The Buried Story: The Art of Supplemental Storytelling

Ever since the days of Resident Evil on the original PlayStation, I’ve been a sucker for a video game’s ability to tell stories beyond the narrative right in front of you. Many mediums, such as movies, comics or even traditional literature, have the theoretical ability to sneak in tales about people or locations that aren’t relevant to the main narrative, but video games have a decisive advantage in the extent to which this can be done.

House of Troubles: Is Bethesda’s “Free Pass” Justified?

Since the turn of the millennium, Bethesda Softworks and their development branch Bethesda Game Studios have gone from an eccentric yet ambitious company, with their own unique visions and goals, to a massive player in the western video game industry, whose name is recognized on the same level as the best of them; everyone invested in the scene knows what they’re about, and especially as a developer they’ve achieved huge popularity and renown. Their development résumé consists essentially of two franchises: The Elder Scrolls, created by Bethesda themselves, and Fallout, acquired from Interplay. Both of these franchises are among the most popular video game series in existence, generating quite a bit of buzz with every new title that’s launched or announced.

Agoraphobia: The Decline of Open World Games

Over the past decade or so, the Open World format has steadily increased its penetration of the video game scene; starting with role-playing games whose nature included such vastness and openness in the game world like The Elder Scrolls series, eventually the number of new games with Open World sensibilities increased noticeably, and existing series began to adopt those features as well.

More linear games like Metal Gear, Far Cry and the Arkham series of Batman games developed from being fairly straightforward, guided experiences into what we saw in Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, Far Cry 3 and 4, and Batman: Arkham City and Arkham Knight. The reason should hardly surprise anyone – it’s the supply to the audience’s demand. My argument, however, is that the tide is well on its way to turning around, changing the landscape of Triple-A games in the next few years.

Center of the Universe: The “Chosen One” Concept

I consider myself an enthusiast of role-playing games, particularly classic, dense, story-heavy western ones. I regard Baldur’s Gate one of the most defining games of the western RPG genre, and The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is one of my favorite games of all time. Being exposed to the genre quite strongly, I would say I have a pretty decent understanding of the composition of a typical game of this kind. But even with lesser experience, one can probably distinguish some of the common elements in role-playing games with ease.

Double-A: The Death of Audience-Specific Games

I’ve often heard Greg Miller of Kinda Funny mention the fact that in the video game industry of today, the mid-sized game developers have ceased to exist, as both Triple-A releases and indie developers consume practically all of the space there is in the market. For the traditional, old-school and possibly somewhat sentimental gamer such as myself, this is upsetting to say the least, since nowadays the only options are either the big titles that are smoothed and, if you’ll excuse my impolite expression, “dumbed down”, so that they will be appealing to as many people as possible, whether or not they’re seasoned gamers; or independent games that more often than not lack the resources to provide a satisfying, robust experience.

It All Started with a Water Chip: What Happened to Fallout?

By the time this blog entry is posted, I’m positive you’re either tired of Fallout 4 related content, or don’t care about the game and are sick of hearing about it all the same. What I’m intending to do, however, is not just compose a lengthy article about what the newly-released post-apocalyptic role-playing game is made of, but rather take a look at the series as a whole, and more specifically how it has gone through changes so thorough that for all intents and purposes nothing of the original game is left to be found in the latest one.