Combat or Story?
Poll: What kind of TC do you want? (19 member(s) have cast votes)
What kind of TC do you want?
Give me combat!
(2 votes [10.53%])
Percentage of vote: 10.53%
I like me a good story
(11 votes [57.89%])
Percentage of vote: 57.89%
I don't care, if a TC was made today I'd play it regardless
(6 votes [31.58%])
Percentage of vote: 31.58%
Yeah, I'm just curious here, what kind of people we have. Here. I'm not thinking about doing anything with this information. Of course not.
Story > Combat
I voted story because I like a good story like everyone else, but there also should be a fair amount of combat in there or it would get boring. You should know that gameplay makes the game. If the gameplay is lacking, then the story may not make up for it. On the other hand, good gameplay very often makes up for a poor story.
So there's my two cents. 
This post has been edited by Lord Rama : 13 September 2007 - 12:03 AM
Yeah, there should be an option for "More Story but Lots of Combat" and vice versa.
I'm sort of hoping for a story that goes like this:
Poll ends
Zapp: Well, hah, there's the TC. And it has both story and combat!
That would make you a king of surprise and win.
Gameplay comes first. If it has a great story but crappy gameplay, it's better off as a book. Though I'd rather not have an awful story either, such as in that World of Wraith plug-in. Either have almost no story (Miners, Teacup), a story that's fairly decent and will suffice (Colosseum, like I've said before, the story is simplistic), or a great story (ARPIA2). But just make sure that fire and foremost the gameplay is there.
There's a reason people still play Marathon and not as much Doom 1 or PWID. The story. And the gameplay.
It seems to me that what a TC provides is new story material above all else. If you all you want is interesting new way to blow stuff up, there are plenty of options in the stock Nova scenario, and if that's still unsatisfactory somehow, there are a number of non-TC plugs that give you fun new toys to play with.
Completed TC > Story > Gameplay
True Dat. 
I love a good story. Combat is fun, and I do it well enough to have a few tricks of my own. But loads of combat with no good story to tell me what progress I've made is no fun. For example, EVN Paintball. So without a doubt, Story!
Speaking of stories, I have come up with many of my own. I tried making a plugin of one of them (Strangely enough, an alternate Fed string), but I found out, I stink at making plugins.
Suddenly, out of nowhere, an alien brainwashes everyone and makes them create Fed Storyline expansions...
Gameplay will in my book always be more important then a story in a game.
@cosmic_nusiance, on Sep 13 2007, 06:19 AM, said in What kind of TC do you want?:
Suddenly, out of nowhere, an alien brainwashes everyone and makes them create Fed Storyline expansions...
Quoted for truth. :laugh:
It was one of those little grey dudes with a big head and an EV nova T-shirt...
I don't think that I ever played the fed storyline. To be honest, EV Nova is not even my favourite game in the series. In some ways I prefer the nova port of EVO, with nova-ised graphics. Nova is good, but it feels too good. Every storyline is clean, every evil dude is still remarkably friendly and sane, the rebs are good, the feds are bad, the aurorans are characterless pasteboard honor-freaks, the polaris are supposed to be xenophobic, but don't act like it... If it were a book, it wouldn't be my favourite or even second favourite, and that's a problem. Gaming is a media too, and it should have, not just long, and not just fun, but well written stories. I don't think that nova's story was especially well written. You just don't feel like you are a human among humans, you feel like you are The Good Guy. Nobody's perfect and acts fine all the time and always makes good decisions, but you couldn't tell from playing Nova.
That's all just my opinion, of course. And ARPIA2 fixes a lot of those problems, though not all of them.
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Gaming is a media too, and it should have, not just long, and not just fun, but well written stories.
Then I'd like to see someone come up with some novel-quality stories for Pong, Tetris, and Arkanoid.
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Interesting... if I said that 8 people were a sufficiently large test group, I'd have to say that story is most important. Oh well... I was going to try and do something, but I'm not so sure anymore.
You'd probably get a more accurate response if two things had been done with this poll. First, post it off the Dev Boards, since there aren't as many people here as there are on the Nova Boards. Here we just get developer opinions, not what the non-dev players want. Second, change the options. I didn't vote because "Gameplay" isn't on there. You have combat, story, and who cares. Combat does not necessarily equal gameplay (Miners TC anyone?).
