Topic: Are Video Game stories getting too grand?

Greetings Nintendolife! This is my first forum topic and I had this question pop into my head today seemingly out of nowhere.

Now me personally, I'm not particularly bothered if a game has a good story or not, as I can enjoy any game as long as it has good gameplay (anything from Super Mario to Bioshock Infinite to Planescape Torment). However, I've noticed that a lot of the AAA developers will put a lot of emphasis on cutscenes and cinematics and will attempt to immerse the player and engage them with a story.

The finest example of this in my opinion is Mirror's Edge. This is an interesting and good game that is brought down by mediocre combat and an appalling story. I was left dumbstruck at the end when the credits started to roll and came to the conclusion that the story was one heck of a rush job. Those who have completed it themselves will know what I'm talking about. There are other examples out there like Pokémon (a series I thoroughly enjoy) and I'm sure you can think of a few yourself.

The point I'm trying to make is would this game's story be better if it focused more upon the main character and the relationship she has with the other characters in the game on a smaller and more personal level (not wanting to give spoilers for those who do want to experience the story so forgive the vagueness), rather than trying to make the story grand and epic? I feel that Mirror's Edge (and many other games) would have a much more engaging story this way if it was written well. What do you think?

I understand that a storyline will engage the player and give them a goal to work towards during the gameplay, even if the story is half-baked or has no effort put into it. However, I believe that a smaller scale story can work and even be effective if done properly, instead developers like to overuse "epic" storylines like a small group saving the world, bringing down the global mega corporation, finding the ultimate weapon that will change the world, defeat the ultimate villain/monster, etc..

I think most big budget entertainment could learn how to do more personal stories instead of saving the world every time. And yes, Mirror's Edge story was atrocious and one of the biggest examples of less story > bad story.

I haven't played Mirror's Edge but I always find ironical that, despite the industry investing more and more money on creating significant and captivating stories for home consoles, the best ones always seem to come from handheld games like Ghost Trick, Professor Layton, Ace Attorney or Virtue Last Reward.
I have definitely liked a number of games with a strong focus on story (Arkham Asylum and Origins were good for instance), but always from a mere entertainment point of view. Usually, they fail at striking a chord with me or be relevant on a personal level, so I'm not really in favour of videogames as glorified movies, especially when it shows that game developers have an inferiority complex to movie makers. I mean, I won't turn down a good game just because of the story and vice versa, but I'd like to see more games trying to tell things in less obvious ways and break the "set up / confrontation / resolution" structure that they have borrowed from hollywood.
One of my favourite games ever is Pikmin 3, which has a very basic story but it still manages to tell you so much and be relevant on an emotional level just through the tiny details, like the way the camera follows you, the way pikmin move, the way flowers bend etc.

I imagine smaller, more personal stories aren't conducive to creating hype or generating the big bucks from the masses. People like spectacle, and we finally have the technology to faithfully reproduce such spectacle in our video games. As such, I don't see this trend changing anytime soon.

This is one reason I prefer Nintendo games, though. The strongest story-based Nintendo games are almost always Zelda games, and even those have very straight-forward and functional storylines. The focus is always on gameplay with Nintendo.

I really enjoy a story-driven game, if that's what I set out to play, but putting too much story into my gameplay without proper breaks/intervals. I don't want to watch cinematics every 10 steps I take in a game. That's awful, especially when it's clear that the #1 goal was to create a cinematic experience and not a game.

I don't really want to use The Last of Us as a poor example, because it's a good experience and I enjoyed it, but that's a great example of not placing great priority on gameplay. It was all about the cinematic experience. The gameplay itself, the stealth, the shooting mechanics, everything was all possible in the PS2 era. Heck, maybe even PS1. It feels like it should have been a Netflix miniseries and not a video game.

I think the most effective way to tell a story in a video game is to keep the narrative simple, but add in a lot of lore and backstory that the player can read at their own convenience. Zelda does this well. Metroid Prime did this well. The goal should be to make the story accessible for casual players, while rich and deep for those who want to get really invested in it.

But it may be safer to make a character-driven game if your aim is to emotionally connect with the player. Nobody will care if the character is saving the world or just tending a farm, as long as it's a good, interesting character in a cast of other good, interesting characters to interact with.

In the end though, for some reason, I found I just connected with characters more easily in the 90s and early aughts, when there was no voicework and the entire story was told with text and sprite graphics.

A lot of interesting thoughts here.

@Ralizah I understand your point. Grander events do generate hype, and this does lead to easier marketing, where the player feels like they can change the world. The problem is when everyone does it, and it becomes the norm. Unless you're Nintendo of course.

@Pigeon I used Mirror's Edge as an example because it could work a lot better if the story wasn't so overblown and it didn't have animated cutscenes at the end of each level. That animation budget would have been better spent on improving the combat, or making more levels,etc.

@SpookyMeths I agree with you on having the story in the background. It's why I really like Planescape Torment. There's a ton of reading, but it is incredibly well written and many dialogue options in the game lead to often humorous scenes. It makes you want to reload your game to see how the scene would pad out. Many games would be better with less cutscenes and more reading that fleshes out the world and characters at your own leisure.

I think it's less about budget and more that those games rely heavily on story to the point that the gameplay is practically irrelevant at points (though that's more true for the latter two than the former...). They're story games where you can do some puzzles or something in a linear, very calculated and sometimes limited capacity, so they can focus on having a good narrative focused game, and Japan likes this type of story meets game more than anyone it seems. And the way they do it makes that work better than putting a half hour of nothing but talking into your action game (though Mass Effect 2 between missions pulled that off somehow...). But otherwise more gamey type games need to put more focus on putting story while you are actually playing the game. Probably the only reason I don't put most Zelda stories as some of the best game stories is because the later 3D games that have the best and most compelling cutscenes never feel like there's compelling story between the cutscenes so it's like there's this disconnect (though nowhere near as bad as some games) for whatever reason. Mainly Skyward Sword I had that problem, probably because most of the actual story happened in 2 hour parts separated by 10 or so hours of gameplay, which I don't think is good pacing (even in 999, the huge gap between how shocking and compelling the first playthrough is and getting to the good endings was a big problem for me).

Pikmin 2 was the best for this. In fact...I'm not sure if we even played the same Pikmin 3, that game told you way too much, and a lot of the subtlety and naunce in the series was actually lost in that game. Maybe not totally, but it definitely felt like a sharp drop in quality as far as the story-telling goes. I loved how thought out the daily logs were for Pikmin 1 and 2, but the real joy was implied simply through the environment itself. They're aliens looking at this big world from the perspective of...basically ants, and it's quite interesting, even humbling at times.

IT IS THE BEGINNING OF A FANTASTIC STORY. LET US JOURNEY TO THE CAVE OF MONSTERS.

To be fair, you could replace 'video game' with 'big budget Hollywood movie' and have much the same point. Entertainment mediums with large budgets tend to be really grand and ambitious, since small scale personal stories tend to sell less games/tickets.

It might also be cause of scope creep or spectacle creep:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SerialEscalation