Gameplay And Story Segregation / First-Person Shooter

• The BioShock series:
  • BioShock: Multiple:
    • This was the game that caused game designer Clint Hocking to coin the term Ludonarrative Dissonance. The game is, as per standard in a First-Person Shooter, a very linear and tightly controlled affair. While the game is designed to hide the fact (again, as per usual in the genre), you are essentially walking down a straight tunnel, with little ability to alter your course or direction. This is cleverly justified by the revelation that you are mind-controlled, conditioned to perform any action prefaced with the phrase, "would you kindly". This clever deconstruction of the genre earned praise, but Clint Hocking pointed out the problem in it: once the mind control is lifted, the gameplay does not change. You should expect to be able to choose any path you now wish, but you're as tightly controlled as ever, despite allegedly being free. In fact, your disposition remains practically the same as in the beginning. You're directed by a supposedly benevolent Mission Control to overthrow Andrew Ryan, except now you're supposed to believe that she really means it for greater good.
    • Hocking's objective went further and into the underlying theme of BioShock: Rand's Objectivism. His objection was that the game's core gameplay, of acting in order to gain upgrades and power for yourself, corresponds exactly to Objectivism. Yet throughout the game's story the player is expected to help Atlas overthrow the objectivist Andrew Ryan — and to do so for no personal reward, which is the opposite of Objectivism. The player can supposedly embody Objectivism in the story by harvesting Little Sisters, reflecting the attitude of doing what is of greatest guaranteed benefit even if it is cruel - but it's Sweet and Sour Grapes; you actually end up with more power by sparing them than Harvesting them, it just comes in the longer term. And the player outright can't refuse to help Atlas, or demand payment from him for their help, or try to gain power their own way within Rapture — even after the mind control is lifted.
    • ADAM is described by NPCs as a substance you need to have injected into you to make plasmids and gene tonics work, and after that regular injections are required to prevent physical and psychological damage. In the game itself, it is simply treated like a currency you use to buy said plasmids and tonics, which cost no actual money besides. The game also features the corresponding EVE, which acts as fuel for the plasmids, and is never touched on in the narrative. One of the Public Service Announcements might be lampshading this: "A Rapture reminder: We all have bills to pay, and the temptation to break curfew to make a little extra ADAM is forgivable..." So, wait, you can pay your bills in ADAM instead of dollars?
    • ADAM is supposed to be overwhelmingly addictive, along with a classic case of With Great Power Comes Great Insanity; most of the splicers attack the player because they think he's someone else, or in the hopes of getting more ADAM. None of these detrimental effects ever affect the player character, despite injecting liters of plasmids over the course of the game. Justified however because Jack was genetically designed to be immune to the secondary effects of ADAM.
    • While the player gets no bad side effects from ADAM, almost no splicers get good effects. While Jack shoots lightning, fire, bees, and ice from his finger tips, only Houdini splicers (who can vanish and shoot flames) and Spider splicers (who can walk on walls) seem to have any rare abilities. The much more common Thuggish splicers and Leadhead splicers all rely on weapons to kill you.
  • BioShock Infinite has a total of 8 Vigors. Several of these vigor containers can be found lying all over Columbia, one even appearing as a component of a game at the Columbia Raffle and fair, but only 3 of these Vigors are used by your enemies, and of those enemies, only a Unique Enemy uses 'Shock Jockey'. Also, the other two enemies who use Vigors, known as Firemen and Crows, have seriously upgraded/modified versions of the Vigor; Firemen can release a blast of flames around themselves which is a kamikaze attack when they're low on health, and Crows, unlike Booker, can turn into ravens but only use them to attack in a cutscene, relying on a sword all other times.
    • Because of the depth of its story, BioShock Infinite also provides an extreme example of a very common dissonance in FPS adventure games: both Booker and Elizabeth talk about their horror and shock at people killed or harmed by Comstock, yet in the action sequences of the game they slaughter many more people themselves with no emotional reaction. This is particularly notable because an early firefight does result in Elizabeth having a horrified reaction at how many people Booker kills in self-defense, and it's touched on again in a few of the later firefights, but overall goes unmentioned. It's almost like the story was written as a movie where only those few action scenes were present, and the bulk of the shooting galleries in the game weren't written to connect to the overall story.
