People who don’t like anything are incredibly boring, in my humble opinion. Imagine putting all of this effort into an essay about why other people shouldn’t like the things that they like. I think a lot of people mistake being a contrarion for being an intellectual.
Returnal, Resident Evil REmakes, most Giant Bomb games, Firewatch, Hellblade…
If you liked Alan Wake, definitely give the RE remakes and Hellblade a shot, and don’t sleep on Firewatch. In fact, Hellblade: Senua’s Sacrifice is probably one of the most thoughtful and atmospheric experiences in gaming (at least in the field of 3rd person, pseudo action games).
#Your favorite game’s “awesome story” robs the player of a basic sense of agency
It is generally not awesome for the player character to join a cult, agree to assassinate their boss’s boss, cheat on their life partner, pick a side in a major power struggle, voluntarily inject themselves with an experimental nano-fluid, etc, without the player’s consent.
Right, so…please tell me a narrative medium that allows this. Somehow movies, books, comics, manga, and literal storytelling all get a pass on this?
I can sort of nod along with everything else, agreeing that there is some truth in the spewing. This statement is so pants-on-head foolish that every other assertion you make gets dragged beneath the water and drowns with chains made of the last page of shitty choose-your-own-adventure book. And for that level of strength in the chains to work, those assertions have to be pretty crappy.
Sorry, but no medium of media allows for agency. I don’t care if you have some of the best writing in a game (whether that means Planescape: Torment, Baldur’s Gate II, Disco Elysium, whatever), or if you want to go with the old choose-your-own-adventure books, but there is ultimately little to no player agency. If you want player agency in a game, you have one choice, and it isn’t a video game: TTRPGs. Even ChatGPT can’t match what a good GM can do, because they can allow you to break the mechanics of the game or add mechanics on the fly to fit what a player wants to do. A GM can literally respond to something a game creator never imagined within seconds. I want to see Planescape or Disco Elysium react to a player doing something they thought of that the game creator didn’t imagine. Buuuulllllshit. Player agency my ass.
Also, as the OP obviously fails to mention any games that he thinks is worthy of being an ‘awesome story’, I’m calling this as a troll/bait post.
Soooo… you’re telling me there’s a game whose story you really love that avoids all these tropes completely? Hmmm… How about Stardew Valley? The premise isn’t entirely unrealistic (leaving a boring corporate job for a dream hobby farm), the story unfolds on its own, you get to decide who you side with, who you become close to and hang out with. Or perhaps you only enjoy franchises that have volumes and volumes of lore behind them to make up for game campaign plots that are too straightforward (Lord of the Rings, Starcraft for example).
Or (like me) your favourite games have little to no story at all. American Truck Simulator, Bloons TD, Age of Empires, Satisfactory, Cities Skylines, Transport Fever are a bunch of my favourite games to play.
If you believe everything you wrote in this post, you are quite hard to please. A game’s plot can’t be too straightforward, yet any surprise twist seems shoehorned in the game. Telling the story through the environment is walking simulator, telling the story through quests is MMORPG Simulator, telling it through Textboxes/Cutscenes is Reading Simulator. Someone hiding something about their character until later in the game is unrealistic, being taken for a ride in a fantasy world is “losing your basic sense of agency”.
Are you playing to try to have fun, escape real life for a bit, or are you playing just to tell people you beat the game? I like games over films and books because you are part of the action and the story, but it’s also part of the game design how far your choices ultimately take you in the world, sometimes they affect everything, sometimes it has no bearing and you’re doomed with what the game has in store.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne