/vr/ - Retro Games

[Anonymous No.2696257]

Are there any retro games with deep stories and character development?

[Anonymous No.2696271]

>>2696257
>Are there any games with deep stories and character development?

Fixed that for you, and no.

If you want deep stories and character development read a book, games are an intrinsically bad storytelling medium.

[Anonymous No.2696276]

>>2696257
Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished

[Anonymous No.2696278]

>>2696257

Strictly speaking, yes. Many, many, many games contain character development.

Deep stories are less common but here and there. But what kind of depth are you talking about? Lore depth? Philosophical depth?

[Anonymous No.2696279]

>>2696278

Either one.

[Anonymous No.2696280]

The game itself isn't that deep but Xenogears
touches on a LOT of deep concepts, and the story line does do a great job of telling a 10,000 year story in one 60 hour game

[Anonymous No.2696283]

>>2696280
>the story line does do a great job
Please be trolling...

[Anonymous No.2696286]

FF VI

[Anonymous No.2696289]

>>2696280
I dropped it after 30 hours of playtime. Couldn't stand it, I literally forced myself to go as far as I did hoping it would get better; it didn't.
One of the worst JRPGs I've ever played

[Anonymous No.2696295]

>>2696279

I found Final Fantasy Legend to have a noteworthy level of philisophical depth but it has zero character development

If you want depth in lore, try Matsuno games (Ogre Battle, Final Fantasy Tactics, etc.)

[Anonymous No.2696297]

>Character Development
Final Fantasy Tactics comes to mind for the protag and his friend. Unfortunately they drop most other characters on your side completely after recruiting for the most part. Story is good if you like your medieval politics until it devolves, but I wouldn't call it hugely deep.

>>2696286
Character development is both a yes and a no. Deep story? Not really because it's an FF, they're never what I'd call deep.

IX had the best mainline character development outside of the dropping of Freya and the Kefka standin if you ask me.

[Anonymous No.2696304]

Vagrant Story
Planescape: Torment
Suikoden (not so much on some of the characters because of the whole 108 thing)

[Anonymous No.2696305]

>>2696257
Final Fantasy Tactics. Almost every character develops except for the main one.

[Anonymous No.2696307]

>>2696295
That's really only at the very end when you realize what the tower's purpose is.

>>2696286
FFVI has a whole bunch of characters, none of which have very much development. The story is ridiculous.

[Anonymous No.2696309]

>>2696305
What are you talking about? As soon as any NPC joins your group they receive almost no more development, or even dialogue.

[Anonymous No.2696310]

>>2696307

I disagree. I think there's some noteworthy exploration of people's different ideas of paradise basically as soon as you enter the tower.

[Anonymous No.2696325]

>>2696309
That's because every single one is optional and can die permanently. Having them be too plot important afterwards could cause all kinds of issues,

[Anonymous No.2696338]

If you want deep stories and character development, read a book.

[Anonymous No.2696354]

>>2696310
I'll grant you that it's better than a lot of games, but it's still nothing special.

>>2696325
I understand why, but that doesn't suddenly make them develop more. The reality is that aside from NPCs, the characters in FFT receive very little development at all.

[Anonymous No.2696357]

>>2696325
Fire Emblem manages it to a point though.

>>2696257
King of Dragon Pass. Character development is next to nill because of how the game is done, but dat lore and setting.

Otherwise? You might want to pick up a book. Most RPGs are where the story is at, and they're mostly thin in comparison without your imagination filling in the holes.

[Anonymous No.2696361]

>>2696286
here we go,autistic retard suggests FF game as one with deep plot

[Anonymous No.2696382]

>>2696357
Why do so many forget KODP? /vr/ even had a clan one time.

[Anonymous No.2696393]

>>2696361
It's grasping at straws. No games have deep plots.

[Anonymous No.2696398]

Why hasn't there been a game with deep story and character development?

[Anonymous No.2696424]

>>2696398
Because the essence of storytelling is relaying a specific set of events that are in the end meant to convey some sort of meaning.

