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I've always wondered: what do you guys think about a game from a bad guy's type of view?



GTA comes to mind

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The concept of having to "lose" to win the game - regardless from the moral side of the playercharacter...

I think that it is a very intruiging concept, although hard to pull off. One way is to let the player play several characters to see the story from all the different sides. I think (but I may be wrong, I haven't played it) Indigo Prophecy went that way. And then there are games like Ico and Shadow of the Colossus - from what I've read (again, I haven't played them, sadly), they both have a very peculiar feeling to them and you never feel quite comfortable with what you're doing.

Most people think that the ultimate goal with your game is to entertain your player, maybe make him laugh and overall to let him have fun. This is what (most) games have been doing for the last years and it goes pretty well. However, from all the games on the market, only very, very few of them tell a good, interesting story with well-developed charakters. You can do without them if you want a "fun" game or if you just want to get some feeling across ("OMG IM IN A SPACESTATION AND THERE ARE ALIENS EVERYWHERE") - but in the long term, thats nothing that could make games really evolve.

A game where you have to escape from everything and everyone whos out to get you, only to be cornered at the last moment with a decision between only terrible outcomes - that is something that right now is pretty much unthinkable for most gamedesigners. Personally, I think it would be an intruging concept. A game that after hours trying to keep my character alive, only to have him commit suicide at the very end of it - that can be either extremely frustrating or thoughtprovoking (or, possibly, both). How it will end up depends on the situation, the story and the character itself. In the end, it would be a tragedy, but if you do it right, you may be able to get a nice little message across - or just to evoke emotions in the player.

Of course, you can also ignore all that and still make a game around the bad guys (i.e. Dungeon Keeper, which is a classic game just with the sides reversed, in essence).

Personally, I think that before we can even think to create games like this in the way I described it, we have to improve the stories of our games - by alot. Most of us in this forum - well, most don't. I'm guilty of that as well: My "Experimental-Series" all have no story at all and no characters to identify with. I swear, I will do that better next time.

Let's have a look at the Showcase, shall we?
Right now, I'd say that one, maybe two (not so sure about Angelas World 2) out of twelve serious projects really thought about their story (this is from the first page of the Showcase I-forums, I only counted real games) and that the story is one of the primary aspects of the game. True, sometimes its not necessary, but its still pretty low. Some teams here tell you what there story is and you immediatly see that it was only a weak afterthought, that it doesn't make sense and that it doesn't even take a minute to completely rip it apart. As long as one isn't able to tell more about all major characters and answer most important questions about the world and the story, one isn't quite finished with the story, I'd argue. And as long as we don't care about stories, it doesn't really matter what happens in the end - you can't expect the plaer to "feel" something about "LOL A CITY" with no notable characters or anything that feels alive.

Which brings up another interesting point, really: Are we indy developers even ABLE to tell such a story in a game thats not totally linear? I'd argue that it would take way to long to do otherwise.

Perhaps this post will get me points for originality at least.

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