Why is storytelling in Video Games so Hard?

I was watching the Detroit quicklook and was unimpressed with the generic story.

So storytelling in games is generally not the best, but why is it that video games struggle so much with telling good stories?
Mainstream movies generally don't have unique stories either, but then there are books, you very often hear about fantastical books, stories that define experiences that we haven't gotten to in video games, yet.

What if the problem isn't the medium, but rather too many people working on the project? Books are usually just written by 1 person, with guidance from the publisher, but thanks to the internet, publishers are a thing of the past.

Could the problem be that developers are trying to make games and are using their tools to make games first and then thinking of the story later?

Or is it that people lack imagination?
OR is it that the wrong people are making games?

I'd say i would refuse to believe that the medium itself is incapable of fantastic experiences, but then again, i'm not one to believe.

It's -just- that we should have had more great stories than we do now; it's definitely not helping that the most profitable games, are those that get people to pay for virtual points.

Or is it that we(as in we the general public) don't take games seriously enough; to be conduits of great experiences?

Could be a matter of too many cooks in the kitchen, a.k.a. design-by-committee. Could be a matter of who's making the game. I've seen plenty of well produced movies that were bafflingly bad, making me wonder just what the hell happened behind the scenes there too.

It's certainly not the medium, especially when story can so easily (and certainly has often been the case) compartmentalize the story part and the gameplay part. Which is to say it's not like every game needs to think of clever ways to tell tell a story through gameplay.

I remember some recent industry talk about single-player games, and whether they too niche and irrelevant to be worth pursuing, so it's definitely fair to say the market has a role in things, naturally. I dunno duder, take your pick.

If we’re excluding inherent issues with the medium, I’d argue it’s because of player agency. I imagine it’s very difficult to craft a story that allows for the types of interactions players want, and for the ways players might want to shape the story themselves.

I know you've likely been thinking about this for a while, but the casual mention of Detroit makes it seem like that was the breaking point. Like, "well, if a David Cage game of all things is derivative and uninteresting, I guess it is true: games are terrible storytellers." I know this likely isn't the case, but I do feel obligated to say that I think a Quantic Dream game is no bar by which to measure good stories.

Anyway, looks like I'll be a detractor, here. I actually think game stories are pretty good. I should mention that lately I have been playing games from both past and present known for their writing, so perhaps that's cheating (God of War, Pillars of Eternity, Wasteland 2). Still, for me personally, I've found that when a game leverages its strengths to tell a story in a way only a game can - and that doesn't have to mean anything profound, just something other than simple cutscenes and mimicry of film - the emotional beats hit harder to me than most other media. Granted, I don't watch too many contemporary movies or TV nowadays, so maybe this is simply a result of me surrounding myself with a particular stimulus and becoming more accustomed to it. Whatever, I don't think the distinction matters.

At the very least, I'm on Vinny's side when it comes to game stories: say what you will about game writing writ large, but dismissing games as having terrible storytelling as a matter of course leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

If you think games are largely unimaginative and derivative, I would honestly say you aren't looking hard enough. But that's just me.

I think they have got better, look at something like the Witcher 3, or a lot of telltale's games (they have a good few stinkers of course).

David Cage is the Tommy Wiseau of games.

It's hard in big budget games because of the expected length and pacing it with gameplay. A movie tends to be between 90min-3h and a tv show evolves to greath lengths over time. A lot of games aim to be between 10-20h and drop in a complete set. So when you add on how much story there needs to be, and making it fit with what you are doing gameplaywise, the pacing is usually impossibly hard to perfect.

Then there is also player agency in a story. If you are doing a dedicated story game like Quantic Dreams does and don't really have a combat system or whatever to mold around. They still want the player to have agency over SOMETHING which means it's going to be the story. And writing a story with branching paths is exponentially more time consuming and harder to control.

David Cage is also a bad writer and I'm still pissed off about Heavy Rain. That game was insulting.