The essence of a game is to give you the freedom to choose how to proceed through a series of tasks and goals. The "game" is making decisions on how what you're doing will turn out.

The more story you put into a game necessitates you taking decisions away from the player and thus making it less of a game. You can derive stories from what you did in a game, but those stories are very rarely compelling in any meaningful way.

[Anonymous No.2696430]

>>2696424
>You can derive stories from what you did in a game, but those stories are very rarely compelling in any meaningful way.

That meaningfulness, as is with any other medium, more or less depends on the viewer/reader though.

[Anonymous No.2696438]

>>2696393
I agree but some games like PS:T and Xenogears have good storytelling.

And it's not a sin to want somewhat good writing in video games, I'm sure there are more that I can't think of right now.

[Anonymous No.2696448]

>>2696430
Well obviously what the reader brings to it is important. But a good story is crafted in such a way that every part of it is important. With a game it's impossible to do that and still give the player any real agency.

The closest are JRPGs which are basically stories that you watch progress and fight meaningless battles to make it keep going. But even there there's not enough room to really tell an interesting story.

[Anonymous No.2696449]

Ultima VI

[Anonymous No.2696461]

>>2696354

He didn't specify PCs though

NPC character development is still worthwhile

[Anonymous No.2696953]

>>2696257
tactics ogre

[Anonymous No.2696979]

grandia 2. Some of the best development of any rpg with a speaking protag.

[Anonymous No.2697051]

In this game, you make your own story.

[Anonymous No.2697513]

Adventure for the Atari

[Anonymous No.2697537]

Though Planescape: Torment's gameplay is over all mediocre, it definitely fits the "deep stories and character development" department. Some people say that the game is about being "2deep4u" or something, but it's really just a fun mystery with some philosophical themes in it that you can ignore if you want to. There are definitely games out there that tries to jam their primary philosophical argument down your throat by having you listen to it over and over again (looking at YOU, Metal Gear), and Planescape only kind of meets that description in a few parts of the game.

[Anonymous No.2697570]

psychonauts is borderline retro, but it has a strong story and good character development.

[Anonymous No.2697680]

[Anonymous No.2697992]

Legend of Kain is pretty fantastic. Just look at this intro cinematic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DOKzTHaPfM

Also, I'd say the Ultimate series before EA fucked them over.

[Anonymous No.2698003]

>>2696271
>games are an intrinsically bad storytelling medium

I disagree with this entirely. Interactive media is an amazing platform for storytelling, especially if you want to tell a story that is dynamic and engaging.

[Anonymous No.2699415]

>>2696271
>games are an intrinsically bad storytelling medium.

This is dumb as shit. A text adventure is a game, and that's basically a book with branching paths

[Anonymous No.2699420]

There's this great bit in the intro of the novelization of starpship titanic where Douglas Adams talks about computer games as a storytelling device and I don't want to type it all out from my copy

He talks about how before writing was standard and in cultures in which stories survive through oral tradition, the story was interactive. A listener could ask a question to further their understanding of the story and it's characters and get an answer back in real time. He talks about how computer games give us the opportunity to bring back this aspect of storytelling.

I think knocking games as a storytelling medium as a whole is foolish. I'm not saying that jrpgs can compare to the great classics, but games are fairly new, and a story of any medium can have depth and worth without being THE BEST OF THE BEST anyways.

[Anonymous No.2699428]

>>2698003
>I disagree with this entirely. Interactive media is an amazing platform for storytelling, especially if you want to tell a story that is dynamic and engaging.

In theory, yes. In practice the people who work on games, particularly retro ones, are people who are tech savvy and willing to work very long hours for low pay and under high stress for strict deadlines.

The people who are good at crafting deep, engaging stories with subtle literary devices write novels and movies.

So the reason that games are bad at storytelling is not because of the medium, but because of who is doing the writing for them. In the case of retro games, most of the games with a storytelling element (RPGs) are little more than a picture book where you scroll text while your characters are frozen on screen or make minimal gestures.

[Anonymous No.2700147]

>>2699428
>I've never worked at a game developer
Obviously, as you know nothing about how they work.

