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Supporting characters, yea or nay?

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I'll be disappointed if there are any other non-possessed humans in the game. If they want to appeal to nostalgia, your player needs to be alone and silent. None of that useless call of duty drama.

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If there are a couple of supporting characters that you run into every once in a while, then it wouldn't bother me. I wouldn't mind fighting alongside another space marine for a small portion of a level or something like that. However, the vast majority of the time, you should be alone.

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TraceOfSpades said:

I'll be disappointed if there are any other non-possessed humans in the game. If they want to appeal to nostalgia, your player needs to be alone and silent. None of that useless call of duty drama.

I agree. The main characters in Doom 3 were pretty stale and the plot was completely ignorable. Those things do not need to be in a Doom game. Period.

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nxGangrel said:

I agree. The main characters in Doom 3 were pretty stale and the plot was completely ignorable. Those things do not need to be in a Doom game. Period.


DOOM 3 plot was fine imo.

I wouldn't mind having some marines maybe at times because it would explain the coop possiblility. Though not any of the bullcrap where you have to wait for npcs to open doors for you or where you have to cover them or it's mission fail.

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Piper Maru said:

If there are NPC's in Doom 4 are you gonna stage a protest?


Now that's not what i said. What i said was that "no npcs that need to be waited to open doors for the player or who have to be protected". Goldeneye for the N64 had npcs and it was fine game.

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I was just exaggerating. If anything, Doom 4 will probably have NPC's who will give you mission objectives etc. I think we can live with that.

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Piper Maru said:

I was just exaggerating. If anything, Doom 4 will probably have NPC's who will give you mission objectives etc. I think we can live with that.


I suppose, as long as it's not in the degrees of Wolf new order where it basically turns in to First Person Spectator..

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Probably something like Doom 3, with a few side characters and a bunch of extras that die shortly after appearing. I personally like this, it's a good way to get exposition, but without getting in the way of your ripping and tearing.

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In Doom, I don't want supporting characters. In other FPS, they do make things legitimately interesting especially if they have an allegiance / alliance and will fight with rival factions. That adds to the cool and fun factor in my opinion.

Doom 3 was okay for what it was and supporting characters do make things more interesting and make it feel like you're not alone and not some psychopath.

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quakke said:

DOOM 3 plot was fine imo.

I wouldn't mind having some marines maybe at times because it would explain the coop possiblility. Though not any of the bullcrap where you have to wait for npcs to open doors for you or where you have to cover them or it's mission fail.


The plot was tolerable, but if it wasn't in the game it wouldn't be different. Just no cut scenes. But I agree with you on the rest.

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Doom 3's plot was fine? What have you been smoking?! Actually, some aspects of it were just fine. That is, the more technical side of things. The problem was that all of the humans were fucking walking jokes. Just a bunch of paper-thin cliches that you don't have any emotional investment in. Awful writing, too. Hearing "the bad guy" laugh at you while proclaiming that you're royally screwed is so cheesy, it took me right out of the game. I really hope we don't see any of that nonsense.

That said, NPCs that fight alongside you, whether human or robotic, would be a cool detraction from standard gameplay if it's thrown in here and there. I also kind of liked helping the scientist in Doom 3. Stuff like that is cool because it only lasts a few minutes.

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Its a video game plot. Its just not needed.... unless the gameplay sucks, then the story is all you have and even if that sucks people will talk about how great it is and why it would make the perfect movie... when it wouldn't, because video game plots are all trash.

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I don't know if I'd say that "video game plots are all trash," but--and I know I'm not alone in saying this--the best a game plot can achieve is something most Hollywood studios would either reject or begrudgingly accept if sweeping changes are made. People think that, because the plots are intricate, have lots of characters, feature celebrity voice overs and slick graphics, that the story is automatically good. But really, they're usually just a bunch of cliches strung together in order to facilitate the action. Doom 3's plot was dodgy, but the cutscenes were skippable, not to mention brief. That's how Doom 4 ought to (and probably will) handle it.

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This should be a player-controlled game in order to make for more replayability, so I think it would be ideal if there were NPCs at various points in the game who offer assistance and the player has the choice to enlist their help. If there were drawbacks to enlisting NPCs, then that would add more strategy to the game.

That leaves the game world (including the NPCs) free and open to the player, rather than just being forced to team up with NPCs at certain points of the story.

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geo said:

video game plots are all trash.

I feel like this is untrue.

If so, then every plot for everything might as well be trash as well.

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Jaxxoon R said:

I feel like this is untrue.

If so, then every plot for everything might as well be trash as well.


