The power of storytelling 2

I’ve written a little about the power that storytelling has for games. Now it’s time to get a little more specific. I have some ideas for this, and I think they’d make the experience of a rock band simulator much more fun.

Let’s imagine. Do you like getting fans in Rock Band? I’m sure you do. But well, what are fans? How are they used in the game? Fans are like a separate score, and some venues require you to have a certain amount of them for you to be able to play there. And that’s pretty much it. You can also compete online for the band who has more fans, but not much else that I can think of.

Well, fans could play a bigger role in the game. For example, what if your band got so popular that now it has its fan club? What if you could play smaller, special shows for your fan club? In Rock Band 2, sometimes you would be prompted with situations like “a fan wants to shoot an indie video of the band”. Fans can provide the band with lots of interesting, random situations.

For example, imagine there’s a big band competition coming up, and the winning criteria is popular vote. You’d need a lot of fans for that, if you want to win the competition. A special concert could be arranged by the fan club in a school campus (maybe in the football field of the campus) in order to get more people to vote for the band. So maybe, giving your fan club some attention could get you some advantages in the future.

Also, I really think the “Battle of the Bands” concept should be incorporated more heavily in the game. We do have some battles already, but all you gotta do is pass the concert and you win the prize. But I’m talking about facing challenges. Like, for example, there’s a battle of the bands going on and an asshole band is the favorite to win. They play good. Their score is 4.5 stars in 4 songs. That means that, in order to beat them, you’d have to score a higher mean.

And maybe after you win the battle, the asshole leader of the asshole band comes to you and says “the songs you picked to play were too easy! Let’s face each other in “Aqualung”!”. And then you’d have to clear it with, at least, 4 stars.

Wouldn’t that be cool? And the prize could be a new guitar, a new outfit, maybe even a new story opportunity.

Another thing, and now this is something that really happened… I recall that one day Iron Maiden crashed into a wedding. I don’t remember the story’s specifics, but I remember they ended up playing in that wedding, they just got their instruments and played there and everybody had a BLAST.

What about RANDOM events such as this one, while traveling from one city to another? Maybe you’d find, while walking in the street, a young lad who wants to win this girl’s heart with a serenade, and he asks the band to help. The girl is a big fan. And the band has to choose a romantic song to play for her, with the young lad as singer. Isn’t that sweet? Or maybe the band joins some street artists they meet while walking around the city. Harmonix even could use the very recordings of Playing for Change. Man, it would be incredible.

Wouldn’t situations such as those make you love your band even more? Wouldn’t they make you curious about what the game has in store for you in the future?

I know I’d love those surprises.

The power of storytelling 1

I think the single most important thing in a game, nowadays, is the storytelling. Having come from a RPGey background, I can tell you that the more people engaged and cared for their characters, the more they had fun with the game. Games with a lot of options and paths that you can choose from (and can actually alter the story) give you this warm little feeling each time you have to make a decision. In those moments, you’re building the personality of your character, and those are great moments. I am proud to have saved that ugly town in Fallout 3 that was built around a bomb. I remember that part, I remember defusing it. I don’t remember the moments of fighting with such clarity.

I think Rock Band 2 did a darn good job in creating a story for your virtual band. They have all those situations where you have to choose (doing a benefit show, doing an indie videoclip, doing an encore), and also the stages where you have to perform a show to earn your van, your bus, or your airplane, for example. Those are great ideas, and my single greatest hope for Rock Band 3 is that we see MUCH MORE of those elements. And this is the first of a (hopefully) long series of posts in which I’ll write about my ideas.

But first a comparison with GH5. Where the HELL is the storytelling in that game? There’s NONE! You jump from venue to venue, and nothing ever happens in-between! No cutscenes, no choosing, no nothing! The only thing you can choose is the songs you play, but come on, that’s basic. I might as well just have gone to Quickplay mode and played the songs… but that wouldn’t give me access to new stages, clothes and… well… everything. So I have to endure a lot of boring songs, with no “story rewards” for them, to unlock stuff.

This is the reason why I have given up on playing Guitar Hero 5. I don’t care for my band there, I don’t care for my musician either. It’s like he doesn’t even have a personality. He’s an angry guitar player who’s playing songs at concerts and that’s pretty much it. What CRAP.

In RB2, though, things are different. I love my band. I love jumping from city to city and performing setlists. I love gaining fans. When the chance appears to make a videoclip, it’s awesome. I love choosing to add a difficult encore to the setlist. And performing huge concerts at large venues is awesome.

I have designed all the members of my band. And I kinda even imagine the personaility of each one of them. I have dressed them accordingly. I have this fiery, tophat wearing Cyndi Lauperesque bass player, the mellow cute redhead singer with a touch of poppish sophistication and the long-haired heavy metal brute banging on the drums. My character is the tattooed virtuoso guy with simple clothes and a big heart. My band is awesome. It plays “Cheeseburger in Paradise” and then “Tribute”. The kids love them.

