f13.net

SPAWN MORE TORTILLA CHIPS

contributed by Samprimary

I finished the singleplayer campaign of Heart of the Swarm and immediately thought "I want nachos."

Maybe I was supposed to feel something different.

Well, okay. I'm not being entirely truthful. I was thinking I wanted good nachos, specifically. I wanted to go out of my way to find a restaurant that served nachos that were not going to disappoint me.

I desired this, because the entirety of my experience sitting through Heart of the Swarm made me baffled and irked in the same way I am baffled and irked when I go and pay money to a place that is entirely in the industry of producing food you want to go out to pay and eat — because, seriously? Nachos are a pretty low bar. You have to be dysfunctional in a special way to end up unable to produce nachos.

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Good stuff

(http://i.imgur.com/Ry0eOuT.jpg)

(http://i.imgur.com/RgYefL6.jpg)

(http://i.imgur.com/ANWteaS.jpg)

(http://farm7.staticflickr.com/6074/6040355619_c485b35517_z.jpg) (http://www.flickr.com/photos/mspt47/6040355619/)
Nachos (http://www.flickr.com/photos/mspt47/6040355619/) by mspt47 (http://www.flickr.com/people/mspt47/), on Flickr


Yay for more rants.

The comparison is great here, by the way. Why serve bad nachos? Only two reasons: 1) you cannot be bothered to give two and a half fucks and you think (probably accurately) that most of your customers don't give a fuck either. (As say movie or stadium nachos.) or 2) you've hired a bunch of guys who've never seen a nacho, don't know how to make a nacho, and wouldn't know a good one if they ate it.

Blizz is #2 all the way. When you hire nothing but manchildren who would struggle to finish reading a story about Dick and Jane fetching water from a well, you get narratives that an eight-year old boy hopped up on a combination of sugary breakfast cereal, bath salts and heavy metal would judge without irony "almost as rad as Sucker Punch".

Now I want nachos.

Well that makes me kinda sad. I had high hopes for this one, and I expected Kerrigan to sit most of it out, as you know, she just got her DNA fucked around again. That's gotta be tiring for a gal. Fuck this has me bummed. :/

(https://encrypted-tbn2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTEGnx2aqLrvr6-XW_SK1wuF36eQZem0aBxy060FKStUKQu0pIa)

I'm more of a minimalist

(http://livefitstrong.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/01/chips-and-salsa.jpg)

Great stuff.  I genuinely am now hungry for nachos.

Not nachos, though.

Looks like Diablo for the PSX.

(http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lt7xv5me1c1qmz4lpo2_400.gif)
(http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-NrJvQMCk3qs/Tf0HI4himOI/AAAAAAAAAFY/fRI7u-DGzco/s1600/demotivational-posters-batman-is-eating-your-nachos.jpg)

And here's for Sam, as this seemed fitting for some of the earlier paragraphs (awful wording aside)


(http://i.qkme.me/369vzo.jpg)

"Put Expensive Voice Overs in my Game"

"Doesn't Play Fun"

To be fair, the title is SPAWN MORE TORTILLA CHIPS

To be fair, the article ends with:


Check and mate, sir.

(http://moessouthwestgrill.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/ccq_nachos-2.jpg)

Like The Hobbit, I haven't even picked up HOTS. It's just not worth it to even be able to rant about.

"STORIES KILLED MY UNCLE!"

(http://papacharlies.com/upload/20121003_recipe-nachose-700x400.jpg)

BTW - These are good nachos

http://www.pamperedchef.com/recipe_search/recipe.jsp?id=75015

Made them during football playoffs and they were amazing.

I think pulled pork on nachos is about the best thing ever invented. 

unghhhhhhhhh. yes. i have to remind myself i can't eat my monitor.

Me too.  There are some fine, fine looking fucking nachos up in here.

You win.

I clicked the discuss button expecting numerous pics of nachos.  I was not disappointed. 

Pork rind nachos are <3

I made shitty nachos last night.  I will try harder tonight.

I think there is a bit of this, but the problems run much deeper and bad nachos are not an ideal metaphor.

