What Happened to Great Stories In Gaming?

During this generation of consoles I have beaten more games than I give myself credit for.

image
Say what you want about hating Call of Duty, but this rendering of Kevin Spacey alone made me want to buy the game months ago.

I don’t mean getting all the trophies or achievements either.  I mean playing through the story or campaign.

I wish I could say I remembered them, but there are only a few I can recall that have been memorable experiences.

Here are my brief summaries of the PS4 games I have beaten the stories and campaigns

–          Watch_Dogs was the first game I bought ‘new’ for my PS4 and it was interesting and enjoyable for what it was at the time.  The story was okay, but in the end it felt like it should have been more.  Sadly, it wasn’t anything worth buying DLC for then or after.

–           Killzone Shadow Fall was a game that I wanted to play strictly because it was a PS4 exclusive and the visuals were stunning (especially when that first trailer hit… whoa!).  The story seemed interesting, but by the end I felt like someone had left me out of a few chapters and the story kind of ended with me killing some guy… every FPS, ever.

–          Destiny… Seriously?  This game was supposed to be so deep and have so much to do and in the end it was about 7 hours of gameplay for a non-existent story and a bunch of grinding for weapons and loot that only really mattered in the Crucible.  I will probably never buy another Bungie game because of this.

–          Battlefield 4 didn’t disappoint me because I knew to expect garbage.  It hasn’t had a meaningful campaign since Bad Company 2 (and even that was mostly because of interactions within your squad rather than something interesting in the story).

–          Wolfenstein was somewhat enjoyable as it was strictly a campaign full of nostalgia for those of us that missed killing a bunch of Nazis and weird robots, etc.  The villains were rendered well and they were on par with what I expected from Wolfenstein… over the top and weird and worth every wonderful bullet in the end.

–          Knack – Meh, it’s a kids game and the story played much like it should.  Adventure meets story meets terribly hidden antagonist meets basic platform game with a kitschy ability for the protagonist.

–          Grand Theft Auto V – I played through this game on the PS3 and then bought it again and played through again on the PS4.  It remains one of the games I will probably not delete from my hard drive (as it was my first digital purchase and took over 9 hours to download and install… not joking).  The story was like every other GTA, a bunch of people need to get shot or run over somehow and then you watch the credits roll before turning the city into further chaos because you are bored.

Call of Duty Advanced Warfare was just like every other Call of Duty but this one had jet packs and exo-suits.  The only enjoyable aspect of this game and the story involved was the acting of Kevin Spacey.  He has rarely done something as far as his acting goes that was sub-par.  I won’t remember the story as much as I will remember the fact that Spacey was a great villain and did a great job with his performance in this game.  Otherwise, this was just as lame as every Call of Duty since the Modern Warfare Trilogy ended.

–          Metal Gear Solid Ground Zeroes was a prologue that offered more than enough reason for a hardcore fan such as myself to pay $30 for it.  The only thing about it that leaves a sour taste is that it was a pre-cursor for the disappointment we’d feel in the Phantom Pain.

–          Metal Gear Solid V – The Phantom Pain was probably the one game I looked forward to the most out of any over the last five or six years.  Then it came out and blew my mind with Chapters one and two only to basically kick me in the balls with a chapter three that was missing.  I will never forget that and might not look at Konami or Kojima the same way again.

–          Fallout 4 is a game I figured I’d put 400 hours into and totally forget about the disappointment of Metal Gear.  Wrong.  Fallout 4 let me basically discover mysteries I’d figured out about 3 hours into the game and then when I found new places for settlements I’d get to play post-apocalyptic Sims with a bunch of idiots that somehow managed to forget how to feed themselves or sleep without a bed.

Now I find myself looking at a few games I have yet to finish in my library.

The Witcher 3 – It is coming up on the one year anniversary for this title and I think I will beat this game just before that point.  It remains at this point one of my favorite experiences as the story is relatively interesting and the world is enormous – almost too big to be honest.  I find it hard to complain about this because it at least has an astounding amount of content and originality.

image

Bloodborne – I bought it at launch a year ago or so, sucked at it so bad that I sold it online and then bought it again in January.  Why?  Because it is one of the best games ever.  It is legitimately difficult and unforgiving.  I often wonder why we as gamers settle for anything less than what Bloodborne provides us with strictly from the gaming level of challenge.  The story is almost invisible, but somehow it still manages to grab me through the amazing artwork and design.  I could just stare at this game all day and be a happy gamer.

Call of Duty – Black Ops 3 – I have prestiged a few times in multiplayer and have yet to get even a quarter of the way through the campaign.  The only other Call of Duty games I have never played through are COD 3 and World at War.  Both of them are Treyarch titles and I must say I don’t worship them as much as others seem to.  Black Ops and Black Ops 2 were okay at best, but with Ghosts, Advanced Warfare and now Black Ops 3 going in whatever MLG post-millennial direction they are – I wonder why in the hell I bought the digital deluxe version of this game.

Advertisement

Author: NoobTubeTV

I work with leadership to provide guidance, feedback and a plan of action in order to improve facilitation, learning, morale, efficiency and quality of production from their workforce.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out /  Change )

Connecting to %s

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

%d bloggers like this: