Blizzard: Game Developers Are Not Shakespeare, Need to Stop 'Writing Books' in Games
"Basically, and I'm speaking to the Blizzard guys in the back: we need to stop writing a fucking book in our game, because nobody wants to read it," he explained.
"We need to deliver our story in a way that is uniquely video game," Kaplan, who left WoW to work on Blizzard's next MMO, explained. "We need to engage our players in sort of an inspiring experience, and the sooner we accept that we are not Shakespeare, Scorsese, Tolstoy or the Beatles, the better off we are."
However, Kaplan did offer consolation to his fellow developers. "If it makes us feel better, Shakespeare couldn't 3D model his way out of a paper bag," he noted.
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Sturm08
replyI agree w/ this 100%. I'm so sick of games that have huge dialogue scenes. You're a game -- show, don't tell. MGS4 is obviously the bad extreme, but even Mass Effect's dialogue was far too verbose the vast majority of the time.
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I don't mind that so much in a case like Mass Effect where you're dictating the direction of the conversation. I think what holds that back more is how limited they are (by necessity) with camera angles and animations, and the limits of how much each scene can reasonably change the story.
I am going to reserve a special level in Hell for people who put checkpoints before cinematics that are anything more than a 5 second establishing shot. And even that's a stretch. -
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I prefer both :D
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Your comment makes no sense, if there are gamers who play games for the story and not gameplay, why are they playing a GAME. The word "GAME" is important here. Go buy a book if you want story or you are just wasting your time.
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I think that's pushing it...some games (the most notable being Planescape: Torment) feature a story that not only is interesting and worth reading, and packed full of incredible dialogue, but also enough variety and optional responses that they would never work in any medium other than an interactive game...and I'd hate to see someone with another story that good simply not write it because "that's not what games are".
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I think the difference is really audio vs text dialog. Neverwinter nights, for example, had tons of dialog and most of it was really boring, outside of the main storyline. Mass Effect, on the other hand, handled their dialog very well, and there were really no cheesy lines or bad scenes with any character's dialog (maybe a bit much at times, but since it wasn't terrible, like Japanese translation games, it didn't matter). Of course that all depends on how good the dialog/audio is in the first place. If it's totally interesting and is like reading a good book, then fine, keep it coming. But if it's boring and sidetracks you from the rest of the game, then just leave it out.
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