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Best Examples of Environmental Storytelling?
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None of it serves a larger plot but Astro Bot Rescue Mission has a lot of little events and background characters that make you think about what life is like in the robotic worlds the game takes place in.
EDIT: I forgot this was about the best examples and not just examples in general so Astro Bot wouldn't really qualify.
EDIT: I forgot this was about the best examples and not just examples in general so Astro Bot wouldn't really qualify.
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Yep, the original concepts look amazing, and full of dread.
The Cremators still gives me chills.
I always appreciated how HL2 never stopped to actually explain the situation in detail to you, you have to fill in lots of gaps. Because, in that situation, where you've suddenly appeared out of nowhere and the remaining human population is treating you like jesus christ himself, and the combine all want to extinguish you immediately, you honestly would never have a moment for exposition, for someone to sit you down and be like "here's the story."
Also, Gordon is supposed to be a genius, so I appreciated that Valve let us, assuming his role, just kind of piece it together as a smart person should be able to.
Yeah, Vault 11 was one of the best parts of the game. I'm impressed they had the courage to leave it as a story rather than try and turn it into some kind of mission.
Metroid Prime, Bloodborne, Shadow of the Colossus, Breath of the Wild, and the new God of War are among my favorites at this
RE2 especially, I think. The game is awash with examples of day-to-day police station routine being violently interrupted, and you can literally see cause and effect evidence that informs the player as to what happened, after it's happened. It's great.
I had to mope from reading the rest of this post. A good friend loaned me a tv, Ps3, and a copy of new Vegas recently.
Vault 11 environment does a good job to tell what happened there even if you ignore all the holotapes (which i dont know if count for this thread). Things look progressively weird as you look at the several rooms and the increasingly passive aggressive campagn posters till it ends with the revelation on the overseer office. The audiologs add a nice personal touch to the story, but are not required for you to understand what truly went down there. Its pretty great.
Also no teddy bears posed in ~funny~ poses with a gun in there which is a plus
Also no teddy bears posed in ~funny~ poses with a gun in there which is a plus
yes.Halo 3. Tsavo Highway.
So, the first act of Halo 2 is set in and around New Mombasa in Kenya, which has become a massive port city owing mostly to it being the first city to have a space elevator. The close of the act involves an in-atmosphere slipspace jump:
Cut to black, and that's the last part of Earth you see in Halo 2.
Halo 3 opens up on Earth, with the Master Chief crash-landing back near south Kenya. Tsavo Highway is the third mission in the game, and involves MC having to follow the road to the town of Voi.
N.B.:
Along the way there's also piles of various wreckage from the space elevator everywhere:
...including, in the skybox, a trail of this wreckage:
...which points back in the direction of New Mombasa. Between "here" and "there" is also where the Covenant are excavating a Forerunner Artifact, to open a portal to the Ark:
I absolutely adore that they built this level around a very distant aftermath of what is, in-universe, a really major event, and never call any particular attention to it. It's just there on its own.
Relatedly, you also get to see the space elevator itself collapse in Halo 3: ODST, which is set in New Mombasa shortly following the slipspace jump in H2:
Yeah, it is great how they merged the gameplay, storytelling and a subtle roleplay into Gordon. His character is defined by player actions+world building.
Take the Half-Life Hazard Course for example. It is a gameplay tutorial, but also explains how a scientist he is acquainted with "shooting things" and presumably why he's running late in the beginning of the game.
Or, to explain the messianic status, The All Knowing Vortigaunt.
What Remains of Edith Finch really did it so well. You walk around a house that is full of so much detail in every room. The book titles on the shelves are hints at later parts. The way items are situated in room tells a story too.
It took me several play throughs of HL2 over the years to really understand how the story telling worked. My first play through, I actually thought very little of the story and thought it was a largely strange game without much happening in it. Hearing others talk about it so much, and especially getting into modding and thus being able to examine much of the game in detail gave me more appreciation. Subsequent play throughs over the years have let me peel the story back. Turns out there is so much story in the games.
