BF2S Forums The "All Other Games" Chat Thread

Pretty cool that Konami made a story driven game like this back in the mid-90s. This and Final Fantasy 7 were such amazing projects for their time.

It was released in 1998.

"Development for Metal Gear Solid began in mid-1995" via wiki

what mac spent $2000 in video card moneys for:

It's a rabbit hole. Soon you'll have a wheel, pedals, and everything.

Mentioned it before, Cruisi'n USA was the best at the arcade or restaurant. This came out around the time of Doom, mind you, and looked/felt fantastic.

Those are fun tho. And much cheaper than real racing


Course mine is collecting dust. I blame my ssd failing

Last edited by RTHKI (2022-02-21 04:59:29)

Why do game stories almost invariably suck?

Like the best games I've played story wise usually approached their world either by shrouding it in mystery and less-is-more type of stuff, or were more filled with hilarity. I'm thinking the original diablo, some GTA games. Of everything I've played, Red Dead Redemption 2 comes closest to actually being a good story on its own, though it still is a pretty standard western.

You'd think between films and books, games provide the ultimate platform for conveying great stories. It has visuals, interaction and few constraints to creative writing. So why do so many games fall short, and what actually are good story driven games that aren't trope-filled, half assed derivatives from masterpieces in other mediums?

Well even in today's hollywood you have directors who are given big budget productions and who can still produce pretty good stuff. It's not all Marvel superhero part 32. Villeneuve has made a few great movies and gets to translate dune to the big screen now. There hasn't been an era in filmmaking without at least a handful of directors and studios who had popular appeal, industry backing and tons of creative talent. You also have plenty of series that are A+.

Where's the game industry equivalents? Asking around for a good RPG gets you referred to mass effect, which is an alright game, but would've been absolutely trashed as far as story goes if it were published in book or film form. Is the gaming community standard for a good story on par with its perception of 'cool aesthetics'?

Larssen wrote:

Well even in today's hollywood you have directors who are given big budget productions and who can still produce pretty good stuff. It's not all Marvel superhero part 32. Villeneuve has made a few great movies and gets to translate dune to the big screen now. There hasn't been an era in filmmaking without at least a handful of directors and studios who had popular appeal, industry backing and tons of creative talent. You also have plenty of series that are A+.

Where's the game industry equivalents? Asking around for a good RPG gets you referred to mass effect, which is an alright game, but would've been absolutely trashed as far as story goes if it were published in book or film form. Is the gaming community standard for a good story on par with its perception of 'cool aesthetics'?

For awhile there was a phase in gaming where your game being "x on rails" was considered bad mojo. "Shooter on rails. RPG on rails. Haha, lazy devs, this game sucks." But open world freedom can tend to make things feel less focused.

You must be looking or asking in the wrong places, if all you get are recommends for Mass Effect. There are a lot of story-driven games, with at least passable stories. What are you looking for in a story game, exactly? Cohesive? Compelling? A lot of "best of" lists look very much the same as far as triple-A is concerned. Where there's a lot of differentiation is when they pluck indies out of the ether to pad it. Look into the indies. Even PC gamer dips into indie whenever they roll out a top list. They're out there (some are literally nothing but text), or you could just read a book.

Ones that made me feel somewhat invested: check out Thief 1, 2, Mafia 1, 2, Tacoma, VtM Bloodlines. Subnautica is a satisfying short story, but there's a lot of exploring in between piecing together the mystery of the planet. Subnautica: Below Zero is a bit of a different take on it in that your character isn't a voiceless immersion puppet like Gordon Freeman.

Get lots of recommends for Firewatch, Disco Elysium, Pillars of Eternity.

Look at Telltale's catalog. Also Choice of Games.

Some games can tell a good story simply by showing you, rather than dragging your skull through it.

Try looking for interactive stories (Tacoma is pretty much one of these in disguise) in the Steam store. Games that actually sell themselves on being a story. Sometimes you'll get ones where the writer is featured in the blurb.

newbie makes a good point. there's been an aversion to rails/themepark-based game design for the last few years now. i suspect a lot of this stuff is highly circular and driven merely by consumer trends/fashion; the market gets saturated with one sort of game, so we get another genre/design philosophy/franchise for a half decade or so. 'open world', 'sandbox', etc, have been the games du jour. that and lootbox-heavy battle royale, and so on.

Last edited by uziq (2022-03-21 18:26:57)

thinking of it in terms of big business, which now gaming surely is, no longer being a pimple-faced teenage pursuit but rather an industry that outgrosses hollywood itself ... it's really a no brainer why the biggest titles put out by the major companies are all highly unoriginal, DLC-drenched, lootbox-riddled affairs.

the amount of time and investment it takes to make a AAA game is pretty enormous. the potential profits of making a game with dopamine-trigger labrat mechanics versus. the potential profits from making an amazing piece of narrative art ... are plain to see. even the very best single-player games of all time, from RPGs to FPS games like half life or deus ex, tend to have limited replayability (if at all for the vast majority of meh so-so releases). investing team/company efforts into making a highly addictive multiplayer package makes total sense when AAA games really ARE essentially just the marvel franchise transpored to the medium of videogames.

like hollywood at its most bloated apogee, the mainstream of the games industry is now highly conservative, risk-averse, and focussed on killer profits.

GTA games used to be fairly frequent and have crazy, ribald, funny, pretty unforgettable storylines. how old is GTA V at this point? 5+ years? all they've been doing is shovelling more DLC for GTA:online. totally indicative tbh.

RDR2 was pretty good for videogame narrative. wouldn't win the nobel prize for literature or anything, but it was very good for a game.

the fact rockstar have this amazing world and IP sitting around and do nothing with it, insofar as single-player/narrative-driven stuff is concerned ... shows you where the industry's biggest players and their priorities are.

the game world of RDR2 is huge and insanely intricate. their attention to detail is nonpareil. they are surely no strangers to the idea of wasting an inordinate amount of time on the smallest, most quizzical detail. and yet. even they've moved away from actually making new stories to bring that world to life.