Epics

[bvanevery]

With the last Harry Potter book out now, I decided to catch up. I was one book behind, so I bought "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince" in paperback. Bought it Saturday, all but finished it in the wee hours of Tuesday morning. Read the last 20 pages Tuesday afternoon. Makes me feel like running out to buy the last book rather than working on my telecommuting job, but I'm resisting in the interest of discipline.

So instead I'm posting here on the subject of Epics, to try to address this dissatisfaction I'm feeling. I feel like I should go write a novel! But possibly what I should do career-wise is write an epic game. So that makes me wonder, have any games really succeeded at that? How many games have I ever played, that made me feel like I was in a world of epic scope?

King Of Dragon Pass (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_Dragon_Pass) is the only game I've played that made me feel I was in a world of epic scope. The game is not amazingly long, but it is somewhat long, and the history of the world is quite full. There's drama, real literary quality to the character sketches, and a sense of long-term purpose as one guides one's clan. There's a plot arc which is eventually fulfilled. You're not there to just smash up monsters, get loot, and level up, although those game mechanics are certainly present.

Morrowind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morrowind) was trying to be an epic but failed. The world is huge, and a history was clearly thought about in some detail, but there's no literary quality to the NPCs at all. You just wander through this big world smashing up monsters and getting loot. Your attention is distracted by all the usual RPG genre nonsense, whether you're getting better at healing or fireballs or whatnot. It's just a big open ended game, not a literary epic. There's no sense of plot arc or long-term purpose in anything you're doing.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sid_Meier%27s_Alpha_Centauri) has epic qualities. The philosophical quotes in the tech tree, and the cutscenes for Secret Project completion, communicate a world vision that definitely has a 200+ year history. The faction leaders are distinguished character archetypes, and fairly interesting as their stories are partly told through tech tree snippets. Character exposition is not, however, SMAC's stock and trade. There are some rare inserts of story text while playing the game, and they come off as somewhat corny and unprofessional. Like they were gonna make another cutscene but they didn't have time, so they just made some cheap text instead. Or they knew how to lay out the sense of a big world, a backstory, but not how to tell a frontstory in that world.

Like I should talk. Frontstories for my own epic concepts of "Ocean Mars" and "The Game Of Immortals" have always eluded me. Actually the general story arc over a collection of books or games has solidified recently. Let's just say it's all about history, evolution, and God. But I still have no specific story I've decided to tell. That level of detail eludes me.

But that's not what I wanted to ask about. What I really wanted to know, is if anyone has played a game that felt like a literary epic. I haven't played enough games over the years to feel like I've covered everything out there, so I pick your brains.

I didn't mention the Infocom games because the ones I've played were mostly concentrating on puzzles, even if they had a historical world attached to them, i.e. The Great Underground Empire. I haven't played the more literary oriented Infocom games really, like A Mind Forever Voyaging (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mind_Forever_Voyaging) from what I've read about it. My suspicion is they may be good examples of storytelling in games, but that they're too short and limited in scope to be called epics.

I have my doubts about any game conversions of recent film epics, like "The Lord Of The Rings" or "Harry Potter" games. I suspect they're probably straightforward mass market action game type stuff.

[Duke]

How about Might and Magic VI (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Might_and_Magic_VI:_The_Mandate_of_Heaven)?
Not sure if it falls completely in your "epic" category, but it sure was an epic experience for me playing it. Unfortunately, none of the later sequels repeated invoking this experience with me.
Came back to playing this game all the way through two more times in last 10 years. A classic.

[bvanevery]

So what kind of storytelling devices did it use?

Were there interesting characters? Did they have depth? For sake of comparison, the NPCs in Morrowind weren't interesting and had no depth at all. The faction leaders in SMAC were interesting enough to wish there was more depth. Good character sketches, but character exposition wasn't SMAC's stock and trade. So you only got a few clues what a character was like here and there, from some cutscene or quote or something. There was no frontstory where the characters actually did anything.

