I finished Fable 2 for the second time over the weekend, it's a terrifically fun game which offers unique game choices, like marrying a zombie witch reanimated using mad science by a crazy obsessed grave digger then using a potion to change your sex and for some reason no one (undead wife included) noticing. It does have some flaws though, the story telling on the main plot is ham fisted to the point of ridiculousness and for all it's jumping up and down about choice the choices are often fairly arbitrary and at other times it forces you to choose an option no one would select.
There is one point in the game where you get knocked out for some reason (I won't go into specifics since this is spoiler free) and some old codger some how locks you into a big cage (why he does this isn't very well explained). He neglects to take all your weapons off you so given by this point in the game I had a gun which to quote back to the future 3 "It'll shoot the fleas off a dog's back at 500 yards, Tannen, and it's pointed your head!" and I had the "headshot skill" and fire rate such that I take out a whole camp of bandits long before they even noticed me yet I had to sit in the cage and wait for the plot device to turn up to release me.
This happens several times where to move the plot on you just stand there doing nothing rather than the obvious option of putting cold steel through your adversary or blowing their head off or reducing them to charred bones with a blast of magic. Not to mention that you feel on reflection the bad guy of the game evil though he is is not really the threat but another character is more of the puppet master ruthlessly controlling your destiny for their own aims.
The whole good bad thing is quite black and white and often the option most sensible people would take is not one of those provided which kind of pulls you out of the experience. Again it's pantomime villain or flower child walk over.
For all the ham fistedness of the main plot the side quests and the variety of things to do in the game are great fun and often well written with a sense of humour it's just a shame the main quest wasn't handled with a bit more finesse. For more on fable 2's story's failings with spoilers check out Shamus Young's diatribe (now into three parts) on it here http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2105
Fallout 3 was another disappointing main quest very short and the ending is completely daft and makes no sense give what has happened only one mission previously. Yet the rest of the game the rich world with the interesting side quests and gameplay is great. Again the concept of good and bad in the game is somewhat twisted usually offering a choice between mass murder and flower arranging. Often you feel the need for that third option the one that makes sense in the game world and from a position of reason. With two disagreeing factions giving the player the options to slaughter either one is not really a good bad thing.
These two are not the only example of this sort of thing just the most recent and most high profile that come to mind.
In both cases the games still remain well worth playing it just makes you come away from the experience feeling as though there should have been more to it, that you have been in someway cheated.
Is there just a lack of good writers in the industry, maybe side quest seem to come out better because they are farmed out to teams and can be almost anything in the scope of the game allowing a lot of freedom to be creative and use the game world where as the main quest is set in stone by the designer god of the game who may know about games but can't write good fiction for toffee.
In these cases it seems that they needed some more work on the story so it didn't seem quite so artificial and forced, so the choices a player had to make were not so random and at odds with the rest of the game.
I'm aware that giving the player the freedom to choose things then trying to wrap an essentially linear story around that is tough. It effectively means you either have to change the story branching like a tree around the choices or you have to maintain the illusion of choice even if the player really has none and the story will play out the same way no mater what. In both fallout 3 and fable your choices did affect the game world their actions improving or destroying regions in the world but you couldn't derail the main story it chugged along the same regardless of your choices. In the end the only difference being what ending you chose. Still these current examples are very obviously forcing you to take the path they want, the story doesn't flow naturally at all it feels ridiculously forced in parts. All of which mars some otherwise very enjoyable games.
Play them both as they are still great fun but the story is somewhat wanting in both. Well maybe fable 3 and fallout 4 will get it right.
Comments
I think Fable's problem is that the very game concept itself almost dictates the core plot (revenge from a young age). That said, I agree that the ham-fisted way you are lead through the game is not great, redeeemed by (in my opinion) the excellent voice acting, and individual characterisation of the NPC's.
What would you consider good examples of story writing in games? I was having a think about this last night, and here are a few I came up with;
1) Max Payne / Max Payne 2 - again the core plot was fairly contrived, however it was presented excellently
2) Final Fantasy VII / X - so long as you can accept that the Japanese are batshit insane, and your character is actually the dream of an extinct race (or a human/alien hybrid with the personality of a dead soldier) you again have a simple plot, but excellent characterisation.
3) Half-Life - apart from that alien shit at the end.
