Writing plots for first-person shooters

[thewayne]

Back lots of years ago, you had Doom. Zero story. Move from room to room and shoot things. Then came Quake. Sort of a story, nothing to brag about. Quake begat Half-Life. Quite a story! And it apparently continues into subsequent releases. The Half-Life spin-offs, Code Blue and whatever the Marine one was, didn't have much in the way of story as they presupposed that you were familiar with it from HL.

Here, an extensive interview with a script writer for a FPS game company! The Slashdot thread has some interesting comments, including something that I probably will steal if I ever run a SF RPG campaign.

http://www.bit-tech.net/gaming/2007/07/23/writing_for_the_lcd__fps_games/1

http://games.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/07/24/1319256

Comments

[neefsck.livejournal.com]

You've left out System Shock 2. :)

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I never played the System Shock series. I've never done console games (I had five operations on my right thumb and I really can't play "thumb twitchers") and I think one of the HL spin-offs was probably the last FPS that I played.

I take that back. HL would probably have been the newest FPS that I played at that time. I subsequently played (most of) the original No One Lives Forever, which definitely had scripted story behind it, but I don't know exactly when those two came out in relation to one another.

[silveradept]

It's interesting - once Half-Life proved that you could tell a story from the first-person perspective and make it interesting, that's the new trend, away from the previous "Here's the level, there's the baddies, find guns, ammo, health, and keys as needed" method.

Does this reflect a greater trend toward making story-driven games, even where sometimes just a minimal amount of plot and a maximal amount of gameplay would be better?

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Story/plot size is an interesting discussion point, especially if you compare it to the movies, which is probably the closest point of comparison. I have heard, though not verified, that the typical Hollywood screen play is only about 30 pages long. I'm sure it would vary depending on how verbose and how many speaking roles were in it.

I would hope that it would produce more story-driven games, and I believe that it probably does. I read that one game only had ten hours of material in it! I would be verily pithed if I spent $60 on a game and finished the whole thing i one marathon session.

[silveradept]

30 pages, really? For a 2.5 hour movie. Most interesting. I doubt, somehow, that game scripts would be that small, especially for those going for quite a bit of plot and backstory. Unless a lot of the action in the screenplay is understated and left to the director and actors to make happen, kind of like it is in some plays.

A 10-hour game for $60 would be massively overpriced. I would be pissed at it as well for giving me only ten hours. (Now, if that were "10 hours if you barrel straight through and ignore the many hours that can be spent on easily-accessible backstory and sidequests that will enhance your experience", then I might be a little more forgiving. At the same time, paying $60 for something that isn't entertaining or very intensive but drags on forever, well, that's no good, either.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Probably more common for the ~100 minute movies. A lot of the backstory simply isn't there for the actors, the writer works it out with the director/producer and they have enough add'l info that when the talent asks "what's my motivation?" they can fill in details that might have been overlooked by the talent.

[silveradept]

Okay. As I recall, from the commentary on The Blues Brothers, Dan Aykroyd's screenplay had to be trimmed down some because he was writing in all the backstory right with the rest. That said, the Blues Brothers is a fantastic movie, probably because of all of that material there.

I just think that it would be better to have all the material there, so that the subtle details get worked out right - knowing why you're going out and killing everything in your path changes things.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Well, amongst the many aphorisms of the movie biz is "show, don't tell". Using Blues Bros. as an example, their meeting up with Rufus after their meeting the Penguin gave you enough establishing background on Jake & Elwood without having to spend screen time on their childhood while costing just a few lines of dialog.

Maybe the aphorism is "tell, don't show." Dunno. Just woke up. Maybe it's "a picture's worth a thousand words, and vice-versa."

[silveradept]

Fair enough. We don't necessarily need to see or be told all the backstory, but knowing that it's there and has been written out would be useful as a resource to consult with. And with scenes like the one you mention, we get hints at a more complete existence, rather than "here's the situation and the characters, and the parts of the background that are directly relevant to the plot. Enjoy."

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Blues Brothers is one of my all-time fav films. The Three B's, as I call them: Blade Runner, Blues Brothers, and Buckaroo Banzai. I know Blues Bros quite well, and sadly, to a degree, I also like the second one.

[silveradept]

The second movie was an excellent example of how Elwood Blues tried to both adapt to and resist the modern world after spending 18 years in prison. Considering how many of the original cast had since passed on, it was going to be a different movie. I liked it, too, in those moments when it was more like the original movie.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

The music was great, the story was so-so. I can only think of three or four deaths off-hand: Belushi, Cab Calloway, and of course Ray Charles. I don't remember if Johnny Lee Hooker passed away before or after BB 2000, but he was really a bit part/cameo role.

[silveradept]

Those bit parts were pretty important, I'd say, for setting the musical stage for the story. But yes, the music was great - the story felt like it was an excuse to ahve lots of zany car chases, which was an appealing part of the original.