Can a game in this day and age be carried solely by its story?

It's the opposite, retard. You should be asking
>can a music album be carried by its concept?
>can a book be carried by its message?
And the answer is yes, up to a 90% maximum.

Bloodlines II

This is furfag

>tripfag
Opinion discarded

VNs exist, so yeah

There's no reason to believe the story'll be any good either.

Honestly what company would you trust to do a bloodlines sequel justice? They all seem like shit nowadays.

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Don't make it a sequel. Just make a new VTM game with a totally different name and make it its own thing. Then just try to make the best RPG possible and go beyond the low standards of modern RPGs with more content and more depth than anything out there and give it zero DLC.

OP says "solely" tho
That doesn't sound exactly right.

Not what I asked though.

every fucking day i daydream about a short hair gf like this

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Tanned tomboys with a modest chest, child bearing hips and a plump ass are where its at my niggers.

yea but she's not tanned, or wearing a swimsuit

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>Can a game in this day and age be carried solely by its story?
more like
>Can the current video game authors write an interesting and coherent story and the designers support it with gameplay elements?
and since most of the authors are second rate that couldn't cut it in the actual fiction novel market it's not hard to guess the answer

Depends how good the story is
The gameplay stills needs to meet a standard of quality and not be completely broken, not even the best story in the world can make you want to play something inherently boring and unfun

You can't be serious.
>can a music album be carried by its concept?
Your lyrics and theme could be the theory of bleedin' relativity but if your music is gansta rap with substep tones it's shit anyway.
>can a book be carried by its message?
If your prose is shit, you can't convey a message in any thought provoking way in the first place.

No, neither of those statements are on the same plane of existence as the truth and thee answer to OP's question is also a cosmic no.

If the concept or the message behind the artform is strong and interesting enough, it's been proven that people will "read through the lines of garbage" and praise it. But the underlying factor has to be exceptionally good, inversely proportional to the amount of suckage from the expression of the medium.

In the case of vidya, an extremely well written story can, and in the past DID, make players forgive shitty gameplay and graphics.

>has to be exceptionally good, inversely proportional to the amount of suckage
yeah, I meant directly proportional, my bad

Of course, Until Dawn was very enjoyable and was an interactive movie.

>In the case of vidya, an extremely well written story can, and in the past DID, make players forgive shitty gameplay and graphics.
Look, Planescape Torment is still a bad video game, even if it's an enjoyable block of text.

since it receives only praise from most of the people who played it, would you say the game is carried by its story, then?

There is technically a very slim chance Bloodlines 2 isn't a complete dumpster fire. "Ma representation!" can be a shitty sidequest, or it can be the main story arc.

Yes. In fact MOST games that are carried by their story are from this day and age.
>Undertale
>The Last of Us
>Red Dead Redemption 2
>basically any superhero game, the Arkham series comes to mind
>countless RPGs, especially the niche ones like LISA and OFF
>Night in the Woods
>Gone Home
>Horizon Zero Dawn
>most Sony "exclusives", really
I even like some of these games, I'm not necessarily shitting on them. Now more than ever people are willing to swallow bad or boring gameplay if they get a fun or interesting narrative, to the point that "gameplay-first" games like Doom are considered to be outliers rather than the norm.

Yes. Check out Your Turn To Die.

I'd agree with only the generic "countless RPGs" out of everything you listed here. Maybe Undertake, but it's a little too naive to be a good story. And Gone Home in particular is going full retard.

I'm not gonna be surprised if it's not popular on Yas Forums but I actually really enjoyed What Remains of Edith Finch. I actually feel like the best way to go for story based games is to keep the experience under 6-10 hours so it doesn't outlast it's welcome.

I'm gonna continue with my train of thought. Hell, why do you think walking simulators and narrative-driven indie games are so common nowadays? I have literally never seen a single person act excited for The Last of Us 2's gameplay and shooting mechanics. They're not even subtle about it - they care about the narrative. To the point that I think games like TLOU and RDR2 would've fucking flopped if they didn't have good stories. This is an interesting development from, say, 15 years ago, and I want to research it more and try to pinpoint when we started shifting from gameplay focus to narrative focus in videogames.
I'm not saying they have good stories, I understand that is subjective. I think Gone Home's story is fucking dumb. What I'm saying is people don't give a fuck about the gameplay of those games, they care about the stories, and that's why they sell well. Take FF7R, I'm not seeing a single thread right now talking about the gameplay changes, or how the game plays. The discussion is solely on the story, how it's changed, and the shortcomings / improvements therein.

Leave him alone he's with me.

they already are.
look at naughty dog, they are hailed for the lackluster gameplay because they slather character writing on top.
so it is not even the story that carries it.

