[Scotty]

The real problem was that NPCs did not level with the lists. Or you. Sure, guards are supposedly always five levels up on you, but tell it to the guy with the 40+ fire/lightning enchanted sword and see how hard he laughs.

Five levels?  Damn, a level 50 guard is a pushover!

[General Battuta]

Any good gameplay tells a story, so it's kind of a false dichotomy.

Right, but not really a good story. I mean, I had lots of fun in the Battlefield mod Eve of Destruction taking unarmed NVA choppers and ramming them into fully loaded Hueys. Over and over again. So, what, 'kamikaze! Respawn! Kamikazee! Respawn! Kamikaze!'

I guess it's a story. It's just not a story I'd have the slightest interest in if I weren't the kamikaze.

Yet you were the kamikaze and the story was certainly interesting.

[Stormkeeper]

The real problem was that NPCs did not level with the lists. Or you. Sure, guards are supposedly always five levels up on you, but tell it to the guy with the 40+ fire/lightning enchanted sword and see how hard he laughs.

Eh. Guards are pussies. Good way to get money selling their gear though. Especially if you raid a guard house.

I agree levelled lists detracted from the 'living world' they were trying to create. Like in a real living world, what are the odds that a tiger would only attack you if you had a possibility of defeating it?

[NGTM-1R]

Five levels?  Damn, a level 50 guard is a pushover!

Word of god; guards always have five levels on you, except some of the named ones, who have only one.

I assume NPC leveling works differently or strength/endurance are their dump stats...

[Flipside]

I've certainly never played through the main campaign without losing either Jauffre or Baurus in the final battle against the Daedra, which, I might add, is a bit of an anticlimax after the build-up, and yet still manage to get through that section in quite a healthy state myself. Maybe it's the fact that Alchemy is far too easy to grind in Oblivion and I'm carrying about 40-50 powerful restore health potions by that stage

[Stormkeeper]

*snip*

My heavy armor + block speccing meant my endurance maxxed out long ago...

Back on topic. Oblivion had a nice story, I think. Helps that as one of the Champions, you are literally part of the story. The gameplay was also not bad. But the main reason for playing it is the openess of the world and the ability to do almost anything whenever, whereever you want.

[Flipside]

I suppose that's what I mean in a way, the story is compelling, but even without the story, just wandering into random sites, the gameplay alone holds the game together quite well, even with the levelled lists, that's why I consider it an example of a good mixture of the two, though admittedly, I don't think the game would hold together without the various stories in it at all, you could only face so many random encounters before you got bored.

[Stormkeeper]

I suppose that's what I mean in a way, the story is compelling, but even without the story, just wandering into random sites, the gameplay alone holds the game together quite well, even with the levelled lists, that's why I consider it an example of a good mixture of the two, though admittedly, I don't think the game would hold together without the various stories in it at all, you could only face so many random encounters before you got bored.

So; again, you could say the story held it together.

[Flipside]

Well, pretty much anything that you play single player needs a story to hold it together, it's only when you go multiplayer that those rules change. But the thing is, the story is quite enjoyable, but even when you aren't following the story you are still having fun, the mechanics work to make an enjoyable game, which additionally has quite an interesting story to it. The two are interleaved, The gameplay wouldn't work for long without the story, but the story wouldn't work for long without the gameplay.

[Ransom]

I think this bespeaks something of a miscommunication about what we mean by 'story'. Asteroids has no story, per se, but the gameplay certainly tells a story: you are surrounded, you are harried, you must move quickly to defeat obstacles. No matter how simple the gameplay task, the player is probably constructing a narrative to go with it: "I'm a hero, I'm so skilled, oh no this is impossible", etcetera and whatnot.

Take...Peggle. No plot whatsoever. But when you play, you're nonetheless spinning out a narrative of sorts - one built out of very small gameplay events (I succeeded! I did better than last time! Uh-oh, I'm not getting as many points as I used to). And that story is part of why the game becomes so addictive; the drive to constantly improve is powerful.

That's what I mean by 'all gameplay tells a story'. Gameplay mechanics must be invested with meaning and value in order to be enjoyable. This is why grinding in MMOs so often becomes objectionable; it feels sterile and unrewarding, a mere mechanical action in pursuit of an abstract goal.

