Wuw lots of tricky questions here, this is good
"have you played any adventure game that the story is of less importance?"
Well let's not confuse story with plot!
Games can have a very strong story (background story, character, character goal etc) while also de-emphasizing the actual plot so as to make the game more open.
But I'm starting to understand like what Pyke says that some peoples main definition of adventure-games vs RPG's is something like this:
Adventure-game: Telling a story through a defined plot.
RPG: Telling a story through through open-world setting (the non-essential npc's, quests, locations etc) with only limited plot (usually that things narrows down towards the end of the game).
I think there's like a hundred different ways of defining the difference in genre (the most common being if it has RPG-type fighting/leveling or not) but this definition sounds like a pretty good one.
Hmmm to put aside genre-definitions for a while I guess what I'm saying is I like playing adventure-games but I don't like playing RPG's (I can't play 5 minutes of dragon age, mass effect, fable 2 etc without getting bored), yet that if I were to philosophize about the perfect adventure-game it would be to somehow make it feel less rigid in plot and have more baldurs gate 2-style city-exploration,
but sure one could argue that what I'm really asking for is a RPG with little to none fighting and where they've spent as much time/focus on story and characters as they would on adventure-games.
or something... all this genre-definitions is making my head spin
Quote:
Originally Posted by jhetfield21
what's the point of having an open world for the sake of it and not have different ways to branch the plot?
|
Tricky question indeed, I'm not sure I can put into words but lemme try:
For example let's write a imaginary game inspired by the plot from Eyes Wide Shut movie:
You're a cool guy who walks around in night-time NYC with a taste for adventure (preferibly also with a loose plot in the back of your mind), you can walk into any nightclub and just talk with ppl, as you walk into the jazzclub you talk to the pianoist and after befriending him and asking about his work he want to sound cool so he mentions a little secret that his gig later tonight is at this super exclusive party where he has to play blindfolded and know the secret password, you ask him for more details but he says he can't tell you where it is, besides all the guys are dressed in black robes with venusian masks so you can't go there anyway.
So if you're smart you now walk out of there and explore the open-world city for a costume-shop and somehow persuades the owner to sell you the costume despite it being closed, now you walk back to the pianoist and manages to persuade him to tell the address.
Can you imagine the suspense of going to that secret party to find out some secret infromation there? it's like it's a good mini-plot by itself to have in a movie or a strict-plot game, but the fact that you found out about it by yourself makes it twice as interesting, especially since you know it's not just a illusion because you know that had you been in a different bar asking questions there are other little gems of mini-adventures to go on.
does that makes sense? all I can do is imagine it myself as something that sounds cool (rather than a rigid plot where you had to ask him for it and then the city only contained the jazzclub and a costume-shop) but I can't nessesarly put it into words.
I can think of many RPG's that has given me that feeling of "omg I've just found some really sweet information I'm so gonna look into this!" but then it just leads to a little fight sequence and a chest of loot, which is possibly since RPG-fighting can be so interesting that they can get away with not thinking through much story of each quest.