    • There's a plot point about halfway through the game where the Vox Populi's leader recruits Booker to help them gather weapons so they can overthrow Columbia's government, which for anyone who has been paying attention just raises the question of why they don't get guns from the vending machines around every other corner like the player has been doing. The story doesn't acknowledge them because they're The Artifact from previous BioShock games, where nobody would bat an eye at someone casually buying high-powered weaponry in the obsessively-open market that was Rapture; Columbia's government would be much less willing to have a lot of guns in hands they don't have control over, but the player needs some way to buy new weapons and replenish their supplies during the several occasions where there are no enemies to shoot and loot.
• Blood reveals very late into the game that the reason the Big Bad was after Caleb was that he knew Caleb would become stronger the more beings he killed, to the point of becoming nearly unstoppable, and he wanted to possess Caleb and use his body to dominate the world. In gameplay, Caleb is certainly a capable fighter, but as it's a first-person shooter, his combat skills pretty strictly manifest in the form of guns and temporary powerups. A Caleb at the start of the game who hasn't killed anything yet and a Caleb who's killed hundreds of enemies are exactly the same, barring only their equipment. And no matter where you get in the game, Caleb can (and will regularly) be killed by regular ol' bullets and explosives.
• Borderlands eventually had to declare the New-U stations non-canon since it didn't make any sense that the cast would worry about dying when they just come back to life, or why the corporation that was trying to kill them would allow the machines they ran to resurrect the cast indefinitely for a pittance. The stations are still around, and they still talk to the player, but no one acknowledges them and they act more like a Greek Chorus.
  • Borderlands: If the player dies in the tutorial area, before, or immediately after, activating the Hyperion New-U Station, they're revived and placed at the point where they left the bus, but still get a financial loss and message like they actually used a New-U Station, even though they didn't. The New-U station doesn't act as the checkpoint for loading into the game, either. The one inside Fyrestone proper is the first one that does that.
  • Borderlands 3:
    New-U Station: We can always bring you back, unless you died in a cutscene.
• Cabela's Dangerous Hunts 2013 casts the player character, Jacob, as a park ranger and self-confessed conservationist. Within minutes of stating this, he guns down dozens if not hundreds of animals during a car chase and things only get worse from there. By game's end, this conservationist has killed likely thousands of animals, including a critically endangered black rhino and what appears to be the entire population of a previously undiscovered species of black lions. And then he starts his recreational hunting.
• Deep Rock Galactic features a bar in its level hub, where its player characters, being Dwarves, love to get plastered. The effects of drunkenness, which range from mild double vision to near-blindness, aim drift, and randomized staggering about, persist if you get wasted before a level, which ironically makes the Elf-brewed "Leaf Lover's Special" one of the most popular drinks for its instantly-sobering effect despite the characters' outspoken distaste for it. Even then, many players decide to get rid of their drunken haze the Dwarven way and "skip straight to the hangover" with some Blackout Stout.
• Destiny has the mysterious Awoken, who live on a distant planet and have a strange and alien culture, which the player comes into contact with during the story... but they're also a playable character race. Meaning that if you play as an Awoken, you weirdly have no idea about your own culture or even who your Queen is. (This was later handwaved by the claim that Awoken born on Earth are commonly treated as outsiders, but this doesn't explain why your character wouldn't know about them.)
  • This game also has replaying missions be a regular part of the game, but when replayed they continue to have the same story dialog as they did on the first playthrough. Thus, you may find your Ghost will advise you of a good place to find a warp drive while actually warping to the planet it's talking about.
  • Destiny 2 begins with the villain blocking access to the Traveler, the entity which gives all Guardians their powers. Your Guardian alone discovers a shard of the Traveler which restores his/her powers alone. They are now uniquely placed to save the universe.. until you go to the first multiplayer sandbox map and meet hundreds of other Guardians who apparently all have exactly the same backstory.
  • According to the lore, Guardians all have their roles. Titans are primarily the guards of the Last City and thus spend most of their time there. Warlocks are researchers and are also often found in the City. Leaving Hunters, explicitly scouts and long distance ranger types, as the only Guardians who are normally out adventuring or fighting the Darkness head on. Gameplay-wise, every class has unrestricted leave to go out and, well, play the game. Although, this could explain why most NPCs you meet outside the Tower end up being Hunters.
• Dinosaur Hunt is about loading maps and shooting waves of dinosaurs. In between maps, the game tells the story of a hidden island, an elite military team, a secret scientific organization, a love interest, and weaponized dinosaurs.