As a general rule people, including those who have accidentally produced it in the past, have little idea how good storytelling is made. They can't identify it as bad or good until it's there staring them in the face and the story is done, and even then they'd be hard pressed to identify what went right and what went wrong. When it's still just a summary or an outline, it looks fine. Story is simple, they think, if there are problems we'll patch them before we publish...

...which matches the way that the rest of production design goes. Visual aesthetic can be cobbled together as it goes along: Does this match what we've already done? Yes/no. Voice actors can be changed and redubbed, music can be inserted, sound effects imagined and added as necessary. Multiple teams can implement setpieces in parallel with only minimal contact. A relatively straightforward design bible will maintain the feel of an artistic whole.

Masterful storytelling doesn't work that way at all. The bits and pieces of cohesive narrative, like individual instrumental parts in a symphony, may be jarring or boring on their own. One narrative arc leads to another which, in turn, answers questions the first implied and foreshadows problems later arcs will explore. Each twist is simultaneously unexpected and inevitable, making perfect harmony from the dissonant notes that had irritated you before. (Gameplay works this way too, but that's a complaint for another post.)

Every note matters, and you don't know exactly how much it matters until the end.

With a big budget movie, what's important is the hype. Will the trailer sell an opening weekend? Will the soundbites make them laugh? Will the poster convince uncertain moviegoers? will the clips we release to review sites get people excited? All of that is forefront on the minds of moviemakers, and none of it has anything to do with whether the story is any good. All that matters is whether it reduces the risk inherent in spending 100 million dollars on a movie. So we get famous actors and directors with script demands, producers with setpiece demands, and any number of other bullshit obstacles to quality.

Big budget video games are similarly concerned about screenshots, demos, trailers, and reviews by people who've only played the first two or three hours. Visuals and basic gameplay are critical. Story is something players might not have a solid verdict on until they're watching the credits roll. The more expensive a game becomes, the more voices in control of money will become involved. They'll want to make changes in order to demonstrate their control, and arbitrary changes to story (which they don't care much about anyway since it won't affect their early sales) will always destroy the intricately woven music that storytelling requires.

So there are a lot of pictures of beautiful nachos in this thread. Starcraft games are full of beautiful cutscenes. That doesn't tell me much about how they taste, and it certainly doesn't tell me whether, a few hours later, I'll find myself perched miserably over a toilet.

They have those @ Safeco Field. Even the terrible chips they use can't make them anything less than ambrosia.

This. At the big end of the AAA level, it seems to me that video games are constructed like some sort of mutually agreed-on (or dictatorially enforced, depending on your studio) jigsaw puzzle where everyone is making the pieces as they go. So while their may be some kind of mutually supported end goal, what can be delivered may not fit together if not correctly managed.

And it is a jigsaw that is made to a deadline, meaning that the pieces may just be thrown together at the end and jammed together to make them fit. Most video games don't actually get to approach fun until the very end of development, when the budget is at its lowest and there isn't the time to go back and replace key systems if they don't work - at best there might be time to tweak, to shave down a few sides of that puzzle piece, but certainly not enough time to completely redo it.

All of which impacts on story. Stormwaltz has indicated that even at BioWare - for whom story is a strength - there is still a mad scramble to cut back story lines when other deadlines loom and then to just make the existing narrative pieces fit together without leaving too many holes.

And as for Blizzard failing to make good nachos, arguably they aren't in the nacho making business, they're in the competitive eating business. Nachos are something they offer because it is expected, but it's not what they see as really important.

One problem I see with attributing specific strengths (such as storytelling) directly to developers on a company-wide basis is that those strengths can be really dependent on specific individuals or groups of individuals within said company. There is no guarantee that the lessons those individual/groups of developers (hypothetically might) learn will trickle down to the company as a whole, and should those individuals pack up and leave - they take a huge chunk of the experience and know-how they've acquired with them. Thus a specific company could keep on training developer after developer from scratch, re-inventing the wheel over and over again, without really advancing much in the "lessons learned"-department as a company (often going in the reverse direction instead, when experienced developers leave for other pastures/are let go).

Seems to me that might also affect individual projects within the same company, if the experienced developers on one project are moved to another and replaced with in-experienced ones that will have to learn the same lessons as their predecessors all over again. There's only so much new developers can learn from documentation and internal wikis and training-exercises.

