It didn’t ruin the story for me because by that point the story was over. John’s death was great, and the real ending of the game, when you take your revenge as Jack, who’s become everything his father wanted to protect him from becoming, and the title card slams over him with his gun drawn, cemented my love for the game. Run-on sentences fuck yeah!
I remember going on a furious rant about the “twist” of Final Fantasy X. It felt tacked on just for extra tragedy, especially since the whole point of the plot was that Yuna realized sacrificing Tidus was the wrong thing to do.
And then there’s the sequel, which plays like some 12 year old kid’s fanfiction plus a collection of mostly awful mini-games.
That’s Red Dead Redemption.
See how much it upset me.
Fable & Fable 2.
I can’t really distnguish them because they have extremely similar plots, including major sections that are virtually identical. The sheer quantity of railroading is obnoxious, and still has no actual impact.
For example (no spoilers because the game is old):
In both games you’re grabbed and stuck in prison for years. Note that in both games, there’s no reason whatsoever why you’re stuck. Your capture in both games is spectacularly stupid and involves you arbitrarily surrendering to foes you could easily crush.
In Fable 1, the Big Bad shows up to capture you… but in fact you can easily be more powerful than him. You just surrender pointlessly because he’s got a pair of goons you can decapitate with a shrug at this point. For no reason he leaves you alive in prison, guarded by more thugs you can decapitate with a shrug. You then spend three years being smacked by petty guards for some reason. Nothing whatsoever changes outside and the plot is entirely unaffected. The villains and you allies do nothing and nobody notices you’re gone or even comments that time has passed. Nobody ages except you. Additionally, you surrender right after rescuing your long-lost mother and have no reason whatsoever to give up.
In Fable 2, it’s even worse. You’re required to infiltrate the villain’s fortress. There’s no reason to do this whatsoever. You have no need to rescue anybody, and if you want to do so, you can just whack the villain and instantly rescue everybody. But no, you have to.
So first you go and become an arena champion, which involves killing dozens of strong armed men. There’s not many people who can do this; it would be impossible unless you have considerable magical or martial skills and are tough enough to survive repeated ambushes by multiple armed, prepared opponents out for your blood. But before you can even do this, you have to become quite famous and well-known enough ot be considered worthy of the challenge.
OK, fine.
Now that you’re a famous arena champion you can get hired by the big bad villain. He apparently doesn’t pay you… and you can never leave his miserable island fortress… and you spend your days doing really tedious guardwork while being humiliated by the evil lieutenants. And the slaves can’t disobey anyway because they’ve got contorl collars, so who knows why they need guards. :rolleyes:
Also, the big bad villain is upstairs. You can paste him with a single attack as he has no particular super powers. Even if he did send all his (famous arena champion?) guards against you you can easily kill all of them. But instead, you hang there for ten years, accomplishing nothing. In fact, your escape is handled when the guy you’re supposed to rescue frees himself with no help from you. :rolleyes:
And at this point, the pair of you head upstairs and wipe the big bad - oh wait, no. You just run away like scared children. Note that after being imprisoned for ten years (!) nobody accomplished anything and nothing changed whatsoever - except for you. Hell, your twenty-year-old dog is exactly as you left him.
Heart of the Swarm: Wings of Liberty had a decent story, that addressed many things in the past (the role of the Overmind, Mengsk’s reign of terror, the relationship between Zeratul and Raynor). I thought Heart of the Swarm would continue this. Instead, we get
Silly on-again off-again romance, badass General Warfield dies like a bitch (you couldn’t have even made him a boss fight? cmon!). Virtually NO MENTION of the overmind whatsoever, nada, which would have been relevant to the story. Letting Kerrigan pretty much turn around and get herself re-zerged which made half the plot of Wings of Liberty feel like it was all for nothing; sure she’s free of Amon’s influence but still!
I’m going to head this thread off at the pass and just say:
Damn near all of them.
Seriously. Game storytelling is really bad as a whole, and big AAA games are frequently the WORST offenders - probably because the story is ALWAYS a slave to pretty much every other aspect of game design in that space, and because all too often in that space, every other aspect of game design is a slave to marketing, focus groups, feature checklists, or just subject general executive meddling.
Better to make a thread that asks for AAA games that DON’T have bad storytelling. 
I agree with this - I play a lot but last game I can remember making me anxious and curious to see what happens next was SWTOR Imperial Agent storyline over a year ago. Even that was diluted by the fact you needed to do the normal crap missions between the story missions to stay high enough level. Other than that, if I’m looking at my Steam list I can’t really find many games with stellar story lines. Maybe half a dozen out of slightly over 100.
