Games with good stories

[JointStrikeFighter]

Gears 2

[Zixinus]

May I throw in Little Big Adventure 2? The story was childish but that was the point. What it does, it does well enough.

If I may be so bold, I'd throw in Tron 2.0 into the mix. Yes, the story was "evil corporation that is definitely not lead by the movie's villain" but it was fun and made more or less sense.

Dead Space manages to get its story across fairly well while relying on almost no cut scenes whatsoever.

Cutscenes aren't necessarily bad.

They're bad when they are used instead of gameplay, rather than simply being a "reward" for playing the game. They're bad when they don't tell anything useful, interesting or relevant to what you are doing. They're bad when they do stuff that you would be rather doing. They're bad when you see "yourself" do stuff that doesn't make sense (like in Fallout 3, I'm wearing full power armour and I'm supposed to be completely stunned by a mere grenade?) or is downright stupid (the selection is just too broad to choose from).

They're good as a reward, for example after a boss battle or merely after just completing a level. They're good to show you stuff that the game engine can't show. They're good to give you hints, ideas and instructions, for example, to show you the weakness of a boss. Charecterization can also happen here, making you either identify with someone more, make you more fearful/hateful of the boss or simply understand where you are going.

[Stark]

Some games can manage the 'cinematic' thing well - I think Gears does this - where cutscenes aren't used as crutches to drive the plot in a direction no sane player would go (like the F3 flashbang) but rather, be alternate media for the game's 'experience'. Even older games that aren't as 'cinematic' can do it - Thief's cutscenes are packed with awesome and information and fit perfectly with what you learn of the world. It's hopelessly scripted poorly-written 'events' that suck.

Valve... needs to learn.

[Uraniun235]

Klingon Academy had a pretty fun "prequel-to-ST6" story. Yeah yeah, "oh noes it does not perfectly fit with established continuity", but on its own it definitely works very well as a game story.

[wautd]

- Max Payne for the reasons already mentioned

- Bioshock with the "would you kindly?"-bombshell halfway the game. One of the best twists I can remember in a game

- Film noir-like games (Under a killing moon, Discworld Noir,...) were pretty solid as well

[Arthur_Tuxedo]

Mafia has one of the better presented stories that I can remember.

[Stark]

- Film noir-like games (Under a killing moon, Discworld Noir,...) were pretty solid as well

Are you seriously saying an entire genre of games have good stories? Remember, 'I like' != 'is good'.

[erik_t]

Doom. There, I said it.

Short, to the point, immersive and entertaining. Also, you go to fucking Hell.

And until just now I never realized that Half-Life's story is almost exactly the same. I guess Half-Life was a game to me, but Doom was a part of growing up.

[Stark]

Doom's story has almost no bearing on the game; it's delivered in text blocks between levels. If you told the average Doom player from 1992 about the other marines going off and dying before the start of the game, they'd goggle at you.

The Doom story isn't just used by Halflife however; it's very common.

[Kelp]

Planescape: Torment. I'm not even sure if I spelled it correctly. I remember playing it as a young teenager. I like the story even though the game is mostly dialogs and relatively little fighting.

[TC Pilot]

I personally thought No One Lives Forever had a very good story.

[Grog]

I liked the writing for the marathon series of games and smac. But it is mostly the characters, the plot is not that great.

[Ford Prefect]

Some games can manage the 'cinematic' thing well - I think Gears does this - where cutscenes aren't used as crutches to drive the plot in a direction no sane player would go (like the F3 flashbang) but rather, be alternate media for the game's 'experience'. Even older games that aren't as 'cinematic' can do it - Thief's cutscenes are packed with awesome and information and fit perfectly with what you learn of the world. It's hopelessly scripted poorly-written 'events' that suck.

I would agree with you there. Not to drag the Gears man-love into two different threads, it's an effectively cincematic game, where the cutscenes are used to give you tone and theme. Bioshock has its problems, but I think it manages this as well in places: Ryan's introduction to Rapture is quite frankly fantastic even if how you get there makes no sense. The 'would you kindly' scene is also effective, though for different reasons. Honestly, I would say Bioshock also possessed a strong streak of writing, with a layered world which the player can uncover through exploration. I think I'm fond of Bioshock mostly because of how effective I found its characterisation of dead people, and the way that their individual stories overlapped.

While I'm in total geek mode, I am going to throw out the God of War series. At the basic level it's just some bald dude getting revenge on the people who wronged him while brutalising a wide variety of weird and wonderful bloodthirsty monsters. I've spoken about how effective I kind Kratos' character, the tortured anti-hero wracked with guilt is perhaps not new, but his touching moments are quite touching and the story is excellently presented (the above cinematic stuff that STRAK mentions). Stuff like the Kraken battle in GoWII and the Caliope stuff in Chains of Olympus give a very human angle to a dude who spends hours everyday twisting satyrs into pretzels. It's marred by how everyone is basically a huge asshole, but that seems accurate to Greek mythology.

