Great column Bruce ! It's a shame SSG lost direction on RFTS. A case of too similar to the original.

When is it worth updating an old game ? It also makes me wonder just what sort of beta testing the game was put through. Maybe this game would have benefited from a public beta ?

I am sure the designers loved playing the game but familiarity breeds ... mediocrity ?

Cheers,
Sean.

"In Alpha Centauri, you eventually have so many units and possible uses for them that successfully finishing the game is sometimes used as a clinical test for autism."

This single line very accurately describes everything I don't like about Alpha and Civ2. The rest of the article neatly describes what I do like about them. "That's a battleship", "Sheild production = good", "Weird Future Hove Tank looks like ... a Tank", "the Great Wall gives me free city walls?" ... game concepts intuitively make sense so a complex game can appear simple. -Or- Easy to play; Harder to master.

RFTS' problem was that it was needlessly complex and obscure. So was Bruce's article, bring the point full circle (perhaps unintentionally).

(smiley-winky-thing)

-Andrew

truly sad thing to me is that I loved the original rfts. It was one of the games that got me hooked on pc gaming. Shame they took it and made it into what they did.

Nothing to add, really. I just wanted to chime in and say "Great article, Bruce!"

Great article, Bruce!

Oh, and yes, games CAN be art. ;-)

anyway, what the hell is Bruce going to medical school for? he should be a writer !!! or maybe write for Salon and be that Au guys alter ego devils advocate... but only if he hated Max Payne... Max Payne as Art? please... my god, whats next, Daikatana's John Romero, MISUNDERSTOOD GENIUS.

"If you ever talk to a computer game intellectual (or someone who plays adventure games, which is the same thing), you'll eventually get a lecture about how games need to transcend gaming clich�s and have real stories that are on par with those of great literature. Of course, these great stories account for the overwhelming popularity of great literature today, so it's only natural that game designers and their midget henchmen want to get in on a bit of this action for themselves. Pac-Man was good, but once Ms. Pac-Man came along to give the whole ghost-chasing and fruit-eating story some emotional depth and context, the franchise had to be taken seriously as art. And since turning computer games into art is the ultimate goal of anyone who has ever made it to the end of an adventure game, it's easy to see how the stakes can quickly rise to dangerous levels.

Games don't have interesting stories because they don't need them. "

this is from Bruce's pretty smart mind on gamespotting. good stuff! and i agree, games can be "art" and they neccesarily DONT need interesting stories!

BTW, if games are ART, who are its ARTISTS? the artist formerly known as Meier? or Russian McGoo? hmmmmmmmmmm.

etc

Great column! This line really resonated:
"In Alpha Centauri, you eventually have so many units and possible uses for them that successfully finishing the game is sometimes used as a clinical test for autism."

Thanks for sharing. ;-)

Thanks to all above -- even Bub with his winky and his smiley. When it's appropriate to update again, there will be the usual rebuttal.

In case that last sentence sounds in any way sarcastic, I completely support Mark and Tom's policy of putting game content on hold for a while.

We'll have some new stuff up on Monday. We have a couple of articles by other writers ready and we'll have new news.

Just to show you how far out of the loop I am, I have no idea who's rebutting Bruce. I think it flashed by me in an email, but I don't remember the details. We did ask several people to rebut, and they either agreed with Bruce and declined or never got around to it or wrote something that wasn't a rebuttal.

I have to say that the analysis of the story in SMAC was very unfair. I clearly remember some piece of text popping up in response to certain events in the game.
Since I turned it off right away I'm not sure what it was about, but I suppose it has to be the wonderful story that people talked about.

Well I played the new RFTS a *lot* and found it enjoyable as a space campaign game but not as a 4x game. It was marred by a series of minor bugs that made the game better or worse especially in the 1.3 alpha patches. It had an awesome scenario editor which probably never got used by anybody as we were all waiting for a stable release. I wish they had spent that effort instead on a better random map generator and/or an AI editor since the simple chess-like nature of the game seemed like it would have made it simple for usermade AI mods. But in any case it only became playable six months after release with the new patches. I hardly think it's a lost cause, sometimes you want to play something fast and light and RFTS fit the bill. I wish somebody would pick up where SSG left off and /or SSG release the source code because somewhere in there is a really great game. (Just compare the ship/fleet selection, grouping, and command functions with MoO II to see what I mean).

Who gives a flux about backstory if the game is good? And who cares about a great backstory if the game sucks? And until someone has a backstory that's more engaging than a Ron Jeremy money shot, I'm amazed people even discuss this.

And just where the heck is the RP in RPGs? As far as I can see, all you do is move an object around, hack most of the other objects to pieces, raid the corpses, and sell the booty. That has all the role-playing of a water sprinkler (I do a pretty mean impression of one BTW, but is that role-playing?).

