GCDC 2007: Rolston and Bates - RPG stories shouldn't be complex |
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An interesting topic was discussed during the Games Convention Developers Conference this year when Ken Rolston, lead producer of Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and Bob Bates, a veteran adventure author, sat down to talk about problems that modern game narratives encounter.The two make an ideal pair to discuss the merits and downfalls of a game narrative. Rolston speaks from the viewpoint of a developer and producer of video games, giving him the insight and experience needed to judge how a game can be written. Bates on the other hand, speaks as an author. Naturally his skills in writing would give an extensive range of insight to storytelling.
It kind of goes against instinct on the essence of an RPG, but both of them agree that the storyline of a game should be less complex and more linear, giving the player less choices. Ultimately the player should only be given a certain number of choices, if any at all, that could affect the storyline.
From Rolston's point of view, the reason for this is that there's little pay-off to be had by the player when faced with a lot of choices that will lead to a lot of endings. A writer would have a hard time giving each choice the dramatic tension it deserves. Not only that but developers would have to provide content for each ending, which could easily fall to disaster when keeping track of all the possible decisions and objects needed for each one.
From Bates' point of view, giving players the freedom of choice isn't fair. The dramatic choices a character makes in a story shouldn't be personally ours to make. "As an author of a story you have to push a character into doing things it wouldnÂ’t want to do in order to grow the character. As a game designer itÂ’s not fair to make the player have to do that."
One point they did disagree on during the talk is on the ambiguity of a backstory. Rolston believes that a backstory can be ambiguous. The developer would leave ambiguous hints of the character's past and leave it up to the player's imagination to fill in the blanks. Bates, however, believes that you can't get into the mindset of a character by being ambiguous with the backstory.
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Comments
bull*****.
I'm going to buy two copies of Mass Effect to beat these men senseless with. I mean them complaining that it's too hard to give each separate choice the dramatic attention it deserves is bull. It's more like we're two old men who are too lazy to make a game as open ended as possible. Linear plots are nice, but they are not the ultimate choice as these narrow minded fools put it.
I have to agree with these guys to a certain extend, Because we have seen it in the past, games with lots of choices lack a good storyline.
I think they're right to the extent that it's annoying to give the player choices that really mess with the overall plot - it tends to end up with a bunch of crappy endings and one or two "real" endings. Still, pretty substantial nonlinear elements can be added without opposing that principle. A good example is the TV series Babylon 5. The creator and primary writer for the series created a 5-year story arc, but having experienced the realities of the TV business he knew that between seasons actors could fall ill, get pregnant, break into Hollywood, run into trouble with the law, and so on. He wrote what he called "trap doors" - for any major role played by a character in the overall arc, he had backup characters and wrote corresponding backup arcs for them so that if the actor for the primary character left, the character could be "transferred back to Earth" or something (with some plausible justification, of course) and their place in the plot assumed by a backup (even with different personality traits, motivations, etc.). Sure enough, this ended up happening to several characters. The result is linear, but the process wasn't, and although it would be more work to fully flesh out all of the possibilities, I think it could be done. In terms of games with nonlinear elements, Seiken Densetsu 3 (sometimes called "Secret of Mana 2", although it makes as much sense to call it "Final Fantasy Adventure 3") has an interesting approach in which you choose 3 characters at the beginning, and the story that you see/play is affected by which characters you choose and the order in which they're chosen (you start with the earliest parts for the first character, then meet the others as you go on), but not in a way that compromises the overarching plot. In short, I think these guys' objections aren't with nonlinear storytelling per se, but rather the lack of a strong plot to support it.
Role-playing started out by making up your own stories, role-playing games just made that idea into a game. Since consoles and computers couldn't do every chose the players made, we now have games that are just "stat based" that are now refered to as RPGs.
As in a game where you're playing a ROLE. A complex role, one that's more important and complex than "shoot/slash/kill everything and save the world!" RPGs can only have great stories if they're linear and pre-set, like all great movies, books, and history. You can make all your own choices, but a game can't pull a real, thought provoking story like .Hack, FF, Xenosaga, ect if it's 100% sandbox. They're two different genres. Keep 'em separate, as I like 'em both, though I'll play X
They are right. If Videogames are to be one day be considered an art form and be taken seriously a linear story would be best, if you wanted a more interesting storyline. GTA would be a good example of a interesting linear storyline. I always thought that with a little more work, GTA could make a good RPG if they wanted. Also, It is unfair to the player because in order to get to the good ending, it usually involves going online or buying a strategy guide. By doing so you find out about future plot twists and there by making the game more about getting to the next level than finding out what happens next in the story.
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