[Anonymous No.2702625]

>>2699415
the branching paths are what make it bad for storytelling, and they're inevitable in even the most restricting games.

[Anonymous No.2702628]

>>2699428
it has less to do with tech savviness, and more with managing complexity. Branching and choice introduce complexity to the narrative. Books already have a difficult time to maintain pacing and focus. You can multiply that problem with every single branch. Suddently the author needs to maintain two narratives. Even if they are lead back to one another again at some point, for that duration, they need their own pacing and narrative managed. Setting up a story in such an environment is brutally difficult.

[Anonymous No.2702635]

CHRONO TRIGGER BEST GAME EVER

[Anonymous No.2702645]

>>2702625

I disagree. Branching paths and player agency can be an advantage. While it makes certain things more difficult, it's a major advantage over books for explaining an concept to a reader/player or emotionally engaging them

[Anonymous No.2702657]

>>2702645
>can be an advantage
I never claimed otherwise. Though with branching you force the author to write not one, but multiple narratives, in the same game. So that raises the question, what story do you want to tell? Something very specific? You can't branch then. Something generic? It might be difficult to get the player on board.

>While it makes certain things more difficult
That's the thing. You still got a human building the narrative, and to them any branching is a severe disadvantage. If, for some reason, you got a master novelist at the helm, that also understands parallel timelines, they may be able to actually use that advantage of player agency. But you know how many books out there have shit narrative and pacing? Even that "simple" linear story writing thing, is difficult as fuck. Adding agency, only makes it harder, and the failure rate higher.

In other words, if a book manages to tell a story, it works excellent. Happens once every 1000 books or so. If a game happens to tell a story, it works even better. Happens once every 100 billion games or so. Now dare write a narrative with these odds in mind.

[Anonymous No.2702661]

[Anonymous No.2702665]

>>2702661
notice how FEW branching paths there are in this. You got entire lines of numbers, that are just sequential playbacks. As far as gaming interactivity and interaction is concerned, this reaches barely the minimum, and yet it's already hellishly complex to maintain any form of involving narrative in this

[Anonymous No.2705314]

Phantom 2040 on the SNES was pretty awesome.

[Anonymous No.2705319]

>>2697992
You mean Eidos

[Anonymous No.2706285]

Has anyone mentioned ultima yet? Its one of t
THE first if not the first rpg on pc, obviously any of then will run on toasters, but ultima 6 looks like the coolest ine to me. Noah antwiler has an amazing review of every single one on youtube. Also, if you can handle the envounter rate, the gba version of ff1 is pretty awesome. The strategy is atleast twice as in depth as pokemon imo but the story isnt really that deep.

[Anonymous No.2706293]

>>2696280
The only type of people who likes Xenogears (and most JRPGs) are the same losers who read and write fan-fiction. in other words, people with shit taste in literature

[Anonymous No.2706807]

>>2696307

ridiculous as in great or bad?

[Anonymous No.2706825]

>>2706293
>The only type of people who likes Xenogears (and most JRPGs) are the same losers who read and write fan-fiction

This is one of the most retarded, nonsensical assumptions anyone could ever do, only people who think too highly of themselves and don't have any kind of human interaction would ever spout this nonsense, but then again we ARE on 4chan.

[Anonymous No.2707001]

FE4

I think the villains have more development than the protagonists.

[Anonymous No.2707058]

>>2696271
>>Are there any games with deep stories and character development?
>Fixed that for you, and no.


>Fixed that for you, and no.

if that is true the average mordern games are FAILLING PRETTY HARD

[Anonymous No.2707069]

>>2707058
I think they're succeeding at what they're aiming for, they want to make money, and casuals eat up the shit they're throwing out. They might not last from an artistic standpoint but neither do a lot of summer blockbuster movies.

[Anonymous No.2708560]

The issue with the question is that it assumes that the only good stories or character development techniques are the ones that work in traditional storytelling media like books or movies. Video games are interactive; they're fundamentally different from books or movies, which gives them their own strengths and weaknesses. Good, deep games are out there, you just can't judge them by the same standards that you would a non-interactive work.

