Foolsfolly wrote...
It's a hook meant to intice. Look at the movie Inception. They begin the movie with a dream within a dream and with three of our protagonists doing their job. It does not start off explain Cobb's backstory with Mal and how he cannot return to America. You do this, as a storyteller, to grab the audience's attention. You don't want to overload your opening with so much information and plot that they loose interest.
Take the Human Noble opening from Origins. There's a ton of things to do in that origin before you fight your first Howe guard, including talking to an old man about the history of Ferelden, Orlais, Thedas, tyrnes, the Couslands, the Howes, Calenhad, the Maker, and THEN you meet Duncan and he tells you about darkspawn, Grey Wardens, and all that noise.
That's not only too much information it's completely unnessary information. Most of that was gleamed by the opening cinematic or learned more throughly throughout the game proper. Your first time through the game, not only do you not understand everything being thrown at you, you don't care because none of these things mean anything to you yet.
DA2 throws you into combat, shows you how to use talents and the new combat system, and then shows you in action meeting other characters before slowing down at the end of the origin and explaining things to you.
It's vastly superior than the clunky over-wrought intros from Origins, from a storytelling perspective AND a role-playing perspective since much of Hawke's past (like at Ostagar) are left for the player to imagine.
Well, different stories have different hooks because you want to emphasize different things. In a Sci-fi action flick like the Inception movie you mentioned, you want lots of fast cuts and movement, because you're trying to sell excitement and, well, action. In a more thoughtful drama, like say the Godfather, you start slow with a funeral director promising a favor to the Don for some help, during the Don's daughter's wedding. They're both memorable beginnings (I LOVE the opening line "I love america" said with an accent by the funeral director) that serve their purpose. Also keep in mind that movies HAVE to grab your attention faster, because it's a shorter medium, time-wise. You're talking about 2-3 hours of story telling, while a video game should last 40+ hours.
By your l;ogic, you're right that the opening of DA2 serves its purpose, but it actually bolsters the argument of the original poster of this topic. DA2 did emphasize the gameplay, and specifically the action of the battles, NOT the story. The beginning did exactly what they intended, which was to highlight and showcase the entirely new battle system that they developed. It was so effective in doing so, that they took the beginning section wholesale and turned it into a demo.
I have to say I enjoyed the beginning for what it was as well, it was exciting, it was fun and enjoyable on its own right as an intro to the battle gameplay, although after a few playthroughs (I was playing through the beginning a number of times because I was troubleshooting some random crashes in the game) I kinda wanted to hit the ESC key to fast forward the Varric's tall-tale version of the battle.
But the story? The key happening of the death of a sibling? so off-key, so without impact, and completely forced melodrama. The sibling was a red-shirt whose death meant nothing to me as a player. There was another death in the beginning with an NPC that was a lot more impactful because you actually had more introduction during the intro about that NPC and another NPC's relationship to him. It was more impactful because the game asked me to feel something that required less investment (sympathy for the suffering of others) for the level of story invetment that we had (less than a few minutes). If I'm actually going to feel something, I need to invest, and that means develp some time in interacing with the character that's going to die, or betray me, or whatever.
Retour en haut
