Achievement unlocked: Read every page of the history book

 I'm still playing Demon's Souls, and it has become a much more impressive beast with each hour I put into it. It just gets better. Yes, I had this the night it came out, but I lapsed quite a bit when about a dozen new games came out that demanded my attention. The time allowed me to reflect and get a fresh perspective on what I could do to survive a little longer, and it has certainly helped. Since I'm not fearing corners anymore, it has given me more time to appreciate the attention From Software gave to their game world, and start to viciously hate some other games out there that avoid this.

 Starting with Half-Life 2 as one of the best examples of all time, the concept of the "game world" should be an awful like what is done with movies in that a movie studio doesn't hand out a book with every showing to explain everything that's going on. That's what the two hours are for. It's a studio's job to develop a world and immerse the viewer in it. Blade Runner did not ask that you read the Phillip K. Dick novel, nor did it explain what had put Earth into such decay. Instead, it showed in a few seconds how pollution had accumulated, and some of the most moving passing words in the history if films described the breadth of human colonization. Nowhere did this movie slap speeches or texts to explain things, and left that task to the brilliant visuals that told their own story to fill in any gaps.

 Half-Life 2 achieves this beautifully, expecting the player to gain knowledge of the events around them by brief context clues and the interpretation of how the events of humanity came to be. The storyline can, in fact, by summed up briefly by speeches, but 90% of what's going on is left for your senses to complete. It is a world of  immersion at heart, and it is a plus for Demon's Souls to carry on with this approach to storytelling. Do either of these games force you on fetch quests or "catch 'em all" achievement lists so that you can understand every piece of the story? Are either of these games pretentious enough to explain more than is necessary?

 Failures of storytelling amount to dropping the midi-chlorian bomb in game form. Less explanation, more application.

 In a strange twist, I chose Blade Runner for its storytelling strengths when a game largely inspired by it came out in the form of Snatcher. Snatcher is a text game that requires you to investigate nearly everything in the game world, but that world is so freakishly detailed that it even has a database dedicated to educating the player on the past and present of the game world. While it seems as if this would be a complete storytelling failure, it actually works well. Some games can pull it off while others cannot.

 It's pretty simple, though. If you're a game devoted to information and brains with a slow pace, then describing more gives a game a novel-like strength. If you're spending most of your time knee-deep in action, than information should be more inferred and shown as creative eye candy rather than taking the pansy route out and dropping pick-ups along the way. While it's true that I had been impressed with the Web of Intrigue within Prototype, it was the introduction of a concept that had me thinking positively, not the way it truly played out.

 In games where a lot of visuals are going on, what a developer chooses to show carries more weight than how they usually choose to explain it. Aeris' ghost in the later parts of Final Fantasy VII caused a gigantic wave of interest, while I do not know of any audio log that has garnered any significant attention. Digg It Stumble it ! Reddit