VG247 have been talking to shy and reclusive game developer Peter Molyneux about Lionhead’s ambitions. They want to tell the greatest story ever. The developer said:
“The greatest story ever told? I think it’s going to be in a computer game. And I think that if I play the greatest story ever told in the same game as you play it, your greatest story is going to be different to my greatest story. And that is power.”
Blimey. I hate stories, me. Just give me a box of toys. But what about you?
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All this nonsense can be put aside when sentient ai’s are in control of games narrative. Shame about the robot uprising 2 months later.
@Bobsy
Ahh RPS can also be the home of FIM, Friendly Internet Men :p
@Heliocentric
hopefully we’ll be able to use what we learned after many years of gaming ;)
yhancik: We’re all friendly here.
So long as you don’t have the temerity to, you know, like stuff.
Perhaps it will be in a game. But I’m fairly sure it won’t be one from Molyneux.
Since I don’t do multiplayer anymore, I gotta have a story to keep me interested in playing the game. If it doesn’t have a campaign/story, I won’t buy it.
My only exceptions are big sandbox games like SimCity, and big 4X’s like Civilization, where you can spend days or weeks playing a single game.
Sins of a Solar Empire was a disappointment in that respect because while they lacked a campaign story, they claimed they were a 4X, and that’s really not the case.
Elite’s story was rubbish, it was about a pilot who crashed trying to dock with a space station.
I dunno about Sins being a 4X. I thought it was more like Rise of Nations in space. It does fulfill the four Xs, but it’s not as deep as other games like Civ or Gal Civ, which have more complex diplomacy models and so on.
@Nick
Ah but the emotional strings that were tugged when the pilot went through the space station and there last breath was what made the game great.
While allowing the player to explore an environment is a great strength of games, I’m not sure that delivering story through the environment is something exclusive to gaming. For example, take the Road, partly because I’ve just finished reading it, but also because it nicely compares with your Fallout 3 example. The man and the boy’s journey through it is used to reveal a similar (albeit significantly bleaker and more cynical) story to the players exploration of the Wasteland. Of course The Road also contrasts this with the relationship between the man and the boy, which forms the major narrative focus, more so than their actual struggle for survival.
We all know that the greatest story ever told is, in fact, Doom.
I’d love for Peter to play Dwarf Fortress.
It may be fugly, and have a learning curve steeper than a cliff face, but as Sum0 says, it’s the epitome of story-generating games.
There’s just so much detail about everything in the game, it can’t help but generate unique stories every time you play.
(I also secretly wish that Peter would fall in love with the game and offer to fund Toady while allowing him full creative control and supplying him with a team of guys to work on graphics and interface design; one can dream)
I do love a good plot in games: rattling off the obvious examples of stellar storytelling, Deus Ex, Grim Fandango, HL2… But for every well-told, deep, complex plot you have generic stuff like Crysis, poorly implemented and uninteresting plots (Far Cry 2, though I still enjoyed it) or just something that’s far too meandering to follow (F.E.A.R. – I’ve never enjoyed the “audio log” method of exposition, because it essentially stops the action for ten minutes while you listen, else the audio is drowned out by combat).
Games can be so much more than this, if only people would try. Dwarf Fortress (which I keep bringing up) was essentially written as a game to explore stories (in the same vein that Tolkien wrote LOTR to indulge his love of languages). You can engrave images on walls for decoration, and in the early game the descriptions refer to dwarven mythology and history (painstakingly generated along with terrain at the start of a game). But give it a few years, and the images begin to reflect the history of your own fortress – things that happened to you, e.g. “This wall is engraved with an image of a dog striking down a goblin. This refers to the slaying of Hurly Gustenberg by the dog Colin in 359.” It’s not much, but when you experienced the goblin attack of 359 and remember it well, it’s mindblowing. (Boatmurdered’s thousands of images of elephant destruction come to mind.)
