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Enough with the lore already, just tell me a good story.
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Mascot horror is also particularly egregious with this issue. Almost none of them tell a story now, they just slap some shit together with vague hints at something and let the communities try and piece together a story out of it.
A pet peeve I have is when a game has some world-shattering plot point hidden in an optional lore item. And the characters never talk about it because it’s an optional item you won’t see if you just rush through the story.
Like in the most recent Prince of Persia, we can come across a document outright telling us that the current queen backstabbed the king and tried to steal the powers of the Simurgh, causing all the problems in the location we’re in. And a side quest ends with the implications that the prince we came here to rescue isn’t actually her son, but swapped with our protagonist at birth. And you’d feel like this sort of stuff would warrant a cutscene where our characters discuss what they’ve just learnt; maybe even be used as part of different endings. Normal ending has everyone go back home once the final boss is beaten; extended ending has our protagonist confront the queen about her usurpation. But they never react or mention these facts. Those lore drops aren’t for characters, but solely for the player.
Games have always had bad stories and that's OK. Sometimes little to no story is better anyway. We didn't need much motivation back in the day when most game stories could be summarised in a sentence.
So you see Silent Hill as a psi-moon from Red Dwarf's Terrorform episode? Interesting. Rimmer's own Silent Hill… ungh .
Sheesh, Yahtzee going all Garth Marenghi on us! "I know writers who use subtext and they're all cowards"!
I can't believe I went and looked up the 'tennis girl' picture after you mentioned it.
Writers were ousted from their passion. Literally just that.
It's going to be ok Yahtzee, Lore-y dies in season 3 👍
Dark Souls 1 and 3 work great. The character played by the player is a thing that existed in the world, died to become undead, and is called by fate or the fire keeper to act in the world! It can feel like acting with comprehension and agency by the middle, even with more motivations hiding in the environment.
I am reminded of an FF13 parody "I dont understand the story read the data entries."
Isn't the game in the ad just another form of Balatro?
This is a big reason why I enjoyed Silksong more than Hollow Knight. Admittedly I had spent years watching people do challenge runs and speedruns of Hollow Knight, so I knew almost everything there was to know about the game before I sat down to play it myself. But the basic A-to-B-to-C story of the game just… isn't there. It takes a long time before the game even gives you an explicit objective (find the three dreamers), and even then it takes some guesswork (and interpreting Hornet's vague dialogue) to even understand why that objective matters or what it will achieve.
In many ways, the story of Hollow Knight is the story of the player exploring Hallownest. As in, the player's personal experience of the world, communicated through the avatar of the Knight, is the story. But then the game reveals later that the Knight actually has a history and a personal stake in the world, and potentially an unspoken motivation for coming to Hallownest. And then the conceit of this being the player's journey falls away, and we're left with an undefined character going on a vague quest for reasons we have to learn piecemeal.
On the other hand, Silksong's narrative is crystal-clear. Hornet has been brought to Pharloom against her will, and wants to know why. Oh goodie! So do I! Lets go on this adventure together, Hornet! The player's goals and the protagonist's goals align neatly, so I can go along with the story and never feel that Hornet is acting out of character. The game even answers questions like "why doesn't Hornet just leave the kingdom?" with "because the bugs who abducted her will just try again, unless she puts a stop to them". Silksong's narrative felt like a breath of fresh air.
Something like Returnal seems like the worst offender of this sort of thing, because apparently the developers intentionally kept things so vague, that there isn't one real, unified plot. Supposedly so much so they don't have one themselves back at the office. It's meant to be interpreted, at which point I have to ask: why? Even with Silent Hill's more interpretative elements you've got a basic plot to follow, as Yahtzee put it.
It's the problem with a lot of contemporary fiction, where the worldbuilding seems like a stand-in for competent writing. They call it "database consumption" when you're sort of collecting these wiki snippets of the worlds instead of engaging with a compelling narrative, but all the maps and histories mean nothing without characters to meaningfully engage with the worlds they describe.
