Cav's Place

I just finished Final Fantasy VII Tuesday. Despite being no less than ten years old, retaining the console controls and relying on a system that doesn’t suit my playing style (I’m mainly talking about materia), I found it really enjoyable. The things I didn’t like made me not focus too much on character development and side quests, which is strange for me, but the story and message kept me playing and made this one of the few games I’ve ever finished without taking a long break (“long” meaning weeks or, more likely, months). Despite being rather simple and a lot of things being lost in the translation, it had something to say and did so well enough.
I have also recently read an interview posted on IGN about the upcoming Diablo III and glanced at their review of Final Fantasy XII (which I’m not going to be able to play since there’s no PC version). Then my mind compared something said in that review, namely that it can take several hours to actually “get going”, with the talk about the story elements from the interview. The difference is significant, though it’s nice to see that more complex story elements will exist in Diablo III, despite the player not being required to pay much attention to them.

It’s certainly true that many people these days have short attention spans, especially the younger ones, who make up most of the gamers by any stretch of the term. It’s also true that another large number of people don’t usually have the time for complex and involved storylines. I guess that’s how things stand and, as nice as it’d be if people would develop longer attention spans and slow down their hectic lives, they shouldn’t be forced to do so in order to play a game. But neither should those who like to immerse themselves into deep and complex stories and worlds be forced to make do with the simpler ones created for the others.

That said, I have a question: Why don’t high profile games feature separate “action” and “story” modes? The companies that make them could afford it and it’d be a nice way to give everyone what they want. The “action” mode would pass quickly through the non-critical story elements, perhaps skip some movies, highlight relevant portions of text (or even display only those portions) and feature shortened versions (or even only summaries) of most dialogues, allowing those who don’t care too much about the story to focus on the other things. On the other hand, the “story” mode would offer a complete experience, including detailed character and NPC backgrounds that you can uncover, very involved dialogues, “books” to read in-game on topics that are not exactly relevant or in any way related to what you need to do and longer and frequent movies and scripted scenes whenever they could immerse you further into the story and atmosphere of the game.
That way developers would no longer need to find that elusive balance between action and story, which usually results in leaving both sides somewhat dissatisfied even on the rare occasions when it is achieved. Those who just want the action won’t be slowed down by story elements that aren’t truly necessary, while those who desire the full experience would also be able to enjoy it.
It shouldn’t be hard to code, just add one more condition for each event in order to choose the version to load according to that setting. It would make games take up more space, but that shouldn’t be much of a problem these days. And creating the separate versions shouldn’t take a noticeable amount of extra time either since coming up with a story usually requires having both a summary and a lot of details in mind.