Quote:
Originally Posted by Matata
I think video games are a pretty poor medium for linear story telling, so I don't even touch games like TLoU. Cut scenes just kill the flow of gameplay and remind you that none of your choices actually matter, because all you're doing is following a linear path between cut scenes, and watching polygon models 'act' is always pretty cringey for me. I think it works better with games that have a sense of humor (GTAV), but generally I just want game play out of my games.
I much prefer the story telling of games like Skyrim because you create your own story by choosing how your character interacts with the world, merging the gameplay and storytelling together, rather than have them constantly interrupt each other.
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Obviously we're getting deep into preferences here, but I would defend TLoU in that it does do a good job of inserting most of the dialogue and character development among the normal gameplay, and uses cutscenes in a fairly limited fashion.
As for linear storytelling... I think I disagree with you there. This might have a lot to do with me being an active tabletop/live roleplayer, but I've always found the "ability to tell your own story" in digital games to be super limited.
To me the real strength of digital storytelling lies in telling fairly linear stories, while really drawing you in to experience the path of the protagonist in a way that few other formats can do. Usually this is best achieved by inserting some level of player agency in the decision making, but the limitations of having to create content/response for anything the player does means, to me, that a highly autonomous player experience tend to be somewhat shallow.
It's actually why I think the best player choice in a game is of the type where most of the work is put into giving a lot of context and background before the choice, and focusing less on trying to create "different paths" after the choice. The Witcher games are a great example of this style of storytelling. They're fairly linear in what actually happens, but the choices you make still feel weighty.
A good choice in games is one where the impact of the decision is less important and less interesting than the process of making that choice.