[EltonBM]

Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw-took it from Escapist.com, good sit, visit it someday!
But in FullyRamblomatic site Mr. Yahtzee, do not understand how I need to move my tongue in order to release that name, said interesting stuff about plots.
Games normally struggle a lot just to die in the beach in this part of development.
What is most strange is why we begin to really carry about it:
Need for Speed was fun until the day a smart guy/girl/being decided it needed a plot. And for what? Cutscenes of course!! Unfunny ones.
Other games fake us with plots: Half Life 1 and 2! In this game the plot is useless, is really money burned! You walk a bit, move a box, kill a lot, walk a bit, talk a bit, kill a lot, turn a valve, kill a lot and you win the game!!! Half Life is deep as any Duke Nuken, Quake or Doom, but with its un-interactive cutscenes it fake us.
The plots are trying to convince that the experience in games are not like in the Atari-meaningless button mash, but in fact it is just that.
Adventure games are just a bit of game add to a tale, and here the it is really more than a make-up.
We never really played Mario to save anyone, we played it to tell everyone we finish it!
Games like Thief, Silent Hill, old Resident Evil tried to put documents and conversation to make us thing about the plot, but they are just different ways to insert cutscenes! Do not get me wrong, Thief have a marvelous plot, in good hands it could be a marvelous Tv series or Movies, but it have nothing, NOTHING AT ALL with stealing infinity amounts of metal. You ever questioned yourself how Gordon Freeman, Henry Mason, Garet, Jill Valentine, Heather Mason and all this wonderful characters manage to carry an arsenal, ammunition, a full library of files and some puzzle blocks without a bag with the size of a container? Until this day only Alone in the Dark (new version) give us a realistic approach to this situation.
The worse scenario for the poor plots are on the Fighting genre. It is disgusting.
I love to play my fighting games in Japanese, so I can´t read the strikes names nor the text.
Until this day, I can´t find a use for a plot in a fighting game, no matter if it is a KOF, a MK or a SF, it is just getting in the way! They are never well translated, and if they where, they did not make any senses!
And while they think about wonderful plots in fighting games, I´m really missing one of the most iconic things in the SF franchise: The broken faces in the end of a fight!
Look out:

or look hereSF2 Loss
"All images from SF Galleries Site".
They removed this wonderful mark of the SF series just to put more text and some of the worse anime style cutscenes on SF4! Bad choices.....
These days they want plots everywhere, Tetris, Bowling, Golf...
One of the only games that keeps fun and keeps itself away from the P-Virus is Burnout! Crash cars, in high velocity. Just Simple.
Oh I do not speak about RPGs because for me RPG are one of the worse things to happen for the game industry. They are boring, repetitive(FF13 in the PS3 will play like a NES RPG for the Sake of Humanity, how they need so much years and money to just take the same game they made in the NES, change the characters, change the places a bit, keep a lot of the musics, always keep the main character as a Sword-wield-fighter, and the last boss fight is always as much epic as Solitarie!!!!)
If we play games only for plots, artistic places and characters, good orchestrated music and Cutscenes, well, Square could become a publisher of Audio+Books instead!!!
Games just need to be fun and simple. And I will give you good examples of this:
Quake 3-FPS
Virtua Fighter-Fighting
Burnout-Racing
Gran Turismo-Serious Business, no plot.
Ninja Gaiden Black-Action(he thinks he is a ninja, never acts like one and almost have no plot, fantastic!)
Devil May Cry 1-Like NGB, but with more characters and less cutscenes and less plot.
Time Splitters 3-It is focused on multiplayer, and in the place of plots it have Jokes, and some good ones!!!
Metal Slug-Action Shooting-If it have a plot, it is only a very small cutscene, no text, no speech.
Streets of Rage-Beat-If it have a plot, is only for one of the most incredible simple and yet amazing twists in any multiplayer game, just play the first game until the end with someone to discovery...
And this post is already too big. Sorry for the english full of errors(in Brazil we speech portuguese) and this si my first post here.
And for Mr. Yahtzee, I did not understand what you say in ZP, but I like it!

[Gobbler]

They warned me about people who use more than one exclamation mark at the end of a sentence. Now I see why.

This post has been edited by Gobbler: 24 June 2009 - 04:36 PM

[Game Over]

Ban him! Ban him, now!

[EltonBM]

Well, sometimes we get a bit more excited.
But hey!
English is not my native language.
And if that was a joke about be banned-Funny.
If is not a joke-Funny.
And what they say bout people who usually uses more than one exclamation point? This is something I usually not do.
And for the sake of humanity: Two replies and not even one about the theme I´ve write?
I know you all have more to say than Ban. And please, did not come with a new version of ban!
Please, comment something good, bad, worse or angelical about what a write. But comment about what I´ve write, not about how I write it.
You all can do more than that.
But if you can´t, I understand-Funny.

[Ghello]

Whats happening?

[Game Over]

Whats happening?

Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

[Thaluikhain]

You mentioned Quake 3. It just so happens I've recently been playing Star Trek Voyager: Elite Force, which is based on Quake 3...I'm currently at the point where you start mucking round with character skins to liven things up...worked out how to make custom skins for Holomatch, but not to edit the ones used in the main game.

Anyhoo, there's a decent amount of plot in that, lots of long, unskippable cutscenes telling you that you will begin at point A, move to point B and may likely have to use the fire button en route. However, the plot more or less worked, came across as a better Voyager episode, more or less. As the story involved you struggling with getting respect or whatever, there's a bit too much emo self-doubt (which may be realistic, if uninteresting), and regardless of how many times you save the damn ship, people keep on at you, though that might be me sympathising with the character.