[Anonymous No.2708609]

>>2708560
got to elaborate on that last statement. Specifically, what standards can I not judge them by? Bonus points if you can establish or name aspects where video games blow linear story telling out of the water, with samples.

[Anonymous No.2708625]

>>2708609
It isn't even a question of linear vs. nonlinear, really, it's a question of what tools and methods are used, and what the goal is. Ocarina of Time, for example does some really awesome things that tie the game mechanics and level design together with the traditional coming of age/heroes journey in ways that no movie or book could, because they don't have mechanics or level design. Not retro, but something like Shadow of the Colossus does an excellent job of using mechanics and design to convey its themes.

Essentially, it's about making use of the inherent interactivity of the medium to further reinforce the themes and ideas of the plot. It could be harder to find in retro games due to how games were viewed during that time period, but I can guarantee that there are some gems out there that do interesting things.

[Anonymous No.2708636]

>>2708625
Linear vs. non linear is practically the only difference. Games introduce interaction. Interaction means deviating from a strict path set up by a narrator. That's all there is. It can manifest in different ways. You can have wildly branching complex stories like linked earlier, but even a non-branching japanese grindfest is ultimately not linear, because the player is in charge of how fast or slow they grind, affecting the pacing of a story. If the narrator is not aware of that, a game's story can become "slow" and uninteresting.

>some really awesome things that tie the game mechanics and level design together with the traditional coming of age/heroes journey
Name them, elaborate why and how they do what they do.

>convey its themes
That's an important distinction. Games excel at conveying themes, moods and emotions, and the interaction plays a huge part in that. All that at the expense of narrative. Instead of a tightly narrated story, you can just string together themes and moods.

>it's about making use of the inherent interactivity of the medium to further reinforce the themes and ideas of the plot
And that right there is such an insanely difficult thing to do, that I'm asking for examples.

[Anonymous No.2708639]

Not good retro games.

Because good retro games are about gameplay. Even the ones with "stories" either don't matter or even in good RPGs weave them into the gameplay so that it's just another game element.

It's mid-90s appealing-to-casual-nugamer trash games that started this whole "lol deep story and character" bullshit that has basically destroyed gaming.

[Anonymous No.2708645]

>>2702625
how is that bad for stories? it enables the player to take an active part in the experience, which always draws the player in more. when you personally have a stake in anything, you will care more about it.

Also, branching paths mean that there is not just on storyline, but several. as many as there are branches. how is this a bad thing?

are you trolling?

[Anonymous No.2708649]

>>2706293
where were you in 1999, when people were pissing themselves over this game? Is there any other game that tries to cover such a broad topic as the creation of an entire civilization and religion? Xenogears did things that had never been done before, in games; and that few games try, these days. what are the chances that a game, today, will seriously try to debunk Christianity and have the player kill God?

yeah, it looks like edgy kid's first philosophy class, but don't act like it wasn't innovative as hell

[Anonymous No.2708662]

>>2696257
Star control 2 had a few spooky conversations.

Darklands wasn't really much of an RPg, you could just choose to be good or evil.

Did robin hood (NES) have character development? Maybe. It followed the movie pretty close

[Anonymous No.2708663]

Fallout 1 or 2? Along with many crpg have good story telling, in a traditional sense though? Likely not, since video games are structured completely different than film. Consider video games as a foreign film, its pacing is completely alien towards a more western affair. Many view the difference as idiosyncratic, often ignoring what lies beneath due to the surface. I'm meandering though, there's good stories amongst even the classics, you just have to go in with a certain mentality.

