Too Human, or Too Poorly Written?

I talk about plot quite often on this blog. In Hollywood, a film can still do well without a good plot if it is well-directed or acted, has great action scenes, or generally contains lots of eye-candy (see: Avatar). For novels, plot is considerably more important, though, again, not strictly a necessity. Instead of being able to fall back on a great actor, director, or visual effects artist, a novelist without a plot can create an interesting setting, or write so well that plot becomes secondary to his or her style.

So what about videogames?

Better yet, why should we even care about the plot of a videogame?

It's an understatement to say that games have come a long way in the past quarter-century.  Thirty years ago today, the world met Pac-Man.  Twenty-five years ago, North America saw the first Famicom, or Nintendo Entertainment System, along with everyone but John McCain's favorite plumber, Mario.  At that time, the pinnacle of electronic home entertainment was an 8-bit man in overalls hopping across platforms as he bounces on the heads of mushroom men and evil turtles.  Any background or story pretty much spawned from what you made of the game's pixelated world.

Today's game systems feature increasingly robust online capabilities, so that now anyone can experience the joy of playing Halo 3 (rated M, meaning that you're supposed to be over 18 before you play it) with a horde of prepubescent 11-year-olds who are more concerned with taking their new dirty words for a spin than they are actually playing.  The online mode has fundamentally altered the layout of today's gaming community.  Now, with every game made, the producers have an important choice to make: do we make a single-player game, or one with lots of multiplayer capabilities?  On older systems, when they went with the latter, the result was rarely anything special, and the single-player experience suffered accordingly.  If a game tried to be multiplayer-centric, it pretty much had to abandon a single-player mode entirely to be successful (see: Mario Party).  It seems like the games I remember playing the most were the rare gems that found that balance between being something that I could play when my friends weren't there and something that I could play when they were, like Star Fox 64, 007: Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, and even Super Smash Brothers.

Somewhat ironically, now that the Xbox 360 is around, and its online modes are so good (it comes with a headset that you can talk into!) multiplayer games have undergone a sort of reversal, where now it's actually quite difficult to play one while in the same room as your friends.  Splitscreen is so 2003, gosh.  Seems like the only games that still do that are Rock Band/Guitar Hero and just about anything on the Nintendo Wii, which shuns online modes in general.  This worked out great for myself and my friends, who had the joy of growing up with local multiplayer and then gaining online multiplayer once we split apart for college.

It's hard to generalize about plots in games, since the genres are so varied.  Of course RPGs (Role-Playing Games) are going to have better plots than a racing game or a sports game.  In fact, when it comes to a sports game, I don't want a plot (ahem Blitz: The League)!  Therefore, for the sake of argument, I will be referring to the genres that are technically supposed to have stories to them: RPGs, Action-Adventures, FPSs (First-Person Shooters).  As a side-note, though, I recently played a demo of a new racer called Split/Second, and while it didn't exactly have a plot, its premise was simple and brilliant.  You're a contestant on a reality show, and during the race you have the opportunity to press a button that will blow things up as your competitors drive past them, thereby potentially destroying their cars and launching you ahead of them in the standings.  It was uncomplicated, effective, and intuitive, and I highly recommend it.

So, what would you do if you were told to write a storyline for a videogame?

Would you write a linear plot - like a book/movie - that happened to feature lots of opportunities for battles (some kind of war game, perhaps)?  Would you write a detective story with branching plotlines depending on what the gamer uncovers (like the excellent Heavy Rain on the PS3)?  Or would you write the flimsiest piece of crap that you could to allow for maximum gaming in the hopes that the game developers have more talent than you do?  Do you present your story through in-game cutscenes, rendered cutscenes, text, or dialog that goes on while the gamer plays?  Do you hire voice-actors, and if so, should you try to get a big name (like Haley Joel Osment for the Kingdom Hearts games or John Cleese for Fable III) or find the cheapest actors you can (Dynasty Warriors!  Just Cause 2!)?  If the setting is fictional, how much backstory do you provide?

