1. Story

2. Gameplay

3. Graphics

4. Surround Sound

@ Kakihara at #7

That is the reason why i change Metal Gear Solid for Splinter Cell but i still have some love for MGS.
----------------------------- -------------------
Story telling in Video Games
From the best way to tell a story in a video game, to the most confusing plots ever told, this episode of the Bonus Round opens the book narrative in today's games. Do games like BioShock and God of War tell effective stories? What is "environmental storytelling" and how may it change games forever? Does the DLC landscape change the way games unfold - do they ever end?

http://www.gametrailers.com...

....in this industry, like most, time = money.

A good coherent, interesting story takes time and skill, which in turn drains precious dollars from the development budget.

Now bear in mind this dev budget also needs to cover design, testing, mo-cap, music and foley, more testing, all of which are more important to the functionality of a game product than a story.

And as far as I know, when it comes to making cuts, details on the story (usually cutscenes) are always the first to be scrapped. Cutscenes are not in player control, take time away from crucial development, and are thus considered irrelevant once the budget cuts start coming in.

Kinda like watching deleted scenes on the special features of a movie. Most of them are pretty unnecessary, but every now and then you see one that really answered some leftover questions or filled some gaping plot hole. We're not perfect, and when directors make scene cuts, sometimes they fail to realize that, while THEY know the whole story and thus think the movie will be okay without it, it's not in the mind of the viewer that this little piece of info was ever there, and that sometimes leads to a previously unrealized plot hole.

This problem tends to be magnified in game stories because there is simply so much development going on at once, that when the hammer comes down to scrap a half-finished cutscene here and there, these separate teams working on the same game can't always hold hours-long meetings on how to restructure the story to accommodate this now-missing piece of the puzzle.

Just the nature of the industry. Not every publisher can spare 20% of a budget on Hollywood-quality story-telling.

I guess MGS4 would be awesome for the fans but I have to admit I found it unbelievably cheesy and not in a good way. Paraphrasing from memory, 'My life has been a rainstorm' 'You were the lightning in that storm' uuuugh. I mean the thing is starring a character called Solid Snake for God's sake. How could it not be super cheesy?? I guess if you've played all the others (I had played the first MGS on PSX) there are some big things going down with those characters but for anyone else it's hard to take characters seriously when they're called Snake, wear mullets and headbands and use lines that wouldn't have sounded out of place in Team America.

Because unlike books and movies, games have so many other aspects that it must cover that having a good storyline takes up too much resources.

If you look at directing a movie and writing a book, the entire focus of designing it is to make sure the story is good. That is the measure of how good it is. A Video Game isn't passive entertainment. There's so many other things to design. Gameplay, Ai, level design, control, graphics etc. In video games, you are trying to create an artificial world for the player to interact with it. This is why i'm a gamer.

"It leans a little too heavily on the notion that the player has played Chain of Memories, the GBA prequel that sets up the main game's narrative. Without knowing what happens in that game a lot of things in Kingdom Hearts 2 are fuzzy to say the least."

Duh, you wouldn't start reading a thousand page novel at page 500, I'd rather it be that way than dumbed down so people new to the story know whats going on. Theres summaries and youtube videos for that.

I couldn't agree more when it came to difficulty spikes though.

In priority of what I think should be focused on (higher=higher priority)

Gameplay
Story
Characters
Graphics

people these days prefer shooting games that largely revolve around overly muscular men who swear more often then necessary, and just go around shooting things and somehow save the world.

Because of mindless hack n slash games like 'God of War', or pointless over-the-shoulder shoot em' ups like 'Gears of War' that consider a good storyline about as important as having to appeal to someone over the age of 13 to sell the damn thing.

I find it funny that the writer does not even mention: Heavy Rain, Mass Effect, Uncharted 2, The Witcher, and so on. Also MGS4 and HL2 have a bad story? NOPE

The thing about MGS4 is that it treats games as their own medium. Kojima doesn't try to shoehorn a 2 hour movie plot into a 15 hour game. There's a total of 60 hours of game play in the four main games.

They're paced so that there's always something interesting around the corner. Those interesting parts are usually twists (it's what the series is known for). And when you start piling twists on top of twists, yes it does get convoluted. But at the end, it does actually make sense. That's quite an achievement.

