The Art Of Single-Player Storytelling - wow gold


[Writer Tom Cross parses out the complex blend of narrative and gameplay elements in Starcraft II for Gamasutra -- to what extent are the characters and conversation related to the gameplay, and do their interrelationships serve the experience?]

Starcraft’s designers plugged many spot-on references and jokes into their space-strategy game. From the three race’s relative similarity to FOX’s extraterrestrial heavy hitters (now the stars of the wretched AvP movie series), to almost every scene and line from Aliens, Starcraft wore its heart and its inspiration on its sleeve.

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It may have pioneered a certain brand of space epic (that stars garrulous space hicks), but for the most part it kept such antics to the brief cinematics that interspersed the Terran campaign.

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All the rest of the exposition was delivered by serious space bugs and serious space zealots, talking about chrysalides and the like. I am thankful for that small blessing, considering what I think is the overloaded, painfully insistent plotting and long-winded exposition found in Starcraft II.

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Starcraft’s world was mostly represented by in-game bxmnbxcfergs voice work and art. We got a feel for what the technology and movements of each race were from the animations and sound produced by units ingame. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.For the most part, when we saw zerglings and marines in the CG cutscenes, they looked (as most CG characters looked at the time) a little stretched out, a little stilted and peculiar, and nothing at all like their in-game counterparts.

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Blizzard was and is immensely pleased with its CG work (presently they’re neck and neck with the Final Fantasy games for most overblown cinematics), but in Starcraft they handed over most exposition and character development to surprisingly effective and attractive pre-mission talking heads, and in-mission chatter.

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There’s a reason why we don’t see the principal actors (Kerrigan, Raynor, and the various Zerg and Protoss heavies) in CG cutscenes: they’d look pretty awful, and the disconnect between their CG selves and their ingame and pre-mission selves would be evident, even laughable.

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Thus, while the tone and delivery of Starcraft’s script was as cheesy and overblown as you’d expect from a company that created Arthas and Deckard Cain, it mostly went about its business and then got out of the way.

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Pre-mission conversations were used to develop character arcs, conflicts, and (too often) to explain what the hell was going on in each mission. Books and friends should be few but good. That was often due to the different missions’ repetitious and uninventive structure. There are too many “survive the assault” and “kill the other guy” missions. The writers had to give some reason for the player’s dogged pursuit of tactical victory, over and over.xll

Editor: DoterLiLi
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