There's a ton of reasons, some of which you mentioned in the OP. There's not one definitive answer. Though I will say devs such as Obsidian and a few others have been making great game stories for decades. It really depends.

I think its a combination of a bunch of things, but I want to actually talk for a second about what a good videogame story even is. Like, i think the stories told in Uncharted are good/well told stories, but they're bad videogame stories because the gameplay has little to do with it- its a means to an end, and Nathan Drake being a mass murderer for the sake of gameplay but ignored in the story ignores the point of the medium, right? Witcher 3 is a better example, where everything about the way you play it adds to the story, where if you watched a supercut of all the cutscenes on youtube you would miss a lot of it. (I have a big problem with custscenes in general, because they aren't involved at all- if you had to go watch a video to get to the good parts of reading a book, its a bad book, right?) Doom is a great example too, because the story is the shooting, the cutscenes are mostly context and a new direction to go shoot in.

But I think truly great videogame story is told in gameplay. Her Story is the best example I can think of, where the story can't be told without it being a videogame. I'm having trouble thinking of another good example that isn't an indie title I've forgotten the name of, partially because there aren't any good examples where the actual gameplay is great.

That's the actual point I was leading to, because development is so hard, the gameplay gets all the budget and focus and the story gets layered in at the end. Because if its a shitty game when you play it, who cares about the story? One of my favorite videogame stories of all time is Bioshock, and they didn't even start implementing the story until very late in its development cycle. I think we're on the upswing though, with more and more indie titles making their way into the hands of the general gaming populace, we're going to see more experimentation and more refined storytelling that only videogames can achieve. We've had a bunch of Citizen Kane moments for gameplay (COD4, DOTA, PUBG, etc.) but very few for actual storytelling. They'll come along eventually, but we're actually looking at an art form in its infancy- we're beyond cave paintings and into realism, but once we're run out of pores and particle effects, then we're gonna start seeing some really interesting stuff. And with videogame budgets getting increasingly insane in the AAA market, turning to stuff like microtransactions and lootboxes to make it back, eventually the market is gonna ceiling on how much you can spend on the art and still make a profit, and then we're gonna start seeing the clever people do amazing things. Lower budget titles like Psyconauts and Sunless Sea are already good examples of people spending the limited money on the story instead of just the gameplay.

Sorry for the short book, but I've spent a bunch of time thinking about this because I work in theatre, and have spent a bunch of time looking at videogames to try and improve my storytelling in my day job. One thing I can say if that videogames do horror by far the best, nothing can touch forcing you to take those steps into the dark. Alien Isolation and Amnesia are scarier than any book or movie could possibly be.

One aspect is the innate interactivity. In games, the player is essentially a director. They're given control over the camera shots, the pacing, and the choice of content they engage with. If the developers take too much agency away from the player, they're not really engaging with the interactive side of the game.

There's also the balance of creating a good game to go along with the story, while other mediums have the luxury of devoting all their budget to the story itself, games have to spend a boatload of cash just creating a foundation for the story to actually exist in, let alone how that story will actually fit in with that gameplay (and there's an alarming lack of creativity in how that last part comes to fruition, unfortunately).

Anecdotally, I've played more games than I've watched movies over the past few years, so when I ever do get around to watching a film, it often ends up feeling rushed, character arcs feeling stilted, or relationships coming across as unearned. At some point I think people will just become familiar enough with how video games tell stories, in combination with developers exploring narrative and meaning through gameplay, and we'll stop seeing such a negative association with video game stories in general. I mean, they're not that bad (disclaimer: I thought the story in MGS4 was great fun).

All that said, David Cage is no gold standard for video game storytelling. His games are absolutely the games you can point to, see the massive budget, marketing campaigns, and studio backing then say "haha, video game stories all SUCK", but in reality very few game stories are quite as embarrassing as his.

