WARNING: this article has some (mostly minor) spoilers for various games.
We all know that games can offer great stories. Anyone who says otherwise is most likely ignorant or has an agenda against gaming. However, there are some commonly repeated mistakes in how games tell their stories. These mistakes hold back the medium as a whole, and often serve as barriers to newcomers, and unnecessary annoyances to veterans. I'll give a couple of them, along with games they appear in.
Too Much Exposition At One Time
This occurs when a game decides to dump exposition the player in a long, often unskippable, ream of text, voice acting, and/or cutscenes. It almost always destroys the pacing of the game, because of the unnatural and excessive method of clueing the player up on how the world works. I understand that sometimes exposition is necessary, but it should be spaced out evenly, and given at appropriate times in the story, via appropriate methods. For example, to inform the player of the game world's history, an in-game book would be far more appropriate than a character spouting off endless lines of historical facts, unless these facts are so crucial that they cannot be conveyed in any other way.
EXAMPLE: Super Paper Mario, in the form of TWENTY minutes of cutscenes and dialogue right at the start of the game (possibly the WORST time to have an exposition dump).
Unskippable Cutscenes
This is one of the most IRRITATING mistakes a game can make, ESPECIALLY when replaying it, even for ten minutes. Christ, just let the player get on with the bloody game! I know you want players to experience your "masterpiece" of a story, but don't prioritise it over fun.
EXAMPLE: The Walking Dead - this game NEVER lets you skip a single cutscene, even when playing through it for the umpteenth time. This really discouraged me from playing to see different choices, simply because it's too damn tedious to do so. What's worse is that Telltale Games keep making the same idiotic mistake in ALL of their games! FFS.
Making Gameplay Worse Because Story
Okay, so this is a bit of a general one, but it basically means any time the actual gameplay is hindered in some way in order for the game to tell its story. What's sad about this one is that it is so easily AVOIDABLE! I love a good story as much as the next guy, but PLEASE don't make it so inconvenient for me to make progress in the game that I just want to give up!
EXAMPLE: The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC - as awesome as this game's story is, it makes this unforgivable goof: it disables all the airships in Chapter 8, AND all the orbments, forcing the player to walk everywhere on foot!
Poor (English) Voice Acting
This mistake is self-explanatory, and unfortunately occurs frequently in Japanese RPGs.
EXAMPLE: Final Fantasy Type-0 HD - one of the most egregious and most recent examples of shoddy voice acting. Most of the characters just sound WRONG. The rest of them speak like robots speaking English for the first time. This is pretty sad because the game actually has an interesting story.
A Lack of Diversity
Okay, so this point is a bit controversial, but screw it - it's important to me, mmkay? Far too many games have middle-aged, bearded white guys as the protagonist. It's really boring and lazy. Why not try a different protagonist? Variety is the spice of life, after all.
EXAMPLE: Prototype - a game with an extremely vanilla protagonist, about as generic as you could possibly get! Oh well, at least he has interesting superpowers.
Too Many Damn Power Fantasies
Too many games focus on making the player feel like an overpowered badass, instead of challenging them thematically and narratively. This is the easy way out for most developers, and it's been proven to sell a shit ton of games, BUT it's SO boring!! The irony is that the more power fantasy there is in the gameplay, the less choice there is in the story - the player basically has no option other than to become the saviour of the whole world/universe/human race.
EXAMPLE: Mass Effect 3 - as much as I LOVE the Mass Effect games, what I hated is that they dumbed down the narrative choices available to the player, to the extent that there is no "evil character" option - you can't choose to fuck over the galaxy or join the enemy; you can only choose between being a "nice guy" hero or a "douchecanoe" hero, i.e. Paragon and Renegade, respectively.
Feel free to comment or even give your favourite examples of mistakes in video game story telling!
We all know that games can offer great stories. Anyone who says otherwise is most likely ignorant or has an agenda against gaming. However, there are some commonly repeated mistakes in how games tell their stories. These mistakes hold back the medium as a whole, and often serve as barriers to newcomers, and unnecessary annoyances to veterans. I'll give a couple of them, along with games they appear in.
Too Much Exposition At One Time
This occurs when a game decides to dump exposition the player in a long, often unskippable, ream of text, voice acting, and/or cutscenes. It almost always destroys the pacing of the game, because of the unnatural and excessive method of clueing the player up on how the world works. I understand that sometimes exposition is necessary, but it should be spaced out evenly, and given at appropriate times in the story, via appropriate methods. For example, to inform the player of the game world's history, an in-game book would be far more appropriate than a character spouting off endless lines of historical facts, unless these facts are so crucial that they cannot be conveyed in any other way.
EXAMPLE: Super Paper Mario, in the form of TWENTY minutes of cutscenes and dialogue right at the start of the game (possibly the WORST time to have an exposition dump).
Unskippable Cutscenes
This is one of the most IRRITATING mistakes a game can make, ESPECIALLY when replaying it, even for ten minutes. Christ, just let the player get on with the bloody game! I know you want players to experience your "masterpiece" of a story, but don't prioritise it over fun.
EXAMPLE: The Walking Dead - this game NEVER lets you skip a single cutscene, even when playing through it for the umpteenth time. This really discouraged me from playing to see different choices, simply because it's too damn tedious to do so. What's worse is that Telltale Games keep making the same idiotic mistake in ALL of their games! FFS.
Making Gameplay Worse Because Story
Okay, so this is a bit of a general one, but it basically means any time the actual gameplay is hindered in some way in order for the game to tell its story. What's sad about this one is that it is so easily AVOIDABLE! I love a good story as much as the next guy, but PLEASE don't make it so inconvenient for me to make progress in the game that I just want to give up!
EXAMPLE: The Legend of Heroes: Trails in the Sky SC - as awesome as this game's story is, it makes this unforgivable goof: it disables all the airships in Chapter 8, AND all the orbments, forcing the player to walk everywhere on foot!
Poor (English) Voice Acting
This mistake is self-explanatory, and unfortunately occurs frequently in Japanese RPGs.
EXAMPLE: Final Fantasy Type-0 HD - one of the most egregious and most recent examples of shoddy voice acting. Most of the characters just sound WRONG. The rest of them speak like robots speaking English for the first time. This is pretty sad because the game actually has an interesting story.
A Lack of Diversity
Okay, so this point is a bit controversial, but screw it - it's important to me, mmkay? Far too many games have middle-aged, bearded white guys as the protagonist. It's really boring and lazy. Why not try a different protagonist? Variety is the spice of life, after all.
EXAMPLE: Prototype - a game with an extremely vanilla protagonist, about as generic as you could possibly get! Oh well, at least he has interesting superpowers.
Too Many Damn Power Fantasies
Too many games focus on making the player feel like an overpowered badass, instead of challenging them thematically and narratively. This is the easy way out for most developers, and it's been proven to sell a shit ton of games, BUT it's SO boring!! The irony is that the more power fantasy there is in the gameplay, the less choice there is in the story - the player basically has no option other than to become the saviour of the whole world/universe/human race.
EXAMPLE: Mass Effect 3 - as much as I LOVE the Mass Effect games, what I hated is that they dumbed down the narrative choices available to the player, to the extent that there is no "evil character" option - you can't choose to fuck over the galaxy or join the enemy; you can only choose between being a "nice guy" hero or a "douchecanoe" hero, i.e. Paragon and Renegade, respectively.
Feel free to comment or even give your favourite examples of mistakes in video game story telling!