This is my new favorite chip dipping into sauce of godliness.

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/hot-sausage-dip/

Thanks for the page views, keeps me in a job.  ;)

"Storytelling is HARD!" as an excuse breaks down in the face of this much incompetence.  Because yes, storytelling is hard, but 'hay guys, let's take everything the player worked for in the first game and totally undo it in the second game!' is such an obviously stupid idea that there is no remedy but facepunching.  If the premise itself is retarded, pointing at the subtle nuances as an example of why writing is difficult is just a waste of time.  Here is an example of better story planning:

We want Kerrigan to be un-zerged: Okay.
We want Kerrigan to be in charge of the zerg during their campaign: Okay.

How do we make these two requirements occur without making the story idiotic?

By putting the zerg campaign BEFORE her un-zerging.  That way she's not bouncing in and out of the zerg like Professor Xavier bouncing in and out of his wheelchair when new writers fix/unfix his spine.

yeahhhhhhhhhhh that's the point of the comparison I belabor so much. Something has to be institutionally wrong to keep a company with this much time and resources (and obviously ambitious designs to expand the storytelling element) from being able to not make their storylines so much worse.  

These games haven't been complicated story prospects. It's games that don't really need a lot of storytelling. There's no plot interactivity or decisionmaking; you're just along for the ride and the same thing happens no matter what. There's no branching. There's mostly just mission drivers. It just needs some basic motivational stuff, clear concepts. It's not a particularly challenging prospect for a story, but something's wrong and it's making it impossible for them to do.

The primary theory is M Night Shamalan's The Metzening — the idea that that dude and/or the uppers in the creative works departments are really just fuckawful at their jobs to the extent that they poison everything that they touch, and they pull all the strings, so it's going to suck. Maybe that's a significant continued issue in Blizzard's case, but there's gotta be something else going on that causes me to see the same strands of the same dysfunction in other studios.

I think that the stories that are being written for these games are dying a death by a thousand alterations, in a way which has become dysfunctionally ingrained into their system for game development. My suspicion is that they have standardized and integrated things that rule over creative vision and fracture it to death, like consistent focus group testing, where they have people play the game and report back on a questionnaire things like "Did you understand what your character was doing?" "Did you feel that your mission objectives were clear?" and that the way that the finalized story is presented to the player is the end result of thousands of tortured, micromanaged adjustments and alterations to ensure that everyone's hand was held narratively.

A person or some people are likely at some point in this process writing a story that may not be great, but pretty much works okay. But then they're required to continually and significantly alter it on so many levels every time the lead devs come back and say "focus group testing shows that some players really don't get the subtlety of X, so it needs to be rewritten and clearly tell the player something more like Y." This probably not only makes the standard level player interaction with the storyline asinine (Hmm, those enemy marines are clustered. It would be a good idea to use my Kill Clustered Marines I spell on the clustered marines that are a cluster of marines over there.), but also leads to the final overarching elements of the story becoming less dynamic and more painfully cliche. It would certainly explain things like how we moved from the constrained and workable narrative of previous diablos (LOOKING FOR BA'AL?) to the exasperatingly belabored comic-book-monologue level exposition of the current iteration*

If my theory is correct, you could take a look at Bastion as a clear example of a game story that could not possibly survive blizzard's system of game design. It certainly hammers concepts at you over and over (the boy the calamity calamities boy calamity calamitied the calamities boy. calamity.) in a way which seems excruciatingly Metzenique, but it keeps with it a clarity of vision that makes it work. It tells a story. Blizzard's version of Bastion would have seen that clarity of vision die under the weight of all its stitches.




 

*to emphasize that point, the transcript of Diablo during the end battle of d3.

THE SEVEN EVILS ARE ONE WITHIN ME!

I AM LEGION!

ENOUGH! LET US SEE HOW YOU FARE IN MY REALM OF TERROR!

ONLY BY DEFEATING US CAN YOU RETURN TO YOUR OWN REALM!

BUT NONE HAVE EVER CRAWLED FROM THE DEPTHS OF THEIR OWN TERROR!

YOU SHALL NEVER WAKE FROM THIS NIGHTMARE!