No, no, I understood that. I concur with the observation - I've taken the same line of argument elsewhere - but the OP clearly equates 'story' with a hard narrative. It seems to be asking how a developer should weigh gameplay with directed storytelling. I think the emergent story that a player creates for themselves is a very different beast to the kind that is told and, while the best games manage to get them both to sing in harmony, it seems a bit dismissive to me to brush the whole thing off as a false dichotomy when you're essentially answering a different question to the one the OP asked.

[General Battuta]

Right, makes sense to me.

[TrashMan]

Oblivion? When the bandits jump at you in the most expensive armor in the game and demand 5 gold pieces?

Frankly, I played it cause I wanted to see the story. Wandering around was fun for a short while, but that's it.

[Flipside]

It's not about personal opinion of the game though, that's the whole point, you wouldn't have been interested in the story if the gameplay was too awkward to make it worth working through it, you'd have looked it up on Wiki or the like. So the story maintains attention, but that is still heavily reliant on the gameplay being enjoyable enough to act as a storytelling device in the first place. I don't think there's any game of that sort that would work based purely on the random wandering, but the fact that the random wandering can and does work, even for a while, is evident that, regardless to what the story of Oblivion was (within reasonable limits, a good story would still be needed) it still would have been an enjoyable game to play.

[Vidmaster]

Oblivion is the first ElderScrolls game that HAS an engaging story. "Engaging" compared to Bethesda's other works.
Seriously, it's as tense as a Pong game without a ball  . You never ever feel like the world is really in trouble, it's waiting nice and obedient to get saved if you got the time.

Games like MassEffect, Baldur's Gate 2, TheWitcher, Geneforge, hell, even KOTOR manage this so much better.

[Androgeos Exeunt]

I play Freelancer more for the gameplay than for the story.

From what I've seen so far, Max Payne 2 balances both pretty well.

There's no real story in Duke Nukem 3D and Death Rally, so...

[Stormkeeper]

*snip*

He's right. I know that every game, simply by playing through, will cause the player to 'see' a story, that they created themselves. That one can only be controlled so much by the story writers and designers. The 'story' referred to in the my first post means the one that can be controlled by the designers, i.e the underlying story that unfolds through cutscenes, scripted events, characters and the like, the one that they write and try to instill into the game.

Let's take an example we all know; ST and ST:R. ST had a story; of that there was no doubt. The thing is, you couldn't really see the story, hidden as it was behind the bad gameplay, plot holes, forgettable characters and various other issues. The story was very much on the backburner, and ST to me seemed like a bunch of random missions that they wrote before writing a story and linking them together.

ST:R, on the other hand, took that story, overhauled it, fixed it, put it to the forefront. You've all played the gameplay before; there's nothing new in terms of gameplay. You're there to see the story, and I'm pretty damn sure you all saw it, whether from nearly being Shivan-jacked or escorting the science cruisers.

The story I think you're referring to, General, is the one you experience through blowing up Lokis, panicking at the Shivan On A Fighter; the one each player writes for himself as he plays.

That story that I'm referring to, however, is the one written into the missions, through triggers, scripts and the like is the 'story' I'm referring to. The one that exists way before you play the game, and is there to give backbone and hopefully bring the game to life.

[TrashMan]

I play Freelancer more for the gameplay than for the story.

I found the gameplay somewhat lacking. The story itself was medicore at best but I loved the execution.

[Ziame]

Definatly gameplay. I like good story in game as well, but gameplay is higher priority. Eg. UFO had IMO weak story but gameplay made you drown in it. Civilizations have no story and are effing great. Heroes of Might and Magic 3 has a decent story... BUT THE GAMEPLAY EATS YOU WHOLE.

Not to mention games like Mount&Blade in which there's little story beside the one you make yourself.

[Titan]

Put it this way: I play games because they're games. Story helps, but if the gameplay sucks, then you might as well read a book.

[Ransom]

Books are not an interactive medium. It's not even close to the same thing. Gameplay's vital, but the assertion that games can't be a serious storytelling medium is nonsense.