I definitely think Valve got better at that type of storytelling as they went on, though. Portal 2 is much better at that type of story telling than HL2 is, as are the episodes. I pretty much feel like Portal 2 is where they had gotten good enough that even if the environmental storytelling wasn't shoved in your face, a large portion of the audience would notice it and take it in with just one play through, even if they missed the more subtle details.
Man I wish Valve would make HL3.
First time I heard/read about Half Life I outright dismissed it.
"Pfff, Sci-fi? Aliens? Made up guns? Get out of here grandpa!"
But after some years, reading about how it was this highly praised and influential game and what not, which made me curious to actually try it for real and right during the Tram ride I was 100% hooked. No kidding, I reload and did the Tram Ride at least three times, I was so fascinated by all the details they put into that world.
Then I got into HL² and my world changed forever.
Then Portal and I felt I was still peeling a never ending fruit of world building.
There are many great examples listed on this thread, but nothing quite like the universe Valve created imo.
When Laidlaw release Epistle 3, I felt relief, but not closure. I still have many questions.
Maybe that is why I play through those games every year.
This was going to be my response. Best example I can remember right now.
They said they approach writing these games more like never ending soap operas than concrete visions with beginnings and endings. That's partially why they wanted to go to an episodic model in the first place, because they really didn't have an ending in mind. With full knowledge of how they worked, Episode 3 made perfect sense to me. I had always figured it wouldn't answer or end anything, and would probably end on an open moment just like all the games do.
I just wish they had actually stuck to that episodic model and pumped out lots and lots of stories like this. Because they were great about building this gripping world with lots of actors and depth. They kept building all these strings, I wonder if any of them would have ever paid off in the end.
I would gobble up anything new in these universes. Actually The Lab is pretty awesome if only to revisit that universe once again. The Lab was hilarious in a lot of the same ways Portal 2 was. I hope one of their VR games is set in the HL/Portal universe for sure.
Metroid Prime. All three, 3 slightly less. In 1, the environment literally is what tell the whole story. There isn't one line of dialogue in the game.
Oh, I wasn't expecting a full stop ending, but at least the answer to some poignant questions.
But perhaps more importantly, if or how they would go on about it.
There was a point when I thought that It wouldn't make sense to just be "Gordon and Alyx defeat the combine and live happily ever after"
Then "Unforeseen Consequences" G-Man Speech near the end of HL² EP2 kinda shifted my expectations even more.
One of the first standard cutscenes in the series where the player doesn't have control, the shift to address Alyx instead of Gordon, more backstory to what happened during Black Mesa and the connections to Eli. I felt like the focus would be on Alyx with a possible shift towards her being the next protagonist. At the end of EP 2 she is the one with a more clear drive to go on.
Gordon and subsequently the player is once again left in the dark.
Even though I accept it, still feels bittersweet.
Maybe I didn't slow down enough, but what are some of your favorite environments in BotW that you felt really communicated the history of Hyrule? Outside of Hyrule Fields, Temple of Time, and Hyrule Castle, I don't recall many big environments that communicated much about the history of that place and the people who lived there.
I personally felt like there were many touchpoints to previous titles in the world (that unfortunately were easily missable), but those locations didn't communicate much to me about what was there before within the time period BotW represents.
Oh, there were many. The statues of the seven sisters, the giant sword in Gerudo Highlands, the stone tablets in Zora's Kingdom, the Lost Temple, Lon Lon Ranch, the ruins of the coliseum, the ruins of Fort Hateno (this actually ends up being a central plot point too)... BotW overall excels at environmental storytelling. I just wish the main actual narrative had been able to back it up.
Breath of the Wild does this, but not in the sense that storytelling = plot. In BotW, the player's travels through and interactions with the environment are the story, and the map is very cleverly designed around this.
It actually does tell a story through the environment too. Fort Hateno is the most explicit example of this.
