What is the worse AAA developer for story?

It has a meaning, but it should only be applied to game development on a game per game basis. AAA just means huge budget.

Oh man the story in the first Mario is so dumb, Nintendo is the worst storyteller ever. Like what is that shit even about? Jumping on loompas? And every single time you beat a castle - guess what - Peach isn't there! Couldn't they come up with any better reasons? Not even "oh she just left". And then they just repeat this nonsense for like 2 and a half decades!! Every game is the same. Then take Mario, put a green hat on him and bam! Legend of Zelda. Now put a red helmet on him and bam shabam! Metroid. Oh sorry Samus/Link your Zelda/Metroid is in another Dungeon/Spaceplace.

@brodehouse said:

I don't know man, it could go either way. They're teasing the face turn pretty hard by putting in stuff like the tactical camera (well, top down view), listening to fan criticism (companion armor can be modified like, say, Shepard's armor from ME2/3), and even granting a few wild fan wishes (QUNARI RACE IS PLAYABLE OMG WTF). Whether they end up making good or not is still a matter of debate, but I don't think anyone can say that they haven't been trying.

The character development in Super Mario World was pretty bad. I never got a sense of getting into Yoshi's head and why he's helping Mario out. What is his motivation? The pacing is also all over the place. Nintendo are hack frauds basically.

These threads are so fucking dumb. I get irritated reading the responses. People saying Bioware... really you couldn't think of another AAA developer that puts out games with worse stories? To the people going "That ending" the reason there was such a hullabaloo about it is because people cared about the story so much. And to the people mentioning games that aren't trying to tell a narrative or are not AAA are just morons.

I was burned by DA2 and ME3 after being a diehard Bioware fan since they started making RPGs but I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt on DA3, still not going to preorder it though.

You're a stronger man than I.

*stares wistfully at the EB Games receipt.*

I understand your pain. I hate baseless attacks.

I already posted in this thread before seeing this comment, but I agree with you more than I do with myself a few minutes ago. As mad as I was about Team Ninja (not Ninja Theory, duh) soiling Metroid's good name, Quantic Dream and Kojima are just so inept at storytelling it's unreal. On every technical level, they screw it up so badly. If Heavy Rain or Metal Gear were submitted as final projects for a creative writing class, they would each get a "D" if their instructor was generous. Heavy Rain had massive plot holes, twists and turns that strained (and then broke) belief and so many filler scenes that were there just so they could have an exciting action scene or to pad out the game's length. Even forgiving how insane, preachy, convoluted and campy Metal Gear is, it's extraordinarily long-winded, full of clumsy exposition dumps and every character has to ruminate on their personal philosophy and deepest secrets in the middle of a spy mission. There's no subtlety. The only way Kojima knows how to communicate information to the player is to have one of his characters say it out loud and then go over it again and again. You nailed it perfectly. There's no major game developers who are as incompetent at storytelling that touch Quantic Dream and Kojima. Maybe an argument could be made the Square should round out the unholy trinity, but I don't know enough about their recent games aside from Final Fantasy XIII.

@chrissedoff: Ninja Theory hasn't made any Metroid games. Team Ninja, on the other hand, has.

I go with Bethesda since they promote the story of their titles so much.

They have this problem that goes along with the scale of their titles where enormous plot holes and lack of story resolution just always permeates in the Fallout and Elder Scroll games.

Absolutely duder. Really Super Mario World 2 is just like Metal Gear Solid 3, where the sequel is actually the past. I realized recently that Yoshi's Island was basically a way for Nintendo to retcon motivation into Yoshi by giving him and Mario this bizarre monster-child relationship that doesn't make a lick of sense. Why is Yoshi helping that baby out when his own brethren are lost? I feel a big missing piece in the Mario mythos is the implication that Mario is royal, a prince who loved Peach but then forsook his heritage to become a plumber.

Oh shit, did I say Ninja Theory? That's funny; I thought all of their games had exceptional storytelling.

Absolutely. One man's FFXIII is another man's FFXIII. heh. This is all about different taste and preferences.

