So Infinitron I expect an official apology from you for labeling my post fake news!
Keep in mind we're talking about a guy that likes squares in his geography.
Vogel is creative in many neat ways but where he isn't he's practically autistic and robotic in his thinking.Codexers always demand creativity from game designers and then they get mad when someone puts square continents in a game, although that's something that exists neither in reality nor in any other game.
That's not even his worst one.
IIRC, that orange-and-cyan combination was fairly popular among computer game developers for several years.
I think it looks beautiful. Like a CRPG Hooked-On-Phonics.He is entirely art-blind. No sane person would come up with a color scheme like this:
Why Video Games Are Tough For Storytelling
A good story can help your game make money, but the medium will fight you every step of the way.
Writing a video game with a good story is easy! Just have it be 20 hours of reading! Done and dusted!
"Players will forgive your game for having a story as long as you allow them to ignore it." - Vogel's 2nd Law of Video Game Storytelling
I recently wrote a blog post about writing good, clear stories that progress logically and make sense. It was based on a short, really good video by the guys who made South Park (and a bunch of other stuff).
The basic idea is this: When your story moves to another scene, the scenes should be collected by "Therefore" or "But then". They should never be connected with "And then."
As in, each scene should be the result of what came before. Someone does something to achieve a purpose. Someone else does something to react to that. And so on. This creates a logical story that moves at a good tempo towards a conclusion.
But I'm a video game guy. (Kickstarter for our next game running now!) What does all this mean for me?
It turns out the things that make a video game feel like a video game make storytelling very hard.
Storytelling In A Video Game Is A Strange Thing
I will go to my grave saying that, if you want to create a game that gets a following and makes money, good writing is the most cost-effective way to help. Good words and good settings are cheap to make, and they can massively increase the popularity of a product.
(This is why licensed games will always be a thing. If you took a Star Wars game and stripped out all of the Star Wars stuff but left the gameplay alone, the resulting game would sell worse. Words are selling it, even though it's just drafting behind a movie made by someone else in 1977.)
So what makes a video game story good?
Remember, I'm not an artsy-fartsy type. I care about games because they make me money I use to buy food. My definition of a good story is: It gets players more passionate about the game, which increases word-of-mouth marketing, which makes money.
I'm a cold-hearted mercenary.
I'm not going to make any blanket statements about problems I see in game stories: Flat characters. Generic settings. Nonsensical or forgettable stories. Sure, that happens a lot. But it's common for movies and TV too. As Sturgeon's Law says, "90% of everything is crap."
What I want to talk about is the friction in video games that keeps a story from engaging the player.
Does story matter in video games? Of course! It matters a lot! As long as it’s someone else’s old story.
So Here's The Scenario
You are making a single-player game with some kind of story. For whatever reason, you want the story to be good enough to engage the player.
I think the real problem is that even when game stories do have good elements, they don't gel. They don't come together with the impact they should have. I just played Alan Wake, for example. That story has a bunch of cool ideas in it. Yet, when I got to the end, it left me feeling really 'meh.'.
And I know I'm not going to get a lot of agreement on this one, but the story of Baldur's Gate 3 didn't make a strong impression on me. It did better than most. I actually followed the main plot, more or less, and I did enjoy the side character stories.
It's just that, in the end, it didn't really come together. The main story was a constellation of largely unconnected events in my mind. In the end I killed a big monster, but don't all RPGs end that way?
That is why most of the memeing of Baldur's Gate 3 was about the companions. The main story had a ton of stuff, but it was disconnected.
In my experience, this happens a lot.
Why?
Because the activities you actually do in a video game, in-between the cutscenes and the conversations, may be part of the story, but they don't move the story forward. There's no "therefore."
Suppose you're playing a single-player game with some kind of story. What do you actually do in the game?
“Ok. I spent an hour leveling up Shadowheart, reading all her new spells, picking her spells, and sorting her gear. Now … Wait. What was this game about again?”
1. Video Games Have Lots Of Training
Training is "And then" storytelling. You do the same thing. Shoot the same enemy, fight the same fight. And then you do it again. And then you do it again. And then. And then.
Training in movies and shows is almost always covered quickly, usually in the form of a montage. (Once again, Trey Parker and Matt Stone come through for us.) Showing a lot of the training would be death for your movie.
There are movies that make training interesting, but the training has to be the whole plot, with characters struggling against some sort of obstacle. The highs and lows of the process give the story a logical flow toward a conclusion.
But in video games? The training/leveling is meant to be the fun. Which is fine, except that it pulls all focus away from your story.
Seven horcruxes was too many. Also, I don’t know, the word “horcrux” just bugs me. I never feel like I’m pronouncing it right.
2. Video Games Have Farming: Loot/Weapons/Keys/Plot Tickets
Conan starts his movies already having a good sword. John Wick gets his gun by digging in the yard for about 30 seconds of screen time.