Thief for example has an amazing story, I'd would mention 2 as well, however since it's not retro I won't. Regardless, Thief feeds exposition through gameplay, not in the manner of audio logs like System Shock 2 (of course that works in its lore), but through narrative delivered by the main character, and conversations you can encounter. There's cut scenes for key moments, yet they're very succinct. In this case story works in tangent with the game, or even your own experience to a degree

[Anonymous No.2708668]

>>2708639
I don't think it was the casual gamer, at all, that brought in the strive for better and more complex stories. I think it was the developers being given more power and funding, and the gamers growing up and wanting their games to do more.

the first time you see Celes try to kill herself is a jarring and terrifying experience. I had always seen happy character platformers, or grim action games. I had never seen a character driven to suicide by loneliness and despair. Once you have a new experience, you will be open to the possibility of more, and are likely to want it.

[Anonymous No.2708678]

>>2708636
>Games introduce interaction. Interaction means deviating from a strict path set up by a narrator
Interaction also means giving the player feedback that would be impossible without it. It gets the player involved in the action of the story rather than being a passive observer, and a good development team can use that interaction to do things non-interactive storytelling media could only dream of.

Take the Ocarina of Time example. I could write essays on that game (and in fact I have). Like how the bow replaces the slingshot when you become an adult. A slingshot is a toy, a bow is a weapon, and you immediately see how much more dangerous the bow is in comparison, giving you visceral feedback that a passive medium can't really provide. Hell, the entirety of the Forest temple, really, is a fucking case study in how a game can use level and environmental design to reinforce themes. It's set in the very first area of the game, where your "home" is located, but everything is weird and dangerous and not right. Weird ethereal music lilts through, there are twisting geometrically impossibly hallways, its full of ghosts and disembodied hands. It's disconcerting and scary, and you feel like you don't belong, because that's how the character feels. He's a kid that's been thrust into the world of adulthood, and being an adult is scary and confusing and dangerous, and things don't make sense, despite being dressed up in familiar trappings.

Plus this all ties into the plot, as Link has to return to the place he grew up and see all his old friends who haven't aged a day, and no longer recognize him. For the first time he has to truly come to grips with the fact that he's fundamentally different from them, and that he doesn't belong.

And that's a game that follows an extremely traditional, tried and true plot structure. Gaming is still incredibly young as a medium, and people are really only now beginning to truly experiment with the medium.

[Anonymous No.2708975]

c'mon guys
KOTOR

[Anonymous No.2709068]

>>2696271
God damn this is the most try hard thing I have read on chan in ages.

Recommending books. Which have paper thin characters you need to imagine and force texture into.

[Anonymous No.2709079]

>>2702628
Linear, but branching, narratives are generally pointless for the work they involve, that I agree on. Which is why I believe the true narrative advantage of games is the ability to do environmental storytelling, ala Zelda, in which the goal is to explore the possibilities inherent in the game's space time structure and how to make this aesthetically interesting as the player experiences it and progressively understands how things connect up to form a larger whole.

[Anonymous No.2709092]

>>2702635
I LOVE linear RPGs that pretend to be more open than they really are.

[Anonymous No.2709096]

>>2709092
Trigger really never pretended to be open, now did it?

[Anonymous No.2709354]

>>2708645
>how is that bad for stories?
Stories tend to be a tight narrative, because they have a goal. Everything that happens in them happens to further the story. Interactivity means the player can do something that deviates from a very strict path. That includes pacing. Simply standing still is an interactive decision, and, for example, fucks greatly with stories that try to establish urgency.

>it enables the player to take an active part in the experience
>when you personally have a stake in anything,
Interactivity is excellent to establish mood and emotions, because the player is not a consumer but active performer. That brings involvement to a whole new level. At the expense of the narrative though.

>branching paths mean that there is not just on storyline, but several
That's an excellent way to bring a story writer to their knees. As I said upthread, humans already have a really hard time writing a coherent book with consistent pacing. With a branch you double the burden.

>how is this a bad thing?
The quality of the individual branches suffers. When you play through the game once, you experience once particular path. If that path is lackluster, because it's part of a massive branching construct, you, as a player, only perceive this one lackluster branch.
The quality may increase with repeated playthroughs, as you establish a greater context, but for one-time players the damage is done.

