Tag Archive for 'Hero'

REVIEW: ‘Fable II’ Needs More Than A Hero’s Sandbox

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on November 14, 2008
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Michael the Farmer has a bag of gold for you. Do you a) slice him in half, b) shoot him in the groin, c) light him on fire, or d) fart and do hand puppets until he gives it to you.

Fable II is made up of choices like this, all of them part of a long process of defining your blank slate hero, and the game is a major improvement over Molyneux’s first fairy tale simulator.

Combat is fun and occasionally strategic, with combat, ranged, and magic attacks. Quests offer diverse, story-driven objectives, from “clear the mine” to “break the girl’s heart.” Minigames, town interactions, and a robust bartering and land-buying economy fill the gaps and make Fable II’s world of Albion feel complete and realistic.

This world is a sandbox for your hero, who starts out an orphan and is raised by gypsies. Through actions and behavior — what you eat, what you wear, how you deal with an angry ghost or a group of slavers — you define what that hero is like and how the world views him.

Your actions swing you between good and evil, pure and corrupt, with many possible variations, and your appearance changes along with it. You also become funny or frightening depending on how you deal with people, and attractive or ugly depending on your clothes, tattoos, scars, and purity.

It’s a complicated system, but so’s life. In the end you’re left with a character who feels entirely unique and who was slowly simmered over 20 hours of gameplay and choices rather than 10 minutes in the character generation microwave.

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Make Your Own ‘Humble Origins’

Published
on November 5, 2008
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Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey can frame an epic tale or be a fallback for bad storytelling, says game writer Corvus on his blog.

“While good writers can use the monomyth structure to great effect and weave a compelling tale that is both familiar and new,” writes Corvus, “lazy writers stick so closely to the formula that they actually highlight the formula within the text itself.”

Corvus looks at how the “monomyth” was implemented in the first two Fallout games, Fable and its recent sequel, and Dungeon Siege, “the most obvious and transparent monomyth setup of them all.”

In the opening cinematic, the narrator states that a humble farmer is all that stands between the kingdom and encroaching chaos. Then you pick up your hoe and start smacking goblins — an activity that continues until Burt Reynolds becomes king.

I’ve written about the Hero’s Journey before, and about the “humble origins” of player-created heroes in games. Nearly always these characters start as orphans or amnesiacs, with no interesting past but what the player decides to give them.

The original Fallout, as Corvus points out, left it up to the player to decide why the protagonist was selected to leave the vault and why he chose to save the world. The Vault Dweller could be the strongest and most noble, or a cunning snake who broke free to enrich himself.

Fable, on the other hand, called the protagonist Hero, and made him weepingly seek vengeance for his family’s murder. The game’s climax is his fate, not something chosen as it is with the Vault Dweller.

Developers need to create new ways to set the player on the Hero’s Journey without feeling dominated by it. Mass Effect allowed the player to chose Commander Shepard’s birthplace and military background, which I think is a good start.

MMO Players Love Underdog Role, Says Daedalus Project Poll

Published
on October 10, 2008
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Massively multiplayer online games are all about choosing a role for your character to fill in a complete and crowded world, and a new study at the always fascinating Daedalus Project asks MMO players eight questions about the roles they love to role-play.

The most interesting finding had to do with game factions.

“In many games where there are warring factions, disparities between the faction populations typically arise,” said the report. Rebels outnumbered Imperials in Star Wars Galaxies, there are more Alliance than Horde in World of Warcraft, and so far Destruction is destroying Order in Warhammer Online.

Yet the 80% of respondents in the Daedalus Project poll said they would prefer to take up arms for the minority side if given a choice. Who wouldn’t want to play the desperate partisan struggling against overwhelming odds? Or maybe they just want to avoid waiting in line for player vs player battlegrounds.

Another interesting conclusion came from gender choices in character creation. According to the poll, men are four times as likely as women to create a character of the opposite gender, with 26% of men admitting to gender-bending.

When it comes to character classes, things stayed pretty even between the four archetypes of warrior, cleric, mage and archer. “The stereotypical gender difference is also seen,” found the report. “Men prefer to be warriors while women prefer to be healers. There were no gender differences in the archer or mage classes.”

The poll also asked participants about their favorite settings and which roles they preferred in specific settings. It’s worth taking a look at, if just for the comparison between male and female players.

AGDC: ‘Tomb Raider: Underworld’ Developer Pushes Refined Storytelling

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on September 19, 2008
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In a presentation at the Austin Game Developers Conference, Eric Lindstrom, creative director of Tomb Raider: Underworld, pushed for new storytelling techniques and more emphasis on story during development, reports Gamasutra.

Lindstrom doesn’t mean to tackle the problem of innovative interactive storytelling — because others are working on that. He’s talking about using the basic tools that have been used in other media, which “are not being used at all, or not being used effectively, and there’s no reason why they can’t.”

Here’s his mini-manifesto:

Stop saying that storytelling is less important than game mechanics. “There are lots of people who say this, but they don’t really mean it.”

Start putting storytelling on par with other pillars of game creation. “There are plenty of people out there who say this is true, but when push comes to shove, it’s not true.”

Stop hiding behind the word “interactive”. “If there’s really one thing to take away today — it’s that ‘oh, but it’s interactive’ is used as an excuse for bad storytelling all the time, and it just doesn’t wash.”

