Since our tiny fists first clutched the Atari 2600 controller, we’ve been taught that story-driven games need to have stories – stories with beginnings, middles, and ends.
Maybe that was wrong all this time.
Consider this article from Eurogamer’s Lewis Denby. A short retrospective on Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines, it so sharply matches my own experience with the game that it truly got me thinking: not about the flaws or breaks in Bloodlines, but about how it was the ephemera, the disconnected tendrils of side stories, that really had me hooked. I couldn’t have cared less about the main storyline, it was boring, and contrived to boot. But some of the side stories – barely remembered now since I’m years out from playing the game – those resonated with me at a very deep level.
Denby mentions the Ocean Side Hotel mission; no Shalebridge Cradle, it nonetheless managed to be one of my Top Ten Most Scary. I remember also a cult house, descending floor after floor to discover some horror in the sub-basement. A werewolf? I don’t recall. I do recall the serial killer in Santa Monica, and that thing in the L.A. sewers. I remember the drug house out by the beach, listening to the thugs inside argue about wedding rings. I remember a girl – but not her name – whose chance encounter with me ruined her entire existence. As Denby points out, none of this had anything to do with the dreary main story.
What if a game didn’t have a main story? What if, instead, it were a collection of stories short and long, some with branching, multi-layer arcs and some brief and bite-sized. Some connected, many not. Why bother to have the over-arching storyline in there? It’s almost always the least satisfying of the bunch.
Think of games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R., or Fallout 3, or – going back a bit – Privateer. all those games are ostensibly open world, a jumble of “side quests” bound together by a single character and his or her “main” storyline. But in each case, would the game have been that much poorer without the main story? If it were just the side quests?
Oh, sure, it would have to be more crafted than just throwing a bunch of side quests in a pile and calling it a game. Like I said, some of the stories would be long and involved, others short and sweet, still others in the middle. Characters from one might cross over into others or, if they died in one, not be present in others, perhaps creating special challenges for the player in later storylines in which the deceased was meant to appear. Some stories would only become available if you’d completed others in a certain way. Others would be Easter Eggs, hard to come by. But they’d all be part of the same coherent world with its characters, all part of STALKER or Fallout or whatever.
Do you need the master narrative arc? Some would say yes; it’s the narratological equivalent of a spine. Without the spine everything falls apart. Personally, though, I’d love to see a big, exciting, story-ey game that does try this.
Two that come close but miss are The Path and Mount & Blade. The Path is an art-house game; in it, the journey is definitely the point. In fact you lose the game if you follow the main story (well, you lose either way, but still). Thing is, though, there are no stories in The Path except the ones you make up for yourself. It’s a circus for the eyes and mind, but it puts the burden of storytelling on you. Games like Mount & Blade, meanwhile, have occasional substories but can’t truly be categorized as story-driven. And MMOs depend on the existence and continued presence of others to make their stories.
Would it work, then? A STALKER where going to the power plant was only one of many options? A Fallout 3 where there is no father-quest driving you, just the lure of what’s over the next pile of rubble?
Maybe we’ve become too enamored of linear main storylines and their tributaries. Maybe it’s time to let the tributaries become the focus. Done well, that might just be the game we’d play forever.
Steerpike, what is that image at the top of your article?
It looks similar to one of Escher’s drawings, but it also looks CG-itized.
I believe it’s a version of Escher’s House of Stairs. I did a little Photoshopping myself – turned it on its side, etc.
I’m not convinced about a game with no main story, though I suppose back in the day I approached (say) Adventure or Zork as an environment full of interesting challenges which weren’t (necessarily) related rather than a single goal and didn’t enjoy them the less for that.
I think the real breakthrough would be in giving you full choice and then making you feel as though whatever you were doing was the main story.
I like this idea. I really think it could work. I sort of view X-Com as a game like this. Granted, it’s not really so much a story driven game as it is a tactial, mission-based type of scenario, but you have the over arching story: aliens invading earth, making pacts with countries, the only way to destroy them is to go to their home planet and wipe them out. That’s the story in the loosest sense of the words. The fun of the game was in the details, the “side quests” if you will.
I think you always need some sort of narrative thread to hold things together, but I think that thread could and should be flexible enough to cater to what you are doing.
Yes, yes and yes! Games don’t require a definite main-quest story.
In fact, some games already did this in bits and pieces. Encouraged you to go off the beaten path. Baldur’s Gate (the first one) actively had you searching out the plot – the world was open to begin with, and the plot was hinted at but not necessary to follow right off – as well as exploration being required to get on with it.
I love Mount & Blade (still playing, got 1 faction down, the second might fall soon). I’ve got my own little dealings with my favourite lords, and am now in my second term as Marshall! (with a massive percentage of the lads favouring me).
That game provides a wealth of things to do, with some mini-quest options if you feel like it. Nothing overarching, no big boss to fight in the end (the game instead has you fight armies with 1300 troops…yeah, I had to reload after that, haha). The game scales well, levels don’t matter as much as armies and the formula really works. I’m surprised no one writing for this site has reviewed or noted it.
