General News - Dan Abnett: Story should be the Spine of your Game

sakichop said:

What do people consider a story driven game?

I’ve heard many refer to the Witcher 3 as story driven but I wouldn’t agree. It’s story focused but combat driven. For instance you can skip every cutscene and blindly pick dialogue choice and you’ll be able to complete the game just fine. However there are several choke points where not only do you have to fight but you have to win in order to advance the game, otherwise you can’t proceed.

The only story driven game I’ve played in recent memory would be until dawn. It does have QTE’s but you can fail them or even ignore them and the game will advance. With poor results obviously but it will continue and you can complete the game just through dialogue.

Maybe I have too strict of a definition for story driven but to my mind almost all games are combat driven.

Click to expand...

Well, I consider story-driven games those that use story as the primary motivator to play and enjoy the game.

So, it will depend on the game and what you get out of it.

Personally, I definitely consider Witcher 3 a story-driven game, because the story was pretty much the only thing I enjoyed about it. It was also a particularly good story.

For my part, I also think games like Bioshock Infinite and Last of Us are story-driven games - even if they both had entertaining gameplay. But in terms of gameplay alone, they weren't terribly interesting to me.

Adventure games also tend to be almost entirely story-driven, for obvious reasons - unless we're talking about games like MYST - which are largely driven by puzzles and atmosphere alone.

Planescape Torment would be another example.

It's as subjective as anything else, I suppose.

I would agree that story motivated game play is correct, probably best, definition of a story-driven game.

__

sakichop said:

What do people consider a story driven game?

I’ve heard many refer to the Witcher 3 as story driven but I wouldn’t agree. It’s story focused but combat driven. For instance you can skip every cutscene and blindly pick dialogue choice and you’ll be able to complete the game just fine. However there are several choke points where not only do you have to fight but you have to win in order to advance the game, otherwise you can’t proceed.
.

Click to expand...

I have to find the links where a CD Projekt employee mentions combat was not the main focus of Witcher II-III. As the story of Geralt was the most important part.

Just read the internet comments criticizing the combat mechanics of Witcher 2 & 3.

I always thought it was pretty obvious that combat wasn't the main focus in any of the Witcher games.

For me it depends. I definitely need a decent story in a RPG to keep me entertained. If I get the impression that the player character and every NPC is a moron (like e.g. in ME:A) then that's a problem, no matter how good the gameplay may be. I need a somewhat good reason to deploy that gameplay, to make use of it. The game needs to give me a context and a purpose to motivate me. If the story is shitty then I won't be motivated to play on.

My personal prime example of a game that had super-shitty gameplay but that I still finished just because it had great characters and a really good story is Fahrenheit (Indigo Prophecy).
The opposite rarely happens to me. If a game barely has any story at all but OK-ish gameplay like Diablo then I can make it through but I can't think of a game that had a really shitty story that I finished just because of the gameplay. That usually does not happen because I quit in disgust over the thoughtlessness of the developer. I don't really appreciate it when a game treats you like a retard. The writers need to at least *try*.

sakichop said:

What do people consider a story driven game?

I’ve heard many refer to the Witcher 3 as story driven but I wouldn’t agree. It’s story focused but combat driven. For instance you can skip every cutscene and blindly pick dialogue choice and you’ll be able to complete the game just fine. However there are several choke points where not only do you have to fight but you have to win in order to advance the game, otherwise you can’t proceed.

The only story driven game I’ve played in recent memory would be until dawn. It does have QTE’s but you can fail them or even ignore them and the game will advance. With poor results obviously but it will continue and you can complete the game just through dialogue.

Maybe I have too strict of a definition for story driven but to my mind almost all games are combat driven.

Click to expand...

Nah, combat in the example you mentioned is the means, not the highlight. You may as well consider many games walking simulators, going by <ratios>.
What takes the lead is what matters and then mechanics are built around it.
Good example of games switching from being story to combat driven is MGS series...from being heavy on exposition/dialogue/cinematics in earlier games to "story" and pacing being put aside for gameplay, and most story found in cassette types during gameplay scenarios.