I think it’s purely a talent issue in smaller titles and risk adversity/focus testing in bigger titles.

There are some unique challenges that the medium brings with it but there are also unique opportunities .

I don't think there is a problem, I don't think storytelling in games is harder than in an other medium. But it is different. Any scenario writer that sees player interaction in their story as a difficulty instead of a opportunity should stick to linear media. I think there are many examples of stories portrayed in games that only really work in games. In which story is not just what you get through cutscenes, but also the story through the environment and gameplay. Think of Dark Souls, Shadow of the Colossus. Just like with movies and series, most of the stories in movies are not so great, but I think the good ones are not just miracles, but made by people that really understand the craft.

I don't think it is fair to blame big suits at big publishers for a failing immersive story. I think more often the vision wasn't there in the first place. Call of Duty will never tell a genuine, good story, because everything it stands for is completely fake and revolting.

David Cage is just a game creator that tortures the medium with B-grade made for tv science fiction plots. Also I don't think his games work as immersive experiences, but I have found they work great with a few people just messing about with snacks and talking about school, big laughs and a lot of fun (heavy rain was a highlight).

Rather than list specific points, I’d say that stories are best when the focus is story. Books are all about the story and typically sacrifice little in the process of delivering it.

Movies add an entire crew to the equation. You need to figure out how to get a story on paper, frame it, make sets, maybe add some CG, find the right actors to help tell the story. On top of that, it probably needs to be 90-120 minutes unless you have a ton of credibility as a director. Plus, there are unions and contracts to negotiate. Who gets how many lines, how much screentime, how the crew can be used.

In single-player games, all those aspects are concerns, in their own way. But you need to worry about game mechanics, about player agency, about pointing folks in the right direction without breaking immersion or hindering pacing of gameplay or story.

Throw in multiplayer and the considerations on the agency, pacing, and direction side are even worse.

In games, you probably have pressure to make x hours of content. Maybe pressure to pad things out with collectables. There’s pre-order bonuses that could mess with things (Catwoman DLC for Arkham City). Maybe DLC can impact your story (Prince of Persia 2008 or Asura’a Wrath).

Now, I’d imagine indy games and movies are easier to navigate as they’re smaller opperations with less considerations, but you still need funding.

More focused games and movies, like a short film or a 1-3 hour story-based game are probably easier as well.

It seems the more you’re trying to accomplish and the more folks (with their own interests) you need to pull something off, the harder it likely gets.

I'd argue SWERY is the Tommy Wiseau of games, people seem to ironically love them both. David Cage not so much. He's more of the Paul W.S. Anderson of games. Most people hate his movies but some of them are fun in a dumb way.

Personally I think videogame stories are mostly bad due to the filler that's crammed into them. The Witcher 3 could have had a great story but it was undercut by lots of bullshit.

@rafar: Agency can be part of the story, though I’d wager it’s a risky and difficult gambit.

In film, there has been some playing with multiple endings and choose your own adventure ideas, but agency is usually about interpretation. What’s happening in a David Lynch movie is vastly different from one viewer’s perspective to the next. These movies pay the price in the mass market just steering clear. Hell, Inception (which I think is a great, straightforward, big hollywood film) sent the world into a confused uproar for a time.

In games, agency is usually a force that hurts stories, but Bioshock turned it into a tool. Metal Gear Solid 2 goes a similar route toward the end of the game, as does Spec Ops: The Line. I’m sure there are many others that I’m not thinking of off the top of my head. The Stanley Parable is more of a story/tobox sort of thing, but it very much relies on the player to tell its story.

I think a lot of good reasons have been given here; but I think the thing being missed is that I think percentage of video games with good stories is actually roughly on par with movies and books, especially on the big budget side of things. Most big budget movies (e.g. Fast and Furious movies, Marvel movies, Pirates of the Caribbean movies) don't have great stories, they can be entertaining, but not great. Likewise, most of the big bestselling books (e.g. Dan Brown books, John Grisham books, the Twilight series) also do not have great stories. I'd say the average AAA game's single player campaign is on par with most of them.

