Rather recently Adam's been having a go at me because I once said "If a game company wants to focus on telling a story they should write a novel." Okay that may not necessarily be true, and it was a stupid thing to say on the account that many of my favorite games are actually VISUAL NOVELS. What i'm saying is not that games shouldn't tell stories, I mean it's the story of the campaign or whatever that makes the game good (so long as you're not thinking about Call of Duty), I'm saying that games designed for a certain purpose or specific audience, say FPS games like Bioshock Infinite shouldn't claim that telling a story is what they set out to do, because it's not.
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| Imagine crossing this mindless violence with the intellectual essence needed to absorb and enjoy a good story. They don't mix do they? |
It's all well and good to have a shooter with a great story, but putting too much effort into a story when you're making a game based off action just means, yeah, the story will be brilliant and endearing, but actually playing the game will be a bit dull. How many people do you think would continue to actively play Bioshocko if it was reduced to solely being a visual novel, and all the gameplay in it was puzzles like the ones in the Zero Escape games, based around escaping Rapture. Sure it would appeal to some, me included, but a lot of fans wouldn't like it purely because they wouldn't get to shoot stuff.
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| Even the visual novels know what will happen if other games try and focus on stories. |
My peeve isn't that shooting games shouldn't tell stories, what it is is when game developers of action games say they're focusing on story. You wouldn't want an James Bond film all about character development and with no car chases or explosions would you? So there's my point, leave the true storytelling to the mediums that are best suited for it, JRPGs and Visual Novels, both of which focus on focus on story before if not on equal grounds to the gameplay, because that's why people love them. games like Halo could survive on just multiplayer alone and there's sure as hell no story to that, same with Pacman. What are games like Persona without their story? Pointless and boring. I like the Persona game's dungeon crawling, but I wouldn't buy a game just for that because it gets boring before long and the story is what really gets me interested.
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| This guy never needed any story or character development to make the addicting fun game we all know today |
I'm sure you could pick a number of holes in this article and that's all well and good, do't get me wrong. I'm only saying that most games are made to be enjoyed gameplay-wise. The story of Bulletstorm is well under par to my tastes in that i can't remember what's supposed to be happening it compared to many of the other games I play, but I'm still more than happy to play Bulletstorm, purely because of how fun it is to tear apart your enemies in the game, and that should be what's most important to a game such as this.