So, great plots can be wonderful, but if it’s a choice between a sweeping tale of WW2 again and a dog fighting off five goblin invaders before bleeding to death, I’ll take the latter every time. Words like “emergent,” “procedural”, and basically using that processor in there for something more than pushing polygons.
@James
I didn’t mean to imply that it was exclusive to gaming, but maybe that it is more possible to deliver a strong environmental narrative in a game. Or maybe I am just reading the wrong books :)
Dwarf Fortress seriously has some of the best story moments in a game, but for most people, they would rather read the stories of other people’s exploits rather than play the game and have them for themselves. I attribute that to a complete lack of playability, even when you know the games mechanics they don’t make sense, there is just no way to justify the spelunking required to navigate its menus. Perhaps Jason Schklar from the previous post could help them out.
Might as well read “Fable 3 Will Not Meet Design Goals”. I’m so sick of his games that get stuffed full of ambitious features and pushed out the door without a lick of polish.
Peter Molyneux? Isn’t he that bloke who said World of Goo didn’t deserve to be in the charts? I spit in Peter Molyneux’s eyes!
Sum0, I agree with you that Dwarf Fortress is excellent in that respect, and it is the one game which has convinced me that it is possible to build detailed and meaningful stories without scripting, or other human driven narrative. However I think Dwarf Fortress stands amongst a remarkably small collection of peers which have actually managed to achieve this.
I was about to argue that through a dynamic, largely machine generated, method, that it would however be impossible to embed layers of symbolism etc. which may be found in more ’scripted’ situations. However it just occurred to me that this may not be true. After all, how much symbolism in any traditional narrative is added by the author, and how much is added by the reader. Any English Lit folk want to take a crack at assigning some form of symbolism to the elephants in Boatmurdered?
Of course, real life has quite crap narrative structure, as many makers of biographies have discovered.
“Peter Molyneux? Isn’t he that bloke who said World of Goo didn’t deserve to be in the charts? I spit in Peter Molyneux’s eyes!”
Ah no, that is Peter “EA Sport Simulator ” you are thinking of:
http://www.joystiq.com/2009/01/02/peter-moore-wtf-where-the-hell-is-fifa-09-and-other-ruminati/
P.
The possibility to create a story and make it interactive (thus becoming unique in videogames) shows that VG’s have no boundaries.
The same happened with cinema in the passage from watching fricking trains go to charlie chaplin.
So take away stories you take away the spark of divinity, you condemn videogames to be dope for retard console kids.
Don’t do it, “story” is not boring like in a movie, it’s one thing with interaction (the toys you’re referring to)
Ugh, please read this before deciding to hate Peter Moore. It’s almost like the guy who wrote the joystiq article didn’t actually read Moore’s statement at all.
I don’t really have input on the whole games-as-storytelling quandary. I don’t want to get caught up in it.
Instead, I am merely here to point out that this is not the first time Peter Molyneux has said something so nebulous and pseudoprofound as to border on dog-barkingly insane.
“Give them a character, an history (not a story), define by a set of rules and numbers how they would act in certain situations, how they would interact with the surrounding world, and see what happens!”
Stalker?
To me, there are two types of games I love:
-Story I make (Fallout 3, Deus Ex, etc) where there’s an overarching storyline, but I basically make up the rest of it myself, and…
-Story I live in (Marathon being the best example). In Marathon, you have to save Humanity, there’s no choice, because like a story, it happens to you. However, Marathon’s story was so good it got me into game design in the first place, by having so much plot, character, and setting, that even though I was reading computer terminals I forgot, and got totally wrapped up in this amazingly well written dialogue of a computer discovering sentience.
It’s kind of funny that Peter Molyneux wants every player to have their own story, when his game Fable 2 locks the player in to experiencing the plot as the writer intended it, in so many places. Shamus Young of Tweny Sided wrote a series of articles about assorted aspects of Fable 2 on his blog. http://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=2105 That’s one of them, do a site search there for Fable 2 to see the rest.