[Anonymous No.2709361]

>>2708678
>Interaction also means giving the player feedback that would be impossible without it.
Fully agreed

>It gets the player involved in the action of the story
I'm with you until "of", because with such interactivity the author doesn't control the narrative. One can do world building and mood establishment in such settings, but it gets difficult to narrate, which is what a story is.

>a good development team can use that interaction to do things non-interactive storytelling media could only dream of
Agreed. But story telling is not one of these things.

>And that's a game that follows an extremely traditional, tried and true plot structure
And you could write up the whole story to it on a page or two. It's a very minimal story, more of a framework, because interactivity does not lend itself to narrative.

>Gaming is still incredibly young as a medium, and people are really only now beginning to truly experiment with the medium.
Agreed. And on that point I'd dare say, trying to make games play out stories is part of that infancy. Devs don't understand yet that interactivity collides with narratives. The abilities of games are elsewhere.

[Anonymous No.2709363]

>>2709079
>Which is why I believe the true narrative advantage of games is the ability to do environmental storytelling
We're in full agreement.

[Anonymous No.2709382]

>>2707058
>if that is true the average mordern games are FAILLING PRETTY HARD

Only if they're trying to tell complex stories. There are still plenty of modern games that are mostly about gameplay.

[Anonymous No.2709417]

>>2709361
correct me if I'm wrong, but you seem to making the argument that a story has to be long and complex in order to be good. I don't think that's the case.Sure, Zelda's story could be written up and condensed into little more than a paragraph, but it doesn't need to be any more. It's a story that's been told countless times in every civilization throughout history. It's a story that continues to be incredibly successful and beloved no matter how many times it gets retold. Because at the end of the day, complex narrative just isn't that important.

Video games also have the potential to allow characters to forge their own narrative within the world that the game creates, which is in my opinion far more powerful than just telling someone else a story. Games can be dynamically personalized by allowing the player some control within the framework of the plot, much like ancient bards and skalds would personalize the stories they told based on the audience they were performing for.

In the grand scheme of things, the idea of a story's narrative as this unchanging monolithic constant of supreme importance is a new development.

[Anonymous No.2709426]

>>2709417
>you seem to making the argument that a story has to be long and complex in order to be good
I am saying that a story needs to be a controlled narrative, not just consisting of stations, but with every action and line having a purpose, and including pacing.

>Zelda's story could be written up and condensed into little more than a paragraph, but it doesn't need to be any more
My point in this case is that games can't handle much more than that. Games, due to their interactivity, can't handle tight narratives. The best you can do is provide a story framework, with a general direction and environment, a setting, if you will.

>to allow characters to forge their own narrative
Fully agreed, but then it's not telling stories, it's writing them.

>which is in my opinion far more powerful
I made no statement of quality regarding stories or games. I do consider tight narratives and games in conflict. I do not consider either superior to or more powerful than the other.

>Games can be dynamically personalized
And in doing so, they lose the controlled narrative.

>much like ancient bards and skalds would personalize the stories they told based on the audience they were performing for.
Yet these people controlled the narrative. They might react to interjections, but they'd not accept input from the audience, unless it's collaborative storytelling.

>unchanging monolithic constant of supreme importance
That's a but too much projection for my taste. A narrative doesn't have to be unchanging, but a good narrative is controlled, by the author or story teller. If the player can interact, then the author or story teller is voluntarily giving up that control. That weakens the narrative, but improves the involvement. As said, these two are in conflict.

[Anonymous No.2709458]

>>2709426
That's the thing, though. Narrative as you're describing just doesn't line up with the history of storytelling until relatively recently. Things like legends and folktales existed completely separate from their original authors, with only rough frameworks tying them together. They changed with every telling, largely based not on the storyteller, but on who was being told the story. Even in the modern literary world, it's questionable whether authorial intent matters at all, much less as the most important part of a story. The fact of the matter is that collaborative storytelling has been the default state for the majority of human history, because storytelling is an inherently communal act.

And that's not even limited to just storytelling, it's found elsewhere in other forms of art. For instance, Jazz and folk music have the idea of "standards," which are songs without any known author, but that serve as a sort of shared repetoir among musicians.

