The Art of Storytelling

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Written by BuckGB on January 20th, 2008

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So, what of the future for stories in games? The Holy Grail of plot-based games has always been an entirely freeform storyline. In other words, every play-through of such a game would be entirely different with almost limitless story branches, AI characters that react differently dependent on your every move and endings which aren't even set, let alone multiple finales.

Games through the ages, such as Deus Ex and the original Fallout games, have toyed with storylines that lead to multiple endings along numerous plot branches. Nevertheless, such games have been few and far between. Even when developers have nailed such a task (with much praise showered on them for doing so), so far it has only been a step along the long road to the aforementioned Holy Grail. However, there are clear constraints on developers which mean that such a mammoth project just isn't on the cards in the foreseeable future.

Rhianna tells us, in no uncertain terms, the issue at hand. "One word: Budget. It's simply not a practical use of resources to create oodles and oodles of content that might not be seen by all your players. However, I think there's a lot you can do, both in smaller scale narrative, and in overall game design to tailor a story (sometimes in quite small ways) to an individual player. Bioware and Obsidian are very good at that. But the branching narrative approach (which really has to be tied into branching gameplay) is not always practical for smaller studios."

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