In a fantasy RPG (even one of mine), you are threatened by an enemy, THEREFORE you get your sword. OK, fine. And then you get a better sword. And then you get a better sword. And then. And then.
Farming has exactly the same issue, but it's more boring.
Then there's "plot tickets". This is just an arbitrary item you need to get farther into the plot. Like you need to fight Archduke Bob. So you need to sneak into his castle through the sewers. If you need the Ruby Key to unlock the sewer door, that's a plot ticket.
The difference between a "Therefore" scene and an "and then" scene is that you can cut the second sort of scene and not hurt the story.
In your story, the sewer doesn't HAVE to have a locked door. You added the Ruby Key as a plot ticket. "You have to fight Bob, therefore you enter the sewer. And then you find you need a key."
Video games (including mine) lard on plot tickets because it pads out the game (not great) and gives the party the chance to train in another dungeon (which can be fun but it is unrelated to the story). By the time the players are done getting the key, do they even remember who Bob was?
There are successful movies that require the hero to gather a bunch of plot tickets to proceed. Indiana Jones did a side quest to find the location of the Ark of the Covenant. Harry Potter needed to destroy seven horocruxes. (SEVEN!)
You can have a few plot tickets. That's where the genius is. Indy's side quest to find the ark's location led to a really exciting scene with snakes. But you can't get away with too much of this. Every moment he spent in that tomb finding where the Ark is gave the audience time to forget why he was looking for it in the first place.
And Harry needing to find SEVEN baubles to break in those intensely over-padded books mainly shows that J.K. Rowling really needed an editor who could stand up to her.
But in video games? The plot tickets are the point. They are expected. You have to have SOMETHING to do, so that you can grind down trash monsters and get loot and experience. It's not a bad thing, except that players expect a lot of it and it can crowd everything else out.
But it’s not necessary for a story. Remember that the most famous magic item in all of fantasy, the One Ring of The Lord of the Rings, just starts the series in the pocket of a guy in town. That guy stumbled upon it by mistake in another book. How you get an item is less interesting than what you do with it.
People talk about how the Lord of the Ring is so long, but the main guy has the Big Magic Item in his pocket on Page 1. That’s as efficient as fantasy storytelling gets.
3. Video Games Have Travel
Travel in stories is boring. The real action in a story happens when you get to your destination.
The Lord of the Rings is largely a book about traveling and journeys. Yet, most of the actual travel happens offscreen/offpage. When the books do describe the travel, it's to give very dense information about setting and characterization. A page or two at most, then, "They hiked two weeks to get to the exciting place."
Star Wars made it even easier for the screenwriters. All the journeys were through hyperspace. Five seconds of pretty lightshow covers it. Very efficient.
But in video games? When you travel, you TRAVEL. Every step of the way. This is necessary. The journeys are where the action takes place: the fights, the sneaking. The journeys are where the experience is farmed to gain levels. So many games are just about the challenge of travel.
And hey, travel in video games is fun. Most of Souls like games are winding your way through a cool lethal maze. That's the game. And it's a blast. These games are not about story, though.
Consider The Last of Us, a game widely acclaimed for its story. It only has one section lots of people complain about: A long, LONG sneak through the ruins of Pittsburgh The game gets us to really care about these characters, and we get kept from them by this grind of "Another shadowy passage full of zombies. And another." This is a great example of a game trying to do good storytelling but it gets eaten by the game part.
Persona 5 has a really good story with really memorable characters. But it does it by making you spend a LOT of time hanging out and shopping with them.
Being A Video Game Dilutes The Story
To be very clear, I am not advocating for the removal of leveling and travel in video games. I do not want every game to become a twee two hour mini-movie. If I want to see a movie, I'll just watch a movie.
You can have a game that tells a very focused story by trimming all this game stuff out. The best example of this: Disco Elysium. It's an RPG that's almost pure storytelling, and it's fantastic. Yet, very few people want every game to be Disco Elysium. One a year sounds about right.
If you ever played any of my RPGs, you'll know how I feel. My games have a ton of story. But also lots of travel and leveling and finding plot tickets. I LIKE the stuff that makes games be games.
However, you do have to be honest about their qualities. Different sorts of content have advantages and disadvantages. The secret is figuring out how to balance them.
Video games should be allowed to be video games. But if you have storytelling as a goal, there are better and worse ways to do it.
Next Week I'll give some of my ideas for how to do that, with practical advice for how to make more money in this business.
Hm, I don't think Ultima 7 was "very non-linear". Sure, you can travel to different cities in almost any order, but it's almost worthless - the main quest is 100% linear, you can't deviate from it even slightly.