Heck, a lot of people talk about how bad the Call of Duty stories have been, but as far as dumb action movie stories, I can kind of appreciate them. It's like saying Michael Bay's stories are bad. I may feel that's true, but to some, they're decent stories for the kind of experience they're wanting to have.

Yeah, I tried to quote the bit I was talking about but quoting fucked up so I just refreshed the page and replied instead. This is the line I was talking about.

I already posted in this thread before seeing this comment, but I agree with you more than I do with myself a few minutes ago. As mad as I was about Ninja Theory soiling Metroid's good name, Quantic Dream and Kojima are just so inept at storytelling it's unreal.

hmmmm I guess Gearbox, I've only played Borderlands 1&2 but the story in those is forgettable and the characters are passable to annoying.

@truthtellah said:

The origin of the word and how it's used sometimes might be dumb, but I still think there's value in a word for games with a significant higher budget then most other games. It would perhaps be more interesting if publishers was more upfront with the budget like the movie business, but most of them don't seem interested in going that route.

@truthtellah: But the Call of Duty games usually have relatively basic A to B to C stories. They do try to throw a little bit of intrigue in there that's usually pretty uninteresting and/or stupid, but the story kind of stays out of the way of the action anyways. In Final Fantasy XIII, the story is the game and on an objective level, it's mishandled. The characters literally spend most of the game wandering around wondering what their motivation is. I personally find Final Fantasy XIII's story to be half-baked, airy-fairy, soft-headed mush. You can make an argument that my take on the story in Final Fantasy XIII is subjective, but it is objectively poor storytelling to have hours of cutscenes in which very little plot movement takes place and instead you listen to a bunch of people whine and navel-gaze and just go in circles for hours on end. I will accept that some people like the plot of the game, but I refuse to accept that these people are not also being very forgiving regarding the execution of it all.

@chrissedoff: The story is not the game. Certainly not an objective level. I also don't find the storytelling poor. You may feel differently, because again, it is a subjective argument. There is nothing inherently objective about any point in your argument. Worse, your language is needlessly aggressive.

@sinusoidal: Holy crap. You are probably the only person who understands that much about the XIII saga storyline haha.

I think there may be use in a term for it, but AAA isn't it. AAA has gotten too muddled in some odd idea of quality when it hasn't ever consistently been that. So, I would say the word, at best, is misleading nowadays. It's too amorphous for specific use. I mean, I'd consider $10 million to be a AAA level of development, but there are also $200 million or more games. Do we need a new AAA+ term at this point? ha. If we only consider it the top of the budget in games, then that's talking about only a handful of studios.

We should take a page from other industries and just say "big budget" games. That conveys the meaning without including any misunderstanding about quality. It's far clearer than how "AAA" is used today.

I would argue that any amount of cutscenes are poor storytelling in this medium, but that's just my subjective opinion. There's no "objectively poor storytelling" since it's all a matter of taste. There are opinions that more people can agree with but that doesn't make it objective.

I dunno, I almost always find something to enjoy out of a game's story. Story is more than plot after all, it's setting, and characters, and dialogue, and character development. Every plot sounds pretty dumb when boiled down, it's the course it takes in the moment that's fun. Judging stories against each other is also sorta pointless since the focus shifts between gameplay and story from game to game. I can't think of a developer than makes just plain crappy stories where everything is done wrong consistently. Not even the Call of Duty people, it's not like I expect talented writers to work on those games.

@chrissedoff: As @hailinel mentioned, none of that is really objective. Personally, I share many of your criticisms of the first FFXIII game's handling of its story. I may personally consider it poor storytelling. Yet, I can't agree that it is somehow objectively poor. That simply isn't how writing or games work.

We do all show more forgiveness to some perceived flaws than others. That's natural. But unless it's a technical bug or mechanical error in a game, it can't be an outright objective issue. It may be a widely accepted issue, but that doesn't mean it is somehow universal or provably bad. You may pursue convincing someone why it is not good, but none of us can authoritatively say a game's story is objectively good or bad.

