How FPS Storylines Are Written 165
Might E. Mouse writes "Cynics might say 'Who needs a storyline for an FPS game?' and if we're talking Quake or Doom then fair enough. But to brand the entire genre as lacking in story is to condemn gems like Half-Life 2 or Chronicles of Riddick. So what goes into writing a really compelling storyline for an FPS game? bit-tech has an article exploring this topic with the likes of Martin Lancaster, writer / designer for Crysis, Rob Yescombe, writer of Haze and more: 'There's nothing wrong with that of course, back in the day Quake was amazing in its own, essentially plotless, right. But it's interesting that only recently has a push for coherently told storylines appeared among FPS fans, bought on by another few years of maturity in what is an undeniably young medium. Paintings and music have both been around since time out of mind, but computer games have only been around for a couple of decades and only recently have they begun to be recognized for the artistic merit posed by their interactivity.'"
Never been done (Score:5, Interesting)
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I disagree. People are just doing it wrong. The lure of interactive story-telling has destroyed the potential to tell good stories with the FPS genre. Interactive story-telling, if it ever works, will require either AI or dedicated human game-masters (like D&D). And honestly, how often has D&D even been good story telling?
If the focus was more on good plot development, good dialog, and believable characters we'd be way ahead of where we are
Re:Never been done (Score:4, Interesting)
Imagine a game world styled like EvE, just as large, and just as expansive. Now smash together EvE and planetside. Space ships in space, marines on the ground and fighters and bombers in air and space. Now of course the game should start off structured. You want to be a marine, you join your respective factions AI or possibly human/employee/game master controlled military. Your opening story denotes a time of peace, and thus your initial job as a player is to do thinks like eliminate a pirate base inside your factions space. Now you could be the only player within your group of 20 marines, or you could be leading a fire team of 9 other players or 4 players and 5 ai marines. So you get your "briefing" from an Ai mission dispenser who is a superior officer.
So you and your buddies or your men or you by yourself go towards the mission. Well you can't attack a pirate base with just your transport, so you get matched up with either some Ai fighter pilots or a mixture of players and Ai. The problem is, the pirate base is in an asteroid belt that is about 4Au away from your assigned station. Well you need a ship with jump drives to get there so you and your fighters get loaded onto a small corvette that might have an AI crew with some humans, or it could just be a single Ai Captain with an Ai crew.
Then you attack your target and hopefully win, if you lead enough successful operations, the men below, above, and beside you could also note you for leadership, thus allowing you to move up in the ranks.
Say you don't want to be part of the military, say you want to be a miner or an explorer, you would start out in your respective structure and work you way up. Slowly as players moved up in the structure, you would allow them to take over things to an extent. You wouldn't give complete control over a factions military to a single player, though you could allow them into the very upper echelons of power. There will be people who stay within their factions structure, and those that abandon it for their own structure of choice, they could even make their own.
Slowly let the players take control, then after say 2 month of play just long enough to let people get into it introduce some chaos using your game masters (Think of them as a race of loki like aliens, make them killable too, cause frankly the hunting them would be neat), have a major NPC leader get assassinated by what looks like the other faction, put another NPC in or let a player take those reins, then let the war begin.
Do what you think you need to do to keep the game going, assassinate, impersonate, and manipulate.
Let the players write the story. It's rather interesting what happens sometimes.
Now if only computers could do this now..
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Wait Im at work, I don't have time for the next part. With any luck I'll call you sometimes in the next 10 years.
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Don't think that MS probably isn't planning this...
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One that is told through a bunch of post-its that are all over the world and is almost completly disconnected from actual gameplay. Heck, I played through the whole game and couldn't tell you a thing about what was going on in that story, since I simply had zero interest to actually read that post-it mess. If that is good storytelling, they better just print all that stuff out, bundle it into a book and ship that with a game. From good storytel
System Shock 2 (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Never been done (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Never been done (Score:4, Interesting)
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Haven't played it.
HL has good cinematic elements to it in the form of scripted events, but I don't know that you can necessarily say it has a great story. I can't comment on HL2
That's being kind. Half life was not a good story. Period. Neither one nor two. It had a good plot - in terms of events - but very, very little in terms of character growth or personal interaction. There was no drama. The potential to tell a story was there, but we need more focus on the *people* in the
Re:Never been done (Score:5, Insightful)
You're basically sitting here telling us that all movies are terrible, but all you've ever seen is Weekend At Bernie's. Watch some Kubrick films, then come back and tell me all movies are terrible, and I might lend your opinion a little weight.