There are definitely some big budget movies and bestselling books with great stories, but there are also some AAA games with great stories, like The Witcher 3 or The Last of Us. In raw numbers there probably aren't as many games that can be listed, but I think that's more a function of the relatively short number of years that games with stories have been created.

Most of the movies and books with great stories are not the big-budget blockbusters, and many either weren't huge successes until well after they were created (e.g. Casablanca) or never actually made a ton of money (e.g. There Will Be Blood). And likewise I think there are a lot of indie games that do have great stories, its just that most of them don't make a lot of money and the genre hasn't yet reached the point of having dedicated historians leading curation efforts (like the American Film Institute does) so there aren't things yet like "The 100 Greatest Video Game Quotes of All Time" posters up on college dorm walls. But that'll happen eventually.

There are tons of good stories in games and tons of bad ones. More than likely its because games take years to make while movies and even books can be done in a few months. They also dont have to worry about viewer choice and interactivity and have decades and centuries(books) of a head start.

Maybe I'm ignorant, but I never really agreed with the sentiment that video games always have shit stories, and if you want good stories, simply stick to books or even film. I think they all have pluses and minuses, and I think video games can tell stories in very powerful ways that movies or books may not be able to since it puts the player in those situations to experience them. As for why a lot of video games fail, I don't know. Sometimes it's lazy writing like someone just didn't think it through or care, and other times it might be because balancing gameplay with a story in many games that are trying to entertain through its gameplay (like shooting guys or cutting them up with a sword) isn't easy. I think for a game to really excel at a story (and it's not always the case), it has to be front and center first, while everything else around it supports it in a way that makes sense. Plus, as of recently (or however long it's been going on), developers have been trying to really focus on the gameplay portion, to make sure consumers keep coming back to their games and supporting it. Games with stories, at least for me, can do that too, so I do find it unfortunate. This is not to say I think stories in games are going away though. I think Quantic Dreams' games are kind of a bad example.

Video games are not movies or novels, at the core they are just games. Even your most story driven Telltale games are for the most part as their core loop is a puzzle mechanic set to unlock a certain cut scene repeat.

Story basically now a days covers up for poor game mechanics which is why I am in the small camp that doesn't like certain popular titles that some might rate 9.5 or 10/10 & enjoys certain titles others may trash. The Mass Effect series is a prime example, ME 1 rough game play but the story & world setting made that game great in my book. ME 2 & 3 the game play greatly improves but the story or more so the end cinematic wasn't to some peoples liking. ME:A had a vastly improved game play but the story compare to the previous titles not so much. For me personally ME 1 and ME:A are my favorite in the series for total opposite reasons, while ME 1 combat was serviceable the story and world building is what kept me hooked and ME:A the core game play was great so I did not really care as much if the story fell short in some side quest or a character wasn't as interesting as those in the past.

A lot of great points made already so I’d like to add that because of all those points, great storytelling ends up being different that in other mediums. Gone Home was amazing storytelling in a way that only a game could present. Same with Tacoma. Games have to find the style of storytelling that they can uniquely stand out with, and that’s when we get experiences that we wouldn’t get otherwise. (I’m sure What Remains of Edith Finch would be a great mention but I still haven’t played it)

@oursin_360: I think the games that excel at story telling tend to take the medium into account. There are interesting things you can do with interactivity.

I remember playing Doom 3 co-op, getting to Hell, and thinking, man, this would be a great place to make each player an unreliable narrator for the other player. Have players see different things, hear different things. Have my flashlight work for me, but they don’t see it. Record and playback bits of our game chat but to only one of us. Make us question and doubt everything.