I’m going to have to head back to the previous pass and point out: that’s not storytelling. In fact, with the possible exception of the Bioshock: Infinite stuff (which I didn’t read as I may end up playing that someday), NONE of these complaints have been about storytelling; they’ve been about plots. Which is fine; the first post mentioned them as well, but they are two very different things, especially given the nature of the medium.
There are plenty of games, even huge, big-budget games, with fantastic storytelling- it’s just that those stories often suck.
Fine, but my point stands because the title of this thread is “plots or storytelling” and frankly, I’m not sure I can think of any AAA games that didn’t botch one or the other.
And honestly, I’m not at all convinced that there are “plenty of games” with “fantastic storytelling” either.
Well, the title says “bad plots or storytelling”. The storytelling in AAA games is usually pretty ok due to the interactive medium, but many of the plots are sub-par at best. For instance:
Mass Effect 2:
As previously mentioned, despite the fact that you just saved the Citadel’s collective ass, nobody believes you about the Reapers. The willful disbelief really strains credibility.
When you bring Legion aboard the Citadel, there’s barely any reaction. People should run away screaming, but apparently the flashlight head brings nothing to mind.
If you choose to destroy the Collector station and Miranda is with you, she effectively tells the Illusive Man to bugger off. With no consideration for her sister. Despite the fact that Cerberus is more or less responsible for her care.
Mass Effect 3:
It’s been discussed at great length, but the ending came out of left field. The extended cut made slightly more sense, but was still very lacking. I’m currently trying out a third playthrough with the MEHEM mod; hopefully that’ll be an improvement but since it’s a user creation I’m not holding my breath.
I don’t really see how “interactive medium” automatically means that storytelling is good. In fact, the Mass Effect 2 example you provide seems to me more like bad storytelling than a bad plot. There’s nothing wrong with the plot requiring people to not believe you, but the way it is presented makes it seem non-credible.
I’ll add a little defense for Dragon Age Origins’ storytelling/plot. Yes, much of it is very, very standard stuff. Great evil upon the land, you and your ragtag band of misfits are the only ones who can stop it, some people are trying to stop you at the worst possible time, blah blah whatever. But exactly how it’s carried out isn’t the usual way.
[spoiler]OK, so you find out that only one of the Special Chosen Secretive Good Guys called Gray Wardens can kill the Huge Evil Baddie - and it has to be via sacrificing your life. Well fine, you have 3 Wardens - you, another guy in your group, and an older man that you rescue. The latter volunteers. Awesome.
Except he’s rather ignominiously killed off in the third act, before you get to the Final Confrontation. Oops.
So it’s down to you or your buddy. Who might just be, depending on the plot and how it played out, the newly-crowned king of the land. Oops. Are you going to let the king sacrifice himself, or are you taking one for the team? Remember that the nation is on pretty shaky footing right now, what with a war and you maybe having usurped the previous ruler just recently.
It gets better. The witch (with all the burning-at-the-stake connotations of that word, and even worse) who’s been traveling with your group wants to screw one of you Wardens. This will make it so that the Big Bad’s spirit power instead of killing you gets sucked out into her newly-created uber-fetus, and she will have one amazing baby with the purified soul of an Old God - but you won’t know for sure because she says she’ll run off afterwards and never see you again. Even if you were romancing her.
Wait, were you playing a woman? Because you can’t screw the witch, then. Only your buddy can. He’s your default romance option, too. So you can take a chance on letting a witch have a baby with a demon/Old God’s soul in it but she has to screw your maybe-boyfriend, then you and your BF get to live but who knows what that means for your world - and won’t the hierarchy of the Wardens be a little suspicious when they learn the Baddie is dead but none of you Wardens died in that battle?
Oh, and if you tell the witch no and take your boyfriend along to the final battle - he runs in and takes the final hit. You can’t stop him.
Actually, you can get another person “converted” to being a Warden too, but he was the main traitor to the king, so your buddy will really, really take offense to this guy being let into this group, to the point where he tells you to pound sand and abandons your group and the quest, not to mention breaking off any kind of friendship or relationship, permanently.
The game has an expansion pack sequel, too, and if you sacrificed yourself in the main game, you play on with a newly-created character. So dying at the end isn’t a game over error; it’s a legitimate and expected outcome.[/spoiler]
I thought Miranda set up her own arrangements for her sister after the rescue, that this was her own side mission and nothing to do with Cerberus proper.
MEHEM - well, it’s a mod so it’s a little rough, but I like it as a “cut out the BS and get to the ending” solution. In the game’s ending, I saw no reason to trust the being you talk with at the end and only saw destruction as valid, but hated the collateral damage it inflicts; their extended ending helps but it’s still weird. (I’m still an indoctrination theory fan, myself.)
