Griffith
With the streak of a tear, Like morning dew
Groovy Metal Fist said:I know I've spoken a number of times about story driven game with player choices. I loved many of them, but didn't feel like my choices changed the overall arc of the story. I could only swap out a few details along the way.
Ken Levine wants to design a story driven game with player choices to genuinely shake up the narrative:
http://gamedesignreviews.com/scrapbook/stepped-on-a-narrative-lego/
I wish him all the best!
I think the major challenge there is the more the "reader" can change the story, the less the story matters and therefore it's no longer "story driven." Some would even say it's mutually exclusive (I'm kind of leaning that way). I mean, how story driven is your game if the story is that dispensable or interchangeable. There are plenty of games where you can sort of do as you please and there's multiple paths and conclusions but most of these would no longer be called "story driven", and the ones that would you'd probably categorize among those only changing details (Mass Effect). Fallout and Chrono Trigger come to mind as games that come down just on or to either side of that line, but they're still limited as far as this idea goes. To truly do this, one would basically have to write multiple separate and in depth story trees that go in completely different directions, perhaps with their own separate themes and individual characters (like if your main characters could live or die =), yet are treated with equal import, as if they're all the one true narrative. In that case, I feel like the story, themes, and the entire game would be consumed by and become about this concept (the "what ifs" of life) and, again, could be in danger of becoming some weird life simulator/experiment with no narrative rather than a driving one. Anyway, aside from the feasibility of all that, most games, or any medium for that matter, unfortunately can't even craft one great story.