I like his shit generally but when he simplifies it irks me. I'd expect more complexity. I'm damn surprised he hasn't released a toolkit to mod the current games but that'd probably end his cha-ching income. And I still prefer his Exile works more but I have to admit I really dig his geneforge stuff. Gfx, sound, music? Meh hardly effects me unless woke trash or it looks like some crappy old clip-art puppetry like many gachas use. That stiff movement is shit and I'd prefer old pixel repetition any day. Stills are even fine tbh.
Mid. It's very utilitarian (which, in this context, is a positive), but relies heavily on worn out clichés and tropes, especially when it comes to characters. In other words, the writing is executed competently enough, but lacks depth. All in all, not bad, considering how much worse most other video games are written, but nothing to be amazed by.
Tips For Writing a Video Game Story That WORKS
(Where "works" means "makes more money.")
Bonus story tip: If your players travels with other characters, they can chat during the game stuff. It helps the player remember the story during all the stabbing.
"Every minute a player spends not interacting with your story dilutes the power of the story." - Vogel's Third Law of Video Game Storytelling
Suppose you want to write a single-player video game with a good story.
Assume you're writing a game to make money. There are lots of ways to skin that particular cat. You could make a freemium, open-ended app. A gacha game. Some competitive thing that people play for a thousand hours. You could have done that, but you, like a madman, decided to rock things old-school.
It's single-player, and you want the story to be good.
How Do You Tell When Your Game's Story Is "Good"?
When it makes your game earn more money.
Does the story so amuse people they tell their friends? Quote your funny lines at nerd parties? Meme your characters? Cosplay as your characters? Write fan-fiction about your game?
In other words: Is your story so good that people give you free advertising? (And word-of-mouth is the best advertising.)
Then it's good.
So how do you do that?
I can't say, obviously. That's where the art is. A million words have been written about storytelling. My #1 piece of advice is always: Be a genius.
However, I have been selling game stories for a long time, and I've observed that some things work better and some work worse. I've done things well and made some gruesome errors. I can offer some opinions and observations, if you want people to care about the words.
(By the way, our Kickstarter for our next story-heavy RPG, Avernum 4: Greed and Glory, is almost done and has done great. Take a look!)
Portal has the ideal combo: Short game, with really sharp, funny writing. Possibly a perfect single-player game.
1. Shorter Stories Hit Harder
Single-player video games are too long.
Sure, there are people who want to sink thousands of hours into a game. Look at the list of the most popular games now. The top of the list is all open-ended games, meant to suck up time forever. So people with infinite time to kill are not going to be your customers.
If you're writing a game, with a beginning, middle, and end? You kind of want people to see the end part. Otherwise, they're paying money for food that's going in the trash. It's a waste for them and a waste for you.
Consider Baldur's Gate 3, a very good game I have written a lot of kind things about. (If you are reading this far in the future, think instead of the most recent, critically-acclaimed hit story game that the vast majority of players didn't finish.)
I know a lot of people who started Baldur's Gate 3. Almost nobody who finished it. You can probably finish it in 80 hours, if you rush. Looking at Steam Achievement percentages, only about 22% reached the end. For a game this length, that is an AMAZINGLY high percentage. Yet, it's still really low for a game we're calling a classic.
This is desperately sad. We're spending so much time and money making so much material that nobody has time to play, because they also need to exist in the real world.
Baldur's Gate 3 is too long. Yeah, I know, you loved this character or that side quest or whatever. Doesn't matter. That percentage doesn't lie. It doesn't matter how good your content is if nobody sees it.
A great exercise for a game writer: Brew some coffee, sit down, lock in, and be one of the few, the proud, who actually manages to finish Baldur's Gate 3.
Then figure out how you would cut 30 hours from its playtime.
It's a really good exercise. It's not even difficult. Your answers will be different from mine. That's where the art is. But it would make a better game that leaves a better impression on the player. Remember, people meme like crazy about the characters in Baldurs' Gate 3 that you meet in the first hour, but I doubt one player in ten could give a coherent explanation of its tangle of a story.
Others liked the story of God of War Ragnarok way more than I did. It did do a good job of keeping a story with a lot of parts clear. Again, they made sure you almost never wander alone. A great way to enable a continuous drip of story.
2. Distractions Make Players Forget Your Story
I wrote last time about how most of the activities expected in a video game aren't good for storytelling.
Long story short, what is most of your time in a game spent doing? Grinding. Traveling. Killing minor foes. Getting levels and gear. Training. Looking for secret doors. Editing your character's face.
These are good things. A video game should have game in it.
Just remember: Every minute a player spends away from the story is a minute of forgetting the story.
Designers tend to lard in lots of these game activities. They're cheaper to make. Nobody wants to cut their pet action sequence, even if it's one of ten nearly identical such sequences. (Old, true writing advice: "Kill your babies.") Nobody wants to write a 20 hour game if a 40 hour game is in their grasp. Nobody wants to write a 40 hour game if an 80 hour game is in their grasp.
