Choice Games and interactive story

[sasquatch2o]

As cranky, old gamer I've become bored with most games so, when I do game, I find myself gravitating toward the shorter, more casual games I enjoyed as a kid. I enjoyed arcade type gameplay but what really captured my imagination and held my interest were games where storytelling, adventure and choice were central to the experience. Stripped of modern graphics, those old games I enjoyed most were like a good book but had a storyline that I could control to shape the Destiny of my character and the world. So many recent games have failed to deliver great story telling and sense of adventure while still allowing the player to exercise freedom of choice. Often gameplay boils down to go here, do this, see that, often without even the most basic of choices to create even the illusion of self determined outcomes. Often it's the case in open world games that the size of the environment and massive number of tasks, few of which the player can really control, become a bore and the lack of a story the player can influence can create a sense of weak purposeless wandering. Many games seem to fall into two categories; those with a single strong storyline that may or may not branch out toward the end or games where player is given a large amount if freedom but extremely limited influence.

I recently been playing choose your own adventure games on my mobile and have really enjoyed that sense of self determined story and personal choice. They allow me to exercise a type of gameplay and oddly provide a clear sense of purpose and adventure that I haven't found in most games I've played for many years.

The reason for this post is to layout the importance of allowing some free agency in the stories we create. By allowing the player to feel they are creating their own story, even if it is a clever illusion, makes the experience so much more enjoyable. At its most basic level an rpg should be about story and choice. A handful of major "real" interactive questlines would be an awesome addition to TR. Obviously multiple, huge branching questioned would take a long time to develop. Maybe there is limited interest in adding a feature like this or completing a really deep interactive storylines and reactive environments are impractical for TR, but Id still like to see choice-based gameplay have an influence on future questing.

If you havnt, give these a try:
https://www.choiceofgames.com/

I really enjoyed the broadsides and robots stories. Some free user-made ones are available to play from the site as well.

[Aeven]

Archived because you already posted this exact post in the Off-Topic board.