Oh wait, I forgot the role-playing must come from hitting alternate choices in pop-up menus. This is the same kind of role-playing one experiences while using Microsoft Office.

Is the backstory figuring out which camera angles the FMV monkeys stole from famous movies for their opening intro?

Or does it lie in recognizing which John Williams/Jerry Goldsmith/James Horner/Danny Elfman sountracks they ripped for the music?

Oh wait, I've got it, the backstory, or the mysteriuous 5th X (for experience), arises from finding out which 3D card maker helpd the developers the most by determining how slow their abomination runs on every other 3D card maker's widgets.

Burn, baby, burn...

Heh -- I agree that backstory isn't essential, but a good one does enhance a game. Half-Life was better for it.

I dunno -- story's not a very good word for what's in games. It's more like an interesting, dramatic setting that the player buys into.

Max Payne had a horribly cliched story to it, but once I was in the middle of it, I wanted to see how it turned out. It's like watching a dumb episode Law and Order. You know the story's stupid, but you want to see the ending.

Here's what I'd say to the issue of games and stories.

The gameplay /is/ the story. Anything else is introduction and postscript. Good ones help evoke the right mindset to appreciate what follows but they can't save the text as a whole if it sucks.

Adventure games are dying a grisly and deserved death, IMHO. They're a counter-intuitive waste of CPU cycles. There is no gameplay there. Puzzles, pixel hunting, inventory juggling and tired linear plots don't do much to take advantage of the medium. Some titles did try to make the best of the situation and reached out to employ interesting narratives, visual or problem solving techniques but these can be counted on the remaining fingers of an incompetant Yakuza thug.

Conventional CRPGs should be pushing up the daisies too but for reasons I can't understand - they, like the Greatful Dead once did, keep on trucking and gathering bigger crowds every year. There is no RP there, as Anon points out, and there are better tactical games in other genres and better writing and visual effects in other media. The only thing I can chalk it up to is the trancelike sutra of levelling that some call 'the whittling syndrome'. Well, CGO's Grumpy Gamer and I call it that at least.

Eventually, as I've discussed elsewhere, somebody has to pick up on the power of real, decision and consequence driven, roleplaying and bring it back to the genre. It's not that hard, it really isn't. There's a reason looping dungeon crawls aren't huge with the roleplaying public offline anymore and haven't been since the mid 80's.

The best 'story' in a game is one that arises from the decisions and consequences that a player faces. This builds a personal narrative of the experience. A war story. The more dynamic and intuitive the interactive, responsive, elements that can contribute to the gameplay story - the more it is a unique experience of the sort only, only, a computer game can deliver.

Nice post, Brian. I think the best story of any game I've ever played, the best "personal narrative of the experience", as you say, came from the first time I played through X-Com.

And I've always been puzzled at declarations that Half-Life had a great story. Loved the game, but I sure don't remember much of a story.

-Tom

It's not that the story is so great as much as the dramatic setting and triggered events all seem to fit.

There was little story in Myth. Between missions we got the war-weary narrative that hinted at great events going on beyond the ken of the narrator, and then we'd get to play our small part in it all, which increasingly became more and more important.

Starcraft also had a nice story that framed the gameplay and made it more interesting.

Myth's opening story in the manual was awesome... i actually remember reading a usenet post by Asher saying it reminded him of Glen Cook and then ordering the books from Amazon!

Also, the writing in NOLF made me like it so much more... the interview level was hilarious! I keep a savegame in that area just to replay it everyonce in a while.

I dont consider Half Life even having a story... more like an experience... i mean after Half Life do you REALLY know what happened at Black Mesa? who is the smoking man suit dude? guess its xfilish.

etc

"i mean after Half Life do you REALLY know what happened at Black Mesa? who is the smoking man suit dude? guess its xfilish."

If Sierra has their way, we'll know the full story after about a dozen more 10 hour games. Get ready to ride the tram some more!

Or maybe we'll get a Half Life movie with Gillian Anderson and Pat Sajak! And Freeman wont even be in the movie, since David Duchovny replaces him, and stuff...

doiy!

etc

"The best 'story' in a game is one that arises from the decisions and consequences that a player faces. This builds a personal narrative of the experience. A war story."

Indeed. Now if only we can get this concept across to all those budding Hemmingways and Bradburys out there, we'll get somewhere.

To the guy who mentioned Max Payne: I liked those few puzzle levels that depicted Max's insanity and delusions. Those were a step in the right direction, but the comic book storytelling was all over the map quality-wise.

"The only thing I can chalk it up to is the trancelike sutra of levelling that some call 'the whittling syndrome'."

If it's done well, i.e. Diablo, then it's entertaining electronic masturbation ala Freecell. Once they try to engage anything more than the hindbrain, with multiple choice conversations, clumsy interfaces, or both (Hello Fallout 1 and 2), I'm outta there.

