RPGs with high quality stories - are there any?

[noobish hat]

Despite RPGs traditionally being the most story-driven of gaming genres, I'm struggling to think of even one title that has a story that matches the quality of the my favourite novels or best written TV shows. Even the RPGs I've enjoyed the most have hardly had me boiling over with excitement to find out what happens next - instead they've just been a combination of good gameplay, graphics, music, characters etc. The actual plots are almost always functional, and highly cliched and poorly written. Does every RPG have to be about saving the world? How many RPGs are there with stories that revolve around something small, or something that only affects one small network of people? Not many, I'd imagine. Why can't we have an RPG with a story along the lines of Breaking Bad, or Cracker?

Any suggestions for RPGs with professional, non-embarrassing writing?

[Guts]

I don't think there is a RPG which could rival classic novels or films, because video games are such a young media and therefore still in baby shoes compared to literature (thousands of years) and films (over a century).

That said, Planescape: Torment is very unique and original and probably the best written RPG I've played and a lot of RPG players would agree with me. The tagline of the game is "What can change the nature of a man?" so that should tell you that it's not a game of saving the world.

As it happens it's on sale on Good Old Games for $5. http://www.gog.com/gamecard/planescape_torment

[noobish hat]

Well I think, ironically, RPGs are not the best gaming genre for story telling. I've enjoyed the plots of point and click and action games more than most RPGs. You're probably right that gaming in general is too young to have writing thought of as a priority by devs, even though there were many great stories being made in film and in the modern novel when those to formats were equally as young. Video games are several decades old at this point, let's not forget. I think we will see an exponential development now though, given that the average age of gamers is increasing. Now we have the likes of Heavy Rain, and even traditionally action-oriented genres such as FPSs and COD etc having strong emphasis placed on story telling. The problem is that it's very very rarely integrated into the game.

[Guts]

Yes, we have had huge advancements in story-telling and the medium will keep growing and maturing. One thing to consider is that most video games (almost all of them) are about the "game" first and story second, the story is there to compliment the gameplay usually although there are exceptions of course.

It's also worth noting as you said about adventure games, that they are a lot shorter than RPGs typically and it's easier to keep a story interesting for 6 hours than say, 20 hours which is why RPG stories often feel like advancing so slowly and have pacing issues.

But you should really buy Planescape: Torment right now.

[H-Man]

That said, Planescape: Torment is very unique and original and probably the best written RPG I've played and a lot of RPG players would agree with me. The tagline of the game is "What can change the nature of a man?" so that should tell you that it's not a game of saving the world.

As it happens it's on sale on Good Old Games for $5. http://www.gog.com/gamecard/planescape_torment

Took the words out of my mouth. Pretty much the option that springs to mind when I think of a well written video game.

[Guts]

On the JRPG side, I really like the Suikoden games (1 & 2 especially) because of their down-to-earth stories (if you don't count the all-powerful super runes). You're not saving the world from some ancient evil, you're just fighting a war (or a civil war in Suikoden 1) against people who aren't necessarily super-duper-evil, but might just have a different agenda than your side.

[Dogg Thang]

Yep, I love the first two Suikoden games too. You make some very good points, Guts, and I think you're right that it needs to be remembered that games are games. One of the difficulties with trying to emulate a novel or film is that those are usually so well plotted that they allow for no real room for interactivity. Try to sandwich game in there and you end up with Metal Gear Solid 4 - a cut scene experience broken up by patchy bits of gameplay. And while many love that particular example, I don't think it plays to the strength of the medium.

One I always think about with regards to this is Silent Hill. The story was, to put it bluntly, a load of arse and that wasn't helped by atrocious voice acting. Thing about Silent Hill is that the gameplay isn't exactly great either. But there is so much room in the dodgy narrative to make the experience your own and it is you making the decisions to turn the next corner, to enter the next room and it becomes an incredibly tense and immersive experience. There are times a more blank canvas story can allow us to put more of ourselves into a game and it's our own involvement which is the strength.