Still, I've never been as enthralled in a videogame's story as much as I've been with the MGS series. Not even close. In fact, there's few movies that can captivate me like MGS. I would say that's successful storytelling.

Mgs 4 all the way to the bank ! baby !!!

Why do so many people miss important story telling elements in games, then complain about the low standards?

Take halo for example, how many people actually read the terminals?
Or metroid?
How many people payed attention to a lot of the radio chatter from the first MGS games?
How many people actively sought out side quests in games like FF, where the back-story of many characters occur?

It's not that game story telling has low standards, it's that the common person plays a game for the gameplay, and not necessarily for the story.

That and games are still largely seen as childish by the media, so they're not allowed to fully exploit more deep story telling elements. Take the mass effect and hot coffee scandals. Or the no russia sequence in MW2?

http://www.youtube.com/watc...

that short film has better story telling them most high budget films.

It's funny, you can't explain your distaste for the story in the MGS series without hundreds of fanboys screaming how wrong you are and that you must not have understood the story. I played through the entire series over the course of a few weeks to a month, I took my time and read every line and fully understood the story. Imo, the story line is pretty bad, it's just too convoluted, filled with plot holes and badly written dialogue that I couldn't enjoy it.

Kojima needs an editor, he needs to have someone look over his work and tell him when he's gone too far out there. There was a good story hidden away in the MGS series, I just think it was ruined by the actual script and some of Kojima's ideas.

I'm completely underwhelmed by his critiques. How can you list Bioshock without mentioning it's superior predecessor, System Shock 2? Where is Deus Ex, ICO, or Shadow of the Colossus?

I can't believe the motherfvcker who wrote this sh!t called MGS4 like that and didn't have the balls to say the truth about Halo...

People like him should be banned from the Internet forever... I can't begin to understand how someone can be THAT motherfvcking retardad, MGS4 is a Masterpiece of gaming in all its forms.

I guess I don't understand storytelling in games. Look at any game with a story... you know what's "supposed" to happen. You know the good guy will win, you know whatever object will be found, you know the alien threat will be destroyed. No matter what you do, there's no way to change it. You're just moving a character towards whatever goal the writers came up with.

Don't get me wrong, I love gaming, but when it comes down to it, I play games to have fun, not to follow a story. For instance, UC2. Nathan is trying to get the Cintamani Stone. Does it matter that he is in a train wreck? How about crawling through the jungles, does that really matter? Does it do anything for the story? In the end, you're just shooting enemies, collecting ammo, and making your way to the next checkpoint where you have a different environment and do the same thing over and over. You could basically take the entire game, move it to a 3D maze, take away the story, and still have the same basic experience. Game stories only cover up the fact that games are all pretty much the same, just different variations.

I like role playing games because there you can affect the story. You can be good or bad, you don't have to necessarily work towards one specific goal. I'm not saying RPGs are my favorite games, but they're more open to creating your own experience.

To be critical of RPGs, quests don't matter much either. Say you are supposed to collect healing plants for a medicine man. In the forest are bears and wolves coming after you. It boils down to killing the animals attacking you and collecting the herbs. Nothing special about that and we've all done it hundreds of times in other games. The only thing that changes is the setting and environment. Does it really matter that you help the medicine man cure the sick person? Does it do anything for the story? How is the story affected? It isn't.

*SHRUG*

Just putting this out there, but didn't Kojima once say that even he gets confused with the MGS story? Isn't that a sign that even the guy who wrote it finds it a mess?....

MGS4 is as corny as it gets. Made no sense and very silly. I can see why Sony gave strict restrictions on the reviews. I'm sure those free trips to Paris helped out their reviews. LOL!

MGS4 wrapped up a plot spanning 6 games and over 50 years of continuity wonderfully. While the game has its share of flaws, story wasn't one of them IMHO.

I honestly can say that those complaining about MGS4 story arent even fans of the series. I mean yeah I understand its all opinion but if your the type that is just looking for gameplay & dont care for story then this is not a series for u. Even so MGS4 at its time had spectacular gameplay to go with its amazing story which is why it is a unique gem compared to just a game with great gameplay & average story because story is a big part of why I think SEPERATES MGS4 from any other "Stealth Action" game in the business because u get everything u want in one package. And is why it is considered not only the best stealth action game this gen but is said by many well known gaming sites to be "The Best Stealth Action Game of ALL TIME". Nuff said.

