Story vs Gameplay

All this time I believe stories are a huge bonus to a game.. One example would be:

Warcraft

It's games are driven by storyline. In fact all Blizzard's games takes place in a huge universe. So an example would be from Warcraft.

The Warcraft universe has a nice long lore.. So many characters with long background stories. The writers really took time to write each story with intriguing characters. Since I can't really explain the story here, so I'll talk about how does it relate to the game.

The game puts to gameplay what the story wrote. The campaign doesn't feel like just plain "destroy the opponent base" style. You feel like playing because you want to know the story.

To me, I find that stories make a game more immersive. Warcraft can certainly go without a storyline. They can easily survive with some lame plot. But Blizzard takes a huge step making a universe from it. So it must mean that storyline is something.

RPG games were basically dead without storyline. In fact, RPG games without story = it is not a game. You NEED a story in a RPG game. Strip DnD, Final Fantasy, off a story, you get nothing. In such cases, story IS gameplay.

But those casual games like tetris, hexic, bejeweled, do not use a story. I don't think Tetris needs a whole universe telling the story of each blocks, why do they have to line up on a line and disappear.

From Mr Lim's lecture, about Objectives, I realised that Story is an objective. RPG games, you play to learn the story. Warcraft, you try to fulfill the mission objectives, which is part of the story. However, Tetris you play to clear as many lines as possible, thus theres no story. So, unless the game's objectives NEEDS a reason, I think story is negligible. However, I still believe that Stories are always a huge bonus to a game.

One of the bonus, is making franchises of it. Similar to movie games, a story can create many games out of it. No matter how similar the game is to another game (So many movie games are platformers, e.g.), people still buy it. Stories provide a setting to create a game. Blizzard's games functions like that. Now Square-Enix is also going back to milk the FF7 cash cow, because FF7 has a great universe.

If people were t0 want avoid getting accused of cloning a game, I suggest come up with a storyline for it. Unless you have managed to find a unique gameplay formula as revolutionary as Tetris. Doing that takes more effort than figuring out a storyline for a game, so I suggest, better think of a storyline.

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