The recurring theme is a simple, or even contrived, plot at the games core. I suspect that the reason for this is that unlike more static forms of story telling (books, films etc etc) the author has far less control of the pace and direction of the way the timeline progresses, and so is forced to rely on cliches and occasionally "forced events" (such as the one Matt describes above...I personally get annoyed with the occasional immortal character, who you really want to shoot, but are not allowed to as it would break the plot you are being injected with). The more recent requirement it seems is for all games to be sandboxes exasperates this, making it even harder to take the player along a coherent story, and instead you are left with a cloud of "sub-plots", which typically have nothing to do with your main quest or reason to be (to take Fable as an example...on one hand I'm saving the world, on the other I'm telling a father that his son is gay).
Taking all this into account, I'm not sure that games are a good medium for original storytelling. They can be very good at presenting individual characters, but linking them into a good plot may well be an impassable challenge). Heavy Rain may prove me wrong, however my gut feeling is that there is going to be limited interaction, and more reliance on pre-determined sequences...
I'm going to go a little left field here. I've not played Fable but I have a played a lot of Fallout 3 and I think it's eroneous to see "The story" as the "Find your father" plotline. The story is a conglomerate of all the things you do while playing the game. They don't always link together but then neither does life. Each time you play F3, you can get a VERY different story. Even the sub-quests can be approached differently depending on who you talk to first. After working the wasteland for hours, you end up either good, neurtral or evil and that changes both the main and all the other sub plots you meet. I'm playing it through as a bastard this time round and the other characters in the world behave very differently. The individual plots are quite interesting too... I won't spoil them... and you can trigger them differently - either turn up and shoot the leader in the face again and again or meet someone who has a friend help captive by the leader and sends you there on a quest. The sum total of story-ettes in the sandbox make the overall story.
I prefer it this way. HL1+HL2+E1+E2, masterpiece though it is, is not something I'd think of sparking up to have a 'fart about with'. Once I'd been through the story, I would not do it again. Alright, I did it twice but only for old-times sake. After this game of F3, I will have another go. I want to see how much of a cunt I can actually be to character X before he starts hating me and then be really nice to his wife. Then come back and lob a mininuke in their front door.
I agree that the main quest should have been beefed up and hopefully it will in future games but the story as a whole is super and I'm still really enjoying it.
Are the sub-quests compulsory?
I guess the game writers are somewhat between a rock and a hard place in so far as they can script a decent story if the game forces you down a linear path which is contrary to the trend in gameplay at present or you have sandbox gameplay and the main story gets diluted by chaff.
I think what you are after is a tabletop rpg ported to a computer but with all the benefits of good GM which does seem a tall order for any programmer.
I am more or less with Mr Fish here... The stand out game for me of late in terms of story has to be Bioshock, which in spite of the moral choice was about as linear as it comes. Cracking story tho!
I haven't played that much Mass Effect but on the surface it strikes me as a game where you get much more involved in the story, as a result (for me in early game) the story became rather viscous. It felt like I was wading through treacle...
Telling a decent story whilst giving the reader choice is an absolute fucker imho. Books are a fine example, remember those books when you were a kid, the ones where you turn to page 37 to go left and 76 to turn right??? Immense fun for my 8 year old self but I'd never pick one up expecting a decent story out of it.
Apologies for the incoherent nature of this post! Hopefully you see what I mean.
That's an interesting question. No, you don't HAVE to but if you don't wander the wasteland, you'll be woefully underequipped and powered for it. Furthermore, if you do some of the other quests in the wasteland, you could make finding your father fucking difficult. In the game I'm in at the moment, I've killed three of the people who were supposed to give me info. One died in a thermonuclear blast (which is more gorgeous in DX10), one I accidently got into a fight with when his wallet jumped into my hand and the last looked at me funny.
Fish is right, really. Trying to get software to be a good GM is difficult. Perhaps the solution might be to have player created quests?
They tend to use alternate mechanisms to get you to do actions that at the time seem completely pointless, or even against the nature of the character you play. The most typical of these is experience or rewards. Most gamers will cheerfully murder their virtual grandma for a new ingame sword, and I've yet to find a game where you don't have a mission such as;
a) Kill person A
b) Do this quest for me and I shall give you Item B
c) Kill person C and take Item D from his corpse
d) Take this valuable Item E and give it to person F
Where the alternate is offered;
[a) Kill me, make friends with person A]
[b) Kill me, and take the item from my cold, dead hands]
[b) Buy/steal this item from me]
[c) Buy/steal Item D from person C]
[c) Kidnap person C's child and ransom them for item D]
[d) Sell this valuable item]
[d) Kill me, as I have more Item E's on my body. So does person F, come to mention it]
Typically quest givers are immortal beings, and are either immune to death, or cause you to fail the game (even when at the point of their death they are not important to some arbitary key plot elsewhere. As Fish said, attempting to do this with a pre-determined set of code, and still have a definable finish/win condition is asking a fair bit...