And in Doom 3, back when that was re-released on 360, it would have subverted all expectation. It’s not some Silent Hill mind-screw. It’s not an indie darling. It’s a big budget shooter that was kinda dumb, so recontextualizing the end of the game by hijacking tools of perception you’ve grown to trust would be great. I think it would have made that the next Eternal Darkness, frankly.

It depends what you want from story, Detroit is a game mostly about people talking to each other so a lot of the story is going to occur through conversation, whereas i prefer story in games like Half Life 2 where the sights and sounds tell a lot of the story, with the occasional conversation for context. I know people who tell me that Half Life is a bad story and i disagree, this is usually from people whose favourite stories come from RPG's and while i agree they usually have a ton of world building through events and conversation, i would still argue that the Max Payne revenge story can be more memorable than something like Mass Effect, it's like music, it's totally subjective and everyone is going to value every genre differently.
I find the story in Ace Combat 6 to be more entertaining than The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, but they're TOTALLY different things.

As other people have mentioned, I believe player agency is a big part of it. The more general you have to make a story to accommodate the options that a player can take, the harder it is to come up with something that hits hard. And if you're dealing with any game type (open world) where the story authors have to give up control over story pacing / tension, it makes it even harder. (Mass Effect 3, for example, really suffered from these issues, as the GB crew and others have noted, and that's one of the better ones... even with the original ending.)

And everybody has a different idea of what makes a story "good", and thus projects their desires and emotions and capabilities on to the story that's being played out through their agency, which means even the best authorial intent can be compromised.

I know many people have pointed to a lot of different elements that may make a good story difficult to achieve, but there is also one simple factor to consider: writing a good story isn't easy. Sure, the format of video games extends the challenge in a variety of ways, but if you had a pot full of games to analyze strictly on the technical level of their story telling, there would be very few that come out on top.

Pretty good point to consider, especially if you start to look into movies more closely you'll probably be able to pick out a few that fail in the storytelling department just as much as some games do. Of course storytelling in gaming has its own unique problems but that shouldn't detract from the point that making a good story isn't that easy in any scenario.

I think it has to do, in part, with the needs of a video game. If I wanted to write a book, I need to be a good writer and find an editor and a publisher. The bulk of that book's success or failure is tied to the writing and the editing and, for my part, I only need to be good at one thing: writing.

Budget constraints, graphical limitations, or studio pressure are unlikely to change my writing significantly; for the most part, I get to call the shots, unless I'm on a very specific contract. What I (or the publisher) don't have to do is devote huge swaths of the book's budget to a team of people specifically focusing on how fun the pages are to turn, and the book won't get dinged in reviews for having bad page-feel or an outdated font choice (gameplay and graphics, as it were). I also don't need to make a protagonist so relatable or so undefined that people don't mind being that person (or robot, or sentient meat-square, or whatever). And let's not underestimate the ego aspect: if my book succeeds, the credit and financial windfall is given to me, the writer, and I join a pantheon of Great Authors(TM) that stretches back thousands of years. That combination of the promise of individual success and fewer restrictions on creativity likely attracts the top storytelling talent to try their hand at media other than video games—there's more room for their talent to rise. If I want money, I can try to be the next J.K. Rowling; if I want recognition, I can make it my life's goal to win a Pulitzer or a Nobel, which has a lot more cachet than Game of the Year. Never mind that many aspiring authors won't even get published, let alone attain those goals (I am an editor; I crush dreams professionally). Despite the hurdles, big dreams will motivate the most talented dreamers.

If I'm a great video game writer for a big studio, I'm just one comparatively small part of a very large project—and the project's success or failure often has as much or more to do with the artists, level designers, and so on. If I want to make an indie game to have more creative control, I have to either be multi-talented so I can do my own design, well-off enough to hire good talent, incredibly lucky, or have some similar advantage. Ultimately, I don't think video games have inferior stories because it's a worse story-telling medium (I think it might be the best, in fact, but I love games so damn much I'm rather biased). Instead, the issue is that the medium just isn't set up to attract the best storytellers, unless they have a genuine passion for video games above traditional writing. It's a lot more complicated than all that, I know. This is just one facet that came to mind for me.