If you only take into account the "movie-like" storytelling, videogames are indeed quite disappointing. But in videogames, narration is not only like that ! In a game, you can mix narration and exploration, gameplay, interaction. You can even let the game make choices and let him discover the consequences.

If you take games like Deus Ex, the Witcher,Half Life 2, Shadow of the Colossus (etc) and just write their story down, it's not so great, but if you play and live them, that's a complete different story and it can affect you pretty deeply.

I wish videogames had better writing, voice acting (there are some great stuff in this field too, but still too rare) and could tackle more diverse and - sometimes - serious issues, but I think it's idiot to just compare them with movies !

We know games won't come close to movies such as The Godfather, Citizen Kane, etc.

But they can atleast out do Hollywood blockbusters a lá Uncharted 2.

He was on to something until he mention MGS4, the game which sets the bar for great storytelling imo.

Why does a great story have to abide by the laws of the real world. If you want to pick out some things that are unrealistic in the story first thing that comes to my mind are the giant mechs with nukes or the war going on where the big robots that sound like cows are jumping over buildings. What may be completely ridiculous in the real world can be completely normal in a game. Yes, the story isn't perfect and the story can be corny, and unrealistic in parts, that doesn't mean its bad. Story's should have no bounds on them in anyway, and to expect stories in games to be flawless is just as unrealistic as a flawless game.

Kojima puts underlying meanings in his games to try to get people to think. He could simply make snake say war=bad but instead he trys to make people look at war, among other topics, in a different way. I wish more developers would push the limits of their stories instead of their graphics. And no, he doesn't pull ideas out of a hat and if he does, I'd love to see whats left in the hat.

Half-Life's story is bad?? Piss off, the story is fantastic but you have to work a bit to find all the details of it, its not spoon fed to you like most console games. Mark Laidlaw is a genious!

Let's just throw this out there. Bioshock is not a spiritual offspring of Half-Life 2. It's a remake of System Shock 2, located under the sea. So, give all the credit to Bioshock's story and story telling to SS2 where it belongs, my friend. Do it.

Alright, now that that's out of my system, I think that story telling in games can be flawed and be alright, as long as I love the gameplay. Plus, if they throw in co-op, I'm even more forgiving. & I think a lot of people are like this, so developers feel like they can get by on not the best story.

But, I'm always up for a good story. I did like the older Silent Hills, System Shock 2, and for this generation I like Fallout 3 a bunch. I really don't like Bioware RPGs.. probably because I hate the combat. Ohh so much.. but anyways, there are others, but I'm lazy.

So many say the story sucks and the plot is convoluted and impossible to follow. To these people I say this...

Maybe it's not the plot that is impossible to follow or overly convoluted. Maybe it's YOU who is simply too dense or too used to simple storytelling in video games (since maybe you've never read a book) that is the problem.

I had no problems following any Metal Gear game.

Halo series is by far the worst and the thing I would like to see the most is Master Chief take of his helmet and it's Jar Jar Binx with a voice modulator.

Fanboyism aside, I normally don't even feel ANYTHING for a movie- that is, aside from stuff like The Hurt Locker, but mostly books are the ones that win in storytelling. Even so, in a game, for example, a RPG, you get more attached to the characters that you'll ever be with movies or novels (leaving TV shows aside, because on those you can get pretty attached to some characters as well). Proof of this is Mass Effect, Dragon Age, FF, Valkyria Chronicles, etc.

Pretentious and corny to the point that I felt embarrassed to play it during most cut scenes... which was a good portion of the game.

Bioshock, Shadow of the Colossus, Mass Effect 1 & 2, and the Suikoden series(most of them) are perfect examples of storytelling in video games done right.

wish I came here sooner, there are some really good comments.

Working on the Bayonetta platinum now, and the story is garbage. Just had to tell someone. Half baked wannabe Kid Icarus chickensh1t bullsh1t.

The writer of the article, Richard Naik, is the same heatbag that crucified Heavy Rain for a 40/100, lowest score out of 100+ reviews, bringing down the Metacritic by a full point. I've never agreed with anything he has had to say. I don't think we'd even agree on the time of day.

Not a fan of Gamecritics.com. Too pretentious.

aw light yagami only mad because he and the other xbots caint have it so they have to whine and cry like the pathetic xbots they really are because they are getting a spin-off than a real mgs title like justin
timberlake said CRY ME A RIVVVER!