/svidya/ - Strict /v/

Shit, I thought Dear Esther was boring as fuck. I had more fun with Gone Home. That being said I see what you're saying. I think Dear Esther would've been much more rewarding without any voiceover at all. It would've been a truly aimless exploration quest, making the experience that much more rewarding. Doubly so if the music was more memorable.

If you can create a truly interactive experience, then I think you've got a solid videogame. There was nothing interactive about the voiceover.

My biggest problem with "interactive story" genre games are that they are lazy. A truly well crafted game experience can take the narrative, the setting, the music, the game world, and everything that makes an "interactive story," and then seamlessly incorporate things like puzzles and adventure mechanics to make for something more than hand-holding. An "interactive story" is just a lazy adventure game. The developers thought "We have this great idea for a story and experience for the player, but the idea of making it dynamic and challenging is scary, so we'll just walk you through the game and then give you a 'The End' for your trouble."

You know what a great example of "interactive story" done right is? Myst. Drop someone in the middle of this crazy fucking setting, give them places to explore, puzzles to solve, story to unravel, and then leave them to their own devices and let them figure it out. Myst gives me the impression that Dear Esther and games like it were lazy. They were great for everything they did right, but the runner stopped short of the finish line and they just shipped it that way. Or maybe they weren't confident enough in the player to truly appreciate the narrative they created without taking the freedom to deviate from the path they laid out infront of you.

tl;dr: Myst kicks ass and Gone Home can suck my dick.

I actually quite enjoyed the vanishing of ethan carter. the end was a bit weak though. I wish the devs well and hope their next game is… more of a game.

I personally loved the Wolf Among Us from an aesthetic and story telling point of view. Then again, I'm always a sucker for retellings of stories or alternative realities. I think they have a place just like any other form of entertainment but should be labeled as such, A Visual Novel is not a Video Game yet the West has such a problem adopting that title because of the connotations associated with VNs. Interactive Story is a bit cumbersome but something like "Vidtales" or "E-stories" could easily be used as a replacement marketing phrase.

They definitely have a place, I think that even walking simulators have a place and can be created as well constructed games providing an enjoyable experience. I, personally, like the genre, its just that much of it is pretentious hipster trash.

>>15436

The Myst games were great, but I felt their stories started to get less interesting the more cinematic and conflict-driven they became. Never played Uru, but the Myst V comes along and kinda weirds me out with the story.

>>16293

>Never played Uru

It's good

And free

Go play it

>>15448

Loved the aesthetics in TWAU as well, but the storytelling was so shoddy that I found myself getting angrier and angrier as the episodes wound to a close.

>Bluebeard can DESTROY EVIDENCE IN A MURDER INVESTIGATION and nobody will so much as say a word about it; the only option you have is an offhand dialogue option when you should in fact be beating the shit out of him for being a criminal.

>Having money to give Toad at the very end is a complete waste, since he gets sent to the Farm regardless of whether or not he can pay for the glamour.

>Bigby apparently doesn't know of any criminal charges related to drugs or fraud with which to charge the Crooked Man. Instead he repeatedly accuses him of DA GORRUBJUN OF FABLEDOWN, despite having no evidence to prove something so vague.

>When you throw the Crooked Man down the Witching Well at the end, the witch bemoans how OUR COMMUNITY IS SHRINKING, because I guess she like to spend time with a criminal or something.

>Grendel gets his fucking ARM torn off in episode one and doesn't say a word about it to Bigby at all.

>Prince Lawrence being alive makes no difference whatsoever to anything. There is a single inconsequential conversation option with him, and that's it. He's barely in the fucking shot, too.

>Deciding whether or not to vandalize Georgie Porgie's club makes no difference at all. He gives you the info either way.

They are just incomplete to me.

In the case of Dear Esther they just made a map that's not even really explorable due to invisible walls everywhere added some pretentious, terrible narration and said "That'll do.".

They forgot the gameplay. There is really nothing else to it.

You can have everything those walking simulators have in a proper game and it'll be much better for it.

How can you even say "the island to explore" when you don't even get to do that? It's linear as fuck, you are slow and there is nothing to find in the entire "game".