>supposed Dev-diary at February
>nothing about it
>no updates whatsoever despite being April
All I wanted was another VtM game.

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People are mostly both got baited and are laughing at Nomura. After KH3, he is worth only laughing at.

As for your hypothesis, I'd say you're starting from it for the sake of it, not because of compelling evidence. Story was a major part of gaming as soon as technology allowed for it, and that's 8-bit era and up.

>and I want to research it more and try to pinpoint when we started shifting from gameplay focus to narrative focus in videogames
I'd hypothesize somewhere around 2008-09, when the cultural zeitgeist surrounding consoles, and by extension the lowest common denominator, shifted almost completely from Japanese game design sensibilities to emergening western ones. I say emerging because while the west hasn't shied away from a emphasis in story, you can compare something like the System Shock games to Bioshock and see where western game design sensibilities were already kind of going moving into the late 00s - much more streamlined and linear. Uncharted's also a good early example of this, as well as huge Japanese franchises like Final Fantasy and Zelda eventually buckling with entries like XIII and Skyward Sword. It's all just a hypothesis, though.

You are pulling cosmic amount of stuff out of your ass. Like, all of it. If you had an education in humanities, I suggest you forget all of it. It's poison.

I agree with you on the cultural changes, but I also think a part of it is technological advancement in consoles. I don't necessarily mean "we now have the technology to insert cutscenes and good graphics", I moreso mean "we've hit the peak when it comes to gameplay so now we have to market with story".
I remember reading somewhere that technological advancement and hyper-realistic graphics hinder an art form because creativity fosters under technological limitations, and imitating reality causes that creativity to wilt. I wonder if the same can apply to graphics? This story-first thing can be seen most blatantly in this generation's third-person shooters, the Sony exclusives in particular coming to mind, and what I notice with all of them is that their insistence on realistic gameplay and control means that the way they play is really bland and they kind of all feel like the same. I liked Horizon Zero Dawn, but gameplay-wise it didn't even feel a little bit different from your average open-world game - yet the enemy design and narrative was pretty good. When you insist that your games be set in the "real world" and thus the gameplay must reflect that, you aren't left with much to innovate on gameplay-wise, so the only unique thing your game can have is story.
That's why when you see gameplay-first games nowadays, they're usually different genres like platformers or something like that, and more often than not, the better ones are indie games.

>i wonder if the same can apply to gameplay?
That's what I meant, sorry. Had a brain moment.

>can a music album be carried by its concept?
Yes.

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Technological limitations are one thing but I'd also consider refinement of formulas. By the time the 7th gen rolled around devs had been tinkering with 3D game design for what, a little over a decade? And 3D was the last really huge leap for gaming, sure there was stuff like motion controls, touch controls and VR that are innovative but nothing quite on the game changing scale of going from 2D to 3D, all of those are still complimentary changes rather than true paradigm shifts. Because of that, devs probably mastered the art of designing games with the widest appeal and see little reason to break out because deviating from it might result in less money being made. Development and evolution in gameplay mechanics has sort of stagnated and there's probably not a lot of reward to weigh against the risk of bucking trends unless you're lucky like how devs are tripping over themselves over Breath of the Wild, and even that's largely a restructuring and reenvisioning of a lot of existing ideas. I don't think 98% of devs really know where else to evolve gameplay, but I also don't think there's enough incentive for them to try either.

That's not a breastlet. You may have rotted your mind, user. But yeah, kuronami is top tier

>her

There's a small global Pandemic going on.

What do you mean by this? I like the streets but don't understand your point.

the music is pretty shitty by all standards, but the story is interesting enough to listen to the whole record

Maybe if its a book.

I couldn't tell you because I haven't played a game with a good story released in "this day and age". It's always the same Hollywood tier shit.

None of the telltale games since the walking dead were revered by their gameplay.

The story got to be really good tough which you can also use tel tales games an example. Some have some really good stories and some shit the bad real hard.

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Nobody ever "knew" how to refine gameplay, all of it had to be created from scratch and then iterated upon. Indies still try new things, occasionally. And people lose their shit over them, like, say, Obra Dinn.

pls be a girl (female)

>ctrl+f disco elysium
>Phrase not found
hmm

Yes. Assuming story is what you're looking for.

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Hollywood was unironically good too. I liked Tarantino's latest movie. He got some balls to release it nowadays.

This game is literally what's wrong with mainstream storytelling. Creative bankruptcy and nihilism reign supreme, but let's take the piss out of everything we can think of. Gotta manage boredom somehow.

this shit made me realize faking smiles is not normal