22 replies to this topic

[Rabain]

I think RPG games are better compared to plays than prose.

As with plays you can read them...but they are not meant to be just read...they are meant to be experienced.

Compare your experience of playing PST with your experience of...say...a stage production of Beowulf.

There are more points to compare...not just the dialog...and in this respect I think games are forming their own artform. Due to the extra dimension of actually participating and affecting the storyline with your actions (to varying degrees depending on the game) I think its all well and good to compare games and literature...but its like comparing a poem and a novel to one another.

There might be something to be gained but not as much as comparing a poem to another poem on the same subject or a novel to another novel on the same subject.

[Githzerai]

The living example of this is in my opinion none other than Oblivion - even though BG2 or PS:T are far more linear, their story still beats OB by a long shot.

Hmm, I am not really sure I agree-as far as I am concerned, the story of TES4 (the only one I played extensively) is extremely linear. All plot point are one-solution. You cannot choose to kill Martin, you have to go with Baurus, you have to fight the Daedra, otherwise the story will not progress to the single end. You always have but one way to progress. In PST, you can in most cases choose to slaughter your way through NPCs, or to negotiate, hell, especially the multiple endings put PST way above TES4 in my opinion as far as non-linearity is concerned...

I tend to look at the guild quests as equal to the main quest. I got the impression that the game treats them as such, and they have nearly the same magnitude of quality/number of quests as the MQ. But yes, the main quest is completely linear in both TES3 and TES4.

To me, ending the game as a happy guildmaster of X guild is an ending too from the roleplaying point of view. TES games are more about making you feel like a part of a realistic world with numerous possibilities of roleplaying than the story, whereas PS:T's story for example is still the main focus of the game even with all the secrets and side quests.

Edited by Githzerai, 15 February 2008 - 06:24 AM.

[Discordia]

you can deconstruct every great story...
even the stories of the great russian writers. (war and peace anyone?)
that aside...

crpgs (or computer games in general) are the next step of storytelling. first there were pictures (visual arts) , then there was language (storytelling, literature), then there were pictures with language (comics), then there was spoken language (radio), then there were moving visuals (cinema, television) added later by written and spoken language. then there were interactive stories with spoken and written language (p&p) and finally we have interactive stories with spoken and written language and moving visuals...

it is the culmination of every form of storytelling we know and since the genre is kinda young (30 years at best) you cant really reduce one of the greatest games of its kind to one of its aspect (the literary part) and compare that fraction of the whole experience to some of the best of an artform that is over 3000 years old.
well, you can, but it isnt exactly fair.

it is an entirely different experience and since it is you to find the evidence and piece it together it makes you more involved in the story and so on...