Choose Your Own Adventure: Player-Influenced Narratives

With the exponential evolution of narration and story development in video games since the turn of the millennium, the gaming community has grown more sophisticated and demanding in terms of storytelling. Arguably, the most severe criticism hits games where there’s more than one possible way the game can play out – in other words, games that feature some sort of choice available to the player.

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.

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.