I know I'm repeating what I said in my 1st post, but I'm just trying to focus on what I think is a big portion of an Epic. You can't just have an epic world or epic history, you need epic characters to strut on that stage. Thin ones won't do.

[Captain Wingo]

So only literary epic games? Hmm, well, most literary games kinda... suck. Authors turned designers (and vice versa) tend to make verbose, sluggish games that really should be books instead. It takes a lot of skill to make a game read like a book yet play like a game!

I've had to dredge through my game shelf to find some good games that meet your criteria for "literary epic". Not perfect matches, but here's the closest I can find:

Fallout: Fallout didn't try to tell you a story; it let you tell your own. But its NPCs and quest paths were so elaborate and well-written that you really could tell your own epic story. Most people who played Fallout will happily tell you stories about how they got through the game. That's a clue that the game is doing something right.

Ultima 7: Intricate scripting, interesting backstory depth, and not-so-memorable characters. But it makes up for it in immersion: the game provides hundreds of unnecessary interactions that really create an "interactive world" feel. Want to spin your own wool into thread, and sew shirts with it? Okay, go for it! Cloth shirts aren't useful for a damned thing, but you can do it. The result was a serious increase in immersion, which made the storytelling far more effective than it would have been otherwise.

Zork: Grand Inquisitor (a graphical point and click adventure game in the old "360 panorama" style). This is a romping adventure story as told in the style of Douglas Adams, perhaps. It's a relatively short game, maybe 12-15 hours long, but it covers a lot of territory, and everything hints at a greater depth (of course, I didn't play all the other Zork games, and if I had I suspect Grand Inquisitor would feel more hollow, but as this is the only game I played, there seems to be a lot going on beneath the surface). Plus, it has some incredibly funny characters. The characters aren't deep at all, but they're just the right sort for the universe they live in. I've played lots of adventure games, but this is one of the only ones where I remember the plot.

Planescape: Torment A relatively modern (1999) D&D RPG, with memorable characters, an epic story arc, and plenty of length. The other D&D games are similar, such as Baldur's Gate, but this one is closest to a literary epic. You can pick it up for $10 in the Wal-Mart bargain bin; worth a try.

For the record, I consider Might and Magic VI to be an epic game, too, though I doubt it would fit your particular requirements. The NPCs consisted of 2D sprites, each with one or two sentences to tell you, but the result worked: the sheer number of unique NPCs created immersion. In many ways, the game left a huge empty canvas for you to tell your story, and it worked. (Morrowind tries a similar tack, but somehow isn't as immersive. Definitely has to do with the overly repetitive NPCs.) Like all Might and Magic games, this is mostly an open-ended dungeon crawl, but the story near the end is unforgettable and quite surprising.

I tend to think of an "epic game" as any relatively long, immersive game. When a game's immersive, I tell my story within the game, and that automatically makes it seem far more epic than the story I see in cut-scenes.

Edit: I just thought of a great example of a literary epic game. It wasn't on my PC game shelf: Xenogears, a PS1 title. It's an RPG with exactly the qualities you're looking for. In fact, I bet you'd really enjoy the game, if you can find it somewhere. It does bog down in the middle of the second disk, where it actually makes you read story screens for 20 minutes at a time... they basically ran out of budget and couldn't finish their epic as an interactive story, so it became just a story. But by that point you've been playing for 50 hours anyway and you've probably gotten your money's worth.

There's plenty of other "literary epic" console RPGs, but this one stands out as the epicest.

[Duke]

Like all Might and Magic games, this is mostly an open-ended dungeon crawl, but the story near the end is unforgettable and quite surprising.

I tend to think of an "epic game" as any relatively long, immersive game. When a game's immersive, I tell my story within the game, and that automatically makes it seem far more epic than the story I see in cut-scenes.

My feelings exactly!