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Hey, I was just commenting based on my observations. I didn't think I was trying to tell everyone "this is how all FPS games, ever, are".
I'll try out some of those games. I've seen Thief. It looked OK. Marathon I've read through, but it's a pain to try and actually get the game to run on anything. I don't know about System Shock 2 or Chronicles of Riddick.
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Marathon runs good on Macs using the Aleph One open source engine, and I think the Map, Sound, Physics, etc files were made free some time ago. (At least, I downloaded them for free from a Bungie site, but I don't know if they are still up, or if it was a limited-time thing.) I haven't tried it on Windows.
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I'll check it out on my macbook pro. I don't think I had a mac last time I tried to run Marathon (I know I tried it on XP, not OS X).
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Sadly, the sequel just didn't have the same charm.
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There is a LOT of commentary there too.
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It's like reading the outline to a novel. If the outline sucks, the novel probably does too. But if the outline's great (as with Maraton) the novel might still suck.
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Sadly (particularly in the Chozo and Luminoth lore) the logbook scans suffer from the same problem as many video games: when it comes to writing in-game text, the writers sound like pretentious English majors (Tycho of Penny Arcade is the most extreme ex
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Defending Half Life (Score:4, Interesting)
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Thief 1 and 2, and even 3 is decent, though not as good as the others. Extremely well-written fantasy, far better than most of the stuff that makes it to the fantasy section in the bookstores.
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I've played the original Half-Life all the way through at least 2 times but it wasn't because of the story. I replayed it not because it is a great story but because it is fun to play. What exactly is the story in Half-Life? Aliens are invading. The government is trying to kill everyone to cover it up.
Re:Never been done (Score:4, Informative)
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Hell, many "first person shooters" allow one to switch to a 3rd person view, but that doesn't change their genre.
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Admittedly nothing in the story explained why key switches in the ship were located on the far side of pools of lava (or some other deadly fluid) but whatever. My friends and I always used to joke that you wouldn't want to be the guy who had to retrieve faxes on the Marathon. "But boss, the last guy you se
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You ever played Alice or Undying? Fantastic games with great visuals in their day. The great thing about the story lines was that you could make it make as much of a difference in the game as you wanted. Didn't give a damn a
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That's another way of saying "they had no storyline". Do novels require input to have good storyli
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You missed the point of the parent post which is players could complete the games without paying attention to the story-line, which is totally different than saying "There is no story-line."
I have played Deus-Ex, I am working my way through Invisible Wars, I have also played HL and HL-2, episode One, Mech Warrior, and others. The only games in that list that I think have a reasonable story line that is required to understand to have fun in the gam
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What bullshit. The input a novel requires is for the reader to put emotion into a bunch of words. Without that fiction is a meaningless waste of time. Or are you suggesting that any story telling can be successful regardless of the observer? If you think that you're even more full of shit then what I originally thought.
We identify with characters who are sympathetic even though we can't influence th
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That's obviously not really "input". I mean input in the sense of "data that goes into the system and changes what comes out". Reading a novel doesn't change the words on the page. The work exists independent of what a reader thinks. You can appreciate a novel more or less based on input (in the sense of emotional investment) but not change the work itself.
You, like the OP fit into my idea that you simply don't want more s
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Uh, the Iliad wasn't character-driven? The whole epic was driven by larger-than-life characters, and padded out by grandiloquent speeches by the same. And its sequel, the Odyssey, is freaking named after its central character.
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Exactly. "Larger than life". E.g. not very realistic. Did you see character development? Nope. That's part of what I'm talking about.
And its sequel, the Odyssey, is freaking named after its central character.
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Anyway, I'm still not buying the notion that we're into characters over plots. Most hit movies are driven by (usually inane) plots with characters that exist to further its tension and resolution. Character stories like Magnolia and Garden State are the mi
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Let's see if I can explain a bit better. I'm not saying that they didn't have any well-drawn characters necessarily (although that's frequently a by-product of plot-driven narrative) but the real hallmark is that the events are frequently driven regardless of
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More or less the same genre, yet some of Infocom's titles surpassed this by a long shot. Try "Trinity" or "A Mind Forever Voyaging".