Hope that difference comes across here. :)

@starvinggamer said:

I think the whole shift with Starcraft going from the story of these warring factions, to just being this super personal tale that revolves almost entirely around Raynor, Kerrigan, and Zeratul, is just really dramatic between Starcraft 1 and 2. They aren't really introducing any new players to the cast, they're just narrowing down on the handful that weren't killed off in Brood War. If they wanted to make a game where I just follow Raynor around on his ship and meet such memorable characters as "scientist nerd dude" and "that mechanic who is pretty much a Warcraft dwarf", they should've just made a Gears of War knockoff where you play as Raynor.

A story can't be objectively bad but the 4 act story structure is abided for a reason. It tends to execute a story better than not following such a thing. Films and games that don't abide it either do it on purpose to be abstract or intentionally bewildering or the rules are ignored because the storytelling is poor. The vast majority of people who experience a story could think its bad, and if that's the case as it seems to be for FF13 its worth noting if nothing else. You liking it personally doesn't silence the broader point of view, if anything the person defending the minority opinion is the one who has to justify it, not the other way around. FF13 can't be an "objectively bad" story for the same reason Transformers movies can't. People love both, neither all that effectively stick to the 4 act structure or hero's journey structure and that can be said objectively. Does that make them outside the box thinkers or bad storytellers? Cus the vibe I'm getting is as long as someone somewhere likes something, nobody can be of the opinion its "bad". Which means nothing is bad. Geez wait till the internet gets wind of this.

@bargainben: I believe a game is bad. I just won't claim it is undeniably or objectively bad. Simple as that.

i vote Ubisoft as worse AAA developer for story!!!!!!!!!!!! they are up their own ass with the assassin's creed lore....and their recent game watchdog was kinda weak when it came to the story.. also Ninja Theory is not a AAA developer........ sooo why?? is ninja theory being talked about here??? :(

Diablo 3's story was horrendous. The gameplay was great, which kept me playing, but if you actually sit there and listen to the story it's like you're watching a Power Rangers movie. The villain is evil just to be evil, the people you'd expect to betray you end up betraying you, they're completely unsubtle in the way they "hint" at future events (oooOOoo foreshadowing), and the characters are ALL 1-dimensional.

Yeah but then it would have been a shitty game on top of having a story you didn't like dohoho random Gears beef.

But honestly, I feel like it's more of a symptom of the prolonged nature of the SC2 trilogy. It's basically taking a story of similar scope to the original and exploding it out over three games, each with significantly more narrative than SC and BW combined. In that sort of elongated storytelling it seems perfectly natural to me to focus in on the characters. I understand if that's not the sort of story you prefer, but that doesn't make the writing bad just because it has turned into a different genre.

Most of the supporting characters in SC2 are pretty underdeveloped, but I'd say the same thing about original SC. It was basically the Mengsk and Raynor and Kerrigan and Tassidar show then. Tychus and Abathur are about as interesting to me as any of the secondary cast of the SC1/BW.

While the XIII trilogy's story may technically not be objectively bad, it is told objectively badly. All three games are massively guilty of abusing the general rule of 'show don't tell'. They are constantly explaining the plot to you through dialog and actually showing very little. It's a huge disconnect that actively detracts from any emotional impact the games might have had.

The first game could have easily shown the despotic regime oppressing some citizens or something, but nope. The Casual bystander doesn't exist in this game. The only characters present are your party, some of their rebellious friends and said despotic regime. It could have shown the fal'Cie doing something evil, but nope, they only ever appear as some kind of vague, monolithic sculpture until you fight one as a boss. We're told the way things are, but never actually shown.

The second game starts off by retconning the ending of the first game through - you guessed it - exposition. It proceeds from there to commit one of the most egregious abuses of time travel ever put to a medium. Time-travel plots are tricky things to begin with, but here it's absolutely unnecessary aside from allowing Squeenix to save money by reusing assets. The game takes place across 700 years and very little changes in that time. Characters conveniently find themselves hundreds of years in the future/past in exactly the same state they were before through various macguffins. Noel - possibly considered the main protagonist alongside Serah - is supposedly from some post-apocalyptic future where only two people are left alive. You know what they never show? The apocalypse! (Cocoon fell I guess. It's hard to tell.)