Anyway, do you see what storytelling can do, even for a music game? It’s what gives games depth. It’s what makes you care. You wanna play because you want to know what’s gonna happen next. It keeps you interested! It keeps you wanting more. It gives your characters meaning.

I’ll keep writing about this, about ideas, and I invite you to do so as well.

Milking the cow

Here’s something interesting. While my friend was here today, we played Guitar Hero 5. His impression about the game was pretty clear: some good songs, the rest was junk. I mentioned to him “did you know they’re working on a game called Band Hero?”.

And by the way, what kind of freaking name is BAND HERO? Could it have been lamer? Maybe if they had picked a name like GUITAR MASTURBATOR it would have been lamer (albeit funnier), but still BAND HERO is a pretty FAIL name. I mean, you have the whole story behind the “Guitar Hero” name. As rockers we used to ask each other “who’s your guitar hero?” or “who’s your guitar god?” and people would answer something like “Steve Vai” or “Mark Knopfler” (my personal one, hehe). But “Band Hero” doesn’t even make any sense! It’s just taking advantage of the franchise in a very uncreative way. What a shame.

Anyway, I explained to him that Band Hero is exactly like a new Guitar Hero game, but aimed at more mainstream and newer songs. To which he scratched his head. “More mainstream than Guitar Hero?”. And I answered “yeah, if at all possible”.

And he said “man, they’re really milking the cow, aren’t them? I mean, there are 5 Guitar Hero games already, there’s one for Metallica, another for Aerosmith and another one for Van Halen… and now Band Hero and Lego Rock Band… they are squeezing it to the LIMIT”. And I have to agree. I think that one thing that Harmonix has done right so far was to take their time in releasing new games. I do think that Lego Rock Band is a wrong decision, but at least Rock Band 3 is only coming next year. That’s the way it should be: better games, new features, not the same crap with some crappy songs for us to buy and be disappointed.

At some point my friend said “ok, enough GH5. This game sucks. Let’s try Beatles Rock Band”. And we did.

And he mentioned to me later: “I will be buying the Beatles one. It is a beautiful game. But not GH5″.

I’m glad I’m not the only one with this opinion. When I search for GH5 reviews on the internet, all I get is people praising the game as awesome. I picked an XBOX360 magazine today at a store and the reviewer gave the game a 9. What the hell.

It’s a game with a lot of crappy songs with the same old same old gameplay and none of the feel of “gosh, my little band rocks” that Rock Band has. That’s what it is. And I’ll write a LOT about gameplay, you can be sure about that.

Graphics rumble

Guitar Hero 5′s graphics kick ass. When I first loaded the game and started playing it, that was the first thing I noticed. The graphics look stunning. The lighting, the textures, everything is just great. Comparing it to Rock Band 2′s graphics may be a bit unfair, since RB2 is much older, but it’s inevitable since I will be comparing other things in this post. So in terms of graphics, GH5 wins by a large margin.

When I was thinking about writing this post, though, I was waiting for a friend to arrive here at my home so we’d play Beatles Rock Band and GH5 together. He had not seen either of those games, so we were gonna play them together. While I waited, though, I played some Rock Band 2. And here’s what happened: I started to pay attention to the little details in the graphics. It seems like RB2′s characters were built using a much lower number of polygons and simpler textures… but they still look quite good. Simple, yet good.

But anyway, I started noticing the details and 2 things kinda stood out. First a weak point in RB2′s graphics: lighting sometimes sucks. A lot. Depending on the light that shines on the character, he can look really really ugly. It exposes the small number of polygons, specially in the face. The drummer of my little rock band has that “meathead” face, with the big jaw, and in the beginning of a certain metal song (I believe it was “Shoulder to the Plow”, but I can be mistaken), a direct light shone on him and he looked like a freaking monster. Really ugly. Also, lighting effects on the teeth of the characters can have very ugly results.

Second… and this really stood out for me… the shows in RB2 have a LOT of special effects going on! And that’s REALLY cool. It’s amazing how I’ve been playing this game for so long and only now, when I’m comparing it to GH5, those details are coming out. Players on the spotlight, fog, “noise” effect on the screen, there are so many cool effects, and I couldn’t notice those in GH5. Those add so much to the “cool effect” of the game that it more than makes up for the old graphics, in my humble opinion.

Also, I think I should dedicate an entire post for character creation. There’s a lot to be said for both RB2 and GH5 on that one. But on the graphics subject, if Harmonix keeps all the cool special effects (maybe adds even more) in RB3, with updated graphics, man… it will be a beautiful game indeed. I just kept thinking to myself while playing GH5: “man, imagine these textures in RB2″. Well, RB3 is coming next year, and I think it’s not going to disappoint me in the graphics department.