And in general I strongly disagree that storytelling is a one way street. The effort of the audience matters. Absolutely every story ever told, regardless of medium, can have someone in the audience who tunes out and says at the conclusion "that sucked". Art is communication. In communicati
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That's not what I'm saying. When an author sits down to write a story is it a one-way street? Yes. Novels are written with very little (if any) collaboration. When a story is READ than the reader invests their time and emotion into the story. So we've got separate creating the work from presenting/experiencing the work.
In the creation phase it is more or less unilateral. And I'm advocating tha
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Pathways Into Darkness
Marathon series
System Shock 2
Thief series
Halo/Halo 2 (especially Halo 2)
Now, you're right that most FPS games have crummy stories. Gears of War and Half-Life 2 disappointed me, since they tell you basically nothing about how the world you're in came to be. The story of Lost Planet was predictable and loaded with cliches. But there are good ones out there, and you're doing the genre a disservice by dismissing it out of hand. There are a lot of
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Gonna get the girl, gonna kill the baddies... (Score:2)
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I think they're good examples of getting it right in an industry that too often says "why bother with a reason to do stuff?"
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I never liked Quake ... (Score:3, Interesting)
I love FPS games, but Quake and Quake II just seemed too pointless and lacking in any kind of reward.
Quake III Arena was much different because it was multi player and the point was more to compete and develop your "skills" (pardon the term, I just can't think of anything more appropriate) against other human players.
But Quake and Quake II had absolutely no rewards. The protagonist was not someone that you could relate to. The monsters seemed rather random. There was no hot chick waiting for you to save her at the end of the game. The game play didn't progress in any interesting fashion. Nothing really happened. It was just point, shoot, kill for absolutely no reason.
The graphics were better than Doom but I found Doom to be more fun. The levels were shorter, and I guess it was just new. With Quake/QuakeII it was like Doom but with better graphics and different weapons and aliens. Been there. Done that.
So yeah
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Doom, Quake and later SeriousSam were all games with pretty much no important story but fun fun fun in multiplayer co-op.
I don't know if I'm alone in this thought, but for me it was much funner to play jDoom [doomsdayhq.com] in coop than Doom3 single. Simple graphics, simple levels and a whole lot of fun.
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Only recently? (Score:2, Informative)
Much underrated game to my mind. One of the few games that I have actually played all the way through.
Shadowman was another.
Undying Hell yea. (Score:2)
The real weakness of the FPS has been the fact that, until relatively recently, you've been constrained on the GUI. I mean, think of the possible actions in your average RPG or other seriously story driven game, and then think of the FPS "actions" which are as follows: run, shoot, jump, action.
Some games make it work; Undying was great, not because of any imaginative action system, but because the s
The good old days... (Score:5, Insightful)
Lead designer: "Nice, that really looks like a gateway to hell. I like the guys chained to the stone walls suspended above a pit of lava too. It looks like their souls have been sucked right out of them."
Resulting game story: "You must pass the gateway to hell, and descend into the depths to save the damned before their souls are harvested."
Dan East
As John Carmack (supposedly said) (Score:5, Insightful)
from wikiquotes...
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carmack should play deus ex a couple of times, maybe then he'll understand.
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-You dare to attack me here? Do you even know who you face?
-So godchild, you have escaped.
-You're not going to torture us any longer.
-Torture? Silly girl, you just don't understand what I'm doing, do you?
-I don't care what you're doing, let us go.
-I won't let you leave, not when I'm so close to unlocking your power.
-We don't want anything from you!
-ENOUGH. I don't have the time to listen to the babbling of ignorant children.
-This is an unsanctioned use of magical energy, all involved will be held
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Shame about the voice they got for Imoen though.
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Single player games without some story get tedious. (Multiplayer games are, of course, entirely different...no story needed.)
Based on my experience... (Score:2)
1) various generic plot devices are written on a couple of hundred Post-It notes
2) post it-notes are stapled to a bulletin board in a random arrangement
3) fifteen darts are thrown at the bulletin board
4) ???
5) emergency all-nighter to write some crap based on 15 of those Post-Its
Honestly, even the "okay" stories in most games are, at best, not complete rubbish. It's just that, as with comic book stories, our standards are rock-bottom low.
