Stories being shoehorned into games

[DragonmasterDan]

Maddox made a pretty great video here.

Anyone else have any thoughts on this?

[NightWolve]

I didn't know Maddox revealed himself in videos, he's not exactly what I expected but that was trippy to see the guy behind the Maddox account after all this time.

I guess he makes a worthwhile point about what game should or shouldn't have a storytelling aspect to it. When I was younger I agreed with him more so in the sense of I just wanted to jump right into the game and skip the story. In getting older, I lament missing out on the story, so I can see both perspectives. Heh. But if his generalization is true that most of the stories game makers tell suck anyway, then it's understandable for him to lean on the opinion that they shouldn't bother and leave it for RPGs where it's a central element to the genre.

[Opethian]

this guy is full of negative inference

[SuperDeadite]

This is not really a trend of modern games though.  There have always been games where the gameplay and design came first, while the story was written after.  Tomb Raider 2 is a perfect example of this, Core knew where they wanted to send the player and designed all the level themes first, they then just made up a plot to loosely connect the dots at the last minute.

[xcrement5x]

This is not really a trend of modern games though.  There have always been games where the gameplay and design came first, while the story was written after.  Tomb Raider 2 is a perfect example of this, Core knew where they wanted to send the player and designed all the level themes first, they then just made up a plot to loosely connect the dots at the last minute.

I was even watching some making of details of one of the Uncharted games and they talk about doing the same thing.  Devs wanted to do some levels of type X, Y, Z at least and had some new ideas, the story team worked with them around that.  Uncharted is a bit of an exception as I actually enjoy the stories though.

[turboswimbz]

A bit too much of a rant for me.   He does make some decent points.   The problem for me isn't so much with story it's with level design.   For instance his mario start is a great example - how do I play this game?  well i can move and if I hit that thing I die.  Next time you learn and get farther. Instant, easy and not much of a flow distrubtion.  Modern games bad games in general have ditched this concept in terms of on screen prompts, dialouge and other things that kill the both the vibe/mood of the game and make it hard to keep the action going.   To me while the story may be the interuption, It's not the story that's the problem most of the time it's the flow of the level design.

[KnightWarrior]

Is he serious most of the time?

[DragonmasterDan]

Is he serious most of the time?

Serious but ever so slightly exaggerated.