But Yahtz in Dark souls in order to get the story you have to go to this one specific part of the poison swamps and obtain a unique item, then carry that item all the way back to the start of the game so you can obtain another unique item then look at that item 3 times before its item description changes where upon it will explain everything you needed to know about your motivations in the games. Its honestly very simple, discovered it on my own and was honestly surprised not more people found it.
As usual completely agree, and will throw in my smug personal semi-contrary point with the Brigador games.
The first one in particular. The base plot is yur here to f£ck sh!t up, so go do that. You can go thru the entire game with just that knowledge n enjoy the tight gameplay and varied stuff u can use
Then if u actually pay attention to the briefings and lore entries you'll learn yur kinda the bad guy and are serving big space corpos to destabilise this colony planet which was under corporate control initially but was taken over by the inhabitants in the recent past but then became a dictatorship and the dictator was kinda good kinda bad, in a trains run on time but careful what you say to whome kinda way etc etc haha
Then there are the lore entries and they're so goddang well written with personality and charm and actually sounding like they were written by someone in this world
So yea, u can totally have both. Jus gotta put in the work haha
"…but even Dark Souls has a basically understandable plot…" Bro out here acting like Vaatividya and Iron Pineapple didn't need to exist.
I've been triggering Elden Ring fans with this argument for years. They're just so dense that they can't admit the obvious truth. ER has no story. It has Lore, but that's it.
I mean, you say it's not an example, but it seems clear to me that, example or not, the source of this is Dark Souls. When it was a big hit, everything about it was copied, including the style of storytelling. But, of course, most of those imitators don't understand why Dark Souls did it or what makes it work. So it comes off as a hollow imitation at best.
Yatzhee claims Dark Souls had a story and proceed to talk about "guy battling monsters to save the world". God, he cant even remember. Bloodborne is not different than Dark Souls.
Magic Eye pictures were EXACTLY that, lol.
Put into better words than I could.
As much as I may enjoy a rich world, I prefer being able to actively enjoy it. Not have to stop, go on a wiki deep dive or watch some lore breakdown video to understand what just happened so I can then play while knowing from an outside source.
Recently played Giggleland and, while it was entertaining enough, the only reason I understood anything going on in the plot was because I'd already seen videos covering the ARG running in the background. And at that point, I felt more like a tourist walking through the game going "Oh, I get that reference!"
I'm not opposed to the odd note here and there, as sometimes those make the world feel lived in, but when everything is fed to you through notes while you otherwise stumble in the dark…ehhh, I get bored. I don't need to be spoonfed plot, but having actual stuff happen for me to follow along with is pretty nice in a game.
I think the reason behind this issue is a matter of imitating without understanding. Speaking as a confessed enjoyer of lore, who loves reading all the item descriptions in gmaes like Remnant 2 and entries in an enemy encyclopedia in games like Bloodstained, I feel the issue sometimes those same things fall flat is because whomever decided to put them in the game didn't understand WHY people enjoys them.
I like to thinks about this kind of lore tidbits as the sauce cups that come with your meal. They certainly make the meal better, and the meal would no doubt would feel worse without them. But wouldn't consume a meal made solely of an assortment of sauce cups, nor any amount of sauce will make a bad meal taste good. A lot of times I see this done, you can tell that the developers had no idea of why they were including them, or thought they were the main attractive of the game.
In the end, it all boils down to the vision of the devs and their ability to properly realize it.
Nioh 3 completely lost me with the time travel nonsense. It became the first game I just skipped the cutscenes in since I was a child.
Huh? A story? You mean a short vertical video of random crap?
This is why Pragmata is still one of my favorite games of the year. The gameplay is basic, the plot is barebones, and it uses an adorable robot girl to manipulate your hesrtstrings, but dammit it worked, and that ending still guts me like a fish.
I remember songwriter Ezra Koenig saying he couldn’t be happy with a song if it didn’t have text, subtext, and sub-subtext. All are fun but you can’t have one without the other.
There's been a few too many stories where all the interesting stuff happened before you got there.