Well, “suimasen” does mean both those things…
Ferret Herder, what do you mean by the indoctrination theory?
Before the extended version of the Mass Effect 3 ending, there was a fanwank theory (highly spoilery) that the previous ending wasn’t the full ending. Spoiler space for blah blah babbling that didn’t turn out to be real but spoils the ending.
[spoiler]The ending of Mass Effect 3 leads you from a full-on on-foot charge to a transport beam and up into the Citadel… where you arrive missing all your armor and all weapons except for a pistol, and very badly injured. You charged there with Anderson, who is now somehow way far ahead of you and in a similar state.
You both end up in a room with the Illusive Man, where he is deeply Indoctrinated (exposure to Reaper tech for too long makes you believe in them and helpless to them, like Saren in the first ME, etc.) and implanted with a crapload of Reaper tech, believing he can control them. He uses his mindfuck Indoctrination powers to mess with you two, controlling your actions and (IIRC) making one of you wound the other. You end up killing the Illusive Man, then trying to activate the Crucible.
Then you talk to a VI-ish version of that kid you failed to save at the start and who you’ve been having nightmares about, who tells you ‘hey, no organic has got this far before - well, the Reapers know that you organics are all chaotic and fuck things up, so they ‘harvest’ you by killing you and that saves your memories and info to databases, cool right? Well you can pick to control them, or integrate all organic and synthetic races into weird-ass hybrids, or you can destroy the Reapers but that’ll also destroy the Geth and EDI - oh and maybe you, you have a ton of cybernetics. So pick one!’ And there are three buttons you can pick for each of these, with “oo, don’t do it!” sort of music around the Destroy button if you listen closely.
I guess the reasoning on the latter is some variant on “organics and synthetics can’t co-exist unless you blend them”, maybe something about how synthetics can just kind of reproduce and live forever-ish and so the Geth would become the next Reapers or something?
Anyway, with most endings Shepard is considered more or less dead afterwards. In Control your consciousness basically controls the Reapers. I dunno what happens in Synthesis (integrate the organics and synthetics) but Shep is gone. In Destroy you’re also gone… unless you were really, really prepared for the final battle and did tons of work.
If you did that? The very end has a shot of you in concrete-type (i.e., not in the Citadel but back on Earth) rubble. Then you draw a breath.
So combine the fact that we know Indoctrination happens. That you think you show up on the Citadel with no armor on even though you were fully armored and armed just prior. You got beamed up with Anderson but didn’t arrive with him. The Illusive Man mind-fucks you. You’ve been exposed to tons of Reaper tech over the past few years.
What if Bioware had pulled off an awesome mindfuck of an ending and made you think you had gone through a particular experience, only to reveal the “real” extended ending later? What if you’d been prepared enough and that breath meant that your Shepard had regained consciousness and awareness after an Indoctrination attempt? What if that was all hallucination and the last chapter which Bioware was going to release in the future was you fighting back for real?[/spoiler]
Yeah, well, it didn’t happen. Bioware sorta fleshed out the ending except for the most hallucinatory parts, but at least the fates of your companions and the galaxy were more clear.
Hmm, you may be right. Still, it seems like it would be difficult to hide from TIM; I still don’t buy that part of the story.
Thanks for letting me know about the MEHEM mod; I’m looking forward to experiencing it in a couple months when I finally get done with the game. Do you happen to know how it gets along with the Citadel DLC?
Re: indoctrination theory; my reactions to the ending:
1: “What the heck? That was the weirdest ending I’ve ever seen. What a way to spoil the best video game trilogy ever!”
2: Browsing the internet, finding indoctrination theory: “Holy shit, that’s brilliant! What a fantastic way to end the best video game trilogy ever!”
3: Reading Bioware’s responce to indoctrination theory some time later: “:smack:”
Half Life 2. The pacing was bad. That mudskipper sequence was terrible and the game handled like a train. Never even finished it.
The Citadel DLC is pretty self-contained, so I don’t think there’s any interaction. To activate it, at some point you get an e-mail from Anderson saying he wants you to go to an apartment on the Citadel. Soon after that you can get into an adventure (from this point you’re stuck in that adventure until it’s done), and then there’s some interactions and stuff. Certain NPCs can’t participate in the post-adventure fun stuff at the end until you wrap up their side quest storylines, so if you want everyone I’d wait until after Horizon to trigger it. I don’t know if you can do the adventure part first and then return later for the other stuff after more quests outside the Citadel, but since the Citadel has two docking options for a while (regular Citadel vs apartment) maybe you can. I should test it out later.