The most successful videogame movies tend towards genre films like Mortal Kombat (the film) and Resident Evil (the series).
Of course, let's not forget that it can be hard to make a good movie, period.
Plenty of games have great characters and excellent world-building. Quite a few pose interesting questions, make you face hard dilemmas and leave you pondering long after you're done playing. Several make you immerse yourself in the world and identify with the characters so much that a particular event in their plot will provoke very strong feelings.
But none of those have a plot you can take and make a good movie out of it. Hollywood could very likely pick one of these games and make a great movie based on it, but not by focusing on the plot.
For example, I would be thrilled to watch a movie based on Dragon Age or Fallout. I might like a movie based on Borderlands, perhaps. On the other hand, I'm pretty sure I wouldn't enjoy a movie based on The Last of Us or Uncharted or The Talos Principles. And all of those games are among my favorites precisely because I enjoyed their world, characters, themes and choices.
Whether games have great characters is of course subjective, but I have to say that I did not seen them. The best ones tend to be comparable with average book character. (Which is ok, I don't play games for writing, I play them for playing.)
FTR, I had the most fun playing BioShock 2, but I still like Infinite the most.
I supposed if Hollywood had some confidence about making video game movies they might be very excited about getting a pre-made trilogy, but since their lack of confidence is well-founded in fact I don't see this happening any time soon.
A Game of Thrones-style "Sigil: City of Doors" series might work. Don't reuse the Nameless One or the plot of the game. Maybe reuse some characters like Annah. Like the game developers did, use the setting and make up new characters and plots.
Maybe before the show airs, put a series of entertaining shorts up on YouTube that introduce the city, the unusual beings resident there, the factions, and finally the main characters of the series.
I thought that The Last of Us was an absolutely fantastic game. Honestly, its one of the few games I've managed to stay engaged with all the way to the end. It works as a game. It's wonderful within its medium. A movie can't give you moral choices (did you guys kill the doctors at the end??), nor the time required to really get aquainted with the characters.
The narrative works best in the medium it was designed around. As a movie, I Dunno, what would the medium bring to the table? I suspect it'd just be another throw away zombie movie
I think a good example of this is the Warcraft movie. Pretty terrible reception overall. But as a Warcraft fan I really enjoyed it and would love another.
I can imagine something similar for games like The Last Of Us, although I haven't played it personally. Sometimes you just can't be bothered to deal with the not-plot parts of the game for 25 out of 40 hours.
There's a yakuza movie, as it happens! It's directed by Takashi Miike, at one point you could find it on Netflix under the title Like a Dragon. The Japanese title is "Ryu Ga Gotoku: Gekijoban.
I've watched it, it's a fun flick. The yakuza series is essentially a soap opera at heart anyways, but the film did a really good job of capturing what's weird and crazy about Kamurocho.
Horizon on the other hand... The opening sequences you could translate scene for scene. It would make a great movie.
Not to mention, part of the appeal of the game is not knowing if those quests are going to end well or not. Some quests don't have good endings, while others depend on your choices, making you responsible for what happens.
And regarding "softcore porn", it's only simple bed scenes, like in any movie. It's totally normal, and given that there is a huge romance plot with 3 different endings, not counting the expansions, it would be silly to tell such a story without mention to sex. In any case, it tells a lot that people are so scandalized by sex, but not by the continous gore, violence, inequality and misery that The Witcher 3 portrays continously.
Not to mention the tedium of the cut scenes where sex is depicted. But you’re right that I have a double standard in one regard: I’ll put up with lengthier cut scenes with magic explosions and plot advancements than I will put up with cut scenes that are herky CG sex.
Ah, I'd suggest you check the digit on your game install again. It appears you've played The Witcher (the 1st game of the trilogy). That was indeed a bit ridiculous. On the other hand, it's not like being strong, handsome, famous and famously infertile is a bad strategy for getting laid. That said, most of the sexuality/romance should probably be kept out of scene unless it contributes to the plot in some way, which is what Witcher 3 does. Whenever you can have sex with someone it is because this either advances the main romance plot or because it reveals an interesting facet of a person.
If you do want examples of great stories from Witcher 3, they are (IMO):
* Main story from the Hearts of Stone expansion
* Bloody Baron sub-plot
* Main story from the Blood & Wine expansion
* Triss Merigold sub-plot regarding mages in Novigrad
* Haunted tower quest from Kiera Metz
* The first 75% or so of the base game's main story is good, but it's complex and hard to get invested in if you aren't familiar the characters and backstory
With the Witcher 3, I felt trapped in a character whose demeanor I found insufferable no matter what options I chose.
I wanted to like the game, and recognize the technical achievement, but it left me pretty blasé about quite a lot.
