of time. I mean, I'm happy with the result, but still, the sheer amount of content I had to wrangle was intense.
Was it published?

Not being a smartass, I'm actually curious.
 

SKBPinkie

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Phoenixmgs said:
Writing in games is so bad no genre should be known as having good stories, not even RPGs or adventure games. Most games regardless of genre have shit writing so what does it really matter if one such genre gets slightly more shit on for having bad stories?

Plus, pure FPSs are mainly "action" games where you just need a somewhat viable excuse / story premise for killing tons of baddies like most action movies. Stuff like immersive sims aren't really categorized as FPSs even though they are 1st-person.
Exactly this. I'm never gonna get why someone plays games for their stories. I'm not gonna say they're wrong for that viewpoint; I know a bunch of people who have this opinion and they're clearly enjoying themselves. I'm just never gonna understand it.

To me, the best video game narrative I've experienced is The Last of Us. Even in that case, nothing about it being a video game makes the story good. It just as easily could have been a book / movie / TV show, etc. So even if the writing / voice acting / story are all great, to me it still needs to justify itself being a video game. What about this being interactive made the story better?
 

Phoenixmgs_v1legacy

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SKBPinkie said:
Phoenixmgs said:
Writing in games is so bad no genre should be known as having good stories, not even RPGs or adventure games. Most games regardless of genre have shit writing so what does it really matter if one such genre gets slightly more shit on for having bad stories?

Plus, pure FPSs are mainly "action" games where you just need a somewhat viable excuse / story premise for killing tons of baddies like most action movies. Stuff like immersive sims aren't really categorized as FPSs even though they are 1st-person.
Exactly this. I'm never gonna get why someone plays games for their stories. I'm not gonna say they're wrong for that viewpoint; I know a bunch of people who have this opinion and they're clearly enjoying themselves. I'm just never gonna understand it.

To me, the best video game narrative I've experienced is The Last of Us. Even in that case, nothing about it being a video game makes the story good. It just as easily could have been a book / movie / TV show, etc. So even if the writing / voice acting / story are all great, to me it still needs to justify itself being a video game. What about this being interactive made the story better?
I don't get people who plays games for stories either. Sure, having a good story and characters is great but if the gameplay sucks, why am I playing it? That's why I don't find Witcher 3 to be a good game because it failed at the game part. I can spend less time watching the game on Youtube and only get the good stuff then. Of course, games that are basically all story like Telltale games are fine assuming the writing is good as they know enough not to make you trudge through shit gameplay. I recently played through Danganronpa and it was basically 30+ hours of wasted time as the characters and story were horrible, I could've watched about 3 seasons of great TV in that time. Lastly, if you are playing some game for story, what's the chances the writing is better than any number of TV shows out there nowadays (there's so much great TV now, you can't watch it all)? Pretty much all the great writers are working in a medium that isn't video games.
 

Casual Shinji

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SKBPinkie said:
To me, the best video game narrative I've experienced is The Last of Us. Even in that case, nothing about it being a video game makes the story good. It just as easily could have been a book / movie / TV show, etc. So even if the writing / voice acting / story are all great, to me it still needs to justify itself being a video game. What about this being interactive made the story better?
The fact that you can consume it at your own pace. You can choose to activate optional dialoge with characters or ignore them, you can find notes that flesh out the world and add another layer to the characters' journey, or you can just wander around certain areas and ponder as to what occured there.

Take the very beginning when you wake up in the Boston QZ; There's a bunch of little things to see and interact with on the street. If this was a movie/book/TV series it would've either all been forced, or not given as much exposure. Bottom line being that it would be out of your hands. But because it's a videogame you have control over how much of this gets a spotlight.

Not to mention that playing action moments has a different effect on you obsorbing a story than watching them.

This is why videogame stories, despite not being up there a lot of the times with movies, books, and TV shows in terms of straight-up writing, still succeed and can often even produce a more engaging story experience.
 