But recently there have been what I call 'Going For A Walk' Simulators. Dear Esther, Home, Silent Hill Shattered Memories. These are basically short stories wrapped around a game engine and, to me, they work brilliantly. Some are barely games but they can be wonderful experiences. And there is The Walking Dead game which is a very powerful piece of interactive storytelling. I love the merging of strong narrative and game.

But in traditional RPGs? They often tend to be standard fare. And they often have to build into ridiculously huge saving the world plots to justify their 60 hours play time. We all know what happened with the Shenmue crates incident - sometimes more real life stuff doesn't work in games.

But that's not to say it couldn't happen. It would be wonderful to have RPGs that really aimed high with their storytelling.

[Guts]

My dream is a (almost) fully interactive story, where every decision changes the way the game progresses. It's probably not possible until we create an A.I. that can play the role of "storyteller" or "Dungeon Master" and make up content on the go based on player choices (it would take a ridiculous amount of work to make all those possible ways to change the story), but one can dream...

[noobish hat]

Not an RPG, but Sentient on the psx is an almost entirely story based game that has consequences for everything you do.

[Guts]

Is it any good? What kind of game it is? Adventure? First person or third person camera?

[Golgo]

I don't agree that RPGs are the "most story-driven of gaming genres". I think they are driven by a very distinctive set of gameplay mechanics in the first instance. This is what identifies them as RPGs. The stories seem always to me to be a fairly cursory overlay on those mechanics to make the number crunching 'heroic'. They need to be generic, I would say, because it would be impossible to generate a story to account for all the minute character and party customizations/choices that inevitably make your playthrough of a certain RPG completely different to mine. Step away from RPGs, however, and there are plenty of games with sophisticated storytelling and characterization. The Portal games, for example, or Bioshock, which is probably as good as the 3 or 4 classics of 20th century dystopian literature.

[noobish hat]

Well maybe not, but I mean they're generally considered to be more story driven than other genres, and during the 80s and 90s I guess they were. I'm just disappointed that their stories are so generic. There are not many games like Earthbound, for example. Earthbound's story isn't all that great or complicated, in fact it's pretty formulaic (collect these macguffins to save the world), but the approach was unique, just being set in the (comparatively) real world.

[BigDeadFreak]

I thought the story and character development in Panzer Dragoon Saga was excellent. The characters all started off as one dimensional 'good guys' and 'bad guys' but pretty much all of them ended up with far more subtlety and complexity. Without wishing to give away any of the plot, their motivations were complex and this added to the overall theme of the game; that of the freedom to vs the freedom from. It posed questions rather than telling you what to think and the ending left you realising that there was no 'right' choice.

Overall though I agree, most RPGs have pretty trite and simplistic story lines. It's a shame because there is so much scope for really amazing story telling in games but it always seems to boil down to saving the world from an arch villain.

[fuse]

Lost Odyssey really deserves a mention here. The over-arching story that actually moves the game on is the kind of predictable RPG fare you're trying to avoid (individuals caught up amongst a backdrop of warring nations), but as the game progresses you unlock the main character's memory in the form of some quite wonderfully written short stories.

To lift directly from Wikipedia;

Lost Odyssey's "A Thousand Years of Dreams" were penned by an award-winning Japanese short story writer, Kiyoshi Shigematsu, who worked directly with the game's producer Hironobu Sakaguchi on Kaim's backstory, while Sakaguchi alone wrote the game's main story.[22] The memory sequences were translated into English by Jay Rubin, a respected Harvard professor who also translated the works of novelist Haruki Murakami.[22] While Rubin originally objected to what he perceived as "adding to the world's supply of senseless violence," he relented after viewing the material and being "shocked" at its pacifist message and "vivid imagery".[22] The short stories in the game were presented in a format similar to visual novel games.[23]

[noobish hat]

Hmm, that's not really a game though. It would be no different to an actual book being included with the game.

I've also come to realise that Japanese RPGs are probably not the place to look, since the Japanese are absolutely terrible at telling stories.