Shareefruck
Registered User
Agreed, although some would argue that the replayability would balance that out and the experience is just iterative instead of linear and it all amounts to the same thing.Don't get me wrong I liked the choose your own adventure novels as a kid too, and there's no reason they can't be well written. Rather it's just an unsolveable technical problem: giving the audience choice to drive the narrative requires an exponentially more writing. Perhaps the best example of this in gaming is comparing where both are exceptionally well written is Portal vs The Stanley Parable. Portal is a straight line that takes about 2 hours to play in 1 playthrough. You'll spend about 2 hours seeing all of TSP as well, except it's done in multiple 5-10 minute playthroughs.
The Witcher 2 is another good example. The player is given many choices, but that just means a given play through lasts 20 hours and you'll only see maybe 1/3rd of the game. While you can make that 20 hour story well written, you could tell a lot more story if you just made the game a linear 60 hour experience. Other RPG's with player choice, like Bethesda, don't really do that either, rather they just give you an open sandbox full of small unconnected stories that you can move through at your leisure until you get back to the main quest line, which tends to be mediocre. That can be fun in it's own right but you will always be able to build a bigger & stronger narrative (and I'm a fan of big epic fantasy book series) if you put the story on rails.
I would argue that by writing to account for the narrative of every diverging player choice, it dilutes the progression of the storytelling as well, as it's unlikely that every diverging path is equally fruitful to explore.
I gotta disagree with The Stanley Parable being mentioned in the same breath as Portal, writing-wise, though.
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