[Techdojo]

What about the Zelda series on the Nintendo - whilst each one may not be consider epic on their own (although I for one recon they are), together they certainly are - then there's all those Final Fantasy games - epics one and all...

When you talk about epics are you talking about depth in terms of gameplay and replayability or length of the actual game.

I found the middle section of the LOTR trilogy to be a real drag to get through and took some disclipine to finish, if it was a game despite it's epic length I'd have got bored and given up, the old 8-bit version of Elite on the other hand had me engrossed for about 10 hours a day for about six weeks, whilst the gameplay was very simple.

Then you have to consider the likes of World of Warcraft? Does it get more "epic" than that ?

Or is "Epic" just a euphmisim for "bloody good" :)

Jon...

[bvanevery]

When you talk about epics are you talking about depth in terms of gameplay and replayability or length of the actual game.

Neither. I'm talking about


whether you feel you're in a world with a deep history
many important events are happening in this world
a lot of things are going to unfold before you're done with your understanding of this world
there's a purpose to your interaction that's pulling you along
when the game ends, you wish there was a sequel so that the events would keep unfolding

Just having a game be long or replayable isn't sufficient. FreeCiv, for instance, is bloody long. But when the game ends, I'm just bloody glad it's over. In fact I don't remember actually finishing the game in recent memory. I always get bored before I can win. The things happening in the world just aren't important after doing them for several hours, they're too repetitive. I've played a lot of FreeCiv, I understand how all the speed bumps in the tech tree work. It may have felt like an epic when I was new to the game, but not anymore. Whereas King Of Dragon Pass (http://a-sharp.com/kodp/) still an epic whenever I replay it, even if I may be too bored to bother finishing it. Similarly, The Lord Of The Rings trilogy is still an epic even if I would get bored reading it over and over again.

I tend to focus on literary means of advancing a sense of purpose, because I haven't seen pushing units on maps or leveling up stats to have any staying power. It ends up being, gee another chunk of the map conquered, gee another skill got a higher number on it. The parts of the map, the different levels of skill, are all too continuous and similar to each other to be of long-term interest. Making the first 9 cities, or gaining the first 5 special abilities, is interesting. After that, you've done it already. Doing more of the same is a grind. Sometimes in FreeCiv I'll have an unusual battle or spreadout strategy, and I think the search for novel circumstances is what has kept me playing it. But usually it's the same old same old.

Perhaps if I applied some metrics to the kinds of territorial expansions or level-ups I was undertaking, I could find a way to engineer more qualitative plot points. Like, the point at which you discover a previously unexplored continent and tap it for its resources. And then, once you've done one of those, you don't have to go through it again. The game offers you something else. The plot / evolution of the world is abstractly measured, and the game intervenes in the plot to offer you something you haven't done, or that might be considered interesting given the sequence of abstract events you've already been through.


I found the middle section of the LOTR trilogy to be a real drag to get through and took some disclipine to finish, if it was a game despite it's epic length I'd have got bored and given up,

Tolkien is a bore. At first I didn't even make it through Fellowship, re-reading it as an adult. But Tolkien has the big world and the big characters, the epic scale. So that's why movies got made out of it, and why it has held people's attention for decades. I like the movies much better than the books, they do a lot more with character, emotion, and securing the audience's buy-in.

Or is "Epic" just a euphmisim for "bloody good" :)

No, please let's try for precision. Space Invaders is "bloody good" in some respects, doesn't make it an Epic.

[bvanevery]

Perhaps if I applied some metrics to the kinds of territorial expansions or level-ups I was undertaking, I could find a way to engineer more qualitative plot points.

With this paradigm in mind, I played FreeCiv and logged every time I felt like I was making a major decision. Anything that could reasonably be called a "plot point" or "plot twist" of the game.