Lightning Returns has Hope constantly and verbosely beating you over the head with explanations about what's going on because the game utterly fails to show you otherwise. We're supposedly on the tail end of 500 years of some kind of stasis that prevents people from aging or giving birth while the world is being eaten by chaos. Guess what they never show in this game. The world being eaten by chaos! You'd never know it was happening if someone didn't remind you of the fact (mostly Hope) every five minutes through -surprise fucking surprise - exposition. Most of the remaining inhabitants don't convey this at all since they spend their days doing regular old RPG shit: running shops, demanding 12 rat tails, checking the town clocks to make sure they're on time, worrying about getting a boyfriend/girlfriend. (Seriously, are these people aware of the impending end of the world or not Squeenix?) If you muted Hope, (whose name's obvious double meaning [it's not even double, it's like a sledgehammer to the forehead of shitty symbology] is horrifically abused in this iteration, see: the ending) this game would be the most incomprehensible thing ever made. Much like this paragraph.

i think ill add Gearbox,

and Insomniac

I'd have to say Blizzard. Because they try so hard, have such phenomenal production, and it's all to push out tripe.

Gearbox's stories (at least the one's I've... experienced?) are pretty bad, but they're also pretty invisible.

EDIT: And I can at least poke fun at Capcom's stories.

Ubisoft just throws shit at a fucking wall and then adds waypoints.

Somebody link that "Every Bioware Game is the Same" spreadsheet.

I wish some of the devs who are bad at telling stories didn't even put stories in their games. Imagine if the gameplay weren't compromised by the story and the story weren't compromised by the gameplay. The game could still have goals like a story driven game, such as discovery and defeating bosses, but the devs wouldn't have to leave out some of their ideas because the story doesn't support them or reshape the story to the point that it makes little sense. Gameplay is often illogical anyway.

I don't really think I have a dev slotted in worst storytellers. Bethesda maybe? their "main" plot usually isn't anything to write home about. But I love the hell out of their games regardless.

Infinity Ward was one that was so good at making damn good gameplay, but just horrible storytellers. I'm still bothered by how anyone would think that showing a map with voices playing would be a form clear storytelling in any way. I would have preferred a wall of text over that.

Bethesda's issue, when it comes to storytelling, is just about how difficult it can be to have all of those things playing out in first person view, which limits your options. If they'd do cutscenes, where they can pull back the camera and do things in a more traditional way...I dunno, maybe that'd help.

The best storytellers in the gaming industry, that are "big name developers", Kojima Productions, Naughty Dog, Bioware, and Rockstar are all top of the list for me.

I think it's bad writing in the sense that they're stretching the plot super, super thin, to the point that the pacing is awful. Something reasonably plot significant happens every 1-2 missions in SC1/BW. In SC2, while the missions are better designed in a gameplay sense, they're also less meaningful to the story or even character development, in that usually little happens until the end of each mission arc. Even then, the "help the colonist/refugees" mission arc in Wings of Liberty just felt like filler, where I couldn't even tell what they were going for since Raynor is kinda flirting with the leader/doctor lady, but obviously the whole game is setting up that he still loves Kerrigan. I did think the Tychus-Raynor moments in Wings of Liberty were quite good, but didn't get nearly as much out of Abathur. To be fair, I think the Zerg campaigns were always the least interesting stories in SC1/BW as well. I miss the random world building vignettes in SC1 and BW, though for all I know they had to lock those in before the missions were finalized or something which is why they're so unrelated to the campaign missions or characters generally.

It just feels like they've dawdled about and wasted my time for two games, where they managed to make Kerrigan human, make Kerrigan unhuman again, and then finally kill Mengsk. Also Narud dies though that kinda barely matters in the grand scheme of things. It just feels kinda lazy that they didn't find any way to include the Protoss in the story, aside from "they want to kill the infected colonists" in WoL and "Kerrigan sneaks aboard that one ship and fucks everything up" in HotS. Everything else is just the dumb Tal'Darim, the "savage" Protoss or whatever, which feels like a cop out. They've seemingly promoted Nova to main cast, but not Tosh or anyone else from WoL, and I sorta doubt anybody from HotS is really going to show up in Legacy of the Void.

No, no they're not. Especially not the first game, which many have criticized for not showing or telling enough.