@Gap Gen: Yeah, SoaSE can meet a very loose definition of “4X”, but it’s really paced and scaled much more towards being a slower-paced large scale multiplayer RTS. As you said, the depth just isn’t there compared to Gal Civ et al. You can make the galaxy map huge, but you still hit the unit cap and max out the tech tree after the first hour.
I am liking Mungrel’s suggestion of dorfs supported by the Molyneux creux.
Very few people play games for the story. And that’s all well and good, since very few games have decent stories, and those that do are still a long shot away from literature.
And I don’t mind that at all. In fact, I hope the pompous assholes of the world of novels and fine art stay far away from this medium, because they’d ruin it. Things like fiction and art were created to be forms of entertainment, and this holds more true for video games than for anything else. If a video game is not fun, then it has failed no matter how “artistic” it is.
I’m sure that 50 years ago people claimed that the best story would be told in a movie. It wasn’t, but does that really matter?
I highly doubt that video games will ever have the best story or even the best “narrative” experience. Games offer a unique sort of entertainment, and that’s the strength that developers need to focus on.
Oh, and Peter Molyneux is a [redacted].
Also, a game will contain the most beautiful picture ever. That game will come out tomorrow and end art design, unless you pretentious art designer assholes send me money!
Let me advertise a slogan I made up (or heard so long ago, I don’t remember where I picked it up):
“Gameplay should be the story.”
“Gameplay should be the story.”
Totally. Videogames are not movies. “STORY” is not something as stupid as Kane&Lynch’s, it’s ONE with interaction.. it’s not like warhammer online, some blah that you skip, the story AFFECTS the way you play.
take the silliest example, an action adventure game. You’re in a point of the game where an officer blocks your way, He’s approaching you to knock you down.
The story at this point would have told you that you’re innocent and that you have to get informations off this guard concerning those who framed you. That’s suggesting the player that you shouldn’t kill the guard, so you should CHANGE the way you interact.. you should fight in a defensive way trying to stop the guy and convincing him that “you should not be enemies but you should work together” (i wonder who takes the reference here). It’s an example of active interaction in story. How can we renounce that for measle toyboxes? videogames WILL end up degraded, if we do.
Btw for more ways into interaction check out my blog ;)
Perhaps the key is that games should only do something if they can do it well. Too many games have a crap story. If you can’t write a story, then don’t have one. If you are focusing on strategy, focus on that one thing, forget the graphics and the immersion and the story. If you are focussing on graphics, go for it, and don’t waste time trying to hack in a cheap cliched story.
Too many gamers expect all games to have all things, like a shopping list. No wonder so many stories are crap, so many gfx dissapoint, and so much multiplayer sucks.
Game devs should be allowed to say “this is what we do well. forget everything else”, and be taken at their word. Do one thing well, not all things slightly badly.
@cliffski: I think the reason I liked Gears of War better than Gears of War 2 was that the original had no storyline and no pretenses to it. Gears of War 2 tries to crowbar in a compelling story (something that Epic has NEVER accomplished), and fails so spectacularly that it makes my teeth hurt.
Remember Unreal? The first one? “You are a convict and your prison ship has crashed on an alien planet. Don’t die.” Not a literary revolution. But I was too busy gawking at the huge open spaces and having fun with the wacky-ass dual purpose weapons and marveling at how smart the enemies seemed.
Can’t write immersively? Hell, can you write COMPETENTLY? No? Then don’t try, fail, and pretend like you succeeded. You will look like a monumental idiot. Cliffski’s right, stick to what you know… and, if experience has taught me anything, it’s that narrative is not Molyneux’s forte.
@cliffski: To be fair, I have to say that the strength of 90ies/”golden age” games is often that they actually succeed at the “shopping list” way of doing games, excelling in every facet possible for a genre.