How well it would do as a movie is beyond me but it couldn't be any worse plot wise than that terrible Valerian and the whatever 1000 movie that got released last year.
You can't actually lose Firewatch can you?
I did really enjoy playing it, although I thought it was rather expensive for a game that I finished in about 3 hours.
I think games with the best stories often allow a lot of freedom to the player and just like in books, we all put some piece of ourselves into the protagonist. No movie will ever quite do justice to the character take part in creating. Add to that the fact that a lot of great story based games allow for choices that reflect our version of the character and it becomes impossible to have one vision that encompasses all of that.
Edit: also overwatch has a HUGE lore behind it.
And just to make the point: the only games on this list I have played and finished are Portal 2 and The Vanishing of Ethan Carter. The others, I either know of the story because people liked it so much I learned it second-hand, or the gameplay was so boring that I just quit halfway through but I put it on this list for the story anyway.
Edit: I gotta throw Paratopic in here. Played that one through twice, it's less than an hour.
But that's what makes it perfect for an adaptation (for a different reason you were arguing about). Its movie script won't break a plot that doesn't exist, won't mess up any character development because there isn't one (recurring characters are secondary), and all it has to do is get the setting right. Writers can go anywhere from there.
IMO it's an example of how to do a game-movie adaptation right: it gets both the mechanics and the themes of the game across effectively, and it uses the medium to set up scenes that would be hard to convey in the original game (e.g. the moment after Elisa leaves)
Not really, not compared to books and movies. If you're in the mood for a good story, you would not look to games.
But it stands to reason, the medium is not well suited for it. Books and movies are excellent vehicles to tell a story. You have full and precise control over timing, pacing, what the end user is experiencing at all times, etc. Plus they've been honed for generations. Additionally, if your goal is to tell a story, you wouldn't make a game to do it (generally).
Maybe we just haven't figured it out yet with games. It's a young medium.
> There are plenty of games that you play for the story and the gameplay is just meh.
Right, but that doesn't mean it's a good story. The desire to want to know what's next is just that strong. That's why there are cliffhangers before every commercial break in a TV show. Think about how many times you've been disappointed by the result, but kept sticking around to see what happens.
Story is often just a tool in game design toolbox that is used to get players to play beyond the point they otherwise would. It works, even with bad stories.
But eventually one of them leads into the heart of the story.
As a friend of adventure games and visual novels I have to disagree. Here are some games that in my opinion have great stories:
- The Longest Journey
- Zero Escape: The Nonary Games (Zero Escape: Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors; Zero Escape: Virtue's Last Reward)
- the Blackwell series
- To the Moon
I wouldn't agree with that. Sure, AAA-level blockbuster video games have simplistic, unoriginal and derivative stories and that's what most gamers play unfortunately, but there well-written games are definitely out there.
Knights of the Old Republic 1 and 2 were both better written than any Star Wars movie by a long stretch.
Planescape: Torment is probably the best written game I've ever played, and playing it almost feels like you're reading a novel at times because the world-building and especially the dialogue is so fleshed-out and thoughtful. This game takes a huge dump over the writing in most movies I've seen.
I mean, that's just two examples. I'm a huge sucker for games with a great story regardless of the genre, but genre is a limiting factor in well-written stories.
You generally don't get much of a story in an RTS for example. You are most certainly never going to get a good story from a beat-em up like Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter.
Same with movies, books, comics, ... but the top is good. The Last Of Us ffs...
Any takers?
I think you're right that video games often sacrifice storytelling for gameplay, which I definitely don't mind.
Why would you bother making a plot when you can make bank with Transformer ?
I would phrase this differently. The interesting parts of the game stories emerge from actions and choices made by the player, not the parts of the story that are actually written. I don't mean that the writers on games aren't doing a good job. Just the opposite, actually: they know how to write the right bits to keep the game interesting, and to help the player work with the game to create interesting stories.
I would posit that perhaps the filtration system of making a wide audience film has more impact on how the screenplay is adapted and I haven't noticed that being discussed.
Yes, it's not merely "mostly", it's nearly all.
Except if we talk about some old-style adventure games (and even those aren't any narrative masterpieces either, they barely make it into "adult fiction" level), video games are just some very basic plot skeleton -- as opposed to a plot.
If they have nuance and atmosphere, that's in their visual, audio and interactive elements (as opposed to the plot and narration).
Taking a complete list of every interactive program that qualifies as a video game and saying 99% of them don't have a plot seems similar to saying 99% of books don't have a narrative or plot.
Perhaps I should have been more specific, but I thought the parameter of -games that were intended to actually narrate a story- was heavily implied in this thread.