I have this frustration with video games that I think other tabletop gamers may have. I wish they provided surprising stories. It might make me a swine but since I'm talking of video games the powers that be might give me a pass. The frustration I'm talking about is nagging me again and again because it feels like video game designers should have the technical capacity to do something about it.

Video games are pretty good at delivering a sandbox gameplay. The first time I experienced it was when I played Elite: as a spaceship owner in this game I could choose to become a merchant, a bounty hunter, a pirate, a miner etc... There was kind of a story out there: an entrepreneurial pilot ascension to success as he's upgrading his vessel. But it was a bit cold and mostly in my head.

This sandbox gameplay has been expanded upon by other games like say the GTA series or Daggerfall. What they did was to bolt upon the sandbox some predefined story arcs that players are invited to explore but are kind of optional since you can still enjoy the world and random short missions and dismiss the "save the world/avenge the death of your uncle" main story.

I find it interesting that those two extremes coexist in those games:

• railroady story arcs which at best offer one or two optional path to resolve but OTOH bring a feeling of involvement with the main characer
• short missions which should feel more surprising since they're generated randomly. The problem being that the random table was so short that it felt repetitive pretty quick and also it felt useless in way of providing a story.

I was hoping that at some point game designers would figure out a way to make random missions/story arcs more satisfying. It should be technically possible. Maybe by making NPCs more recurrent and evolve differently over time because of your character's actions. Or maybe by building story arcs randomly out of some virtual lego sets of story pieces.

Artificial intelligence and physics engines managed to become things of their own, even middlewares sometimes, that video game designers can reuse inside different games because foes need to make tactical decisions to get a challenging game or bottles need to break when droped if you want to improve verisimilitude. I wish dynamic story telling had emerged as a branch of video game design the same way. And I'm surprised it hasn't because at least I feel the need for it.

Ok I think I'm done ranting for now.

This is why I only play strategy and war games. Games with stories are pretty much always just boring; and even if the story is interesting you can only play it through once.

Quote from: noisms;372547This is why I only play strategy and war games. Games with stories are pretty much always just boring; and even if the story is interesting you can only play it through once.

Well you could play it more than once but chances are you have another reason to do it: different character build, different overall strategy, 100% completion or whatever. But I'm with you on the lack of replay value for this type of game.

You need to play better games.

Fallout 3 is chock full of BOTH sandboxy fun AND some pretty decent story, and all with the freedom to approach it in whatever order you like.

GTA is a horrible sandbox game from a story perspective, because there simply isn't one outside the construct of defined, ordered missions.  

A good sandbox RPG like the Fallout series however, suffers no such failing.

I've found that GTA Vice City has very little replay value after one gets 100% completion.

About the only "sandbox" stuff I found to do after 100% completion, was to go around killing cops.  The easiest place to do this was at the mall in the northeast part of the map, where one stands behind the wall surrounding the east side of the mall.  Behind the wall you can fire at the cops, but the cops can't hit you with their bullets.  That got pretty boring after awhile.

Quote from: J Arcane;372590You need to play better games.

Fallout 3 is chock full of BOTH sandboxy fun AND some pretty decent story, and all with the freedom to approach it in whatever order you like.

GTA is a horrible sandbox game from a story perspective, because there simply isn't one outside the construct of defined, ordered missions.  

A good sandbox RPG like the Fallout series however, suffers no such failing.

I'll also nominate the other great Bethesda game series - the Elder Scrolls, including Oblivion. They do an amazing job of replicating a pen and paper feel.

-clash

Quote from: flyingmice;372596I'll also nominate the other great Bethesda game series - the Elder Scrolls, including Oblivion. They do an amazing job of replicating a pen and paper feel.

-clash

Oblivion is pretty awesome, though avoid the main storyline like the plague unless you like pointless repetition and want to lose all respect for Sean Bean as an actor.  

Morrowind I could never get into.  The oppressive brownness of it all, and the obtuseness of many of the quests and navigation, always put me off.

Quote from: ggroy;372594I've found that GTA Vice City has very little replay value after one gets 100% completion.

About the only "sandbox" stuff I found to do after 100% completion, was to go around killing cops.  The easiest place to do this was at the mall in the northeast part of the map, where one stands behind the wall surrounding the east side of the mall.  Behind the wall you can fire at the cops, but the cops can't hit you with their bullets.  That got pretty boring after awhile.

San Andreas was the only one I ever did more than just fuck around in for half an hour before getting bored.

The massiveness of the gameworld, and the fun of exploring stuff, all backed by my own custom soundtrack, was pretty awesome, and I poured nearly as many hours into it for a while there than I'd usually pour even into an MMO.

Quote from: J Arcane;372590You need to play better games.

Fallout 3 is chock full of BOTH sandboxy fun AND some pretty decent story, and all with the freedom to approach it in whatever order you like.

GTA is a horrible sandbox game from a story perspective, because there simply isn't one outside the construct of defined, ordered missions.  

A good sandbox RPG like the Fallout series however, suffers no such failing.

Am I right to assume that Fallout 3 is quite similar in term of gameplay to Oblivion? Main story and side quests, several way to achieve goals, nicely scripted game that (almost) hides the railroad?

That's cool, I'll give it a try when I can.  

What I'm complaining about though is that in the end all these games are scripted. They may have planned 12 different endings and many side quests to pursue/ignore and a plethora of NPCs to befriend/antagonize/ignore... But in the end it's still one big rigidly scripted game. It's awesome for the replay value, but there will be a point where a player has explored most significant choices and won't be surprised by the game anymore.

What I wish for is a dynamic story that would surprise me, especially when I play for the n-th time. And I would be fine if it felt a bit constrained like a choose your own adventure book... if at least the story arcs made me feel like the book was rewritten every time.

FO3 is indeed somewhat like Oblivion, just better in every conceivable way.  The main story doesn't suck like Ob's does, and there's even more cool side quests and hidden things to find and such than Oblivion ever got close to.

The VATS system also makes it a little more friendly for those of us who aren't always good at "twitch" gaming.  

It's a really great game, probably right up in my top 1 or 2 RPG games of all time.  I just have so much fun with it every time I load it up and just start wandering the wastes.  In some ways, as a sandbox game, I think it even succeeds better than the original Fallouts, leaving me hard to decide which would even come out on top.  

Also, definitely play it on PC.  The modding community for this game is insanely huge, there's just so much cool stuff and worthwhile gameplay mods and additions that it can't be missed.

Technical limitations and design limitations, mostly.  They have to make sure people can't break the game *and* that people are presented with a fun experience.

You see some developers trying for the completely emergent, AI/faction driven type gameplay, and they usually fail miserably (STALKER, which I love dearly for its attempts at emulating a post nuclear zone, but didn't meet any of its original design goals).

I think it's one of the things that separates tabletop from video games, and is tabletop's biggest strength.  When you have humans involved in running the show, you can ad-hoc things as necessary to produce satisfying results.

Still, there are certain things like Valve's Left 4 Dead AI, which dynamically constructs and alters levels, that could be expanded upon to handle larger worlds.  You're looking at a ton of work, and never-ending bug/playtesting, though.  

I mean, Beth didn't want to make important NPCs in FO3 permanently killable because they were afraid of dead-ends and broken scripts.  Can you imagine a video-game developer trying to tackle a completely emergent and reactive game-world?

(I do agree about FO3, though.  Great game, and one of the few in the last couple of years that I played through in a single week.  Only two games hold that honor)