I feel like games are on par with movies and books when it comes to bad stories. Some games have good stories, some have bad. Just like the aforementioned media.

@sasnake: but the challenges in delivering story are completely different between mediums.

The interesting thing about especially big games and tv shows is the fact that they are crafted from multiple voices (as stated earlier). But I think what one often misses to acknowledge is the unifying voice, the showrunner-- the script gatekeeper, if you will. In video games, it's often the lead designer. Prominent names some of us may know are Cory Barlog with God of War, Casey Hudson with the Mass Effect-trilogy, and Ken Levine with the Shock-series. They didn't create it all themselves, but I'm guessing they had final approval on most, or all, script-related decisions.

There are two major obstacles that makes story-telling in games much more complicated. Firstly, immersion. The big upper hand books have to both movies and videogames is that no one is creating the image for you. Even if the writer goes into the minute details of describing something it's still created in your mind with your imagination. Which means stuff has a much bigger tendency of making sense to you. In movies the biggest problem is usually bad acting or bad set pieces, but with videogames it throws the a whole plethora of technical issues at you. Even the most brilliant story-driven games is filled with minute details that makes it less believable. Stuff like bad animations, stone-faced NPCs, poor voice delivery, buggy scripting, clunky conversation system etc etc. That's not to say you can't get immersed, but the barrier is infinitely much higher.

Secondly, videogames is an active medium. You are part of the story. And when you're part of the story being passively thrown a bunch of exposition doesn't work as well. It's the old "show don't tell", but turned up to eleven. You can have very passive games that are close to interactive movies or books, but then you're still facing the immersion issues and usually the extra interactivity is more of a detriment than a benefit. Me having to hold the stick up for ten seconds, then click A a few times to trigger the next cutscene doesn't improve a largely cinematic experience.

Personally I've always been a believer in that the best stories from videogames are not the ones that are told, it's the ones you experience. It's the one time you pulled off that awesome stunt in GTA, or that sense of dread you got running through the streets of Yharnam, or that monster that scared you shitless in Amnesia. You can think of it like a spectrum between describing and creating the scenario. In a book the writer is purely focused on describing. As in, they would write "Sam felt a warmth sense of joy running through him". In a movie the writer has to both create the scene but also have an actor describing it through their actions. As in, you would have a shot of two people hugging and you could see this expression of joy on the actors face. In a videogame the writer has to create the scene in a way that makes me, the player, feel joyous about the fact that the other character is hugging me. And the jump from telling the feeling to imparting the feeling is massive from a writing perspective.

I mean, we have the best stories ever made in the Metal Gear Solid series.

If you've got great writers working on the game's story, there's a better chance it will be good.

If the developers have to do the story themselves, then it'll be bad. It's two very different streams of work and skill.

Because the player has control. The closest analogy I can think of is trying to tell a story verbally to someone who interrupts you every minute to ask a question or go to the toilet. When you give the player control its very hard to know what they will and won't see.

Imagine if you wrote a book but weren't sure if half of the people reading it would skip chapters seven and nine. It's a nightmare. That's why most storytelling in games has devolved to all critical content being a cutscene (thereby taking control away from the player to guarantee an experience) or audio/text logs for inconsequential crap that doesn't actually matter.

People with talent for writing go to mediums focused entirely on it.

I think good stories are pretty hard in any medium, but in the case of video games the writing is usually not nearly as important as the game design it surrounds. That's not as much the case with games that are explicitly narrative-focused, but even then I don't think most video game developers are especially great writers.