Just Cause 2 actually has an island to explore and you can even do stuff and maneuver it well. True freedom instead of one path that you can't stray from and that wouldn't even give you any reason to do so as there is nothing of interest besides that path when it occasionally widens a tiny bit.

In short: They are complete crap without any value to them. Not artisticaly, not gamewise, not even as a tech demo as they can't even reach that level of pretty enviroments. They are outdone by actual games in every regard.

Kana: Little Sister, Colossal Cave, and Myst were good.

>>16315

I remember coming out of the spider caves into the cliffside face and being all WHOA at the view..

Oh how I wished we could have explored more of that island'd beaches and cliffs, or that city in a more open environment.

WHY IS THERE NO SEQUEL?? WHYYYYY

>>16352

Probably because Arkane think Dishonored is their spiritual successor to this game, despite Dishonored being quite bad.

>>15436

My biggest problem with adventure genre games is that they can also be lazy with gameplay. A lot of adventure game puzzles are just there for the sake of being more game-y, but don't thematically link to the story/setting/mood at all.

Myst's machine puzzles make sense because it's about exploring manufactured worlds. It's engineering tourism. On the other hand, you've got The Longest Journey whose kooky rubber duck puzzles are at odds with the serious-looking environments.

Gone Home's "puzzle gameplay" is figuring out what your family went through. The scoring and win state checking of this goal happens completely in the player's head rather than through the computer calculations. What's lazy about Gone Home is that most of this discovery is told through voiceover diary entries. The core gameplay of looking at stuff in the house contributes little to the narrative puzzle. It's a great experience when it does. For example, when you enter the master's bedroom, you worry because it looks like your parents left in a hurry. Or when you find your sister's gender swap fiction, it says something that she chose to hide it rather than burn it. But for the most part, house navigation just acts as a way for you to read things in correct order. It doesn't make a difference whether the diary page is in the attic or the dining room.

>>15422

Dear Esther would've been better if rather than the narration there was more environmental story telling, you as the play piece together what happened based on what you find and in that way the story could change because you might find something that leads you to one possible scenario in your head while missing something else.

Like Gone Home both games suffer from the story being told to you, if they didn't have narration they might have actually been somewhat good but I think the pretentious nature of the developers meant they didn't want people to miss out on their 'deep' and 'complex' narrative structure.

>>16334

>Kana: Little Sister

Wait. Isn't that an eroge?

>>16584

Yeah. Visual novels are interactive stories (very similar to interactive fiction), just not a walking simulator, and it was dramatic and written to get people emotionally involved.

>>16586

Shit if we're counting eroges, the game has changed.

They are complete bullshit. Computergames are now per definiton an interactive narrative medium. A developer team has to do its best to bring visuals, sound design, game mechanics, narrative, and level design together and form a coherent and enjoyable piece of art. The player has to experience the computergame by acting within it. Current design cliches often violate this directive and create sequences in which they put the player into the role of a helpless observer of a simulated enviroment in which he cant act, but rather is force to take in visual and audio information, stripped off of control of his avatar, barely retaining enough of it to follow the path at an agonizingly slow pace until he is given control again. A perversion of the scripted ingame storytelling of Half Life.

Walking simulators may have their place, but they are not computergames, as you correctly noted, but a big part of the industry hasnt yet realized this. I am afraid if we do not differentiate enough between these different types of interactive simulated enviroments, they will harm each other by spilling into each other where they dont belong.

>>16915

To add. Half Life is an "interactive story" done right, precisely because it never frustrates the player by stripping him of full control of his avatar for a prolonged amount of time like modern shooters tend to do. Half Life 2 already was a step in the wrong direction with more boring scripted story sequences. As things go, this device became more and more dumbed down and cliched over time and now we have that endure it in nearly ever major release. Take the beginning of video related for example. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRW0PnHj9So

Alan Wake is an otherwise excellent game, but every now and then it forcer the player into one of these excruciating walk n talk sequeces which add nothing to the game. To the contrarty, the hurt the pacing. And they were put it even when the game already has a vastly superior way to to slow down pace when needed. These sequences only exist because developers, like moviemakers, are not immune to cliches. I think the type of walking simulator generally consumed by the vidyagamer crowd simply leads this cliche to its logical conclusion. Lets burry it and leave it to the artsy crowd. Its a step away from videogames.