The trouble with Story Telling is that you have to have a good story to tell, that's quite a trick in itself.

Someone once said that everyone's got one good book in them.

I thought I'd got a good story for a game a while ago, it was epic. I started to work on a game framework which would allow me to produce a game based on it then after everything, I came to realise that it would take me an age to produce all of the assets required for the story.. and the story wasn't very well fleshed out afterall.. so I gave up. I might try again at some point as I quite liked parts of it. It had a lot of potential, Time travel, Worm holes, impending doom, a war, the fate of 2 planets, plots, morality, shadey characters, a rebellion, an oppressive regime, a puppet master and a plot twist at the end.. oh yes, and multiple endings based on your decisions.

The best story driven games I've played so far are Deus Ex and Outcast (which I'm currently replaying)

Both games had a strong narrative, player choices which had some impact on the game's outcome. They had good pace and lots of events and interraction for the player to immerse themselves into the story enough to make it a personal experience.

In both games I felt emotion, in Dues Ex, it was anger, fear, betrayal, revenge.

in Outcast it was a mixture of different emotions, from serenity to rage, especially one time where I killed one of the main bad guys in a few seconds when I ran at him in a blind rage for something he'd done... I'm sure it should have taken longer..

another emotion was a guilty feeling as the Talon race had built their entire religion around the events from a scientific experiment gone wrong..

perhaps I took them a little too seriously ops:

A good story can add so much more to a game.
But a bad story can destroy a technically good game.
But both require a lot of effort.


Try creating a story in something like the Neverwinter Nights toolkit (using the plot wizards), you'll see how much effort goes into something even very simple, even using existing art assets.