What do you mean?
Super Metroid
The environment is the story.
Metroid is the king (or queen) of this sort of thing, TBQH.
Also anything by Team Ico. Shadow of the Colossus, Last Guardian, Ico are all fantastically rich worlds told simply through level architecture and incidental object/lore placement.
Negative points when lore becomes a book. That's not the point of environmental storytelling. Making me read a ton of text that tells me a story is the wrong approach. Building a broken down tower to the gods or a decrepit building where an advanced alien race used to live is the correct approach.
The environment is the story.
Metroid is the king (or queen) of this sort of thing, TBQH.
Also anything by Team Ico. Shadow of the Colossus, Last Guardian, Ico are all fantastically rich worlds told simply through level architecture and incidental object/lore placement.
Negative points when lore becomes a book. That's not the point of environmental storytelling. Making me read a ton of text that tells me a story is the wrong approach. Building a broken down tower to the gods or a decrepit building where an advanced alien race used to live is the correct approach.
I just find it so funny how it almost seems like botw comes up in every thread whether related or not. In this case, it's a valid answer but it doesn't make it any less funny.
I mean most of the times it's brought up because people feel it's a valid answer. It's one of the most praised and beloved games of the generation, of course it's going to be among the more common answers. That's no different than TW3 or God of War or I assume RDR2 going forward.
Really liked it in The last guardian, traveling in this advanced civilization city was incredible, it's like discovering Atlantis. Too much info and the magic is lost, tlg did it perfectly.
I was surprised at how well they did this. The protagonist being a cave-woman delving into tombs from the modern age. I wanted every drop of lore I could find to know how their (our) age ended.
It really is an incredible story. Love it to bits. :)
Well, BOTW is one of the best games ever made so it'll be in conversations for a long time to come.
I agree though. It is an appropriate example.
First there's this:
Breath of the Wild isn't just making homages to past games. It is encompassing the entire history of the series. It's a beautifully designed overworld map.
Then there's other design concerns, from landmarks to the "triangle rule":
This is incredible world building and it's why, besides the excellent physics/chemistry/AI systems, the map is so fun to explore.
Not many games feel as organic, real, and memorable as BOTW. And it does that without long winded lore scrolls littered all over the place. Instead it does it with impeccable visual design and landscape geometry. That's environmental storytelling.
Fallout 4
TLoU
Horizon Zero Dawn
TLoU
Horizon Zero Dawn
Oh wow this is true and I've beaten the campaign like 5 times now shame on me.
The Witcher 3 points of interest are really well contextualized or just random stuff you find in the forests like a family that starved after the father hung himself and so on. It by far exceeds Souls games. RDR2 does it really well too with the cabins but they're more on the nose. I didn't think Horizon did this well at all because everything was in your face or full of logs. That said the logs and flashback holograms were the most interesting part of HZD. The actual story outside of it is dross.
Bioshock 1 immediately comes to mind for me. The environment forms the backbone of the narrative and is symbolic in how it's crumbling just like the political and economic systems of the city. Incredibly atmospheric as well.
Both Left 4 Dead games. Following the journey of these nameless characters through graffiti is really cool.
In Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, you reach the Sanctuary Fortress Temple, the biggest stronghold of the Luminoth species that you're trying to assist throughout the game's story. As you platform around the room and use grapple points, spider ball tracks, etc., you realize that you're climbing around on the remains of their enormous temple guardian, lost in the war, which are strewn throughout the temple. This thing was colossal, with its knee joints alone spanning ~50 feet in height.
Then, hours later, you explore the dark world version of that room, and this rises before you:
Then, hours later, you explore the dark world version of that room, and this rises before you:
Another World. Probably one of the firsts and definitively one of the most influential games ever.
Ooh, great example. Yeah, I loved the environmental details in L4D, the scribbles and scrawls and cartoons and safe rooms that told the story of survivors trying to escape.