The list seems endless, and just about every option has been tried, to varying effect.  I've seen games with no voice acting but the most wonderful storylines (Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy VI, Skies of Arcadia) and games with voice-acting better than many animated movies (Kingdom Hearts, Bioware games like Mass Effect and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic).  I've seen games where the world's history is presented to you only in the instruction booklet (this happens more often than you might think), and games where a character walks and talks to you while you still control your own guy (making for some hilarious moments of personal space invasion that, sadly, doesn't even faze the speaker), and games with slick, stylized cutscenes that look more like comic book frames than anything else (Marvel: Ultimate Alliance 2).  A great story can come in just about any form, when it comes to games.  It just depends on what the developers have at their disposal.

Believe it or not, I'm writing this post specifically because of one game, one that is somewhat related to the next post that I shall be writing.  It's called Too Human (for the Xbox 360, 2008), a hack-n-slash, loot-drop game whose setting is a sort of science-fiction retelling of Norse mythology.

Two quick, unimportant definitions first:

Hack-n-slash: the type of game where you control one guy (Baldur, in this case) who slices his way through hundreds of enemies as he progresses from room to room.  You have a health bar that depletes every time you get hit.  These games are primarily about the action.

Loot-drop: when the enemies die, they routinely drop new weapons and armor for you to try on or sell.

Yay!  Anyway, I knew very little about Norse mythology going into this game.  I knew that Thor was the god of thunder (and a great character to play as in Marvel: Ultimate Alliance because everytime you kill something he says "The son of Odin is triumphant!" or some other nonsense), and Loki was the trickster god responsible for Jim Carrey's The Mask, and Odin was important somewhere in there, but that was about it.

The story of this game is presented as if you have been dropped right into the middle of the game.  You are given no backstory except through things that character mention off-hand, and with everyone who speaks to you you must figure out who the hell they are on your own.  You learn that Baldur's wife or something died at some point, and after a mission or two you learn that some guy named Hod was responsible.  For the entire time, the game plays as if you are somehow supposed to know the full backstory already, and believe me, it's frustrating.  I realize that game developers probably aren't all that concerned with getting the gamer emotionally invested in their game, but it couldn't hurt to try.  Some games do well with less story (like the "sandbox" style Just Cause 2, where I spend more time hijacking helicopters, flying them as high as they'll go, then blowing them up and freefalling for a good five minutes before pulling my chute as close to the ground as I can without giving the landscape a fresh pockmark), but your missions in Too Human are not just to go out and kill mindless monsters; they are directly involved with the game's overall plot, like the mission where your character decides to hunt Hod down and kill him for revenge.

After thoroughly not caring, I went and did a bit of research on Norse mythology, thereby learning much of the backstory on which this game apparently based itself, but even then the game made changes that still elude me.  Granted, I've yet to finish the game, so perhaps all will be revealed in time, but there's a subtle difference between evoking mystery and confusion, as I believe I mentioned in a recent post (the one on The Warrior Heir, I think), and the writers for this game don't know the difference.

That, and the gameplay's not very fun, either.

I'm not saying every game has to have a well-told story. That'd be ridiculous, and more often than not all I want to do is plop down in my chair and beat up a few thugs or blow up some expensive-looking machinery or kill 2000 unfortunate Chinese men from the Han dynasty.  I'm not even saying that all games in the style of Too Human have to have engaging plots (just look at Blizzard's masterpiece, Diablo II: 95% action, 5% plot, and it's one of the best games I own).  I'm just saying that if you're going to make a game as obviously plot-centric as Too Human was, then spend the extra money on hiring writers who give a crap.  Hell, I'd have done it for free if they'd have just called me up.  I could have written something better.  Or, ideally, they'd have remade Too Human as a game version of Gene Wolfe's The Wizard Knight series, which I shall be reviewing next.  Stay tuned if you want to hear what a REAL story based on Norse mythology is like...