Does that really matter? As you said, Portal is a linear series of puzzles, conversely, System Shock 2 (and presumably, 1) are set in a cohesive setting (as opposed to just a linear series of areas) you have no inital knowledge of and have find out the overall layout and function of as you explore; learning things from other characters is just part of that. They’re pretty incomparable in that regard.

The important thing is that, in both cases, removing either SHODAN or GLADoS would have a huge (negative for the vast majority of people) effect on their respective games whether they are telling you what to do or not, as they are distinctive characters whose motivations have a large impact on the overall atmosphere of their games and imagining their games without them is almost inconceivable (which, it has to be said, is where most “mission barkers” fail miserably).

The main difference is that GLADoS is mainly for entertainment purposes, not as a crutch for delivering objectives that would otherwise be quite unclear. Aside perhaps for the first incinerator and the boss fight, it’s fairly obvious what you need to be do, or at least easy to figure out with a little trial and error.

If for some reason (e.g., you lack a sense of humor) you don’t want to hear GLADoS’s comments, and you turn the volume down, you’re still able to make progress because, for better or worse, the game is a linear set of puzzles. Turning off SHODAN’s voice, on the other hand, is going to leave a lot of gamers saying “ok… so what do I do now?” or, assuming they muddle their way through it, “what was the point of all that?”

Except they do, Portal is part of the Half-Life universe, and was pretty much written by Valve (at the least, it was accepted by Valve), and is almost entirely based around the “voice in your head barking instructions” mechanic. Also, in Half-Life 2 itself there’s the section in Entanglement where Alyx speaks through your suit radio.

Of course, many games use it terribly (or, at least, forgettably), but that applies to almost any gaming narrative device.

(Could someone please edit that quote right? Blockquote doesn’t seem to work).

i also think it was probably most masterfully used in the first system shock, a game i loved but is now sadly pretty unplayable due to the UI. having to run about trying to reach the woman who’s been your only human contact for hours and…ooops, sorry.

I just think it’s worth pointing out the virtual omnipresence of the voice in your head in first-person shooters, and the significance of the fact that the best FPS developer around doesn’t use the contrivance.

Look at Halo 3.

The story [which bungee were obviously so enamored by] just got in the way.

I just wanted to shoot the FIFTY ELEVEN THOUSAND bits of mutant that were trying to kill me I couldn’t give a shit about the crazy bitch AI talking overwrought gibberish at me or the tribal machinations of the guys I was trying to shoot.

Compare that to something as lean as COD4 which propelled me from one seat of the pants set piece to the next.

Or Ninja Gaiden’s “these things are trying to kill you. It’s got something to do with what happened in the tutorial level” brutality.

Halo 3’s story was like being punched in my imagination.

Yes, peel away the story and the specifics and you can say that title X has you doing the same damn thing as title Y. So? Every movie ever made has you sitting in a chair for long periods of time and staring at a screen. Every book ever made has you reading text for HOURS. Oh man, why does anybody write?! It’s all the same!! Sarcastic remark!

There are games that need a story, and there are games that work better with a short blurb of background and then let you have at it. Off the cuff, I’d say that games with a story do tend to have more formulaic gameplay. Compare a fun action-centric Flash game to the latest FPS du jour, and you could say that story is what props up the same old ‘push crate, shoot that’ mechanics.

I should point out that Half-Life and Half-Life 2 are really no different, especially as the sequel often locks you in a room with a bunch of NPCs who jabber at you for awhile, say you’re great, and tell you to get a move on and do whatever. It’s immersive and it (usually) doesn’t take control away from you, but beyond that, it’s really no different than Bioshock or Halo 2. The main difference is that a lot of people feel HL2 has a really good story, and I agree there. I also think Bioshock had a really good story. Halo 2 had a completely horrible story in my opinion, the gameplay was same old, and so I didn’t finish it.

I’d agree gameplay is king but story is important, and it’s where and why I draw the sited line between “jock” games and “nerd” games(edit: I should note those labels go a bit far, it’s purely a matter of taste and what expectations you’re holding a game to, not your frat membership or lack thereof). It’s really just the difference between good writing and bad writing.

While I don’t think there’s necessarily a contradiction between the two quotes taken on separate occasions that are used in this news post, significantly there is one between his speech and the way the story was conveyed in Bioshock. Imo, that game fell victim to precisely the approach Levine is criticising, in that it seemed rather too fond of its own story, and so rammed it down your throat at every opportunity. To copy paste from a post I made on Shacknews:

One major criticism I’d aim at Bioshock’s story-telling, however, is the over-reliance on the some-cunt-yammering-endlessly-in-your-ear method of plot and world illumination. Irrational commented frequently in the run-up to Bioshock on the extent to which they’d use mise en scène techniques to unravel the plot before the player, yet while this approach was inevitably used to some extent, much of the detail about the world, the plot and the player’s goals was just rammed directly into his brain via his ear hole. You are now at location A to fight B because earlier C happened and if you don’t do D the consequences will be E. *SPOILER SPOILER SPOILER* It was Atlas for about two thirds of the game, then his alter-ego Fontaine, along with Tenenbaum for the rest, just as in System Shock 2 you had to listen to about 10 hours worth of Shodan telling you what was what at every turn. It’s an incredibly crude method of informing the player what’s going on and informing them of what to do in the world, yet sadly it’s almost ubiquitous in first-person shooters, seemingly the result of lazy designers who would rather take the easy approach for conveying plot details and tutoring the player on game mechanics.

It’s worth noting that this device is conspicuous by its absence in Valve’s games, where they positively go out of their way to not explicitly tell the player what to do in a given situation. It would be all to easy to say that the HEV suit contained a radio and camera, then have some random NPC guide you through every moment of the game, as is the case in other titles, yet Valve do the arduous, complicated work of ensuring that the player can decipher the world on his own and their games are much the better for it.

End paste

While both System Shock 2 and Bioshock have worlds which are almost unparalleled in terms of the atmosphere, setting and characters, while also having the basis for a much better story than most video games because of the fact that they actually have underlying themes being discussed, I feel the narrative is undermined in both cases by the extent to which it’s piped incessantly into your ear, rather than allowing you to uncover events yourself. As the poster beneath me on Shacknews pointed out, it’s also a technique fundamentally unsuited to the interactive, emergent nature of video games, since short of locking the player in an empty room, the developers have no way of predicting what will be going on while you’re listening to Atlas/Fontaine/Shodan’s latest spiel. Thus, you often have the incongruous situation of listening to a soft, lilting Irish brogue merrily conveying his entire life story while you’re getting your skull bludgeoned in with a crazed splicer’s wrench.

I suspect someone with a non-technical skill (writing) in a highly technical environment (video game development) can often end up going rather overboard when attempting to justify their own existence, and I have a suspicion this happens to some extent in Irrational’s games.

It offered differences to standard shooters. It’s actual combat was pretty bad, but it wasn’t a standard shooter by any stretch.

Bioshock was fairly poor combat wise, had a wonderful atmosphere and setting but not much else that was that great.

As for no one dying in Super Mario Brothers, I did. Many times.