Games with a plot tend, IMHO, to be better than ones without, as long as it doesn't get in the way of the game and doesn't suck.

Not sucking, however, isn't all that common...given that amount of movies with crap plots, it's naive to expect much better of games.

[EltonBM]

I´m better speaking than writing. But well. What is really important in a normal game, adventure games not included, is the way we play it.
And everywhere I see people talking about bad choices and bad plots, poor character development, etc.
When I said that HL is just a trickster, making us believe that we are on a vivid tale, I´m not alone.
I´ve been playing games for some time. I never had a Snes, but PS, DC, PC, PS2, XBOX, I have this consoles and played all kinds of games.
And until now, I only see plots getting in the way, and not helping at all.
Every time Ms. Vance show in HL2 you can´t do much with her, just look. And it´s just get worse in the action cutscenes.
See, VideoGames are incredible ways to develop visual art and sound. But for plots, it is really a fail.
Looking to Fallout 3, there is so much in that game that is lost from the previous versions-Spoiler!-In the first game you could defeat the last boss only speaking to hum, or fighting him-but in Fallout 3 you have to kill and kill. Almost everything in the wastelands are there only to shot or be shot.
The plot is outside the act of play the game. So it is always an alien to the game, something that orbit the game and at certain parts land and stay there for some time to take flight again.
I did not remember a game where the plot changes the way we play.
Decisions do not change the way we play. If you chose to kill or not kill at one point, it do not change the game.
Soul Nomad & the World Eaters from Nippon Ichi did a different thing and is the closest thing I ever see from a plot change the game: You are forced to receive a soul, the soul of a terrible creature, not terrible in appearance but the type who eat your babies in the coffee break.
If you accept its powers, you gain miraculous strikes to destroy enemies, but it came with a big price-Spoiler-he gets more and more in your mind and body-Spoiler. But if you refuse, you will have to grind all the way to the top, not easy task, but can free yourself.
This is very uncommon, even in Gamasutra post about the theme the pic in the link is from this game.
So here the plot change the way you play! Is not the way you play that changes the plot.
And to be more precise: I really do not remember a very good plot in games. We already play games for time enough to see plots. From the NES era until this year, more than 20 years have passed.
RPG and adventure games are plot based, but do not play as other games like FPS, action adventure or platforms. Even Strategy games are extremely weak in this.
If a mandatory character dies, normally the fight needs to be restarted, so you cannot change the plot at all! You are slaved by the plot.
I did not see a good plot in a lot of games, and the ones who have one, become slaved by them: You need to do what is in the plot. You do not change the plot, you choose what plot you want and follow it until the end.
I´m, already repeating myself.
This is my opinion about the theme.

[Thaluikhain]

Yes, plots tend to be very linear, and you're stuck with following them, but what's wrong with that? It doesn't mean that the put you are stuck with is bad...you don't condemn movies for only having one plot each, why should you complain about games?

[EltonBM]

Movies are movies. games are games.
In movies we see the plot moving trough time. Movies are just a new way to listen to a history.
When we sit to see a movie we just sit there and expect the story to be told the best way possible.
But in game, we do no expect to sit an "just" see something. we play games to act over it.
So the plot in the game cannot be the same, not even close, to movies or books or comics.
In games you watch what you do!
In games like Oblivion or GTA we do not see a guy walking for some seconds and them there is a cut and he appears in the final objective. In games we need to walk, run, drive from A to B. And we need to do that all the way.
Writers and producers need to understand at once this fact. We are not in a movie. The plot cannot work the same way for such different things.
If you could make me a favor, please tell me where are the language errors in my text. I need to improve my english.

[Thaluikhain]

Movies are movies. games are games.
In movies we see the plot moving through time. Movies are just a new way to listen to a story.
When we sit to see a movie we just sit there and expect the story to be told the best way possible.
But in a game, we do not expect to sit and "just" see something. we play games to act over it.
So the plot in the game cannot be the same, not even close, to movies or books or comics.
In games you watch what you do!
In games like Oblivion or GTA we do not see a guy walking for some seconds and then there is a cut and he appears in the final objective. In games we need to walk, run, drive from A to B. And we need to do that all the way.
Writers and producers need to understand at once this fact. We are not in a movie. The plot cannot work the same way for such different things.
If you could do me a favor, please tell me where the language errors in my text are. I need to improve my english.

I disagree. Although it can be infuriating trying to figure out what it is you are supposed to do in a game, especially when there are other obvious options, you can still try to make a game be similar to a movie...I think the phrase "interactive story" has been used about this. Yes, it is restrictive, but it's not really possible for designers to take account of everything a person could do, instead of hurrying them down one path where they've put some hopefully interesting things.

This post has been edited by Thaluikhain: 26 June 2009 - 03:02 PM

[Thiefree]

I personally have absolutely no problem with heavily plot-based games, as long as the plots are good. Unfortunately this seems to be something that the gamind indistry finds to be quite a challenge. Linear games with cut-scenes are a source or anger for some, but I enjoyed Prince of Persia: SOT. I think they got it right. Big thumbs up there.

Obviously, as with all things, it's about balance. Nobody likes to feel as if they're being led through a game by the hand, and I've heard rumours of half-hour cutscenes in some games, something that should be punishable by my cooking (or death, whichever is worse).

[Thaluikhain]

I don't mind cutscenes...as long as they are short, interesting, or skippable.

Having an autosave kick in just before the long unskippable cut-scene so you can get to where you died last time is really annoying.

[AdamM]

Every time Ms. Vance show in HL2 you can´t do much with her, just look.

I know, I know. It's a damn disgrace.

[Game Over]

I know, I know. It's a damn disgrace.

When will they ever give you the ability to do more than shoot or look at a female zombie?