Where the story becomes the game

A particular genre of "games" has thankfully died a long time ago, that of the interactive movie. Imagine a game where you mostly just watch things and occasionally do a couple of things to get more of the story, though that doing part is maybe one percent of the overall experience.

"Wait", the clever reader says, "that sounds like games today, but with less doing things" and you are right of course. Essentially we have come down to sports games (including just driving around), sandbox games (mmo and non mmo) and then comes what is essentially the furtherance of a simple scroller game. Especially that last one adheres to the principle of going from point A to C by passing point B. No way around it. Although you have elements of sandboxes in many MMO's but really, if you look closely at it, things like WOW and SWTOR are heavy based on the quests you have to do in a pretty predefined order (to experience the story).

So, now that is the big selling point, the story.


That is both good and bad. On one hand you have a nice story being told, after all those side scrollers, jump and runs and so on, have their allure past getting power ups, killing enemies and rescuing (almost for most of the game play) the princess.

The bad is, once the story is over, you've seen it. I can tell you the story of Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas, though my versions will differ from yours in some details. It's worth it to play it through 3 or 5 times, but more than that gets tedious, because some things you have to do over and over again. Mario on the other hand, or SWTOR, you will get the same story from everyone who played (the same class). Once the story is over, replay-ability is rather low, which is why sandbox games are favored in that regard. Even if you reached 100% in Grand Theft Auto, which very often is no small feat (try it in San Andreas, see you in a few weeks), you can still go in and just drive around, do crazy stunts, try to get from A to B in the shortest time, with the most damage or mayhem. You can do a bit of a side job that you liked until you hate that particular one. You might want to replay missions, because they were so cool. You try to find all the easter eggs or listen to talk radio for hours.

As soon as the story becomes the game, there is very little to be done. Story over, game over. Yes, end game content, but I have the opinion that certain games have been a success despite what they call an endgame instead of it. There are few games that deliver a true endgame, or some that just leave it out entirely, in order for the players to create their own.

Another pitfall is stacking boxes, which creates problems another post also needs to mention.

For a long term game, destined to run for multiple years, building upon the story is in my view a rather big mistake and an easy one to avoid.