Does narrative context fix repetitive mission/quest design?

[Eumi]

Honestly, I don't like the fact that you're separating them out at all.

Video game narrative is usually pretty deeply tied to its gameplay. You can't remove one from the other without drastically altering the core of the game.

Gameplay is narrative, and in a lot of games, narrative is gameplay. The Witcher 3 gets as much gameplay out of the player deciding how to act in a situation as it does from them pressing the attack button to kill the monster, and it's narrative is as much affected by the process of utilising the game's systems to overcome that monster than it is how you tell the villagers that the monster was born from one of them or whatever.

I really wish more people would broaden their definitions of the concepts. Most discussion acts as if they're two separate things, when even in games like Red Dead where there is a clear divide between mission and cutscene, narrative and gameplay still interweave in important ways.

 

[jtb]

To some extent, yes. With TW3 and Assassin's Creed Odyssey, just the fact that you're getting high production values (instead of a text box, like the 360/PS3 era Bioware games, for example) doesn't hurt.

I think the games that are most successful have branching paths within their side content. But no one really gives a shit about choice and consequence anymore.

 

[sph3re]

Not even remotely.

GTA IV's missions don't get better just because the game tells me Niko is a driver-for-hire. They're still painfully boring.

 

[Asbsand]

It quite exactly doesn't do that, in my opinion. It can help but it can also hurt.

In some cases "Narrative context" for quests comes in the form of some super-premise that is supposed to justify everything you do. Think, NLA in Xenoblade X or War Assets in Mass Effect 3. The quests themselves have no real story, but the "Narrative context"(TM) is there to make sure that you never feel like what you're doing serves no purpose.

"It's going to improve your outcome in the war!" says Mass Effect 3.
"It's for mankind's survival" says Xenoblade X.
Now go somewhere and collect something. Have a counter that makes it seem like you made some progress.

And then there's also narrative context where what you're physically doing in the game is some nonsensical crap of killing generic foes until your NPC says "Thank you for looting 20 bananas. Now I can definitely get back to selling some bananas!" and that's just lame.

Nier being mentioned is something I agree with, but I also think while often dull, there's neat little scripted events for those quests and they avoid being generic. They're just not high budget but they're all pretty unique from what I remember, taking you to places you wouldn't normally have went, like dark underground caves or making a robot follow you across the desert while protecting them from enemies. There was one where you hunt down other androids like yourself and you share the grief they express when they're hunted by you, which makes you feel guilty for doing the mission. It's definitely narrative context done right, but as in my examples there's so many ways to do narrative context wrong too, and it really comes down to having both the context and thoughtful design that makes missions work in my opinion.

 

[Deleted member 37739]

I think TW3 goes is particularly good in contextualising the gameplay structure in the overall narrative. Missions are not only well-written; Geralt's life as an itinerant contractor makes believable narrative sense of that typical go-here-do-thing quest deign of open world RPGs, which normally seems at odds with the grand hero type of protagonists you play.

 

[KORNdog]

The best way to fix a repetitive quest structure is to allow the player to have multiple ways of "solving" any given quest. Writing's fine but it can only do so much.

Click to shrink...

This is my opinion too. Ideally you want both good context and good player choice. But it seems one gets more critical praise than the other. RDR2's universal praise shows this pretty clearly. That game has absolutely no player choice. You are directed to do things how the developers intended you too...but it's wrapped in good writing. From looking at reviews at least, that seems to be what people value more, or at least what it rewarded more in reviews.

 

[Deleted member 11832]

It's more than just the narrative.

If narrative is half-alright, AND core gameplay loop is very fun in itself. Then, yes, I don't care if the quest design isn't varied.