There's an exception to every rule of course.

What are the best video game plots you've played?

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GoatLord said:

I don't know if I'd say that "video game plots are all trash," but--and I know I'm not alone in saying this--the best a game plot can achieve is something most Hollywood studios would either reject or begrudgingly accept if sweeping changes are made.

I'm really not sure why this sentiment is so common - sure, video games aren't that great at supplying Hollywood-type plots ( aside from maybe Uncharted? I've heard good things about it basically being Hollywood: The Movie without many drawbacks, but I've never experienced it myself. ) but that's because Hollywood-type plots focus on the protagonists having their own specific agency and characterization. Video games are pretty much terrible at this, because the protagonist of a video game has their agency and characterization assigned to them by the player.

It's not impossible to make the protagonist have a strong personality while still getting the player to connect with them fully, but it takes a lot more effort to blend the gameplay and narrative when you're doing that.

All that said, though, video games are fantastic for plots that don't require specific personalities from their protagonist or even allows them to create their own agency. They're also really great for tell stories purely through action or background elements, not words; one particular moment from an early game I can think of is near the end of Metroid II, where the Chozo statue that was supposed to be holding the Ice Beam is shattered, and the Ice Beam's orb is hidden in a pile of empty ones nearby; meanwhile, the only living organisms anywhere nearby are unhatched Metroids, and their living queen; through nothing more than some attention to detail does Nintendo show that the queen is fully able to figure out what can threaten her children, but also cares enough about them to try and hide it away so Samus couldn't use it against them.

That's the real strength of video games; without saying a single word, heck without even animating a single moment, you can create quite the narrative just through proper level design - both for gameplay and aesthetically - and what you make the player have to do to advance. Of course, many modern games choose to not take advantage of how much story they can tell without taking away the player's control, but even then they can manage to tell good stories - it's not the medium that enforces crappy plots, it's the creators who use that medium improperly.

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"Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important." -John Carmack

He's right for the most part. Deus Ex was the only game series where I legitimately cared about the plot, all the other stories in games I have played (the few of them) I never really cared about.

@GoatLord. I meant Doom 3's plot was "tolerable", I didn't like it, but it really didn't ruin the game too much for me, so I was somewhat okay with it.

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nxGangrel said:

"Story in a game is like a story in a porn movie. It's expected to be there, but it's not that important." -John Carmack

This only holds true for games like Mario, honestly, and only the main series - and even then, only because Nintendo pretty much aims for that. They can do some pretty dang great writing for Mario when they want to; sure, Mario RPGs and such tend to do more for humor than otherwise, but that usually enhances the plot by making the serious and dark moments stand out even more.

A game can be made entirely to tell a story in an enjoyable way, which is where the quote falls flat. I can't really blame Carmack for it, though, given his time was while there was still a ton of experimentation on game play and what makes it good. While some of the best examples of narrative through game play or through level design do come from his era or before it, it was likely not often taught or discussed at the time, meaning that such concepts and how to execute them stuck as trade secrets for those who discovered and experimented with them.

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Jaxxoon R said:

Bubsy


Yoshi's story is pretty good. You're an animal trying to save a baby, because the parents are too drunk to care that their infant went down a pipe. You'll never be thanked, but you'll be loved forever, even when it comes down to survival. You'll sacrifice yourself to save that baby turned adult as he hops off you, while you plummet to your death.

I never thought I could cry writing a Doomworld post, but here we are :*(

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Oh joy, more of this "Make the new DOOM as old-school as possible or it won't exist to me" shit...

Listen, times change. Games change. A fully old-school rendition of classic Doom into the modern age would not work, so even id necessarily need to make compromises in that sense.

Regarding the topic at hand, I for one would be completely okay with supporting characters, as long as they serve a purpose within the story's context. I actually felt that almost every NPC in Doom 3 was more than "just there", so to say. (Yes, I said it, alright.)

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It won't hurt if there are few NPCs to give you some hints and infos (Like Half-Life) ,But not to do everything for you .

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I'm fine with plot, NPCs and cutscenes. I just don't want it to make me feel embarrassed like Doom 3's did.

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Absolutely nothing against supporting characters, as long as the only fearless demon killer is the player him/herself. No mindless "badass" NPCs going WOHOOO whilst gunning down demons. That should be the sole privilege of the player, on this side of the fourth wall.

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GoatLord said:

I'm fine with plot, NPCs and cutscenes. I just don't want it to make me feel embarrassed like Doom 3's did.

Sgt. Kelly said:

Does your mother know you're gay, marine?

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