Other games do this as well – Civilization and the Sims games are a classic example of progressing gameplay – you play as a leader over whatever you’re doing, with no real quests to speak of, but instead perhaps small items to go and complete, near and long term goals to do, and so forth. These have some of the strongest stories in them however – we all know of Alice and Kev I hope, and Civilization 4 have enough epic figures to provide a twisty-turvy line of diplomacy, betrayal, war and peace that really forges great memories.
I don’t think there is a shortage of examples of it working well. I think main story line quests in RPG’s are suffering – certainly Fallout 3 suffered here (STALKER less so), since the thought was there was some real time limit – but there really wasn’t – the plot pulled a fast one on any actual reason for the plot going the way it did. It is hard to justify an “optional main quest” in many cases where death might be involved (whereas STALKER successfully made it a mystery quest, exploration based and entirely not needing to rush against unseen enemies).
I know your original point was solely on having a story-driven game not having a main quest, but it’s a bit limiting to look at it in such black and white colours. It’s safe to say some attempts have been made, and I hope more appear in the future! Players are much more clever – and if “side quests” are given enough time and energy, there might be multiple things to solve, do, fix, complete, work on which are all satisfactory and themselves make a greater experience then one large ball-busting quest that is meant to shadow out everything else.
Oh, also, I forgot Storm of Zehir – which is similar to Baldur’s Gate, which while it has somewhat of a “main quest”, it is pretty optional (and certainly too difficult to complete straight away in a fast way), given it is more a nice side-quest, basically consisting of a few linked encounters and a end-of-game dungeon (which is optional if you want to end the game there! you can just go back and do more questing and building of your trade empire).
It’s pretty nicely done even if the story isn’t stellar! Main thing was it was fun, even with NWN2 mechanics.
I still need to write about that game…it’s kind of been ignored, I like how it streamlines the Baldur’s Gate fantasy exploration, and removes the “necessary main plot” to the most major degree I’ve seen.
The great thing about The Path was the way the “main character” slipped through your fingers just as you were finding it. Each girl had a piece of a larger puzzle that was different with each gamer. There were no quests just a sort of generational shuffling back and forth via age groups depending on the order you played.
This article reminds me of a thread on the old FFC forums were we discussed a hypothetical game based on generational gameplay, where your character dies and then is reborn as a son or daughter and on down the lineage. There would be no main quest, just a thread of random actions connecting nodes of events that shaped your descendant’s fate. Nothing so rigid as an “arc”, more a ever shifting wave moving through space. I think that was one of Fallout 2 great strengths, that if you had played the previous game, you had in a way shaped the present game…though in fact the developers had.
I can easily imagine games beginning to fracture main storylines in favor of personalized “events”.
You know, the first two Fallouts are also good examples of games that sort of do what I’m describing – the “main stories” of both turn out to be just long side quests, while the side quests are often quite engaging. Of course, they both end in the classic sense, once the real main story is revealed and the arc completed, but those two strike me as good first attempts at the sort of open-world storytelling I’d like to see attempted.
I still like a story. I think this reflects on the limitation of the way games have been traditionally constructed and delivered. Most games simply run out of either content or the capacity for new interaction. I’m content to play Oblivion for a long time doing only side quests and generally mucking about until, very suddenly, I’ve had enough. I’ll then move on to complete the main quest and put the game away. If I make the mistake of solving the main quest thinking I’ll go back to explore, ALA Fallout 3, I never do.
Also I think a game where the player brings or develops the central theme really falls into the same category as a game where the developers provide the central theme, as I perceive The Path to be, although I haven’t played it at all. For me, an example of this is the driving game. There is no main story, only a series of of cars and tracks. I continue playing because I feel like I’m getting to be a better driver, and the richness of interaction allows great gradation of (pseudo) skill, and this is building up my great internal legend of Helmut, driver.
So if there’s a story, I’ll build up my character in the context of that story and when it’s done, it’s done. If there’s no story I’d better be able to build up the notion of my real world self because if I’m not able to do that I’m just farting about, and that never satisfies.
a hypothetical game based on generational gameplay, where your character dies and then is reborn as a son or daughter and on down the lineage. There would be no main quest, just a thread of random actions connecting nodes of events that shaped your descendant’s fate.
It’s called “The Sims”.
I was thinking more of the movie “Giant” or the first few
Dune books and not so much a Sims time generator. So, probably some kind of story in there. Somehow.
Brilliant article. I don’t actually remember the specifics of the main storyline in Vampire: Bloodlines either but the side quests have stayed with me ever since. The Nosferatu warrens, sneaking around that beech house, the haunted ghost house, fending off the zombies in the cemetery, stumbling around the old hospital only to find that flesh eating lady: there are loads but the actual main quest pales in comparison to some of these gems.
The only game that I had to resist pursuing the main story arc was Planescape: Torment’s simply because it was so compulsive and downright addictive. It was a joy to come away from a slew of great side quests and realise you could sink your teeth back into the delicious and meaty guts of the main plot. Fantastic.
My girlfriend always spoke about how she preferred the standalone episodes of Buffy and The X-Files rather than the overarching stories running through the series’. I don’t like Buffy so I can’t comment on that but the mystery of The X-Files’ main story I really enjoyed, more so than the still very enjoyable ‘distracting’ episodes.