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. :)

[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?