I can't stress this enough: If a player wants quantity, there are tons of popular, free games out there that can last literally forever. I think this market is much more starved for games that give full, complete experiences that can be enjoyed by someone with kids and a job.
I've gone beyond the "story" issue with this one, and yet not. For a single-player game, a story is a key part of the experience. You can't tell your friends how much you loved a story if you only saw a third of it.
Baldur’s Gate 3 story: Kill that floaty brain thing in the middle. But it put mind-control worms in your head and you have to remove them. That is a very strong trunk of a story. I think they loaded the core story with too much extra baggage.
3. KISS = Keep It Simple, Stupid
Even after you pare back the game in your game to a playable amount, there will still be a bunch of hours of play in it. During those hours of walking and fighting (and, in Baldur's Gate 3, searching 20000 identical crates), players will forget a ton of story.
So to make your story memorable, keep it simple. The stories players remember most had at their spine only a handful of very strong, very clearly drawn elements. (The Last of Us story was made of: Joel. Ellie. Zombies. The Fireflies. Just four!)
I think most game stories are written by young writers who grew up on a diet of genre fiction and are ecstatic about the chance to make their own thing. Alas, this understandable enthusiasm comes at the cost of restraint. I have fallen victim to this myself.
Don't make a game bloated with nations and factions and characters and settings. This is particularly a plague in RPGs. If you introduce five countries, players will forget three of them. If they aren't super punchy and memorable, players will forget all of them.
As in many things, emulate Tolkien. When preparing to write Lord of the Rings, he created an infinite blob of lore, most of which you don't want to read.
When he settled down to write 900 pages of book, though, he pared it down to five major elements: Hobbits. Elves. Orcs and Sauron. Humans of Rohan. Humans of Gondor. All of them are super-memorable. Once you have them down, you have the trunk for the entire book, and then it's easier to remember the branches. (Saruman. Ents. Dwarves. Palantirs. Tom Bombadillo.)
Tolkien had the discipline to pare down what he wrote to an easily remembered core. Martin does the same thing with the Game of Thrones books by having its huge crush of information filtered through a handful of very clear point of view characters.
(These authors are helped by being geniuses. I really can't stress enough the importance of, whenever possible, being a genius. Genius is rare. If you are lucky enough to have a good writer on your team, keep that person.)
If you're going to make a ton of story, you have to find a way to make it fit in the players head. In a game, which is full of game, you have to work twice as hard.
Remember the crazy-ass baron storyline in The Witcher 3? It was perfect. Short. Clear. Self-contained. Intense. And you could forget everything about it once it was done. 10/10. No notes.
4. Be Funny
When someone asks me what an underserved market is in video games, I always have the same first answer: Humor. Humor is hard, and there's never enough of it. Humor is easier to sell than anything else.
Portal was a solid 2 hour puzzle game. What made it iconic was that the story was funny as hell. Walking simulators are done as a genre, but Stanley Parable was able to be a hit twice (release and remaster) by being funny as hell. The Borderlands series is still eating out on how funny Borderlands 2 was in 2012.
There are lots of sorts of funny. Some are easier than others. Humor based on memes or being ironic about your game genre ("funny" RPGs are plagued with this) is common and easy. But I can't judge. If your game makes people laugh, you win, no matter what route you take to it.
Remember Persona 5? It had eight chapters. Each chapter had exactly one very memorable, hateable villain to fight. When it was defeated, it was gone. This broke the game up into manageable stories and kept what you had to remember to a minimum. Very nice.
Are Video Games A Good Storytelling Art Form After All?
I'm really not sure. It's works for me, but I'm a tiny insect in a huge industry.
Games approach being art in a lot of ways. Bloodborne is a classic game with a story that is completely incomprehensible to me. However, as a work of visual art, it is stunning. Minecraft is a strangely lovely thing to immerse yourself in, and it has no coherent story at all.
And yet ... People keep telling stories in games. A story in a game serves an incredibly valuable purpose: It gives structure to the experience.
A lot of people don't want sandboxes. When they enter a game, they want a finite experience. A start, a middle, a satisfying conclusion, and you can go on with your life. To have this, you need a story. If you're going to have a story, it should be engaging. Also, if you don't have a story that ends, how do you know when your experience is done?
Humanity is a storytelling species. Stories are how we communicate with and teach each other. Stories are how we mentally organize our lives. Therefore, video games can't escape story. It's the best way to make the game experience make sense.
So try to do it right. If it works, it's free money.
To be fair, that was a victim of its era, early 00s UI and product design (for kids) often looked like that.He is entirely art-blind. No sane person would come up with a color scheme like this:
Mid, but only because the bar is so damn low. Under better circumstances, I would place it closer to bad than average.
Pretty much agree.