Hawki

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Seth Carter said:
I'm a big fan of the series, but I wouldn't pretend that Ultima 1 had a story beyond "Go kill the things so you can go kill the thing to go kill the bad guy". I'd be willing to bet that a decent amount of folks enjoyed Exodus through False Prophet (3-6) as a turn based strategy thing too. And actual writing that we'd qualify as such didn't start to really pop in until the 5th game, as novel as the broad concept of 4 was.

Though as a genre definer, Id was never particularly solid about story stuff. They really focus on their engine work to the point I'm surprised they didn't up and switch to being primarily an engine vendor. Their earliest ventures were not "Let's make a game about a kid going to Mars, or a guy escaping a Nazi prison" and such, but "Can we make a Mario-style side-scrolling thing on PC" and "Can we make a first person 3d game (or approximation thereof", with the stories and even the finer points of gameplay stapled on after.
Okay, fair enough, and pretty much everything about what I know about Ultima comes from Spoony anyway. However, far as I can gather, Ultima at least had the intent towards storytelling/worldbuilding, and improved over time (I gather that many fans wouldn't see IX as an improvement, but go figure). Meanwhile, with Doom, we have Carmack's "story in a game is like story in a porn movie" comment, and apart from Doom 3, Doom's never made any effort to have a compelling narrative at all.
 

maninahat

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Generally its true. You can point to the FPSs that have better stories (note I said better, not good, as even the examples Op provides are simply competent), but I could point to the overwhelming number of bad FPS stories.

An FPS doesn't even need a story to be functional or fun, but its nice when they're included. The problem is they're treated like porn plots, used by the devs to provide the barebones justification for why people are fighting. Also like porn plots, there is often an strong undertones of racism, sexism and incredible stupidity. Heck, I just finished playing the story campaigns of Battlefield 1, which mainly exist to pass the time before the multiplayer part downloads. It starts with implying all men are equal on the battlefield, before running straight into the "THE TRIPLE ALLIANCE ARE THE BAD GUYS" angle. Why no, you can't play as a German, why would you want to when you can manly sacrifice yourself as a Brit or Aussie? Why yes, you should feel sad that your twin brother died in the fighting, even though you've only seen him on screen for four seconds, and you've just killed hundreds of faceless Austrians with your machine gun tank suit. Why yes, you can play as a woman, as long as you get straddled and molested by some cackling Turk whilst he rants about his super train. It's elementary school, mawkish, chest-thumpingly patriotic bullshit.
 
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Hawki said:
Wait...Doom 2016 had "good writing?"

I mean, maybe by the standards of the early Doom games, but apart from that...huh? Even by the standards of FPS games of the current day, Doom 2016's writing is lacklustre.
Between the Slayer's testaments, the nifty codex entries for the monsters, the interesting characterization for the doom slayer (He's a rampaging nut, but not outright a maniac. There's lots of little moments that give him some added depth), and the intentionally cringy holograms that really sell just how insane the UAC became, and how fun Samuel was...There was enough that it kept me interested and wanting to know more. I'd say that's pretty good writing, especially for a game that's a throwback to "Guns over here, demons over there, kill they ass".

Like, take it from me, I actually wrote for a more story-driven open world game for an indie studio. It wasn't anywhere near skyrim levels of NPCs and quests or world interaction, but still...Hoooo boy there was a massive ton of stuff to write (and player actions to take into consideration) in a not-very-long period of time. I mean, I'm happy with the result, but still, the sheer amount of content I had to wrangle was intense.
Was it published?

Not being a smartass, I'm actually curious.
It should be coming out later this year. Release date is still a bit nebulous, but it shouldn't be too long from now.

The game is called "Outward" if you're still more curious. :)
 

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Charcharo said:
Because most people, westerners especially, are kinda bad at understanding any art form?
To continue with the broad and useless generalizations made here, I'll take not understanding any art forms over the "plastering in some bouncing tits and tentacle rape makes it the epitome of masterful storytelling (just don't forget the underage panty-shot!)" attitude held by easterners.

I like this game. We should play it more often.