HOW TASTES YOUR FEAR, NEPHALEM!

YOU CANNOT DEFEAT YOUR OWN TERROR!

CAN YOU FEEL YOUR DEATH APPROACHING!

YOUR NEPHALEM POWER WILL NOT HELP YOU IN THIS REALM, MORTAL!

HOW DOES IT FEEL KNOWING YOU HAVE FAILED THOSE WHO DEPENDED ON YOU?

NO! THIS WRETCHED LIGHT MUST BE ERADICATED!

ALL THAT YOU HAVE KNOWN - ALL THAT YOU HAVE EVER LOVED - SHALL DIE ALONG WITH YOU, NEPHALEM!

*DIES*

Intriguing. Tell me more.

I imagine the same problems happen during the production of Hollywood blockbusters. Some jackass producer or director is always sitting there while the latest dailies produce puzzled grimaces saying: "We can redub that, we can delete this scene, we can edit that character out, and besides... we've still got a lot of material in post. It'll all make more sense and flow better once that's on the screen." No, you probably can't. You have probably fucked it up beyond recognition. Things like narrative and tone depend on an overall audience impression of the entire film. If the mismatched work you've already produced is just a bad line, a bad scene, a stupid prop, or a crappy background then you might be able to fix it with movie magic. No? It's the flow of the plot? You're doomed.

Like I implied before, gameplay works the same way. If it's not fun as a whole, your players are going to be varying degrees of upset. Like with stories there are familiar frameworks that tend to create positive results, and players aren't too upset if you reuse them judiciously. Like with stories, if you try to just add features without considering the whole you will get yourself in trouble. BUT, when you get yourself in trouble with gameplay, portions of the game are rendered unplayable. Either they're too dull to enjoy, too challenging to complete, or it becomes too easy crash the game by trying some unanticipated combination. The game is obviously broken.

Applying the lessons you have learned perfecting gameplay to story will still kill the story. You can test gameplay piece by piece because "This part was fun" is still something players will remember the same way testers do. "This particular piece of foreshadowing was great" and "this character's motivation was strong at this moment" are not going to overwhelm the sense that at the end of the game the whole mess didn't hang together. We love listening to one event after the other, but every narrative contains an implicit promise that the story we are being told is worth telling. It's why shaggy dog stories and overlong jokes exist: Surely, the audience thinks, all these details and oddities will be explained at the end. Surely this person I like to consider my friend wouldn't just have been talking for fifteen minutes solely in order to piss me off. Maybe this suddenly gets good.

Nope.

I'm not just arguing that storytelling is hard. Anybody can make nachos, and most can even make nachos worth eating. The trouble is that a story developed via accretion by a committee will tend to be more cliched and make less sense than one developed by a single writer and left sacrosanct. For the same reasons, only the whole story can be focus group tested because the individual parts of that story are fundamentally less important than the whole. The fact that testers don't understand exactly what's going on partway through can be -- in many cases should be -- part of the grand design. The fact that the committee has screwed up the whole story by futzing with a piece of it isn't immediately obvious because the way a story feels is something you realize when the story is done. At which point the people who spent tens of millions of dollars getting the game produced aren't going to want to hear, "Nope. Shit sucks. Gotta scrap the whole thing and start over."

Nachos made by comittee and a focus groups

(http://www.examiner.com/images/blog/wysiwyg/image/mcdonalds_fries.jpg)

(http://static.neatorama.com/images/2010-06/reverse-engineer-mcdonalds-fry.jpg)

On that point, who are the actual writers of HotS? A short googling only turns up Chris Metzen.

Sidenote: I went into a cheap food place on the weekend and they had nachos on the menu and all I then wanted was nachos so I ordered the nachos and they were ordinary. Nacho sales worldwide have exploded thanks to Samprimary.

Anyone else find it funny that "Blizzard has unoriginal, poorly-written scripts" makes it to the frontpage while Bioware shitting the bed on three separate, consecutive occasions goes by with nary a whisper?

That just shows that Blizzard has more (angry, former) fanbois than Bioware.

Whoa whoa whoa.