I was surprised to find that I made all my key decisions in the early game, right at the beginning. Things like finding out what kind of land mass I was on, whether I had any neighbors to invade, doing maritime exploration to get a complete picture, selecting my early techs, etc. Once I had made all those choices, I just spent enormous amounts of time waiting for cities to produce units, and waiting for units to move to where I needed them. The midgame was deadly dull and took hours and hours and hours. I think I started at 9 pm and quit at 1 am, declaring the game unfinishable in any amount of time I was actually interested in spending.

It would be like you watched the first 20 minutes of a movie, got really jazzed up about what it was all about and what you thought was going to happen... and someone turned on an infomercial for the next hour. Bored out of your mind, you leave the theater in disgust.

Of course I knew that FreeCiv is long. What I never quite realized, is only the beginning has real decisions in it. I think what happens is, once I've made all those decisions, I'm invested and I want to see the results. So I push, push, push the units, waiting for the results.

I don't think the brain notices that the decision was made a long time ago. Every turn, in my imagination I'm deciding anew. It's like the test of a for(;;) loop, have I reached the end of the loop yet? Performing the test of how you've done is interesting, for a number of iterations. Until eventually you realize that hey, this loop is never going to end! Then you get bored and quit. But when you make a decision, the brain will stay engaged for some X number of iterations after the decision. This is psychologically important as far as guiding the player's experience.

Another way to say it is if you've convinced a player he's doing something, he will continue to believe that, until some large interval of time has passed where he simply can't believe he's actually doing anything anymore.

I suspect also that different people have different thresholds of tolerance for that. What's the joke / observation about all programmers having ADD?

[ChrisP]

Does Deus Ex count?

[bvanevery]

Does Deus Ex count?

I don't know. I haven't played more than the demo of it.

I have played Thief (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thief_(computer_game)) I and II. The level intro movies were well done and Garrett is a strongly developed character. Some of the bad guys were reasonably well developed. The world certainly seemed big and historically complete. I think what's missing though, is that most of the levels are about isolated tasks, not driving a story forwards. More of "here's a good excuse for a job" rather than "the Dark Lord had this ring and now we have to drop it into Mt. Doom."

On the other hand, Tolkien wanders and meanders through all kinds of arguably pointless stuff designed to show off his world. Particularly Tom Bombadil, which got cut from the movies. So, if an epic doesn't stick to task, is it less of an epic? J. K. Rowling discurses all over the place in the Harry Potter series. In the last 1/10th of any given book, she'll suddenly remember that there's supposed to be a plot and some kind of conclusion, and she'll wrap it all up really really fast. Sorta like, oh, there really were bad guys doing stuff the whole time after all!

Do epics need more than 1 strong character? Not sure.

[Infinite Element]

Do epics need more than 1 strong character? Not sure.

My game-in-planning has one very strong character, one who has mystery behind him, and the others aren't as well thought out as those two. I still consider it an epic, however, since the whole game revolves around the story, which is very strong.

[MrGoldfish]

I think that truly epic games are rare because games bring together a multitude of disciplines, such as music, video and story, to create one experience. I guess all of those things need to be individually epic to create an overall epic experience.

If anyone has listened to the Pirates of the Caribbean 3 soundtrack; track 13 just screams epic to me. I can just listen to that and be blown away. Now throw that on top of the epic visual effects of the film and it's an epic experience. Final Fantasy games do it aswell for me. So i think that if all the parts that make up the game feel epic in their own right then putting them all together should make a pretty awesome game experience.

[bvanevery]

Hadn't thought much about musical epics. I don't know if any single track could be epic by itself, unless it was rather long. When I think of musical epics, I think of orchestral suites, like Holst's Planets (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Planets), Mussorgsky's Pictures At An Exhibition (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictures_at_an_Exhibition),
The Lord Of The Rings soundtrack (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_The_Lord_of_the_Rings_film_trilogy), or for Star Wars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars_music). I'm not sure how I'd turn Holst's or Mussorgsky's music into games. I've contemplated using both in The Game Of Immortals.

