#freespace2

Tagging on to my first post, I have been gaming for over twenty five years and have been exposed to virtually every kind of storytelling that is present within the Video Game industry. Linear or branching structure, supported by a given or built narrative, and a multi-player or single-player experience. I have played games from any classification you can think of and found delivery methods which work and those that don’t. Compare these games: FreeSpace 2, Freelancer, No Man’s Sky, and Tachyon: The Fringe. They’re all spaceflight games.

FreeSpace 2 is a linear, spaceflight combat simulator. To me, this was and is still the single best linear story game that I have ever played (this opinion takes into account things outside of narrative though, like how I can’t play horror games because I jump to easily; if this weren’t the case, Thief II: The Metal Age may have been a contender for that spot). It had an extremely engaging story which was all translated expertly on a “need-to-know” basis via the mission briefings and de-briefings, and in-mission transmission between mission control, your wingmates/escortees, and yourself. The rest of the game was you being a bad-ass pilot and protecting some stuff while blowing the living hell out of other stuff. For its time, the graphics were phenomenal and the scenery (whether open space or a shrouded nebula) beautiful. The accompanying soundtrack took players on an emotional roller-coaster ride entirely appropriate for every scene you played through and was truly breathtaking. Honestly, the music of that games can still bring tears to my eyes in the right moment. The game, as a whole, succeeded at its storytelling because of all of these elements combined, and because it made you feel as though you were directly responsible for the success of missions through leadership (ability to command wings to secure/destroy/protect objectives) and skill, and your character was rewarded with commendations and promotions to reinforce that feeling.

SPOILERS AHEAD: I know the game is now twenty-one years old, but in case I have inspired anyone to try it out through GOG.com I wanted to warn of spoilers. Despite this being a linear style of narrative, this game still provided me with my first truly “influential” player choice in my video game experience which directly influenced how the final mission ended. In the final mission, the bad guys of the series are causing a sun to implode and cause a resulting supernova to destroy a system. Your mission is not to destroy the ships causing this to happen, but to escort the relief fleets evacuating all civilized life from that system from their entry into the system to the jump-point out of the system in a given time-frame. When you begin to near the end of the mission you’re presented with two options: you can either choose to burn hard to the exit saving who you can and escaping yourself or stay back and protect the stragglers, getting them through and failing to escape yourself. Either way, so long as you saved the primary escortees, you complete the mission and are presented with an ending cinematic. However, if you chose to remain behind and sacrifice yourself the cinematic that you are presented with is in a tone of subdued jubilation, the narrator mourning those who sacrificed themselves for their victory of escape. You won either way, but if you sacrificed your character this cinematic stirred a lot of real and deep emotions. END OF SPOILER.

Freelancer is a third-person, spaceflight RPG, with a core story line which was a semi-linear and semi-branching in nature. It was linear in that you had to complete various core missions to progress to the next phase of the game, but it it was branching in that what you did in between to advance to those transition missions was entirely up to you; you could become a mercantile behemoth, a pirate, a military officer, a smuggler, or a mercenary. There was expansive lore in the game outside of the core missions for you to discover, a variety of ships and weapon loadouts for you to choose from which affected the difficulty, and occasionally the lore, of the game universe. When comparing space games, this is easily my favourite RPG style space game that has a story to it (Star Citizen, EVE Online, and Elite: Dangerous don’t qualify because while they may have goals you can aim for, there isn’t really an overarching story in them). The story itself gets characters emotionally invested in the game’s universe, and uses pretty darn good foreshadowing in several instances.

Tachyon: The Fringe is a mechanically excellent game, but it falls far short of the excellence of FreeSpace 2. It is another primarily linear story line, though you are given the choice of choosing a faction to support, which just determines which of two linear paths you will follow. The writing of the story’s structure leaves much to be desired, though it must be credited with being fairly compelling despite this. It’s also presented in the lac-luster manner of job board postings. There are side missions that can be completed, however there’s little variety and zero bearing on the main story. The soundtrack is of middling quality and doesn’t inspire nearly the emotional response of FreeSpace 2′s masterpieces of composition. Not much more I can say about this game other than, “It was meh”.

No Man’s Sky is infamous within the gaming community, and for good reason. It was promised to be the most expansive sandbox game ever created, with diverse ecosystems on procedurally generated planets, whose fauna was also to be generated using this procedural process and as a result be unique, have a deep story that players uncover pieces of the story as they travel towards the center of the galaxy only to be thrown into a much more expansive story when you get there, and be actively multiplayer (but were told it’d be super unlikely you’d run across any other players)! Except it was nearly nothing like it was promised. The planets weren’t unique, the animals were all similar, and the story was dull as all hell, and when two players coordinated over stream to get to the same location on a planet, they couldn’t see each other (multiplayer wasn’t in the game). The story of this game relied on information dumps on the players at uncontrolled intervals, and there was nothing present within its content or delivery which gave players any reason to care about or engage with the “main story”. This was a branching narrative “sandbox” game which failed for a variety of reasons at launch, but story wise it failed because it didn’t catch the players’ interest.