I actually liked the Max Payne acid trip dream sequences... it did attempt to try to get the player into the ... madness. Plus they werent TOO bad as jumping puzzles. Actually come to think about it, the best parts of Max Paynes story WERE the non comic book novel parts. The ingame sequences were as good as stuff in half life... i liked the mansion levels and the parking lot levels... so much is better in the experience in games than the story.... meaning a game can attempt to get YOU the player IN the game... obviously...

But anyway, yeah Max Payne had cheeze factor, but parts of it were actually sad. The beginning "Oh my god" death scenes were done pretty well imo, and they were done ingame. thats how it should be done, not in cinematics or sequences. games are interactive... they are not movies!

etc

If you can evoke an actual emotional response in a game then I think the story succeeds. I was always impressed with the Wing Commander series storyline, flying along side the pilots and talking with them in and between missions made the story take on a more personal feel. It felt like you were in the story as opposed to just watching things unfold, at least up until WCIII. In the first game I used to let Angel get at least one kill so she wouldn't get chewed out by the CO in the first game. Silly maybe, but I felt like my character would be protective of her and played it that way. I bought into the story the game told and it made the game that much more entertaining.

In my experience, a story in a game can serve in two ways. The first is just to set a backdrop in which the player creates a story in his mind as he plays the game. I remember being deeply immersed in some old Apple II games where the only hint of a story came on the sheet of paper that came with the game, and then, as I played, I created the story in my mind to accompany what was happening on screen. Those were some very vivid storylines, some of which I still recall.

The other, of course, is the story that explicitly unfolds on screen during a game. I still think, however, that the player needs to exercise some imagination to get the most out of these games.

As an aside - I'd love to have a game based on the great detectives in fiction. You select a sleuth - e.g., Sam Spade, Hercules Poirot, Mike Hammer, Johnny Dollar, etc. - and the game, each time you play, creates a new crime. You explore and investigate, trying to determine relationships and pick up clues. The heart of the game and each crime would be personal relationships: A father-in-law that hated his daughter-in-law because she convinced her son to leave the family business, a waitress having an affair with the local minister, etc. How characters react to you and how the game world reacts to you would differ based upon the investigator (e.g. Spade, Poirot, etc.) you choose. The "crime generator" could be set to generate a simple, moderate, or complex mystery.

Oddly enough, way back when, EA had a neat little game called Murder on the Zindernouf, set on a zeppalin (sp) in the 20s, that did this in a very simple manner.

I've got a couple story epics from early Civ2 experiences. There was this time when I was a 3rd rate Roman power and I snuck a bunch of Galleons down to South Africa, unloaded my musketeers, and nailed the Zulu capital in one turn. Split the mightiest empire in one stroke (Civil War) and, even though I couldn't hold it, I dramatically changed the game in a single turn.

A shot heard round the world, one might say.

-Andrew

"As an aside - I'd love to have a game based on the great detectives in fiction. You select a sleuth - e.g., Sam Spade, Hercules Poirot, Mike Hammer, Johnny Dollar, etc. - and the game, each time you play, creates a new crime. You explore and investigate, trying to determine relationships and pick up clues. The heart of the game and each crime would be personal relationships: A father-in-law that hated his daughter-in-law because she convinced her son to leave the family business, a waitress having an affair with the local minister, etc. How characters react to you and how the game world reacts to you would differ based upon the investigator (e.g. Spade, Poirot, etc.) you choose. The "crime generator" could be set to generate a simple, moderate, or complex mystery."

Geeze! This sounds like an awesome idea Jeff. Talk about being able to break outside the mainstream computer buying crowd. The mystery fans would love it. Why the hell did I choose accounting when what I should have done is choose programming!

Heh - yeah, I've thought about this one for a long time. The concept is to put the player in the role of being in a film noir - to keep things managable, the graphics of the various characters would be re-usable. While theire would be be a LARGE number of characters, of which you would only see a small portion in any given mystery, you might see the same old man playing the role of a retired doctor in one mystery, and the role of a bank president in another. If you're going to have newly generated mysteries each time you play, you have to do something like that.

I'd certainly buy it - and I'll bet the mainstream public would too. Marketing would be easy, and I could easily see "Entertainment Tonight" type coverage.

Didn't Sid Meier's Covert Action do something similar? If I'm not mistaken, it was a sort of dynamic spy movie generator. Anyone know if it's close to what Jeff was talking about?

-Tom

I've still got Covert Action. It was a blast, still is. It did, in a very simple way, create a new conspiracy every time you played, but it was more a top down action game with some code breaking and wire tapping action thrown in. It never did get the praise I thought it should have - I can still crank it up today while on a flight and get some simple yet significant enjoyment out of it.