I'll save you some time... (Score:5, Insightful)
New games need story. Stories need writers. Writers need to think about the audience.
Some games already have stories.
There's a lot of plugs for the Haze game, for some reason.
And that's it... There's nothing else. They act all philosphical about how FPS's need story/etc, but it's absolutely no different than how other games need story, except in scale. RPGs need more, puzzle games need less.
Manatees (Score:4, Funny)
Don't forget the Marathon series... (Score:5, Interesting)
Mod parent up. (Score:2, Informative)
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Of course, with Aleph One [bungie.org] and tons of free content [bungie.org] available for Mac, Windows, and Linux, everyone can play it now.
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It wasn't even Bungie's first FPS, per-se - that would be Pathways Into Darkness [bungie.org] (wiki here [wikipedia.org]. Some argue that this was technically a first person RPG with shooter and horror elements (like Ultima Underworld, TES Arena, etc), which I wouldn't disagree with, but I found it more intense and difficult than most shooters of that era (Wolf 3D, Doom) and even the next generation (like Rise of the Triad, Marathon, and Duke Nukem 3D).
on a completely unrelated note,
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Half life (Score:5, Interesting)
Another mod for HL1 was They Hunger, which had a pretty decent storyline, it had 3 installments and was a zombie based game. In all it had a good story to it.
So to sum up FPS games can have good story lines, but depending on what the game is a bout and when it is set matters and might limit what story can be conveyed.
Penn Jillette on stories (Score:4, Insightful)
- Penn Jillette
Re:Penn Jillette on stories (Score:5, Funny)
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Interactive art is different from non-interactive.
Not better. Not worse. Different.
When I play a game like Monkey Island, I am not wrecking some guy's story, and I am not missing out on the insane fun it would be to just hear it told.
Montfort's Twisty Little Passages, I think, while not totally satisfying, makes a basic case that games are more like riddles than like conventional stories.
That wouldn't explain mods, though (Score:2)
1. There are people who actually enjoy being creative in their own right, and taking the story in their own direction
2. There are people who have strong feelings about what kind of characters they want or don't want to play. Since a game essentially requires you to be the lead actor in that story. And it has happened to me before (and to countless others) that a character was a major tur
Choice in game doesnt ruin a story. (Score:2)
We havent reached a point where games have significant AI where everytime you play through a story the ending will be different. All your endings are already written and apart of the story, you just happen to choose which one you end up seeing. The story is already made and is apart of what the storyteller wants you to see.
You are still apart of the artists vision, its just that his vis
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I would go as far as to say that fixed stories are actually a rather new thing, thanks to printing press and movies that allow to keep them in an hard to modify state, before that, they might have changed each time they got told, since they only existed in the tellers mind and not word for word recorded on paper.
Butcher Bay and other underrated games (Score:4, Interesting)
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Theif (Score:2, Interesting)
Outlaws! (Score:2)
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Oh, wow... I used to burn so many hours in college on that one.
The taunts...oh, the taunts!
(And don't forget dynamite!)
Duh! (Score:2, Funny)
Um... (Score:3, Insightful)
I like the story of the OSS FPS Cube. (Score:2)
Truely unique. And all the story I need for an FPS.
( http://cubeengine.com/ [cubeengine.com] )
Clive Barker's "Undying" (Score:2)
I don't want a story in my FPS (Score:2)
If that is how stories are going to be told in FPS then leave them out or at least make
Call of Cthulhu (Score:2)
It's all a matter of taste... (Score:2)
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I just finished Thief 3 (Deadly Shadows). It was built on the Unreal engine, unlike the first two games which used a proprietary engine, I believe. I was glad to see that the gameplay was tweaked to match the original.
About the only thing I missed was that items such as keys and letters no longer go in your inventory, although I suppose that helps keep it less cluttered. There are also less keys to find to open doors--unless I kept missing them; they are hard to spot after they fall off of a ragdoll.
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Try the original System Shock. I'm a big fan of the sequel but still think it pales in comparison to the original.
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Surely thou jest (Score:3, Insightful)
Heh... reminds me of the high school days, when I'd occasionally be bored enough to imagine a whole touching story about such games and characters as Chucky Egg.
Admittedly, the whole was more or less part of reverse-engineering how to write a sch