Another one that struck me recently is that most movies only have to pace out a story over the course of 1.5-3 hours, whereas even the most "cinematic" of video games are often at least 8 (to not even get into bigger open-world games and RPGs, which can last upwards of 40.) That's hard enough on its own, but then consider that the player has some amount of control over how quickly that story is experienced. It's why the vast majority of the storytelling in your average Bioware game is done through self-contained vignettes and side-arcs. It's a lot easier to structure a plot for a long-ass game around a very simple core idea (Assemble a team to stop The Collectors!) and branch out than it is to try and have a fairly complex through-line in a game with a decent amount of freedom and nonlinearity.

The best game stories in my opinion are those that feel like a collaborative experience between the player and whats happening on screen instead of award winning writing. Afterall, it is an interactive medium. Games tend to lose that with cutscenes because the player is then relying on the developer team to tell the player a convincing story that justifies what they just did a minute ago when they had control of the game. It often doesn't add up to the same experience or reflect what the player actually wanted to do.

I don't want to get too wrapped up in specifics, but this is why the intro to Half-Life is regarded as an excellent moment of game writing and interaction because the player directly impacts the world that they're in by being part of a science experiment that goes wrong.

Now not all cutscenes I would argue are bad. If they're kept to a minimum and provide context for a level in a game, all the better right? Which is really what Halo: CE did. Each level had a beginning and ending (sometimes in the middle) cutscene that transitioned what the player was going to do next and had an emotional tone that was created by the scene. We're introduced to how dangerous the Covenant are in the first mission, then we're left completely secluded in the second mission, only to regroup with our allies in the end who have vehicles to fight back against the enemy. The introduction of the flood makes us feel pretty scared about fighting a new enemy that slaughtered our current enemy and we saw our allies get massacred. Pretty standard power fantasy writing with a few wrenches thrown in to make it more interesting, which is what most basic action game stories do and for the most part, it works.

Plus it's not like the story writing process is the most freeing experience. Writers are part of the team that have the same time constraints as others and they're all under pressure to make something possible within their own limits. The big ideas all come from project or creative director which is the head honcho that basically decides what the game is going to be. The writer is just in charge of the narrative, dialogue, and cleaning up plot inconsistencies. So there isn't a lot of wiggle room on what a story can be when you're limited by the technology of the platform, budget, and whatever the project director has in mind with what they envision the game is going to be. Case and point, the original Destiny 1 story. The veteran writers of Bungie basically wrote what they thought would be an interesting story, but it didn't line up with the head creative members, so it got canned and reduced to what it's known for now.

The Relation between good gameplay and story is something to hard to do you wanna pad out the story so you don't have a game that takes 4 hours to finish. Programing wise shooting games or games with attacking a object are the easiest thing to make. I am a big fan of comedy but comedy games IMO are the hardest to make you can put some adventure elements in there but you still want to focus on gameplay or you can focus on story and take away control from the player it self. Think of it as you watching a movie picking up a controller and start moving the protagonist it doesn't make all that much sense story wise the the protagonist starts jumping every 10 seconds but it's something game programmers have to deal with to get a good game/story flow. David Cage tends to take away controls in order to tell his story, and then we get people crying over to much QTE's etc. I still think Alex was a bit to harsh about Detroit i still think it's one of the best games David Cage made, maybe a bit to ambitious in the end when he has to tie up every storyline in a few cutscene's but i think it's step forward in videogame story telling.

I think the medium is a large part of the problem.

And it breaks down in a couple of ways:

1. Games are long.

This is fairly simple, but many big games are much much longer than any other media. To finish the Witcher 3, or HZD, or a Fallout or Skyrim, is about a 40-50 hour at minimum. More like 70 for most. That's just about the entire run of Game of Thrones. It is really hard to engage your audience for something that long. Most games solve this by going really wide - a ton of sidestuff that is more worldbuilding than having to do anything with the story. Other media are much more deep, even in shorter timeframes. Less characters that experience more.

2. The writer has no control over the timing of the story if they give the player freedom of movement

A story only consists of what is told for a small part. How it is told is much more important. To keep the audience engaged, you need the actors to be good, the sets to be good, but you also need the editing to be good. A movie will infer meaning by how it transitions from scene to scene.