• GoldenEye (1997) has a particularly jarring example of this. Natalia is supposed to be your ally in the single player campaign. If she's killed at any point during a mission, you automatically fail it. What's more: in the "Cuba" mission, she just learned how to fire a gun and is shown to be a pretty unskilled gunwoman. However, in the multiplayer mode, she's a playable character. Thus, in a multiplayer game, she and you can freely shoot/kill each other until your hearts' content. And her firing skills in the mode are every bit as capable as anybody else's. This is true for quite a few other characters in the game, as well. Even scientists and civilians (who are totally defenseless in the single player campaign) suddenly become ruthless killers when used in multiplayer.
  • Perfect Dark did the same thing but hand waved it by referring to its multiplayer mode as a "Combat Simulator," with the implication that the matches were just computer simulations rather than reality.
  • MindJack had a similar issue with the player being able to transfer their consciousness to any NPC. While it is not unreasonable that a person mindjacked by an experienced marksman would become a good shot as a result, it is slightly odd that every NPC is apparently carrying a shotgun, purely to pull out if they suddenly become the player character.
• No matter how injured Gordon Freeman gets in Half-Life, he can always be healed by health kits, and Alyx Vance has regenerating health which makes her almost as tough as Gordon. Gordon's healing can at least be hand waved by his HEV suit's life support systems, but Alyx has no logical excuse. Then near the start of Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Alyx gets stabbed by a Hunter, leaving her critically injured and apparently comatose. Of course, Gordon has to go get larval extract from Antlions, as neither health kits, a medic, her regenerating health or four Vortigaunts can do anything more than stall her death.
  • Also, the HEV suit Gordon wears occasionally mentions administering morphine as its primary medical treatment but it also mentions injuries including major fractures and lacerations. While pain killers might help Gordon keep going a little longer, there's little reason as to how Gordon can get those wounds multiple times and not literally fall apart.
    • The suit also somehow prevents headcrabs from latching onto his head and turning him into a headcrab zombie, even though it doesn't have a helmet.
• Halo: has some pretty severe examples, though in this case, it's more like "books and everything else segregation":
  • A common misconception is that the weapons are much more lethal in the books. The plasma pistol melts huge holes in flesh and can kill anything in one hit, and the needler does exactly what one would expect a weapon that fires exploding glass to do. This is not actually the case however; the weapons only act like this one specific novel, and in that case were noted to be modified. In the actual game they're often two of weakest weapons; the plasma pistol usually only good against shields and the needler tends to only become a real threat if you shoot out half the clip into one target. Gameplay-wise, even a standard marine or grunt can take a plasma pistol or needler shot to the face and not be all that harmed by it. This is quite consistent with cutscenes (both in-engine and prerendered) which depicts plasma weapons as somewhat anemic, as well as official films.
  • Canonically, the Spartans in MJOLNIR armor are capable of running upwards of 40 miles per hour in short bursts, jumping 15 feet in the air, surviving both in a vacuum and underwater, (barely) surviving atmospheric re-entry, and punching holes in vehicles. In-game your default speed is about 16 mph, which is pretty fast for a regular pace (and still superhuman considering how much armor you're wearing) but nowhere near that; this would be less noticeable and more justified (as presumably your character's default run speed isn't their fastest sprint) if the games from Reach and onwards didn't specifically put in a sprint mechanic that's only 23 mph in bursts. Also, you die instantly if you fall more than a few dozen meters or go into the deep part of a river, which acts as a barrier against Sequence Breaking and Unwinnable situations. In Halo 3: ODST, where you play as just Badass Normal elite soldiers, the differences in gameplay are very minor. If anything, Master Chief was often derided in the early days of Halo's lifespan for being comparatively unimpressive next to older FPS protagonists who really did move and fight like that. Halo 4 and Halo 5: Guardians made the effort to avoid this trope, giving the Spartans more in-game superhuman feats like climbing up ledges and natural sprinting, alongside Action Command sequences that let you pry open doors and handle heavy items. You're still relatively slow, though (at least according to two specific books; they pointedly never demonstrate speed on that level in any of the cutscenes or films).
  • Cutscenes tend to override any weapon selection your character may have had prior to it. In Halo 3: ODST, Romeo fires three shots at an enemy, and when gameplay starts, he's missing three rounds. But at the end of that segment, the cutscene has him still wielding a sniper rifle, regardless of whether you kept it with you during gameplay. This is necessary for the Rookie to be able to find the broken rifle later. This is especially odd on occasions where you aren't using a gun of any sort, but perhaps something like a giant melee hammer.