[Vendetta]

It was also telegraphed from like the 3rd mission. I didn't even finish the game because it was awful but I was hardly surprised when I found out later that he was actually evil.

Arthas' transformation was telegraphed in about mission 4 of Starcraft. And then guess what, they do exactly the same thing with Grom, and Illidan.

Blizzard do very pretty cutscenes, they don't have a lot to put in them.


Back on topic, I always found the story presentation of Ace Combat 4 to be surprisingly effective in that none of the "story" scenes take place even in the general vicinity of the player but still shows the effects of your actions half a continent away, as the viewpoint character follows the enemy ace squadron around, introducing characters who you will later feel like a bastard for killing.

[K. A. Pital]

Max Payne.

Hmmm... first KOTOR had a lame story, but an awesome mid-twist, which made me go raving Dark Side from the Light immediately.

Fallout 1.

[PeZook]

Hmmm... first KOTOR had a lame story, but an awesome mid-twist, which made me go raving Dark Side from the Light immediately.

The sequence was stained by the hugely lame fight with Malak just seconds later. I totally spanked him there, and he went "Ha ha I can paralyzes you now!" and then Bastilla had to - get this - sacrifice herself to "save" me.

I mean...Jesus motherfucking christ!

[Rawtooth]

KOTOR 2 while terribly buggy with gobs of cut content has a nice story behind it. It is remarkably like Planescape from what I've heard.

[Vendetta]

Hmmm... first KOTOR had a lame story, but an awesome mid-twist, which made me go raving Dark Side from the Light immediately.

The sequence was stained by the hugely lame fight with Malak just seconds later. I totally spanked him there, and he went "Ha ha I can paralyzes you now!" and then Bastilla had to - get this - sacrifice herself to "save" me.

I mean...Jesus motherfucking christ!

I think that still stands out as the single worst and stupidest example of story intruding into gameplay in any game ever. Just above the end of Fallout 3 and the wedding scene in Final Fantasy X where you get captured by the very same mooks you were powering through with no effort merely seconds before, and who you could have continued to effortlessly dispatch until your thumbs fell off, threatening you with piddly guns which, in gameplay terms, you could stand in front of all day laughing as their puny bullets fail to register above a tickle.

In fact, that one scene disqualifies KOTOR from this thread.

[wautd]

- Film noir-like games (Under a killing moon, Discworld Noir,...) were pretty solid as well

Are you seriously saying an entire genre of games have good stories? Remember, 'I like' != 'is good'.

In general I'm inclined to say they have. The story is one of the most important factors of the genre and it's in the developers best intrest to come up with a good one. Of the few games there are I can't think of any that had a bad story.

[Palantas]

Planescape: Torment had a really fucking great story, and it was told mostly in in-game dialogue. The only cinematics I can remember off the cuff are the intro and ending scenes, the rest is just walls of ingame text. That puts some people off, but I enjoyed it quite a bit.

I read somewhere that Torment's dialogue text is four times the size of The Lord of the Rings. Even if that is bullshit, I was very impressed with the story in Torment, and the array of options you had when dealing with a problem.

[Stark]

In general I'm inclined to say they have. The story is one of the most important factors of the genre and it's in the developers best intrest to come up with a good one. Of the few games there are I can't think of any that had a bad story.

I love how people can walk into threads with posts like 'xyz is effective for abc' and 'here is a paragraph explaining why this works' and 'this game has a laundry list of postive features' and just contribute 'I declare an entire genre good based on nothing'.

While I thought KotOR2 was a bad game, I didn't mind the story itself; it was clearly forced into the game itself, but looking at it purely as a story it was more interesting than OMG TEH BAD MANZ CHOP THEM and appeared to tie back into KOTOR1. What I've seen of KOTOR1 doesn't sound as interesting, but Bioware make bad games so this doesn't surprise me. I'm amused that nobody mentions Mass Effect's poorly-thought out, inconsistent and uninteresting story in this thread.

[CaptHawkeye]

Shhh. You'll jinx it. A year later everyone has totally forgotten it ever even existed even though it was surrounded with claims of "EPIC STORY FOR THE AGES" and the like.

[DPDarkPrimus]

Mirror's Edge has some terrible cutscenes.

The game is super-immersive and has great art direction. So what do they do for the in-between level cutscenes? Break immersion entirely with cheap Esurance-looking 2D Flash cartoons instead of having them take place from a first-person view or even having them be FMVs from a third-person perspective in-engine.

[Stark]

And don't forget that rather than a message of freedom for the masses against tyrrany, she's clearly a drug courier.

[Ford Prefect]

And don't forget that rather than a message of freedom for the masses against tyrrany, she's clearly a drug courier.

Man, I could have done with a couple more missions about being a courier. I actually really, really enjoy Mirror's Edge (it even appeals to my preference for artistically worded pretentiousness! ), but there waso nly mission about getting a yellow bag from point a to point b. I was lied to!