What can go wrong in a video game?
by Dark_Laharal
by Dark_Laharal
Making Video games has always been a tricky thing to pull off. No matter how good a game is, it will surely have a pitfall that will sour your experience by a bit or a lot. Often, a developer has a great idea for a story but they fail to deliver in terms of gameplay and the opposite can happen as well. A great story has potential to keep you playing even if you find yourself frustrated by the controls or some other problem plaguing the gameplay. A video game with awesome gameplay but lacking in the story department will be fun to play but you will often find yourself wondering why you are playing other than for the fun provided. Sometimes, the pitfall waits at the end and (depending on how bad it is) it can sometimes ruin the fun you had leading up to it.
Take a game like Breakdown, this game was released for the original Xbox, Breakdown had a very good story that made you wonder what was coming next. You play as Derrick Cole an amnesiac who wakes up and is told he has been asleep for a long time. You cannot remember who you are or where you are but soon you find out you are wanted dead. From there you meet a girl who says she knows you well and wants to help you escape. From there you are lead down a crazy sci-fi adventure involving; aliens, time travel, super powers, time paradoxes, and memory fixing machines! It is such a great story that I often could not put it down BUT! The gameplay of Breakdown had quite a few problems plaguing it. You see Breakdownwas played in first person view where often the guns were useless against your enemies, you had to fight them with kicks and punches. The problems this point of view caused were numerous, they often caused many unfair deaths to the point of frustration. A perfect example of a frustrating part of the game is when you are forced to run through a laser security system, you were forced to slide, jump, back flip, summersault, and run without getting hit by the lasers. I died a ridiculous amount of times, so much so that I just had to stop playing for a while and get some air.
Despite the pitfalls that Breakdown’s gameplay had I pressed on because the story had me hooked. I looked past the frustration I felt because I wanted to know how it would all end and it was well worth it in the end, even if I did end up confused and wishing for a sequel. For me Breakdown is a great example of a great story compensating for pitfalls in gameplay. A game were the gameplay is the only reason you play the game is sadly now a days more common. Examples of gameplay orientated games include; Call of Duty, Prototype, Dying Light, and Dead Rising.
Let’s talk Prototype, I seriously had to look up a video to remember what the story was in that game. You are Alex Mercer an amnesiac who……wait…..woah yeah an amnesiac who wakes up in a morgue and can’t remember his past then gets help from a girl (his sister in this case) to uncover what happened to you and what’s going on in New York. You get some crazy shapeshifting powers and kill stuff. The story is built up in such a way that you can pretty much figure out how it’s going to end about a quarter of the way through. Personally after figuring out the end by myself I was pretty much at a loss for finishing the game. The only reason I finished Prototype was because the gameplay was fun, shapeshifting into a normal human then sneaking into a military base and slaughtering everyone was very fun. Sometimes all I did was random missions where I got to use my crazy powers to kill stuff.
Games with either good gameplay or good story can still be great games if their area of lacking is saved by its strong point, i.e. good story saves lacking gameplay and vice versa. It is really hard to get both good story and good gameplay but it is not impossible. Games such as Journey, Fallout, Skyrim, Half Life, and Bioshock are good examples of good story and good gameplay.
Bioshock, one of the greatest stories with the greatest twist have ever seen and I had fun playing thought the game as well. The gameplay of Bioshock was fun, it was FPS but it added nice elements like; plasmids that allowed you to set people on fire, shock them or blow them up into the air with…well air. Bioshock gave you the choice whether to be ”good” or “evil” but it really didn’t matter because this is the only place it kind of fell short, the ending. The ending did not matter though because by that point you were done playing the game, it had nothing left to offer you.
Video games used to be all about gameplay but recently they have started to become more of an art form with stories to tell apart from the gameplay. It is not always important to include gameplay though, there are some games that are almost all story with choices to be made, but that’s a story for another day. A game can stand alone with either good story or good gameplay and both of course! No matter what, a game will include some pitfall, large or small, that might slightly or totally sour your experience. Tell me what games you guys enjoyed and what ruined it for you even if it was a minor detail. I know I’m not the only one who sees these minor/major pitfalls!
New Challenger Gaming 