    • Averted in Halo 2, where cutscenes reflect what weapon you were using before you entered them, and whatever weapons your character is given or picks up in a cutscene at the start of a level are what you start gameplay with, in noted contrast to Halo: Combat Evolved where the Chief always had an assault rifle in his hands. However, it is always wielded as if it was the default weapon, causing some weapons to clip into the character model in certain scenes.
• Bill in Left 4 Dead is stated to have suffered a knee injury from shrapnel during his tour of Vietnam, which makes it hard for him to walk or go up and down flights of stairs. In the game, he can run just as fast as the rest of the survivors. Adrenaline is a heck of an anesthetic.
• Coach goes through a similar thing in Left 4 Dead 2. Coach suffered a knee injury during college football and he hasn't been the same since then. Admittedly, being a defensive lineman doesn't necessarily require a lot of running, and the other three survivors clearly aren't more fit than he is, even if they're slimmer.
• The Marathon series consists of nothing more than jumping from one terminal to another while destroying Pfhor or sometimes human enemies with every gun you have, flipping switches and collecting components. The terminals really have no bearing on the plot in hindsight — in fact, the fan-made website "Marathon's Story", with all the terminals from the games, can be read to get the story without troubling yourself to reach each one.
• Metroid:
  • Metroid: Despite the Metroids being built up as the ultimate threat of the game to defeat, destroying them or even fighting them is completely optional (avoiding them is possible, but extremely difficult). Destroying them has no bearing on the gameplay either, as they simply respawn. In fact, you're better off just freezing them and moving on, since you'll be needing a lot of missiles to fight Mother Brain. Metroid: Zero Mission addressed this by putting a set number of them in the area they inhabit, then requiring you to kill every one in any given room before the doors would unlock to let you progress.
  • In Metroid Prime 3: Corruption, Samus must ultimately find at least 5 Galactic Federation energy batteries in order to activate enough doors on a wrecked cruiser to get a code that unlocks the last area of the game. However, she's working for the Galactic Federation. And at the end of the game, they're waiting on her to do this. Surely, she could just let them know that she needs a few batteries. No, she must scour the landscape of four worlds for batteries from Federation installations, crashed ships, and the like.
• Overwatch is a particularly extreme case, as its gameplay and lore are treated as two different entities. The matches you play have nothing to do with the actual story and character relations. In other words, the game isn't part of its own canon!
  • Some characters' personalities wouldn't make sense in lore, with gameplay mechanics being the only thing that make it work. In particular, Tracer's playful happy-go-lucky attitude to shooting enemies or planting sticky bombs on them is appropriate to the game where the enemy is simply eliminated and respawns in a few seconds. Imagining her having a similar attitude in the external setting where she would be actually killing people makes her appear quite different... Sure enough, official shorts and comics show Tracer taking actual battles and character deaths extremely seriously.
  • Although most characters in the game have the same skills in the lore and in the game, the exception, for balance, seems to be Reaper, who in the official comics and shorts is seemingly indestructible and is immune to the sleeping darts of Ana.
  • D.Va is portrayed in-game as a trash-talking gamer who often spouts Leet Lingo and plugs her stream. In a drastic contrast, D.Va in her short film “Shooting Star” is a solemn person who takes her duty to defend her country very seriously, and is also struggling with lingering PTSD. Her “gamer” persona isn’t heard and it’s at most implied to be an advertising stunt, one she doesn’t seem to put much effort to maintain considering her teammate complains about how much time she spends secluded in her workshop rather out in public.
  • Echo was built by the remorseful Dr. Liao to be highly adaptable to any situation and show that humans and Omnics could coexist in peace, with her specializations implied to be humanitarian in nature by her official bio, such as medical support and construction. This makes it quite odd that, for all her gentle voice, non-threatening design, friendly mannerism and purpose, in-game Echo is a highly destructive Damage hero with sticky grenades and a beam that does more damage when the target is at low health. Echo did start development as a support character, but with Duplicate, her ultimate ability, being considered fundamental to her identity as a distinct character and lending itself to damage, it was decided to change her intended role.
  • Mei is one of the most extreme examples of a character whose story role drastically diverged from their gameplay role. In the trailers and her voice lines, Mei is characterized as a cute, cheerful Friend to All Living Things. In steep contrast, Mei in-game garnered a reputation as a Memetic Psychopath due to her playstyle which involves freezing her enemies in place, leaving them helplessly watching as she lines up her sights to impale them with an icicle through the head, giggling cheerfully all the while. Blizzard would occasionally nod to her dark reputation with a few of her later unlockable voice lines, but never went so far as to change her personality to anything but friendly.