While not specifically the EV fanbase, if you need a sufficiently large test group of what gamers prefer (story or gameplay), look at the best selling games of all time. The top seller is Super Mario Brothers, which we all know only has "Thank you Mario! But our princess is in another castle!" as it's story. Yet it's sold over 40,000,000 copies, which no other game has even come close to doing (and that excludes all the remakes). Most story-heavy games these days are lucky to sell even five million.
Hence again why I prefer to emphasis gameplay. It's a game, people want to play it, not read it. If your TC is just some boring periods of flying from point A to point B between blocks of text, nobody is going to play it a second time through.
Don't get me wrong though, I do enjoy a good story and I write fiction myself. I just believe that games need to focus on gameplay first.
This post has been edited by JoshTigerheart : 13 September 2007 - 11:03 AM
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Gaming is a media too, and it should have, not just long, and not just fun, but well written stories.
Then I'd like to see someone come up with some novel-quality stories for Pong, Tetris, and Arkanoid.
I wasn't talking about pong. I was talking about EV Nova. Some games, like you pointed out, don't have stories but are still just astoundingly, unreasonabley fun. Look at action games. Heck, look at X-com, look at Quake 4, look at Republic Commando. But too many games are pure stupidly fun action games. How many games have you heard of that were made within the last 4 years that actually HAD GOOD STORIES? Nova has good stories; I just don't think they are characterful enough. That's something I'm trying to address in my TC.
Do you have a PS2? Almost ALL of the games for PS2 are extremely mindless fighting/action/arcade games. Nothing wrong with that; sometimes I find that fun too. But searching through HUNDREDS of games looking for something other than GO HERE AND KILL LOTS OF STUFF games gets old real fast. Action is important. It grabs your attention, puts your lizard brain to work. Story exercises your real brain. No game can be a true masterpiece of design without good story. That's why even though Oblivion had less story than Morrowind, Oblivion was largely the better game. Oblivion had better action, and still had good story. It had both, and neither element suffered. Look at Starsiege. Starsiege had an indcredibly detailed story, and also had great action for when it came out. I was blown away by Starsiege's story , and I was largely playing, not just because it was hugely fun (which it was) but because it had the best, most involving, most realistic story OF ANY GAME THAT I'VE EVER PLAYED!
That's what I think. I'm not going to get involved in a discussion, though, because I'm too busy writing my story for my game.
Well, I'll actually give my opinion this time around...
Story is important, but not vital. Let me explain: a good story is immersive. It can give an epic feeling about some things in the gameplay as well. It can make players identify themselves to their characters. It can have detailed descriptions and intrigue that makes everyone play and replay the game because they want to know the "how?" and "why?" behind everything.
It can also bore the hell out of some players, make some say "This is stupid! It's so so obvious! Shoot him!" or "I wish I had the option to do something else". And some players will just hit the "OK" buttons without reading it at all or only parts that tell them what to do next. Either because they don't like the story or because they couldn't be bothered to read.
Conclusion? You either want a full blown, well-written story that will interest those looking for that and make them curious, interested or plainly addicted. Or you don't want much story at all. So if they don't like your story, they can just not read it and still could enjoy the gameplay instead which leads me to...
Gameplay. This is what will keep players hooked for a while, or slowly bore them until they quit. Gameplay is vital. With an average gameplay, you might keep the players who are into your story playing, but those who don't care won't be playing and re-playing your TC very long. Extremely crappy gameplay will make players interested in the story wish it was a book because they wanna know what's next but will make the actual game a chore. Very good gameplay will keep both the action craving and even some story hungry players playing.
I'll give you an example with real games, though I doubt many of you know those. Xenogears had a fun gameplay. Sure it was sort of basic, but it's an old game and it was fun. It had a crazy huge, albeit complicated story that had me completely addicted. I probably have over 700 hours of game time on that game. That's extreme.
Then came the "unofficial prequels" sequels: Xenosaga. The first one had crappy gameplay. Redundant combat and music, which was even worse because it could easily dumb down to using the same attack every fight over and over, and the worst is that the attack animations were long and tedious and couldn't even be skipped! No matter how much I was interested in knowing the story, I eventually quit the game altogether before being through it even once. A friend of mine did it and showed me the rendered movies and story and I was happy with that... That's the same concept applying to a TC or any game for that matter, in my opinion.
How good both aspects are makes the difference between a "WOW!! Great game!" or a "Yeah, it was fun... but time for a new game/plug."
