I don't agree with your (zyrolasting's) evaluation of ancient literature. However I have to admit I'd only briefly considered deus ex machina in modern storytelling. Today it's rarely used effectively outside of comedy. It's generally superfluous.

Although I find it difficult to write DEM off altogether, it's good advice to avoid it.

This thread is in the context of writing, so I wasn't trying to suggest overpowered characters can't work in a design context. There's no argument here.

Quote: Don't make everything about the player. He is most important, but he is not the only character. For a world to feel right, it has to feel like it could exist without the player.

An entire community that fuels an MSPaint comic agrees.



I try to ignore this, as I enjoy the atmosphere of Metroid. Sometimes I just want to enjoy the feel of a unique world. You have to admit there aren't many games that quite have it's charm. Another thing: Samus was a loner until just recently. The world really felt like it could be built for her in earlier games, where story was almost completely hidden. It was almost like a non-linear arcade game.

Quote: Everything and I mean everything was made for Samus to use. The ball tunnels are always the perfect size. The tools always fit. Nothing else uses these ways of getting around besides Samus.

Well... I'm probably the only guy in the world that uses the Scan Visor and actually reads everything. The Space Pirates are trying very hard to imitate Samus' technology and have made several attempts to mimic her suit. There are enough implications lying around that the pirates actually do make use of this equipment. To be fair, it's so obscure it may as well not be mentioned. You aren't told the story... You look for it. Sounds bad in theory, but I think it's neat.

Truth is, I can't think of many games off the top of my head where Nintendo actually had good writing outside the Legend of Zelda. This is probably because of their intense focus on gameplay over anything else.

How about we start talking about something by Hideo Kojima? At least his games have more focus on story.

I did actually read a lot of it, though not all. Ill take that they want to imitate her tech, but it needs to be more evident for it to really work. Having a powersuit isn't close enough to seem like imitation, I need to see space pirates rolling around and using zip lines to get from platform to platform. I mean on that planet, how did anyone else get around??? The timing of the tools to open new areas was also far to coincidental and caught my notice far too much. I did finish the game though and enjoyed it, though mostly for its art more than anything else. it was also the first game I'd played on Wii that actually tried to make good use of the accelerometers to map movement which was nice.

For examples of good story there are a lot of old games out there that had great ones. Some are very well developed, complex, and interesting. I can't honestly comment too much on current games as my gaming for the year is the first Left 4 Dead, Resident Evil 5, Oblivion, Bioshock, etc. I try to stay behind the price curve.

Fire Emblem, I can't believe I didn't mention that. I think the tunnels in Metroid could probably be explained by being heating/air ducts and stuff like that. But Fire Emblem had a good story. And it also comes back to my problem, it's a smallish band of fighters that have to have interesting interactions with each other to make for an interesting story, like if you view the info conversations you will find out more about the characters, like the fact that Mia owed Griel something before, or that Soren pretty much just trusts no one but Ike (If you havn't played the game you can find that stuff in the fire emblem wiki fansite).
And yes I have heard Hideo Kojima is a good story teller, but I have never played a Metal Gear before so I can't speak from experience. Thanks for all the help and ideas.

Last I knew, a fire extinguisher shot out a pressurized stream of material in basically the same way a water-filled rocket does. Due to that law of physics about equal and opposite reactions, that would indeed propel the fire extinguisher and anything attached through it through space. It's not terribly plausible that this could be used effectively for navigation, possibly a fire extinguisher would just explode if exposed to vacuum, and they should probably have foreshadowed it with at least a shot showing the fire extinguisher's existence. But it's not illogical.

