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

[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.