What makes a good game - A critics perspective: Episode #3 - Story and Storytelling

Hello everyone and welcome to a new series starting here on Kralizec Gaming - „What makes a game good – A critics perspective“

In this series we will look at mechanics that make for good, fun and entertaining games.

Today it's time for the thing some people consider being the most importnat thing for their games while other just don't care about it all. We will talk about stories and storytelling in games

Taking a look at the games story as a critic is somewhat similar to trying to review the music of game. By that I mean the fact that both story and music are very much subjective things. Yet in a similar way to music we can go and judge things like the fittingness of themes to the gameplay, the pacing of the story or the way the story is presented.

The story itself

So... as I said already, judging the story is something that is very hard to do, unless the story is really bad or on the opposite side of the spectrum super good. You know, those instances where almost everyone can agree on the quality of the story.
And again, similarly to music a lot of developers see the story of the game as just something you slap on top of your gameplay, because the medium requires you to have it there. Somewhat interestingly, that is completely untrue. You can easily make a game without any story or lore at all and have it be a massively successful game. Just look at the Counter Strike games. They are just the kids game cops and robbers adopted for the computer generation.
But on the other hand, take a look at another massively successful shooter - Overwatch. Apart from being a good shooter, with good mechanics and awesome graphics, it created a story for each of its characters. And people fell in love with the characters. There were games that tried to initially compete for the spot of the new king of the team/class based shooter with Overwatch and they didn't lose the battle because their mechanics have been worse, but because people wanted to play Overwatch to play with the characters they've learned to love.

The thing I'm trying to say here is that interesting characters are what heavily drives most of stories these days. Another recent game that is heavily praised for its story is The Witcher 3. And why is the story so good? Because the characters are interesting to such a degree that you actually want to know more about them. The Witcher 3 singlehandedly increased the amount of the books sold by an enormous amount.

Storytelling

The second thing we need to look at when trying to judge the quality of stories, is the way they are being presented to us. Here we can actually go into a few objective points and by far the biggest one for me is the pacing the story is being introduced to you. And obviously there can be two problems here - either the story just gets dumped on you so quickly you lose track of things being introduced to you or the story takes too long to get going and you get bored of it before the good stuff comes.
The second thing that can be somewhat objective is how the story is being presented to you. And I don't mean whether you are getting introduced to the story with text, by a narrator or while watching a cut-scene. What I mean is whether what the game is trying to present to you is easily understandable.

And here we can see games evolving at an amazing pace. Just a few years ago the usual way to tell the story was either through plain text or through a few cut-scenes here and there. Right now we are starting a completely new way of story telling, where the focus is on telling the story through the gameplay instead of just cutscenes or text.