The Escapist Bulletin: What Aliens vs Predator can teach us about storytelling

When Rebellion Developments say that the upcoming Aliens vs Predator reboot/sequel would suck without graphic violence, it’s kind of hard to argue.

Neither the Alien nor the Predator movies were exactly shy when it came to gore, so leaving it out of the game would be a strange move. But the fact that AvP is remarkable in having justification for the type of violence that's commonplace in video games is a little sad, because it suggests that we’ve hit a dead end in storytelling in the medium.

AvP has an excuse. It’s drawing on source material stuffed full of marines and aliens that burst out of ribcages and collect skulls as trophies, but what about the rest of industry? Why do so many games look to violence as first resort?

Well, simply put, telling a story with an interactive element is hard and stories of combat and war are the easiest to tell.

It’s a truism that there is no drama without conflict, and in a medium where the storyteller does not have total control over the experience the simplest form of conflict is to provide the player with an antagonist to fight and let them get on with it. It’s a tried and tested formula that’s been around for decades, and while it gets constant refinement, it remains fundamentally unchanged

It’s not really all that surprising: making talking exciting is a lot harder than making a pitched battle with aliens exciting, but in nearly 40 years of game development it seems strange that so little progress has been made breaking out of that mould.

It’s telling that even games lauded for their writing are still incredibly combat heavy: Mass Effect 2 might have some of the best characterisation ever seen in a AAA game, but you had better be prepared to shoot an awful lot of people if you want to see the end of it.

Previous Bulletins might have taken Heavy Rain to task for trying too hard, but trying too hard is a heck of a lot better than not trying at all, and a hundred ambitious failures is infinitely preferable to some God of War clone, which takes no chances whatsoever and instead clings to the coattails of other established games.

What’s especially infuriating is that making a good, compelling, combat-free game isn’t impossible, as the Phoenix Wright games prove, but as yet few developers and or publishers are willing to try this approach on a really big budget title.

There are certainly games are moving towards it. The conversation system in the Mass Effect series is an effort to make non-combat encounters more exciting, and Peter Molyneux’s recent announcements about Fable 3 suggest that combat will be taking even more of a back seat than in Fable 2, but it’s going to be a long time before a major title eschews combat entirely.

There is so much potential in games to tell stories, but if we want to tap it, both gamers and developers are going to have to be bold. Mistakes will be made, but gaming will be all the better for it in the end.