For my personal enquiry I want to attempt to tackle the debate of "Story vs. Gameplay". I want to keep the enquiry fairly diverse, not just focusing my personal opinion on which is the superior but also how certain games present each one and how successful they are in using them. Also "what sells?", do consumers want a rich story movie like experience, or do they prefer just playing.
I'll be looking into various games that focus on the two elements. As for gameplay based games I want to talk about the Guitar Hero series, which although has quick cut scenes between levels portraying narrative, they're more justifications for the visuals of each level rather than attempting to portray a narrative. I'll also look at the best selling games of all time: Tetris, also the Call of Duty series, the Payday games and I'll probably find more games to include as I further my research.
As for the story side of the enquiry I'll be looking at games which I feel that narrative is the primary focus, some of these games will have interesting gameplay mechanics but if they're in this list I have looked at them and weighed up that the narrative is the primary focus of the game. I'll be looking into Mass Effect 2, Beyond: Two Souls, The Witcher 2, and like I mentioned before I will most likely find more games to fit into this category.
I'm making a third category here for games that aren't quite primarily gameplay based or story based, I want to explore how these games merge these two elements and ask the question of if one of the elements were to be removed, then could the game still stand? My list so far for these games is as follows: Portal 2, the Metal Gear Solid series, Batman Arkham City and the possibility of more.
To give an idea of how I want to look at this third category I'll dissect Batman Arkham City. So this game lets you become Batman for the duration of it's story arc, the game has this "easy to use, difficult to master" classic brawl fighting mechanic which is based heavily on counters and chaining combos. I find this to be a very satisfying feature, the rush you get from racking up a massive combo applying all of your concentration not to mess up is exhilarating. Then there's the hunter like stealth sequences where it's like puzzle trying to trick your foes and taking them out one by one while trying to remain unseen. Then there's the boss battles, they're classic and for the most part fairly simple, a lot of it is remembering patterns and learning how to react.
Then there's the story, I won't go into major spoilers for those of you who have not yet played it. So you're Batman (major thing) and you're essentially in a playground full of his enemy's, the game is set quite far into his career so it doesn't waste time forcing you into an origin story of each character, it assumes you already know most of these characters as they have become a part of pop culture, this allows for the game to get straight to the point, no unnecessarily dragging out characters. The situations that Batman is faced with are fairly extreme and make him question his morality and pushes his character into interesting emotional states. The story takes a lot of twists and turns throughout and didn't go the easy route of just following a specific storyline from a comic.
So which element is more important here? The enjoyable gameplay lets you become the Batman and kick some ass, but also I'll remember experiencing the story through my first play through and instantly want to play it again. So what happens if we strip the gameplay away? We're left with a film like experience in which we are presented with entertaining visuals and plot twists. And what about removing the story? We have a well designed set of different gameplay systems which although aren't exactly new and innovative, they play nicely. But one of the best things about the combat was it was because you were Batman throwing those punches and traumatising those thugs, the fact that you were this character improved the gameplay.
So if I had to remove one of the two elements, I'd remove it's gameplay, but the game wouldn't be nearly as good without it's great gameplay to accompany it, the game stands stronger with the two parts working together.
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