Should a Games Plot strive to be more like an epic or a novel?

I suppose we all enjoy lenghty Rpgs with big plots and lots of cutscenes or dialogue. However the most popular games are more like epics whit bright characters that simply fight through the odds and get the princess. The latter sometimes gives us more fun gameplay.

So which way do prefer games to take your which way should they strive to go. A balance here is not a option but ay thoughts about are good

You know, sometimes I get bored of the super epic, over the top plotlines.

I'd like to play a game where you don't end up fighting off some evil Eldritch Abomination for the fate of the planet. Small, localized conflicts where you're only fighting for yourself could work too.

^What about something like Just Cause 2 where you're fighting to reveal why an entire nation has broken allegiance?

Not really that small, but not that global.

edited 8th Oct '11 4:31:17 PM by RocketDude

Yeah, that's a nice feeling.

The World Ends With You has your characters essentially only fighting for their own survival until the end of the game, and I like that sort of thing.

I just thought of final fantasy tactics advanced. Its a conflict between a couple of characters and a monster who weaves illusions. So its them against their fears but it takes a setting on an epic. Now that I think about it, this trick happens a lot on games.

Edit: For all ive heard of that game I wonder why havent I played it.

edited 8th Oct '11 4:41:35 PM by Jorgeazgad

Scale does not matter, it is how important it is made to seem and how invested the player can get into the conflict. Persona 4 was a reasonably small scale conflict In all but the best ending, but it managed to make you care about it due to the character's investment and caring about the people involved or put in danger. Final Fantasy XIII, on the other hand, was an epic which involved the fate of the whole world, but it all seemed trivial because the world felt hollow, there were no real characters and the protagonists had no personal motivation for fighting beyond "But Thou Must".

So, guess which game succeeded in having an interesting narrative. It was not the globe spanning epic about rebellion against the gods, but rather it was the small scale murder mystery set in a town with about 300 residents.

Depends on the game and genre.

I tend to prefer RP Gs that try to be epics, they just have to be good. Case in point, FFVII. However not all RP Gs have to be these epic battles, The World Ends with You being a prime example.

Outside RP Gs I generally don't think a game should try too hard to epic. RP Gs generally have a bigger focus on story by nature and this big, epic story seems slightly out of place if it's in a non-RPG game. That's not to say you can't have cutscenes and such, just not to the level of an RPG.

edited 8th Oct '11 4:51:44 PM by Kostya

Any game can fall into either lengthy or just a burst of fun

It's not a matter of should or shouldn't. It's more a matter of can or can't. If it's not possible to cram that much plot, then don't bother, focus on the gameplay. If good gameplay is integrated with the immersive storyline, all the more better as long as it's actually possible

I find both ways can have equally good results if done well. But from what I've seen, it's very easy to ratchet up the stakes in an effort to increase the drama level, yet that alone rarely works well unless you build up a lot of support around it. Thus we tend to see a lot of mediocre writers tending towards trying to make things ridiculously epic. Then Sturgeon's Law kicks in, and we get a ton of mediocre examples and a few good ones. Conversely, only writers who are confident they know what they're doing will attempt to have the stakes be bragging rights, because that's a lot more challenging to write. So we see fewer such examples, but a larger proportion of them are well-made

I also find that the key to both methods is to develop the characters (and preferably the world too) enough to make the player care about them, particularly before all the chips are down. Otherwise you end up in A Million Is a Statistic territory. But as long as I have characters I can relate to and sympathize with, I'll tend to like the story regardless of the stakes.

edited 10th Oct '11 3:20:17 AM by PoochyEXE

I don't really understand the OP's question. Can someone explain it to me?

I interpreted it as asking whether you prefer developers focus on making this big epic story with lots of cutscenes or whether they should focus on gameplay and balance first.

Honestly, I prefer it when games are more down-to-earth. Simply, because most games try to be too epic, too often. That's why I liked Persona 4 so much, it focused on a small town murder mystery with a supernatural bent. Instead of being a more standard, huge, "save-the-world-from-X" style plot.

edited 10th Oct '11 3:38:00 PM by Neo_Crimson

No.

I don't think video games should strive to be more or less epic than they already are. It's not a question which, if given a definitive answer, would result in video games being more interesting or engaging.

Persona 4 was, for almost the entirety of the game, concerned with a conflict that was small in scope, and it was extremely fun and engaging, but it wasn't engaging because it was focused on events of smaller scope, it was because it had novelty and charisma. Make games focusing on conflict of a similar scale on a regular basis and it will provide no novelty.

I think a lot of games suffer because they concern themselves too much with what formula they should follow, and not enough with the details.

Game plots aren't such a big issue for me, they can be about whatever they want as long as the writing's good- video game writing is the real issue imo.