@Couchpotato

It may be that this interview with TW3 Game director Konrad Tomaszkiewicz is the article you had in mind as it focuses on importance of story vs gameplay. Specifically:



__

sakichop said:

Maybe I have too strict of a definition for story driven but to my mind almost all games are combat driven.

Click to expand...

More a lack of definition than a strict definition case.

It is enough to remove the skipping feature in dialogues and fit a few quizzes here and there that would force players to pay attention to dialogues (bad answers would deny advancing) to fall back on what is said to give the driven property.

Dialogues add little to replays (not that TW3 is meant to be replayed) so dialogues must be skipped. Combat, on the other hand, might change enough from one run to another to allow a few bottlenecks here and there.

A story plot must be advanced, players want a story delivered to them, with a start, middle and end. Pushing bottlenecks here and there based on story works against that.

Combat acting as a bottleneck is not even connected. These days, there is less and less demand for difficult products. There are, though, many people who love to figure themselves as game proficient. They somewhat excell in gaming. So they think. Difficulty levels are designed to satisfy that desire, to give them an impression of difficulty.
So fights acting as a bottleneck are more the result of an inadequate decision over the difficulty level, it is very unlikely that the fights hinder progression when played on the easiest difficulty level.

There is no defining in the comment.

Moriendor said:

I don't really appreciate it when a game treats you like a retard.

Click to expand...

You do realize QA today means giving the prerelease product to 50 actual retards in order to see if they'll have fun with it?

Either there’s a miscommunication or some people didn’t read my post before commenting. In my 3rd sentence I said TW3 is story focused. I just believe that focus and driven are 2 different things. So I’m not sure why I have people trying to tell me it’s story focused or that combat wasn’t their main focus.

Either way I don’t want to go back and forth about the Witcher again it wasn’t the point of my post. Thanks to the few that actually read my post.

I don't think people misunderstood, they just disagree.

Me? I believe, after they realized removing cards from the second game was a mistake, TW3 was TCG-driven but won't go discussing it in the story being a spine topic.

sakichop said:

I just believe that focus and driven are 2 different things.

Click to expand...

It takes to read the post to notice the delineating as it is done does not allow to define anything.

@sakichop

I don't get what you don't understand. This game requires probably hundreds and hundreds of story check points, properly selected, for game to be completed. It's non-linear, so you could have a thousand monkeys clicking on the dialog, walking on roads, opening doors. and those monkeys are not going to go to the cities, islands, ships, talk to all the different characters, etc, and the a necessary order, sufficient to complete the game. Just won't happen. Clicking for years.

You say there is one and only one, combat choke point needed to finish the game.

So you have probably hundreds of story points and story actions needed to complete game, and only a single combat point needed to complete game.

And yet you cannot understand why this is not a combat driven game???

You cannot understand why this is a story driven game???

__

Anyone ever feel like their in the twilight zone. No matter, I’m outta here.

You actually don't need to stay lost in the Twilight Zone. Difference between combat-driven and story-driven is actually quite obvious, at least in context of TW3.

__

I think I mentioned before that I've been looking into game design. One of the conclusions that I've come to, at least with regard to RPGs, is that is not so much storytelling, but worldbuilding, that is perhaps the crucial element. We need an imaginative space that appeals to us, that makes us want to explore it, and this is built up through a visual language, music, lore, and so on. I think this is the element that is often most overlooked in indie productions.

A huge benefit is to have an imaginative space that people already recognize and understand - I think Bioware understood this when they moved through licensing D&D and Star Wars before attempting to craft an entirely new IP. If you see what I'm getting at, this goes much deeper than simply enhancing sales through name recognition. I also think that if an RPG succeeds in making us enjoy the very idea of being in its world, it already has you, and thereafter we will tolerate quite a lot of clunkiness - in writing and mechanics.