For the ancient storytelling techniques, I'm on the side of believing that some of them are mostly inapplicable today. Some genres, like surrealism, have closer ties to myth and can ignore science and the laws of reality in favor of dream-logic. The more extreme forms of comedy also by convention can make ridiculous things happen then hit a reset button to avoid any unwanted results, and also make heavy use of convenient coincidence. But modern fiction which isn't heavily comic or part of a genre which has different rules really can't do crap like deus ex machinas, excessively convenient coincidences, character inconsistency, plot inconsistency, and nonsense causality or motivation. I really wish people would realize epistolary novels are dead, I cringe whenever I see someone propose writing one; that one works okay in games and short stories though. BTW by literary theory conventions Shakespeare is pretty much modern, so I wouldn't use him for an arguing point. The problem with talking about modern fiction is it's not a chronological thing, it's about the literacy level and cultural level of the community in which the story was created. You can find examples of pre-modern storytelling in tribal myths recorded a hundred years ago, and examples of modern storytelling in Greek plays from 300 BC.

Quote: Original post by abstractionline
There's nothing wrong with overpowered characters, so long as they aren't one dimensional. Take for example Achilles from Homer's Iliad. He's clearly physically overpowered. He receives brilliant armour from the Goddess Athena and he drives back an entire army, turning the tide of the Trojan War.

This story has stood the test of some 2800 years.

Most of the Iliad isn't about Achilles kicking ass, but rather about his mother, his fate, what gods think of him, friends and enemies, girls, lovers, revenge, being killed, and so on. Being "overpowered" merely makes him an important Greek character.

I've backed away from arguing about DEM. Shakespeare used it a fair bit, but I accept that it's arguable just how modern his writing is. And I couldn't find much else to support my assumptions.

Quote: Original post by LorenzoGatti
Most of the Iliad isn't about Achilles kicking ass, but rather about his mother, his fate, what gods think of him, friends and enemies, girls, lovers, revenge, being killed, and so on. Being "overpowered" merely makes him an important Greek character.

I wasn't stating that he's one dimensional -- just the opposite. Sorry if that was unclear.

The easiest way to avoid being cheesy is to not have plot devices. If your story, at any point, rests on the recovery of one sole "relic" for longer than an hour, or if the peril of this items recovery is anything greater than say, one person's life, than you can consider your story cheesy.

There's a difference between "finding a key to get through the door that leads to the antagonist" and "finding the only magic sword in the world that can harm this monster, which incidentally is about to destroy the world"

Scope is also important to reduce cheese. Personally when anything greater than say, a small village or like 30 people, "hangs" in the balance - it just ruins immersion. Why should I care about 10,000,000 faceless people in a world that exists where I've only been to like 6 towns and a few key locations? A presence that's been in direct contact with the player for a majority of the time, at risk towards the climax, has always been a stronger motivator than something as arbitrary as "the world"

"epic" is usually synonymous with cheesy - even if you'd like to think its not because you shelled out $80 dollars for the game and you don't want to sound like a fool. I'm looking at you guys, Bioware.

Quote: Original post by 3DModelerMan
Are there some good guidelines to keep game storylines from seeming cheesy and rediculous? I know the developers of Ninja Blade for XBox360 were TRYING for something epic, but they failed. What could prevent a game from making a mistake like that? Where you start out with an epic storyline and it just branches off into the realm of rediculous game stories?

Don't worry about being cheesy. Embrace the cheesiness! You are writing a story, not a report. If you try to subvert every cliche in whatever you create, you are going to end up with something boring and uninteresting.

Sometimes being cheesy is intentional. Hideo Kojima, Capcom (everything by Noboru Sugimura, and then some), whatever nuts made Illbleed for the Dreamcast, etc. Actually, I can't really say for certain if these were intentionally "bad" or not, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt. Ninja Blade falls under this category; the developer has made (attempts at) non-cheesy stories in their other games, the difference is clear.

Anyways, there are a lot of ways to make something cheesy, but I've always felt that it boils down to a sense of artificiality, a break in the (*gak*) immersion. An obvious way of doing this is "breaking the fourth wall". The way most games are set up, there's almost always some amount of it; at the end of the day it's still the default "cheesiest medium", since you've got the controller and all. I think Kojima realized this with his older games, but I digress.

If you want to avoid it, you will need to do writing in a way that makes the setting and situations seem authentic. Easier said than done, especially when it seems like so few players care, or even prefer the cheesy stuff.