I don’t really buy into the modern “we have a great storyline, so we had to cut some of the strategic depth” way of gamedesign. Mostly, it’s just lazy or a knee fall towards the impatient audience. I prefer thinking of it as lazy, though, since most players aren’t quite as stupid as publishers think.
@cliffski: Well said. It makes me ill when I hear some commenter or reviewer say something along the lines of: “the graphics aren’t up to this generation’s standard” or “there’s like NO story” or my personal favorite: “there’s no multiplayer!”
I just want to say, hey asshole, maybe that’s because they didn’t want to sacrifice the game on the altar of your feature checklist. The most tedious games for me aren’t the games that lack these things, but the ones that try and fail to implement them because it was decided in preproduction that the game would need to be multiplayer, need so-and-so graphics tech, or my personal favorite, need “a gripping story” to get approved, as if producing a great story is as simple as producing a dump.
Cliffsky: there’s no need to FORGET story and focus into one thing. The point is to make story not be a useless appendix to gameplay but one thing with it. To do that you don’t need to be the new Marlowe, just lemme be part of it, don’t babysit me. Many games (mostly consoles) are structured in a wrong way: usually you get cutscenes that reveal exciting things, then you’re told to go kill everyone to get to new exciting things. And so the only interactive part is kill everything in dumb ways. That way stories are useless and games are educationally harmful and degrading.
If what YOU DO is meaningful to the events narrated, ANY story will do wonders. For this reason stories don’t have to be original, it’s the interaction that will make ‘em original, since you’re its artifex. Plus, there’s plenty of sources to take inspiration from.
I doubt Richard Garriott is Henry Fielding, He simply had to reuse arthurian legends and D&D, and mixed into a videogame like ultima7 nobody cares that stories are recycled, because inside a VIDEOGAME everything is still new and fresh.
Peter Molyneux is a liar and a thief
What games need are enhancements in terms of AI and even more data in them, so we can have multiple paths to follow, different endings. Games nowadays have that to some amount, but much more is needed.
Multiple solutions to problems are key. Haven’t you hated some games because you thought of a creative solution to a puzzle, but the game forced you to make what the developer thought was right?
AI is key to have realistic NPC, with logical behavior. In that I think that a game of this generation that has amazing AI is The Sims 2 in the way every NPC pursues their own objectives and follow their needs. That’s what other games need to copy.
I also think that there needs to be procedural generated stories which adapt to your actions and let you have freedom.
In the future we should have games that have the perfect balance of scripted and freedom and that will make games the best storytelling form.
Really, The Sims 2 is one of the best examples of story in computer games. Make a character and be free to play his life how you want.
That’s the maximum in sand box free play toy story telling device.
I can’t wait for what The Sims 3 can make in terms of telling stories with a full neighbourhood and characters with some real personality this time.
And so the Molyneux shite-machine rumbles into life again.
Pilouuuu: that’s all crap, man, it’s not really story-telling, plz stop saying nonsense.
The problem is that story is commonly seen as an element external to gameplay, something taken directly from cinema clichés, a waste of time before having fun, that’s why cliffsky says if you’re not a good writer, just take care of the gameplay, and Rossignol said “just lemme play screw stories”.
It’s a corrupted and superficial insight.
If you’re making a strategy game and you’re good at making strategy mechanics, if you REALLY take care of that you’ll be able to make that gameplay naturally meaningful to story itself, and it doesn’t have to be a masterpiece or even original, the gameplay will make it so.
So to answer both Rossignol and Cliffsky, stories are important to the depth of gameplay, and they don’t have to be complicated like in a novel, just meaningful to gameplay.
@ (Con)Quests: whaaat?!? What’s crap? TS2 is a powerful story-telling device. Exactly because it’s not scripted.
IMO story needs scripted drama, not random stuff.
If what you say is true, you can narrate chronologically what happens during a match at PONG and call it a story and even insert MADE UP drama into it.
Doesn’t make sense, though :)
I don’t want they tell me a story. I preffer to build one myself, thank you
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