//added. Simpson...I bought Gill one of those books for her birthday (I'm such a romantic). It's called The Regional Accounts Director of Firetop Mountain, and it's utterly impossible (in that some of the fights are impossible to win), so it assumes you cheat. At one point you have to count how many fingers you have reserving back pages...
Nice, Pete. I agree that most quests fit that sort of format but F3 does offer some alternatives.
b) Do this quest for me and I will give you something. What are you doing in my flat? Leave my stuff alone! I'll shoot you! No, you have a minigun, you bastard! AAAAAARGH!
c) Kill person C and take Item D from his corpse or makes friends with C and go and butcher the good guy and steal his stuff instead. You talk to the good guy's friends, who will hate you when they find out what you've done. Oh bollocks, the good guy was going to tell you where your Dad was. Error.
Quest givers in F3 are far from immortal and there is always more than one person to help you - that is if you don't kill everyone on sight.
With fallout 3 I managed to skip a whole section of the story plot by accident I was supposed to go to point B from A and instead went directly to C and thus picked up the story much further along. I suspect no matter who you kill you could eventually just manage that and pick up the story later in the game. I suspect you could go right to that place where your dad is and the story would pick up from there. The game will always deploy some handy deus ex machina to get you back on track I suspect even if you killed everyone you ever met you could still somehow do the main quest.
I don't mind that so much as people have said it's tough to do a branching story line various games have tired Fahrenheit being the most recent example with Heavy rain the spiritual successor hopefully doing a better job. My main gripe with Fallout 3 was how horribly contrived the ending is how it forces you to chose between two utterly insane options leaving a perfectly sensible option who might be right in front of you (for those who have played the game I just say fawkes) but won't let you pick it this time when last time the exact same situation came up it was a perfectly ok way of going.
Again and as you mentioned in fallout 3 where the game shines is in the subquests the stuff that you have no need to do they change based on your attitudes and personality they are varied and interesting with multiple ways of approaching it. The main quest has very little of that it is a linear trawl you can jump over elements of it which is better than some but still you are only hitting the skip button.
The immortal NPC is a problem I've seen this in GTA4 most of the characters in the set pieces (big gun battles or motorbike chase) are unkillable because the scene setting has to progress to a certain point before you are allowed to off them. This is very annoying when you've wasted a load of time chasing someone on a motorbike while firing which is one of the trickiest things to manage without sliding along tarmac only to find you needent have bothered.
I did see an example where it wasn't the case where options where
a) do ridiculously complex quest for item or
b) shoot me in the face and loot it from my corpse
not sure what game that was tho.
The voice acting in Fable was very good with Stephen Fry, Ron Glass, and Julia Sawalha as the heroes. This does mitigate things. And again in Fallout 3 the voice acting is pretty good Liam Neeson as your dad (always handy if you happen to get kidnapped by slavers ... byrn will know what I mean it's a taken reference) though he felt underused Malcolm McDowell even I suppose Ron Perlman. Still good voice acting only gets you so far.
As for my top story games I tend to have to go back a way. Beyond good and evil was fantastic subtle emotive and entirely linear but it flowed correctly it didn't feel forced. The old lucasarts games back in the era when story was really all they had The Dig, Grim Fandango, Full Throttle, Sam and Max, the Monkey Island games, Day of the Tentacle all classics stories to different degrees. The broken sword games where good (recent episodes less so I'm mainly thinking 1&2 3&4 were less well crafted). Half life was pretty good, and I did enjoy the subtle story telling in portal too. Bioshock was stupidly linear to the point of wreaking the logic of its final sequence if you played bad guy but it was a nice tale.
They told a story and it flowed naturally from start to finish, admittedly there was nothing much in the way of choice along the way and it didn't change direction but it also didn't present the bizarre choices fallout 3 and fable 2 do to keep their stories on the rails.