Should video games become more and more like major motion pictures?
Many AAA-game developers I have met seem to think so. While games like Modern Warfare and Battlefield owe their success to the fact that their games play out like movie-fare, sometimes…gameplay suffers as a result.
Recently, at least one influential developer has spoken out against this trend. We discuss this topic and wonder aloud whether developers should put the “game” back in gaming, or whether they should continue to evolve the digital arts until it overtakes movie-going audiences in both numbers and in terms of artistic merit.
To discuss this and many other topics, we have brought on a new roundtable member, he’s a former producer for KAOS Studio’s Homefront, Edmar M. — the last person I interviewed on BASH, is making his first FBS appearance. As usual, we also have our good friend from fpsadmin.com, Jim (aka Rudedog).
Stories ruin gaming?
I have to be honest, I’ve always thought that the game should come first and the story second in any video game…but I have always felt that I was in the minority. Many of you, will only buy a game for its story, just look at the heavily scripted Call of Duty as an example of how popular the “story as-a-game” can be. So, I know that I’m swimming uphill on this one.
It is no surprise then, that I was elated to hear that God of War creator David Jaffe recently lectured his colleagues on the appropriate use of narrative in video games during D.I.C.E. 2012 in Las Vegas. As I am nowhere near as eloquent as Jaffe in expressing my wish that developers should prioritize gameplay, I’ll be quiet and let Jaffe express his arguments here:
Note that Jaffe isn’t saying that we shouldn’t ever have storylines, he just cautions against turning a videogame into an ebook.
Ravaged
In addition to giving us insight into the world of game development, Edmar also alerts us to a really interesting indie vehicular-shooter that is currently being worked on. The name of this new game is called Ravaged and it is being designed by 2Dawn Games.
Ravaged takes place on a post-apocalyptic Earth that has been devastated by natural disasters caused by solar flares from the sun. The main conflict in the game sees the so-called “Resistance” fighting the “Scavengers” for territory and resources. A “Mad-Max” style art design is employed and you get a really good feel for the game when you take a look at some of the gyrocopter action in this new pre-alpha teaser:
Here’s a Trike Vehicle vid that came out in a 2Dawn developer diary a few months ago:
YES! Jock is back <333333
I don’t agree that its impossible for a game to have a complex and emotional story. It maybe true for the FPS, since its the genre that mostly exists to provoke basic emotions.
But there are tons of games with very complex storylines and very emotionally developed characters. just to name a few:
Metal gear Solid – very emotional game(s), with better written story line and characters than 99% of the movies. And also the game with probably the most complex gameplay out there.
Then games like Heavy Rain, indigo prophecy, Alan Wake.
Than you have games like silent hill, fatal frame, from the horror genre. And of course the genre with the most complex story lines, RPG. With games like The Witcher, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Final Fantasy and many many more. All of which are single player only, and some of them take more than 100 hours to complete. And have very complex branching story lines, very developed characters. Some of them even have their own mythology, history, religions, different languages for their races… and all in such detail it can almost be compared to some of the Tolkien’s books. Some of them do suffer from simplistic shooter-ish gameplay ( like mass effect ) but some can be much more complex like the witcher ( especially on higher difficulties ) or final fantasy or even dragon age. And many more I did not mention here.