Stories in Games

Today, gaming industry is just like Hollywood industry with big budget on the line when it comes to making great games with complete package. Lots of money are being dumped in many departments you can think of (art, programming, development, management, quality assurance, sales, music and so on). Story is one of the most important elements a game can have. A good story of a game can indeed bring a lot of fans. My cousin don’t play games that much. She is more into rhythm games. However when she played Assassin Creed II, she keeps on saying to me when is the next one coming out. The reason is that although there are lots of good games with good gameplay with Assassin Creed series being one of them, the story and setting made her a complete fangirl of the series. Yup I agree with her, the story of Assassin Creed series is indeed too good that makes me buy more games of the series to know more about it.

 

Playing a game with a good story is like watching a good movie or reading a good book. Game is also a form of storyteller but in more interactive way and how you make the story revolve around your decisions and gameplay. That’s why Mass Effect series became so popular, since you can alter a story in many directions as possible with so many decisions at end. In Fallout 3, it’s the exact same case. The ending depends on how many quests you solved and how did you finished it. Bioware has been so intelligent when it comes to storymaking that they allowed story alterations between multiple games in the series. For example, Mass Effect 2 allows players to carry out the story based on how the player finished the first Mass Effect. Not to mention, Mass Effect 3 will have the same thing. So it turns out like this: there are multiple endings in ME1, multiple endings in ME2 and if you carry through ME1 story to ME2 there are even more endings. It’s just basic combination math: Number of ME1 endings multiplied by Number of ME2 endings (imagine if ME3 comes and if you multiply the number of endings in ME3 with the result then how many endings you can get). This improves replaybility to greater extent since players always want to know the story in every possible manner they can get. As a result Mass Effect is extremely popular.

 

Assassins Creed took a different step. The story has greater depth than those in Mass Effect series and each story in Assassins Creed leaves players with more questions than answers due its reputation of having WTF endings (ACI had WTF ending, ACII had WTF ending, AC Brotherhood had WTF ending). So gamers tend to play the game again to greater depth, searching for more clues and look around the net and even buy the AC game guides (I got some answers to some questions that I had in mind when I saw the ending of ACI in the ACII game guide). So what is the end result? With every games having WTF ending, it definitely builds up curiosity among players because humans are generally curious beings. This builds up anxiety and becomes the potential customers for the game. So as each AC game come out, the potential customer builds up because the story made them do so, since they keep on waiting for the next game to come out. I really wonder how many people will buy the game on the first day when ACIII comes out (which is the final installment of the series).

 

So after looking at this, did you get any answer or get more questions? (Source: Giantbomb)

 

Keeping the last statement in the above paragraph in mind, I can come up with another example Halo III. Remember that Microsoft had created a marketing campaign saying “we are going to finish the fight”? Yes the statement is a bold marketing move as people always tends to see the climatic ending of the games. That is why Halo 3 had scored a record sale numbers during the launch. Mass Effect series and Assassin Creed series are going to the same direction and I can’t really tell how big the games going to be sold when the final installment of both games come out. Speaking of final installment, nowadays gaming industry became quite intelligent of making a storyline and break it into trilogy. There are good games in the market which do have good storyline (example Enslaved, Heavenly Sword, Ninja Gaiden) but cannot build that amount of fanbase compared to the previous games I mentioned. The reason is that people bought it, played it, liked it, like the story and the game is done with a proper ending, case ends. There is no guarantee that any game similar or a sequel based on the game will have good sales since people are left out with no curiosity. It seems the game developers are starting over everything again to build up yet another group of fanbase with another great game. To solve this problem, there is a series called Fallout, where the games have different storylines. How Fallout tend to have a large fanbase? It is because they already build up an extremely impressive setting (dealing post-apocalyptic era after a Great War with 1950 cultural setting) for the story for all the games in the series. If you need to read the setting with complete details, then you need to go to the Fallout wiki site (http://fallout.wikia.com/wiki/Category:Fallout_setting).

 

Post apocalyptic California in Fallout 3 New Vegas (Source: Fallout III wiki site)

 

Some of us had played games since the retro eras (from the Atari gaming days) and today most of us tend to bash the companies for making the game short or making the game not that fun to play. We seem to point out that nowadays gaming companies think only money. However we all have to agree with one point, they all have improved on making great storyline and story settings. Well they should, since good stories, brings good bucks.