Larian Studios Forums General Chat RPG Chat Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous

On the subject of "video games can't tell good stories," I always thought it was simply that most of the time video games fail to tell good stories in their execution. As in the medium is perfectly capable of doing it, but most of the time they fail. That is no different from the majority of fiction or tv or film. Abits I totally agree that by writing off the medium people actually acquiesce to video games not needing good stories - when actually it's very important to affirm that video games are capable of telling good stories, and the fact that they so often don't is a failure of scope, vision, writing, design, pandering, the specific but not insurmountable challenges of the medium, content-production as an industry and so on and so on. I want better, basically.

That being said - the uniqueness of video games as a stroytelling medium, when it works, can be phenomenal. the Baldur's Gate saga is case and point. The BG story is nothing special in its constituent parts: but the way it is executed as a video game is exceptional. It is a story that is perfectly suited , integrated and built around the game presentation: isometric cRPG. In that I mean the BG saga is not just "what happens" but the plot + presentation + gameplay + the cRPG sense of progression done so well; all meshing together as an integrated whole. It just does the art of "storytelling" really well in the medium it is presented in - there is nothing particularly "new" in the story, it just tells it well taking full advantage of a particular stroytelling medium.

So what I think is that so often video games stories seem to be fighting against their medium - the game is almost an inconvenience to the story - but to really tell good stories in video games the possibilites and potentialities of the medium need to be the reason why that story is a video game, not say a movie, or book, or play, or music video, or whatever.


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Any way I have high hopes for WotR, hopefully it will do video game storytelling well.