Start training and employing storytelling experts. “Hollywood knows how to write dialogue more than anybody in the industry on average. The last 10 movies I saw, seven of them had pretty crappy dialogue — so it’s not going to be perfect on average. But you’re going to find more people who understand storytelling.”

These points are good ones, but, as Lindstrom admits, these goals are really only ways of perfecting current storytelling techniques rather, which have not advanced much since the big games of the 1990s, and they don’t progress new strategies. A good Hollywood writer could work out the plot holes and cliches and help put together a satisfying climax, but only someone with writing and game development experience can integrate story into gameplay, so the two work together rather than being seperated into the game and the ensuing cut scenes.

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The Archetypal Hero in Video Games

Published
on September 13, 2008
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All of human literature, fiction and myth can be reduced to two archetypal plots: a man goes on a journey and a stranger comes to town. These basic formula are even more true of role-playing games, where the story must leave room for a main character who is controlled and sometimes even created by an unpredictable player.

The interactive aspect is what set video games apart from other media. In a traditional story, authorial control over a character’s disposition and history is absolute. Games follow the same structures and conventions of plot.

The most significant impact of these binary plots on gameplay is a reduction in the degree of creativity the player can exert over the protagonist, especially that character’s past. The man who goes on a journey must come from somewhere defined by the game’s creator; the stranger who comes to town is liberated from an established history, transferring responsibility for creating history from author to player.

Man goes on a journey

Scholar Joseph Campbell wrote extensively on the hero’s journey, that fateful series of events that drew mythic and modern heroes like Odysseus, Conan the Barbarian, Harry Potter and Luke Skywalker to epic adventure. The journey begins with the hero’s call, sometimes refused, and the crossing of the threshold. Guided by mentors like Obi-Wan and Merlin, he overcomes a series of trials, receives a boon, and returns home with boon in hand.

Because they must have a home from which they set out, these characters often have pre-established backgrounds that fit into the plot. Link starts The Ocarina of Time as a normal kid in Kokiri Forest, and Crono’s mom wakes him up so he can cruise the Millennial Fair in Chrono Trigger. In games where the player can choose the hero’s race, gender, and appearance, he becomes an orphan (Jade Empire) or an amnesiac (Knights of the Old Republic).

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A Hero’s Death: PAX’s Panel on Storytelling in Games

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on August 28, 2007
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This past weekend’s Penny Arcade Expo, which has outgrown its webcomic roots to become one of the top video game conventions in the nation, hosted a a Q&A panel addressing the new possibilities for storytelling in games afforded by advances in technology.

Titled “Once Upon a Time… Storytelling in Games Today,” the panel consisted of Dave Grossman, creator of The Secret of Monkey Island, Ron Gilbert, also of LucasArts, and Sly Cooper developer Nate Fox. Moderated by Chatterbox Radio’s Alon Waisman, the three developers addressed a number of interesting points, including user created content, linear and dynamic narratives and AI involvement, all of which are quoted in Gamasutra’s coverage of the panel.

One of the most interesting and most often undiscussed subjects visited by the panel involves death in games, which is ironic because only an absolutely infallible gamer could avoid it. All of us have led our protagonist into the gaping maw of death only to have him spat out in shame, perhaps minus one of his collected “lives,” and sent back to face the barely-surmountable odds once more.

“I think the death of the protagonist is just one of those things where the belief has to be suspended. I think in games people just don’t think about that. You don’t want to kill people to introduce frustration, I think death will just be one of those languages of our medium that people just don’t think about,” commented Gilbert.

Death is so common in games that it becomes mundane. That demoralizing exclamation of “Game Over” loses any significance it holds in real life, loses any significance at all beyond annoyance–all it takes is a quick tap of the reset button to start anew. However, the protagonist’s death is not without its repercussions.

“Interruption of the narrative is much more important to me than anything else,” said Grossman. “I don’t like what happens when you have to restore from a saved game. I try to avoid it.”

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Protagonist or Pawn: Canon in Video Game Tie-Ins

Published
on August 5, 2007
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Gamers regularly make choices when playing a game. But what if those decisions were truly important? What if they changed the future of the plot?

An article in the most recent issue of The Escapist looks at how games in multi-media franchises treat “canon” — the official position on plot and characters which is necessary to ensure continuity in series like Star Wars that span films, shows, books, graphic novels and games. That is, you delivered 100 pizzas in the Spider-Man game, but is that the Sam Raimi-approved number of pizzas delivered by Spider-Man?

This may seem like the realm of nerds and Star Trek enthusiasts, but the changing relationship between canon and video game tie-ins raises an interesting question: What if the player’s actions and choices tangible repercussions in movies, games, and books to follow? What if the player could influence a franchise in a way that readers and film and television audiences cannot?

Chris Dahlen’s Escapist article, titled “The Open Source Canon,” looks specifically at The Matrix Online, a tie-in to the Matrix films with an interesting catch. Troy Hewitt, a writer and community event manager for the game, said in 2005, “Our intention is that players who play a really big role, or make a key decision, become part of the Matrix canon, and they become part of the story.”

In other words, The Matrix Online’s player-driven events and their conclusions are part of the official canon. This includes everything from small quests to major plot events given to the community to play out. In 2005, one of these events resulted in the official death of Morpheus, demonstrating the magnitude of the story decisions players are allowed to make.

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