It's probably worth thinking about the structure of such suites, as it may be an easy way to see the ingredients necessary for an epic game. I think when we contemplate story lines, game mechanics, or visuals, we tend to get lost in the details.

[bvanevery]

While perusing those various Wikipedia entries, I found an interesting comparison between the Star Wars saga and Wagner's Ring cycle (http://www.trell.org/wagner/starwars.html). The analysis reduces the themes of both works to love vs. lust for power. I wonder if choice of overarching theme, and consistency in dealing with the theme, is necessary to make a work into an epic.

One thing I found to be a letdown about the Thief storyline, is that Garrett's cynicism about "saving the world" really didn't feel true to his character. He should have been a lot more cynical. Probably should have turned his back on the whole idea and left people to die. Instead he has this sort of whiny guilty angst that perhaps he should do the right thing. It felt very clumsy and tacked on, considering how much time had been spent establishing that he's a hard boiled, smooth move thief who likes to profit. He might make a moral compromise of choosing not to profit from the deaths of others, but I have a hard time seeing this guy saving the world for any ideological reason.

Maybe Thief should have made up its mind whether it's about a cynical thief, about saving the world, or about a cynical thief who feels a need to redeem himself by saving the world. They're 3 different themes. Maybe an epic can't succeed if the character arcs are clumsy.

[TimS]

First off... I can't believe the word "storytelling" was used in this thread without having summoned Corvus (http://blog.pjsattic.com/corvus/), so I'll summon him with this link to his blog so he'll see it.

Secondly, the real thing with epics is that they tell the story of a hero of their time, in a timely fashion, and in a complete way for a given people.

The story of Gilgamesh, The Illiad, The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy... ah what the hell I'll throw in Ulysses... (mebbe even toss Finnegan's Wake into the bargain, but who can be sure?).

If we're going to consider Epic video games, can we think of any that speak to our time in the way that these books spoke to their own?

I'd vote for the Fallout series (1 and 2) to some small extent... not by much though.

[zoombapup]

Arent they all just "the heroes journey" when it comes down to it??

Epic: Maybe final fantasy?

Not my thing, I'm not a narratologist, so I'll stick to me ludemics/ludology/ludistics and make games that feel nice.

Although, I've recently gotten an idea for a game involving a royal family in hiding that have turned into pirates in order to survive and now are pitted against the republic that was founded when thier royal reign was toppled. Epic no?

[papillon]

I'm not really sure what's epic. I'm currently working on a very story-focused game (which is part of why it's taken me two years!) but I don't know if you can call it EPIC scope, since at the heart of everything, when you really understand it all, is a much smaller story...

There's a lot of events happening and a lot of things that have happened in the past that you have to find out about slowly through play but all of these events revolve around a fairly small group of people, even if they do cross centuries and continents. :)


* whether you feel you're in a world with a deep history
* many important events are happening in this world
* a lot of things are going to unfold before you're done with your understanding of this world
* there's a purpose to your interaction that's pulling you along
* when the game ends, you wish there was a sequel so that the events would keep unfolding


I'm sure there will be cries of "But what happens NEXT?" but since that has fifteen different answers (this is a multi-path, multi-ending adventure) it's not precisely sequelable!

[bvanevery]

You have to wish there was a sequel. The scale of the work should exceed your actual reading of it, you feel like there's something before and something after what you read. Doesn't matter if it's vague or just in your imagination. The point is your mind is engaged. You see what could be in the distance.

[bvanevery]

King Of Dragon Pass (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_of_Dragon_Pass) is the only game I've played that made me feel I was in a world of epic scope.

I'm remembering now that the music was epic in scope as well. The developer said that wasn't exactly planned. They just happened to use a guy who happened to write really good music. You can listen to some KODP music clips (http://a-sharp.com/kodp/music.html), and if you download the demo (http://homepage.mac.com/dunham/KoDP-Tour.exe) you can hear more.