While I do think that games can do story extremely well (see: Portal, Bioshock) many games tend to approach storytelling entirely wrong, usually just resorting to lengthy cutscenes.

Games should not be made more like movies. Do that, and you lose what made them games. Storytelling should be done in a way that makes it feel like the player is affecting the plot himself, not sitting and waiting for the plot to resolve on its own in a cutscene.

If a games story gets in the way of the actual game, I don't want to play it.

Actually, I think the OP is asking if games should be more like High Fantasy (big scale, long arcs, abstract philosophical principles) or Heroic Fantasy (a string of visceral, self-contained encounters or short adventures).

I now want a game where there is a narrator who describes things you do and the plot as a whole in the fashion of epic verse. You never talk because you're just a hero in an epic. The narrator reads out the speeches he wrote for you if you do communicate.

edited 10th Oct '11 10:22:06 PM by Aondeug

While lacking the epic verse, Bastion is actually quite a bit like that. The entire story is told by a narrator, with even the dialogue being more his narrative summary. It's surprisingly effective.

I know. Bastion is kickass.

BUT EPIC VERSE.

In Eddaic format.

I thought the OP was asking whether games should be epic or novel in the literary sense:

-Epics (think The Odyssey) are stories with a distance created between characters and the reader. Their characterisations are shallower and more archetypical, or make use of cliché. Think Final Fantasy, or the Tales Of Series, or the original Baldurs Gate, or Age Of Empires, or anything that's relatively simplistic. Dead Space and other horror games use this a lot in order to appeal to primal fears/nauseas in the audience. They're often sprawling in plot, but don't necessarily have to be: a Novel can have an epic plot without being and Epic.

-Novels are stories with deeper characterisation and multiple points of focus/perspectives. I'm thinking latter day Bioware and Obsidian, or Max Payne, or the Persona series. Characters are implied — even minor ones — to have a life away from the reader, or the gamer. For instance, shop keepers do things other than manage their shops all day, every day for the needs of the player. Something like Oblivion or Dragon Age 2 implies that characters have their own needs and motivations which may conflict with the player's agenda.

Truth is, most games use a little of both, with a greater focus on the Epic. The very nature of the medium means that the audience is always one step removed from the characterisation, adding extra levels of narrative discourse (that's the telling or retelling of the story that allows for multiple interpretations) due to the current limitations of interaction as part of the medium and the nature of the market in which games are sold. There's always an attempt to prevent alienation in the audience, meaning that there's a certain degreee of every-man installed into the main persona being operated in order to prevent potential buyers from being discouraged from purchase.

What the OP is also doing — and I think that they're wrong to do this — is to imply that that Novelistic games can't have complicated mechanics, or that a focus on developed storytelling means that mechanics suffer. There's no kind of dichotomy, an Epic story-lines are just as capable as being complicated and involved as Novelistic ones.

I personally think that both storytelling styles are good and worth seeing in games. Psychonauts works better for being Epic, reflecting the style of both children's stories and dream telling. Dragon Age needed a novelistic style in order to support the way that character motivation impacts on the narrative.

Edit: An Bastion plays with the concept. It seems to be an epic, complete with tpyical elements like huge wars and a narrator. But that narrator turns out to be unreliable, and then there's multiple ones, moving towards the Novel. It's a sliding scale, even within that one game.

edited 10th Oct '11 11:48:29 PM by Nicknacks

Yep you kind of nailed it. I wonder how you people understood what I was saying. I re-read my own post and couldn't make it through the grammar errors.

I confess I believe that higher the characterization goes the more the gameplay suffers. It´s just a pattern I tend to see. The games that pull it through become cult classics. Because of the medium the characterization matters less than the mechanics ( a big point in a game is mostly to be in control yourself) however the games which impacts us the most and which make mastering it seem important are those with a good story and characterization.

Edit: I guess the silent protagonist is a way to avoid giving a everyman characterization to the protagonist, That way the player fills him with its own.

edited 12th Oct '11 7:56:50 AM by Jorgeazgad

Ah, okay.

Personally I think the answer is "whatever works best for the game." Metal Gear really took off once it became more cinematic. But some games, like say the Shinobi franchise, honestly worked better when the plot was more "this is what's happening, this is your motivation. The rest is implicit in the artwork/background stuff and we're just gonna let you draw your own conclusions."

I do think there aren't enough games nowadays that have that old platformer style of "immediacey" where they just introduce something and run with it. Everything is focused and cutscene-heavy now and explicitly lays stuff out for you instead of letting you draw your own conclusions. Again this works for some games, but for others we really need to give the storyline the middle finger.

Or play a Namco Museum anthology.

The way I see it, there's no answer to this question. If the game is a more compelling experience with an epic-style plot, then it should have that. If it's more compelling with a novel-style plot, it should have that.