Gamers across the world, old and young alike, take most of what we see in games today as granted. Arcade games with no story are almost extinct and most of us are shocked if a game doesn't support 7.1 surround sound or if the game-play is painstakingly hard. But believe it or not, things were completely different just a few years ago.
So what caused these changes to occur? One of the obvious answers is progress – games are becoming more advanced as we speak and only a fool would expect them to stay the same for ever. Another crucial factor is that games have become a favourite pastime of the general public – a once elitist market is now aimed at the general masses.
Some of the induced changes are so big that we decided to take a closer look at how time has affected the various parts that compose a game. Since the scope of such an endeavour is too large for a single article we decided to break it up into several parts, each of them dedicated to one specific side of games.
(hi)Story
I want all of you readers to think really hard and try to figure out the answer to the following question: What makes a good story? As you probably figured out the answer to the question is far from simple and is very multi-layered. Several elements can make or break a book, movie or game. A good story should keep the reader/viewer/player interested in its outcome, offer thinking material and have a few twists and turns to keep things interesting.
1. Like reading a book, only interactive - Colossal Cave Adventure
While books have had all of the above for centuries now and movies had us all ogling at the deep character relations they offered, games didn’t posses much of a story until the recent years. There are exceptions to this rule, such as the interactive books and adventure games that came out in the early 70s (Colossal Cave Adventure was one of the first adventure games) which were entirely text based. With time such games got rudimentary graphical elements, such as pictures that displayed the scene – until then everything had to be described with text.
The above mentioned story relating mechanics were very thorough, but offered little to no player interaction. As time went on more advanced and interactive games came out. This often meant that game developers had to focus more on the way the player interacted with the game (to prevent/limit the player doing something unexpected) and less on the story elements of the game. As before there were exceptions – adventure games required the game to have a strong story to keep the player interested in how everything played out. This was not needed by the more action oriented games, as the action alone provided the enjoyment in those.
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2. While not crucial, the story in CoH made things more personal
By now you probably realized that most of the above still holds true today, with a few notable changes. Today almost every game (regardless of genre) is required to have some sort of story. Sometimes the basic premise of the game (such as WW2) is enough to keep players satisfied, but for the most part we usually expect at least some sort of background story. Company of Heroes - a recently released WW2 strategy game tells the story of a platoon of soldiers during the final years of the war. While this story has no impact on the game-play, its presence gives the player an additional motivation to progress through the game campaign.
First person shooters are also a typical genre that doesn’t require much story to be fun. Just think of Quake 2 – the story can be summed up in a sentence or two. Same goes for Serious Sam, Unreal Tournament, Doom 3 and many more.
Before any of you start objecting and going mental because of what I just said, I want you to take a deep breath and give me time to explain. A game’s story does not equal its storytelling techniques, which can be often very complex even though the story itself is simple. I’ll come back to storytelling shortly, but first I have to mention another trend that is becoming more and more apparent – people have less free time today than they did 10 years ago. As such, they have less time to play games and want to be able to enjoy a story even though they can’t dedicate several hours to a game. This forced game developers to deliberately avoid making games with longwinded stories that require several hours of dedicated attention (at a time) to even the most minute details. A very good example of this trend is the game Oblivion, which can be played without paying attention to the games (otherwise solid) story by just following the quest arrow and fighting/talking/interacting with anything that lies at the end of the path.
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3. We'll do the thinking; you just follow the compass arrow
Storytelling
As I promised a paragraph or two back it is time to explain how the storytelling techniques changed over the years. I previously mentioned that the first games were text based – it doesn’t take a genius to figure out how those games delivered the story. The next logical step was relaying the story through pictures which were usually still accompanied by text.
Cut-scenes
4. The father of the dying adventure genre - Maniac Mansion
It wasn’t until much later that cut-scenes were introduced to the gaming scene. One of the first titles to offer them was LucasArts’ (at the time LucasFilm games) Maniac Mansion. Just like today, the cut-scenes took away the control from the player and allowed the story to progress. Back then the cut-scenes had very basic graphics and it took several years before such scenes became fully animated and similar to what we know today under the term cut-scene.
When CD-Rom drives became popular another trend started – FMV (Full Motion Video) cut-scenes. They usually featured live actors and brought games closer to Hollywood than ever – that is, if you ignore the crappy acting and B-quality nature they all shared (the Command and Conquer series is renown for this).
5. Try taking this guy seriously - C&C
Today cut-scenes are more often then not done within the game’s rendering engine. This makes them much more cost effective and allows the developers to focus more on other aspects of the game, such as game-play and graphics.
Scripted scenes
What made Half Life one of the most highly acclaimed games of all time? Besides the amazing gunfights with the army soldiers, the excruciatingly painful deaths at the hands of the evil aliens and the flawless level design, one of the culprits were the scripted scenes.
The main difference between regular cut-scenes and the scripted scenes Half Life offered is that the player keeps control of his character while the scene takes place. This often helps give the impression that the player is actually in the game, as he can freely move around during such scenes.
6. The famous G-Man. I wonder what he is carrying in that suitcase...
Other games used this storytelling method as well. A few notable mentions are: Doom 3 and System Shock 2 with their journals that explained what happened in greater detail and Unreal with its alien world filled with mystery and dangers. There are of course many others which are possibly better and also deserve to be mentioned – go ahead and use our forums to let us know what you think.
Conversations
Adventure games have always used conversations as the main means of moving the story forward. RPG games also gave their worlds a whole new dimension just with conversations. Several cross-genre games (such as Deus Ex or Outcast) also relied heavily on NPCs to tell the story. The big advantage of this approach is that it is easy to make it interactive – the player can ask questions and get different answers depending on the chosen line of questioning. This is harder to achieve with scripted scenes - they have a tendency to ignore what the player is doing.
The most notable change to the way conversations work were the voiceovers. Talking to somebody and getting only text answers is a major immersion breaker – hearing the reply is much better. Another (more recent) improvement are the facial animations. Being able to tell how the person we are talking to is feeling helps give more depth to what he/she says.
The future?
Predicting the future is always an ungrateful task – Murphy’s law dictates that time will make me look like a complete fool by making the opposite of what I say come true. I’ll take the risk and say that very probably not much will change.
7. It looks better, but under the hood not much has changed
Hopefully scripted scenes will become a bit more interactive with the help of advanced physics engines and complex AI programming. Besides that there is not much left to improve. I am probably wrong in saying this, but I think that stories and storytelling in games has pretty much reached its pinnacle – from here on we can only expect minor improvements at best. Not that this is a bad thing – just take a look at games like Fahrenheit, Dreamfall and the soon to be released Neverwinter Nights 2 and Gothic 3. We can’t really complain, can we?
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