Unofficial Tex Murphy

With every release now, I hear either the lead writer or producer discuss how difficult it is to adress the issue of story-telling in video games. And I seem to hear roughly the same mish mash, without so much as an actual approach or solution to it.

Aaron adressed this issue years ago, and yet it still comes up as something new. What's even funnier is, Deus Ex actually solved this issue 12 years ago, and no one has turned to it for an answer ever since. The blueprint is there, for anyone to look at and grab, to what I have come to call the ''playing the story'' approach. For some unknown reason, it has never, not in one single instance, been used again. Not even for DE's own sequel, Invisible War.

Truly mind-blowing.

Frank wrote:With every release now, I hear either the lead writer or producer discuss how difficult it is to adress the issue of story-telling in video games. And I seem to hear roughly the same mish mash, without so much as an actual approach or solution to it.

Aaron adressed this issue years ago, and yet it still comes up as something new. What's even funnier is, Deus Ex actually solved this issue 12 years ago, and no one has turned to it for an answer ever since. The blueprint is there, for anyone to look at and grab, to what I have come to call the ''playing the story'' approach. For some unknown reason, it has never, not in one single instance, been used again. Not even for DE's own sequel, Invisible War.

Truly mind-blowing.

Yes! I agree 100%

In fact, the way I see it (and I'm sure you have noticed too), the best solution most modern game publishers have been able to come up with themselves in recent years is to make a series of cinematic trailers and shoot real life sequences as part of their advertising campaigns. There are some really engaging cinematic trailers for games that are otherwise boring as bat-s**t when you actually sit down and play them.

So basically, they steal the "cinematic feel" to get you hooked and draw you in, and then neglect to maintain it for the actual game itself because by that stage you're a potential sucker for spending more money on useless crap, with all this "special edition" crap and a plethora of crap merchandise, and so called "mist have" bonus content that probably took little to no effort to produce. It's all about money making.

-Cub. =o)

The cinematic trailers are hilarious. Assassin's Creed comes to mind, because they were done here in Montreal.

I find it ridiculously amusing that this web series, which was nothing else than an expensive marketing toy, was highly praised for its originality, while the game itself used one of the worse possible approach to story-telling. Some semi-sandbox environment which allowed you to embark on insignificant arcade-style missions, right int the middle of a key plot element. The story in Assassin's Creed 2 is painfully impossible to properly follow, because it is constantly cut by the ''playing'' part of the game. You either play some stupid arcade missions, or you watch the cutscenes. Not once do you actually play the story, or interract with the plot or the envrionment in any way.

It's a shame, because they could have done actual marvels with that engine. There is a lot of fabulous work accomplished in this series. But the story-telling falls completely and utterly flat.

On the opposite side you have Arkham City. A comic's superhero game, built to be, and publically marketted as an arcade platformer/beat em up, which turns out to be possibly the closest thing I've seen in years to an old-school story-driven game. It uses all the old tricks in the books, and does so perfectly well. I absolutely adored it, despite the very simple and somewhat repetitive game mechanics. Of course, I was an enormous fan of Batman TAS as a kid, and Paul Dini did an amazing job with Arkham City's story.

All good points.

Also, if you want a good laugh, watch the latest cinematic real-life trailer for Prototype 2. It tries to pull on the heart strings which, while beautiful in essence, is kind of raped by the fat that the only premise in the game itself is to run around destroying $#it.

-Cub. =o)