Even something like a movie is an inherently collaborative act. The scriptwriter, the director, the actors, and more all have some measure of control over the narrative. Movies are still considered a valid form of storytelling, though.

[Anonymous No.2709467]

>>2709458
>They changed with every telling, largely based not on the storyteller, but on who was being told the story
And yet, that particular telling was tightly controlled by the story teller. They'd spice things up for one audience, embellish things for another, but it's all controlled by the teller. With games, the subjects of the story are, to some degree, in control. This changes everything.

>it's questionable whether authorial intent matters at all
Too fixated on the author. The game's not the author of the story, it's the narrator, or tries to be. Still, it needs to deal with pacing, audience and stuff, and the player's getting in the way of that.

>collaborative storytelling
That's an entirely different beast, because in collaborative storytelling not even the teller knows the direction, because the audience can not just give feedback, but control.

>Jazz and folk music have the idea of "standards," which are songs without any known author, but that serve as a sort of shared repetoir among musicians.
And yet they're never played with things like the audience yelling "stop" in the middle, or whistling a different melody just to fuck with the musician. THAT is what the player is doing.

>movie is an inherently collaborative act
At no point is the consumer of a movie able to affect it. That's the vast difference between games and ... everything else.

[Anonymous No.2709473]

>>2709458
Not the guy you're arguing with, but there's a world of difference between a legend being slowly altered over the years by various storytellers retelling and adding their own flourishes and the types of stories we're able to fit into games.

There is something to be said for the emergent stories that can come about from certain games. "This troll was coming at me and I did the coolest thing to get away from it"

But that's very, very different from a traditional story which is being told. Where the characters and events are put together and told in a specific way to make a specific point.

After all, that's the purpose of a story. To tell a story. Not to start an open ended narrative that may or may not go anywhere and may or may not mean anything.

The problem with a game is that you can't tell a directed story (that is to say an actual story) without removing agency from the player.

[Anonymous No.2709478]

>>2709473
>There is something to be said for the emergent stories that can come about from certain games. "This troll was coming at me and I did the coolest thing to get away from it"
I would like to add here, I love the concept that games like RPGs and roguelikes maintain a more elaborate "log". Instead of saying you hit X for Y damage, the messages vary based on weapon, damage, foe and circumstances. Same for the non-combat actions, like resting, searching, etc. That way, the log becomes a written story, of one particular playthrough. One part computer generated, and one part player driven. I think it'd be fun to actually keep the best ones.
Unfortunately the kind of people that develop roguelikes, are perfectly fine with the log being mere status reports with numbers being crunched, so it's likely just gonna stay wishful thinking for a while.

[Anonymous No.2709483]

>>2709478
Forgot to say, that kind of "story log" would include introduction paragraphs to describe the rolled character and motivation of the dungeon crawling, some closing paragraphs when the player died or won. Each dungeon level could be a different chapter, etc. The general concept here is that the roguelike or rpg itself is the mechanism that the story is written, and the resulting story is an actual output of the game, maybe as a nicely formatted text, html or pdf file, to share.

[Anonymous No.2709484]

>>2709478
Rougelikes were actually the specific genre I was thinking of when I mentioned that. More than any other game, recounting what happened in them feels the most like telling a story. That's mostly because they're so complex and the player has such a large amount of agency in the world that any number of things may happen and you almost inevitably die in the end.

As for this,

>Unfortunately the kind of people that develop roguelikes, are perfectly fine with the log being mere status reports with numbers being crunched, so it's likely just gonna stay wishful thinking for a while.

You may not be entirely out of luck. I forget his name, but on one of the recent Roguelike Radio episodes they were talking to a guy who is trying to develop a much more narrative based one. It sounded like he was having some trouble, but is at least trying.

[Anonymous No.2709493]

>>2709483
This reminds me of the original Dragonlance novels, Dragons of Autumn Twilight, Winter Night and Spring Dawning written by Margret Weis and Tracy Hickman

The story of them was essentially a novelization of their D&D campaign and the events that took place. Which I always thought was fascinating.