• Dallas in PAYDAY: The Heist is a chain smoker and is always out of breath, but that doesn't happen at all while you play as him, which is a good thing since you will be running around a lot.
• PAYDAY 3: The story cutscenes show Pearl joined the PAYDAY gang after the events of No Rest For The Wicked, but nothing is stopping you from playing as her during said heist.
• The 1998 PC game SiN has this in spades. A number of bizarre gameplay elements include: the main character (John Blade) being turned into a half-naked mutant late in the game, then being changed back to his original human self, weapons, armor, and all; not being able to walk into a testing facility early on because you have police attire on, but the moment you switch into a work uniform, the few employees at the building won't recognize who you are; the opening two levels revolve around an unsuccessful heist to retrieve a document, but if the player finds the item wanted by the terrorist, it is simply an empty envelope that doesn't factor into the rest of the story; walking into a building and being captured, even if you have full health and enough ammunition to waste its entire group of occupants; falling into a trap door in a random room at a secret base that only serves to dump you into a meat cart for the final boss battle, and many other minor infractions.
• It's a plot point in S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Call of Pripyat that anomalies move. In the game itself, however, none of them ever leave their positions.
• You will never see anyone firing anything other than the boring 'ol handgun in a Time Crisis cutscene, despite the fact that machine guns, shotguns, and grenade launchers have all been standard equipment for some time. The funniest example would be Giorgio Bruno taking a few shots at a swarm of Terror Bites... this after you've taken out the last wave with a machine gun. Then there's Alicia Winston threatening Jake Hernandez with a handgun and firing a warning shot next to his head... the same head you've blasted several dozen times to get to this point, raising the obvious question of what the hell good one more is going to accomplish.
• Team Fortress 2: The animated shorts frequently show scenarios which would be impossible to undertake in the game proper, for various reasons.
  • "Meet the Heavy" has the Heavy claiming his Minigun fires 10,000 rounds per minute, when it actually fires "only" about 2,400 rounds per minute.
  • "Meet the Scout" has the titular character running so fast, he's able to dodge Sentry fire from relatively close range. While the Scout is the fastest character, the tracking for the in-game Sentry is still more than good enough to nail a Scout dead-on from that range.
  • "Meet the Sniper" shows the character climbing the ladder of a tall tower to get a good sniping point. However, the actual tower in-game is out of bounds on the map the short is set and there's no ladder-climbing mechanics either way. The Demo also accidentally kills himself by falling on some explosive barrels; while there are explosive barrels in the game, the ones in the short that explode are different.
  • "Meet the Demo" has the Demo drawing the fire of the Sentry with his rolling bombs, which can't be done in-game, and he's shown placing down 16 sticky grenades, but the maximum is only 8 (it was initially possible to place down 16 grenades in developmental versions, but this was nerfed before the animation premiered, something jokingly referenced in a disclaimer that appears at the very end, warning viewers that the behaviour of the grenades in the short may not be accurate). The short also seems to show BLU as the defending team and RED as the attacking, but the opposite is true.
  • "Meet the Pyro" shows the character as a One-Man Army capable of brutalizing an entire team by himself and burning down an entire map. For obvious reasons, the former is not the case in gameplay, while no maps are actually destructible. Also, the short shows that the Pyro is Obliviously Evil and sees everything as a Sugar Bowl. However, in the actual game his viewpoint is exactly the same as everyone else's unless he equips the small number of items which enable Pyroland, which only works on eleven out of well over one-hundred maps.
  • "Meet the Spy" might be the most extreme example in this category, aside from having the Spy do many things he isn't able to do in-game (such as throwing a sapper, killing a Medic in hand-to-hand combat, and not losing his disguise momentarily when he touches a member of the opposite team). The intelligence room is shown behind a code-locked door (not present in gameplay) and the BLU Soldier is depicted killing a member of his own team (under the mistaken belief he was the RED Spy in disguise). This instance has two major segregations: it's impossible to kill someone in one shot with a shotgun, and there's no friendly fire in-game. In fact, shooting your teammates is the recommended way to find an enemy Spy in your ranks.
  • The trailer for Player Versus Environment "Mann vs. Machine" game mode shows the BLU and RED team pulling an Enemy Mine to fight the hordes of robots together. It's only possible to play as the RED team in the game mode, probably due to ease of visual identification (due to the robots being bluish) and the robots being classified as BLU in the game code.

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