Honestly, Townfall's problem was that the protag wasn't the RIGHT protag. Richard should have been the real protag the whole game was his fault. Then with F if you understood something of Japanese history around the 1960ish time was a bigger feminist movements over there battling with dudes still licking their wounds post-WW2. The issue with Townfall, beyond the bad protagonist, was the fact that nothing really happens even the endings are like "yup that happened" and that's only supposed to be the dog ending, personally. F was basically putting the Japanese horror of Silent Hill back in Japan, yet you still get rug pulled by the end. that what happened was basically a deluded dream.
I'm playing Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown right now, and I gotta say it's very refreshing to know what the player character is doing and why. There ARE lore bits scattered throughout the game, but they aren't necessary to understand the basic story.
Compare that to Blasphemous games, where I was just so confused that I stopped paying attention to the story completely. "Th Miracle this, The Miracle that. Go to the right and kill that guy." "OK, going to the right and killing that guy."
I struggle to really engage with games if the story doesn't compel me. It's why I rarely get into the Soulslike genre, even if the quality otherwise is amazing.
Nor do I need a LARGE amount of story, just enough to invest me, such as with Skyrim or Crimson Desert (after the DLC), or even Dragon's Dogma to a lesser degree.
Even on bringing this topic up no one will dare suggest Dark Souls wasn't faultless and make excuses for how THAT absense of a story and thin scattering of lore fragments doesn't count.
The difference is that Dark Souls' plot hinges on the player (and by extension the chosen undead) being clueless to the truth of the world around them
Lore is more interactive.
My interpretation of SHf is that gods are real, and as for what happened in the game – Hinako just stuck in some kind of timeloop in her head/underworld which had 4 outcomes. True ending is her finding the solution she actually desired.
I feel like I'm the only one who has this issue with Hollow Knight. The story is amazing… once you actually uncover it in like the last 4 hours of the game. Before that we don't really know shit without digging into external lore.
This really correctly articulates how i felt about Silent Hill f. Left me feeling so meh.
Lore and obtuse is good for YouTube video creation, which in turn means more social media and free marketing which makes the line go up. So good for the marketing Dept and bad for you
Christ I wish you'd shut up about Silent Hill already. You didn't get it, you had to have it explained to you, now you can't stop whining about it because you're aggreived that you weren't smart enough to figure out the lore. We get it. Shut. Up. Yahtz. Get over yourself and move on.
"We like the heroes and hate the villains." That's all we need, right?
uhhh, there's no need to show that the events of SH are actually happening. what an absolute swing and miss understanding SH.
Come on, Yahtzee, we both share 2 of our top 3 all time favorite games. You should get this.
I think it's another part of the stealing off of Fromsoft's dinner plate. the Souls games have a very intentional level of ambient story telling that is open to interpretation, but there's a distinct throughline that keeps everything coherent. Games copy the vague storytelling the same way they copy the mechanics, imitating the vibe without the substance.
I am glad you brought up how in the past, you've railed against traditional storytelling in games. This is a common element with gamers, where their issue with gaming, changes into the exact opposite problem later on down the road.
I knew he was going to make this.
Also, if your story can only be told through cutscenes – you want to make a TV show, not a game. The gameplay and world should tell just as much as any cutscenes, if not more.
I think it’s been a while since I’ve disagreed so hard with a take here. The problem seems to be with the importance placed on the narrative experience of the player rather than the character or characters in the games themselves and the examples don’t make a huge amount of sense if that’s the take. Bloodborne I get as problematic for this, but Townfall and f? Those are both absolutely stories where the people we watch experience them are having reactions to their experiences as things progress. It provides space for the player to examine their own impression of what’s happening and why but the things on the screen still have narrative weight and their own context. Maybe it’s that it’s hard these days to get a good story in a game that doesn’t also incentivize the meta-analysis? There’s plenty to be exhausted about there, but that’s not the argument getting made. Just a weird take all around.
This is why I stopped playing Gunfire Reborn. There is nothing going on.