This Saturday, at PAX East, I had the pleasure of attending the “Plot vs Play” panel, moderated by Joystiq’s Ben Gilbert and Kotaku‘s own Jason Schreier. The panel brought together three developers who have all worked on landmark, story-driven games to discuss their differing philosophies on the presence and purpose of story in gaming.
One of the many eternal battles the gaming community consistently fights among itself is the seemingly irreconcilable “gameplay” vs. “story” debate.
According to Ubisoft, this is a trailer highlighting the story of Assassin’s Creed: Revelations. That’s odd, because I’ll I can see is more than two minutes of Ezio showing me why I love the Assassin’s Creed series so much.
The Tokyo Game Show trailer for Platinum Games’ Anarchy Reigns neatly summarises the game’s story before jumping back into footage of people beating each other up.
What, you thought Platinum Games’ online multiplayer brawler was just a bunch of super-powered beings battling each other for no reason? No sir, there is some sort of story going on in Anarchy Reigns; it just happens to involve a lot of punching, kicking and stabbing.
Ubisoft’s controversial third entry in the Call of Juarez series tells the story of three very different above-the-law heroes, and players can step into the shoes of any one of them, both online and off.
Dragon Age 2 is the latest story driven RPG from Bioware, and is due for release in March 2011. Earlier this week we managed to spend some time with the game. We took the opportunity to quiz producer Heather Rabatich on the importance of story, and why Bioware is one of the few studios that truly allows writers to drive the development process.