If you play HZD, the cutscene has no idea if you ran from story quest to story quest, or if you spent 10 hours doing hunter quests and finding metal flowers in between. This makes the urgency and purpose of characters extremely tough to maintain. Most games choose to act as if all main story quests happen shortly after each other, while sidequests happen in a version of the world that is static. It mostly doesn't respond to which sidequests you have completed. You usually don't see a character that you can save during a sidequest show up and shoot some enemy that was sneaking up on you, they're just never mentioned again.

3. Ludonarrative dissonance

Even though this phrase became way overused, there's still a core of truth there. Very few games manage to have the cutscenes gel with the gameplay. A recent example is playing the new Tomb Raiders, where I put in a lot of time climbing a mountain, only for cutscene Lara to fall off it again. Like 10 times, in various forms. Player mostly wins the fights, cutscene I get caught, my gun jams etcet. I beat a boss, but a cutscene starts and he takes off in a helicopter. But this is actually hard to solve, because players are used that they only advance when they succeed (The unique aspect of games over other media, your movie doesn't restart if you don't understand a plotpoint), so in order to introduce setbacks, failures and threat storywriters put most of it cutscenes. The scene of "shoot a helicopter to half health - cutscene kills your friendly npc - shoot remaining healthbar - cutscene of you crying about your npc friend" is very dissonant.

Now all of these can be avoided if gamemakers wish, but the more you do, the closer you get to the "walking simulator"

I think the largest hurdle to overcome will always be pacing.

When people read/watch/play something and think "that was a great story", what they are usually picking up on is that story was paced really well. There is nothing new under the sun; hero journeys, 3 acts, and the work of Shakespeare all but guarantee that just about every story has been told using a tried and true formula.

Pacing will always be hard in games because good gameplay pacing can be at odds with good story pacing. The latter will always need more slow moments for balance, while you can have great gameplay with constant action and very little downtime. Combine that with the fact that games just aren't very good at pulling off those quiet moments, and it becomes pretty easy to see why stories in games still have a long way to go.

It's a series of additive problems:

1. Writing is hard. Like, really, really hard. Much harder than most people think it is. Creative writing in particular.

combined with

2. A lot of developers thinking they are better writers than they actually are (see; Cage, David).

combined with

3. A lot of players not recognizing good writing even when they see it.

combined with

4. Some games not, by definition, investing much in plot. Call of Duty games are always going to be more in a lather to get people to shooting stuff as opposed to a meaningful story because that's what the player base is after.

combined with

5. The realities of game development being a non-linear process. The original design might have had a really cool level concept with a great story surrounding it and then it becomes apparent that level isn't possible on some technical level, so things need to be re-written. Or corporate comes in and scraps part of the budget, so there goes a huge chunk of the story.

combined with

6. Even if things work really well and the story is written smoothly as part of the development process, the open ended nature of games means players aren't necessarily going to experience things in a linear fashion. Or, if the game itself is linear, they aren't going to notice important plot details.

So basically, video games are hard.

A lot of criticism for story telling condemns good video game stories for not matching their expectations for what a story is supposed to be as movies and books dictate it.

It's a two step problem. Video game stories can be bad because they try to match a format that does not suit it AND a lot of people demand that stories are not good unless they match expectations for the tried and true formats.

We have been experiencing great video game stories here and there. We just don't recognise them without further analysis.( They still have an effect..so it's not like we invent the notion that we enjoyed them.)

Bingo, we have the right answer. Its a shame but its the truth.

Video game narratives have to be written in service of interactivity and player agency. Most games that are lauded for their stories are usually written in a way similar to films, tv, or books and are delivered in that way too i.e. cutscenes, and text dumps.

The medium is the method.

Assholes like me who do all the side quests before continuing the main story.