Bioware isn't Bioware anymore. Working up hate for them would require increasing the already seething disgust everyone has with EA. Hating EA is just a big 'ol waste of time at this point. By proxy, the same goes for Bioware. As such, why would we write about Bioware? That entire corporation is officially no the "any news is good news" plan since they're so crap.

Edit: I'm aware Blizzard is part of Activision, but they've still managed to operate mostly independently compared to say, Infinity Ward. Also, Activision isn't trying to compete with Steam in a fight they'll never ever be able to win. Whereas EA has both the hubris and stupidity to jump into an arena they don't even understand.

Does that mean I'm allowed to post in Bioware threads again?

(https://dl.dropbox.com/u/82533/qpT3m.gif)

Oh come-on the debate between Simond and the Anti-Simond of our new poster, Nayr, would be good for a laugh until you had to ban them both.

Save time, ban them both now.  :awesome_for_real:

Would this like, be a potential energy source like akin to matter-antimatter reactions

like, if I write a future sci-fi world can F13 be the name of the world's source of cheap and plentiful energy?

To go back to the topic at hand, I think in Blizzards case it's really just Metzen.

After all the stories aren't as big to need an entire team to do it. I have no idea on how game production works, but can it be that Metzen sits in his office, just following is own dreams/ideas and what he writes goes into production straight away? I don't think he has an editor or even someone who'd face up to him and say 'That entire storyline is crap to the core'.

Reminds me a bit of the Plinket Star Wars Reviews, that have outtakes of Lucas rambling unchecked with a bunch of scared underlings standing by and nodding wisely.

'And again, it's like poetry, it's sort of, they rhyme. Every stanza kind of rhymes with the last one.'

And we know where that lead us... :grin:

I think for the most part they let Metzen be Metzen because they determined in the past that storylines have next to no effect on their sales. Plus nobody can follow his nonsense.

We'll see how Heart of the Swarm sells in regards to conversions from the original game. It posted good 2 day numbers, but that's still only 20-25% of users who bought the original. If it doesn't get a 50% adoption rate, I think you can blame the bad press about the storylines.

I think I said this already in another thread, but Metzen is drinking buddies with whoever runs Blizzard.

Blizzard needed some lolore for their first game or two and their buddy Metzen is a "good enough" artist and isn't afraid of writing out his fanfictions for everyone to read and will do it for a case of beer.

Goddamn it...stuck on a conference call and this made me laugh out loud. Thankfully I managed to mute myself before it got too loud and interrupt-y  :awesome_for_real:

I tried to make a comic that started with kerrig ..

no, i can't do it, i can't spoil it. I gotta just man up and get me a computer with photoshop and a mouse and do this.

Polygon has an article up about what HOTS lead writer Brian Kindregan has to say about cinematics (http://www.polygon.com/2013/3/31/4158872/cinematics-emotionally-connect-players-to-game-narratives-says):

I'm probably the only person on this board that doesn't want to be pulled out of my gameplay to watch a clip of a shitty TV show.

Really, really not the only person who feels that. I'm currently playing Borderlands 2 DLC since I got gifted a season pass, and the unskippable cutscenes annoy the everliving shitty fuck out of me.

It's not just you. If I wanted to watch stupid cutscenes all day I would have finished Metal Gear Rising.

Eh, that actually seems to be the prevailing sentiment around here.  I like a good cut scene, but it's hard to argue that they haven't become a bit bothersome in their current implementation in most games.

The alternative seems to be along the lines of "Angel talks to you and takes up your screen while you are trying not to die to a Super Badass Goliath", so I can't fucking win when it comes to story in games these days.  Except in games like Path of Exile where talky-talky is relegated to non-combat areas.

I thought Borderlands 2 was pretty much the perfect way to tell story: give me the dialog while allowing me to continue to PLAY THE FUCKING GAME. The cutscenes in BL2 were both short, relatively few (basically one per NPC), and all skippable.

I agree, actually, but I can't listen to her and Jack and everyone else while I'm in a firefight.  Butt Stallion can't say HELLO if I'm dead. :oh_i_see:

The problem really manifests in MP when I have other jackholes triggering things while I'm occupied elsewhere.  In SP I can mostly manage to understand what the shit is going on.  Now with the new update, I can go ahead and talk to Marcus and Zed so that I don't see their cutscenes every time I interact with them.