While all three games in the series do have their narrative faults, and while you're using this thread to, yet again, rage shit all over the series, the structures in which they tell their stories are not any noticeably worse than other games with similar narrative structures. There are elements that are certainly awkward, such as the retcon forced at the start of XIII-2 as a means to pull the story back open, but from a pure mechanics-of-storytelling perspective, none of the games in the trilogy are so egregious in their offenses as to be considered awful when put up against other games and other franchises. And despite what faults exist, a story doesn't need to be told perfectly to still be enjoyable, so long as the story it self is enjoyable and the way it's told works despite the flaws that are present.

Other M's story structure is far, far and away more egregious in its blatant disregard of "show, don't tell" than any game in the XIII series. The narrative relies almost exclusively on Samus's narration to express her viewpoint in the story, and to expound and explain aspects of the narrative that would have been better served through additional character dialogue or action. Key points in the narrative rely heavily on the idea that the player has knowledge of Samus's past as explored in external media, rather than sufficiently detail those aspects in the game itself for those unfamiliar. The core story, I find, is entertaining, and I do enjoy it, but it suffers from scriptwriting that feels amateurish. (And no, it was not Team Ninja at fault for the script.) In short, the story is fine, but the method of delivery is lacking. Even so, I don't hate it in the least.

Whether an opinion is majority or minority, it needs to be properly expressed and argued to come across well. Even if an opinion rests with the majority, the person arguing the opinion can't simply assume that their points are objectively in the right. Just reading this thread, people have made those assumptions, and made no effort at forming a proper argument. Instead, they simply stated their opinion as fact, in some cases with excessive levels of aggression and/or mockery.

Similarly, that a story does not follow a four-act structure does not make the story itself bad. Nor does failing to adhere to a three or five-act structure. The Wikipedia page for Screenwriting alone makes mention not only of the three-act structure, but of the Hero's Journey and Syd Field's Paradigm as other popular theories on the art. Point being, there's no one single right or wrong way to structure a video game narrative, and to suggest that Final Fantasy XIII is "objectively bad" for failing to adhere to the concept of a four-act structure is short-sighted.

Yes, yes they are.

I provided numerous examples from each game, the crux of your rebuttal - and I'm paraphrasing here - seems to be that 'there are stories told worse in video games'. I won't argue with that, but it certainly doesn't make XIII's story told well.

You stated that the manner in which the stories in the XIII trilogy were told were objectively bad, and I stated that while the games certainly have their problematic elements, the manners in which the stories are told are still not objectively bad. Some people find the elements you cited easier to swallow than others, don't find them as bad as other offenses, or again, simply don't consider the execution in the series to be "bad". Could aspects be better? Yes. Does "could be better" equate to "bad"? Not necessarily.

Also, the goal of this thread was to discuss the AAA developer that's the worst at telling stories. You don't really make any argument along those lines and just use this thread to rag on a series that you've ragged on countless times elsewhere without making any effort at connecting your points to the thread's overall goal. And even in that sense, Square Enix as a whole is far from the worst at telling stories.

Yeah, you maybe should. Very overlooked series, offered a really unique take on the WWII shooter at the time.

Quantic Dream is actually like, the perfect example for this. I don't know why I didn't realize that before.

They're the winner(or in this case, loser, hehe) for me because what they're trying to do is REALLY heavy and they just kinda fail miserably. They're basically trying to do stuff on the level of The Last of Us and end up making schlock.

@grantheaslip: Yes, I can at least agree with you that FFXIII's story is better than Indigo Prophecy. Everyone, let David Cage bring us all together.

Like most of the people in this thread: Gearbox by a country mile.

Shout out to Ubisoft though. Watch Dogs, AC3, Far Cry 3 and Splinter Cell: Blacklist (to name a few) were all really terrible.

Like all of them. If I had to pick one, I'd probably say Gearbox or maybe Square but for most AAA developers, it's just different degrees of bad. To be fair though, I doubt most of them care. They're just trying to get you from point A to point B. Most of them can do a serviceable job of that, I suppose.

@frostyryan: I don't know what you're on about man. The thread is about AAA devs that are the worst for story. Nintendo fit that bill.