Dreamfall Chapters developer, Ragnar Tornquist, responded over the weekend to the comments made earlier this month, by Star Wars creator George Lucas, on how video games are still looking for a popular game to be as successful as a movie such as Titanic. Lucas said:
“The big game of the next five years will be a game where you empathize very strongly with the characters and it’s aimed at women and girls.
Lucas then goes on to explain his point.
They like empathetic games. That will be a huge hit and as a result that will be the Titanic of the game industry, where suddenly you’ve done an actual love story or something and everybody will be like ‘where did that come from?’ Because you’ve got actual relationships instead of shooting people.”
Sitting on a panel at the Rezzed conference held this past weekend in Birmingham, Tornquist responded by saying,
“It made me so angry because I’m currently playing The Last of Us… I’m not going to spoil anything – but the beginning of the game sets up this great emotional connection… The controller turns on and your heart does not turn off. You feel desperate.”
Tornquist and his colleagues went on to say that they see a very bright future for video game storytelling. He says that he feels linear storytelling will never go away and that some of the most interesting things he has seen in when the devs try to “bend it [storytelling] with the emergent player story and combine the two.”
Rezzed is a self-titled “PC and Indie Games Show” where many of the pc devs show up to showcase their games to the public. Rezzed was created by the team behind the popular Eurogamer Expo and is a chance for the general public to play and see their favorite upcoming games first hand.
What do you think of video game storytelling? Is it as good as a movie script or can it be compared at all? Comment below!
