These clouds produce "Paradox Dust", which is what the Doctor needs to change things back to their original form. The dust can be located on everyday items, hence the need to collect things. Why these items need to be found within a time limit, and why so many of them are cameras or step ladders, isn't really explained. And there are instances when you're asked to collect dust to complete simple tasks, like speaking to someone. As a result, the gameplay and story rarely feel connected.
— Doctor Who Magazine on the Hidden Object Game Doctor Who: An Unlikely Heist
Jo will still have all the money she had at the end of last time. She'll keep everything she bought or unlocked too. That means she can potentially be a millionaire but remain the same poor bartender.
— Anna, VA-11 HALL-A
"Why is my inflammable suit burning?"
— Fastpass, South Park: The Fractured but Whole
"You should complete [story relevant quests] first to get the best experience from this quest. You can still unlock the event and experience all relevant story and gameplay without completing said quest(s) if you enter through Quick Start, but your experience will be affected, as you might encounter unknown characters and relationships, and some characters might be occupied by other quests. Do you wish to start this event without completing the aforementioned quest(s)?"
— Genshin Impact warning players about this trope.
"What I'm saying is that I like games where the story and gameplay go hand in hand, while in most JRPGs, the story and gameplay are kept on either side of a wrought-iron fence made of tigers."
"He murders the gods of the sun and the sea, causing untold damage to the world, and all to get his revenge on Zeus. Revenge for what? Stabbing him in the heart in God of War 2? Kratos had walked off that little paper cut inside 10 minutes!"
— Zero Punctuation on God of War 3
"What confuses me, though, is that even after you've been wrongly accused and are on the run, you can still arrest people. In fact, when the evil private cops show up to arrest you, you can arrest them back. What organisation is going to come around and pick those guys up? The Criminal Police from opposite land? who give talks to high school kids on how drugs are really great and everyone should take them?"
— Zero Punctuation on Battlefield Hardline
"I wouldn't harp, but there's this whole bit in the introduction where an American and a German soldier lock gaze over a field strewn with bodies and both lower their weapons in recognition of their inner humanity that can never be erased by a system that views them as nought but expendable cogs. And then five minutes later it's back to, 'Phwoar, massacring expendable cogs sure is fun, eh lads?!'"
— Zero Punctuation on Battlefield 1
"But let's not gloss over the story, because Anthem is a game of two parts that are forced to live together in a state of open hostility like Israel and Palestine, although Israel and Palestine have never tried to flog lootboxes to Lebanon.
On one side, you have Story Land, where all the story happens. A happy community hub roughly the size of an average suburban strip mall, packed with smiling NPCs with big, golden speech bubbles over their heads that seem to say, 'Please click! I used up three exercise books working this character out!'
And literally walled off from that is Gameplay Land: a huge, beautiful, expansive bugger all which you venture into after putting on your Power Rangers romper suit, confront whichever of the four or five enemy factions drew the short straw today, and create enough new widows and orphans to make up, say, a standard philharmonic orchestra. And diplomatic relations between the lands of Story and Gameplay seem to be poor.
For example, Story Land just doesn't acknowledge multiplayer at all. As far as it's concerned, you are a lone warrior who is humanity's last, best hope, and if you're curious to know why three other guys keep popping out of your arse every time you leave, then you'll have to find answers elsewhere, it's busy writing more optional dialogues for you to ignore.
Meanwhile, show up at Gameplay Land and ask if it will be possible to play singleplayer, and the game reacts like you sat down at an expensive restaurant and ordered a bowl of Corn Flakes. You go to the privacy settings — once you can find the fucking things, 'cause this game has a worse menu system than a McDonald's drive-thru after a major earthquake. What is it with ultra AAA games having shitty interfaces these days? Is it the same principle by which Las Vegas casinos are laid out? To get you lost and unable to glimpse the sun in the hope that you get confused and accidentally drop all your money? — and your options are: "Public Match, As God Intended" or "Private Match For Big Stupid Losers".
Then, when you set it to private and try to start solo, a window pops up, saying, 'Ha ha ha, sorry. Someone's clearly made a dreadful mistake. Surely you don't actually want to play a solo private match. Just click here and we'll set it back to public play so you can rejoin all the normal people.' But I didn't click that, and then the tip on the fucking loading screen was something about how playing multiplayer earns more rewards and doesn't make the little Baby Jesus cry. What the fuck is this, guys?! Am I on suicide watch?!"
On one side, you have Story Land, where all the story happens. A happy community hub roughly the size of an average suburban strip mall, packed with smiling NPCs with big, golden speech bubbles over their heads that seem to say, 'Please click! I used up three exercise books working this character out!'
And literally walled off from that is Gameplay Land: a huge, beautiful, expansive bugger all which you venture into after putting on your Power Rangers romper suit, confront whichever of the four or five enemy factions drew the short straw today, and create enough new widows and orphans to make up, say, a standard philharmonic orchestra. And diplomatic relations between the lands of Story and Gameplay seem to be poor.
For example, Story Land just doesn't acknowledge multiplayer at all. As far as it's concerned, you are a lone warrior who is humanity's last, best hope, and if you're curious to know why three other guys keep popping out of your arse every time you leave, then you'll have to find answers elsewhere, it's busy writing more optional dialogues for you to ignore.
Meanwhile, show up at Gameplay Land and ask if it will be possible to play singleplayer, and the game reacts like you sat down at an expensive restaurant and ordered a bowl of Corn Flakes. You go to the privacy settings — once you can find the fucking things, 'cause this game has a worse menu system than a McDonald's drive-thru after a major earthquake. What is it with ultra AAA games having shitty interfaces these days? Is it the same principle by which Las Vegas casinos are laid out? To get you lost and unable to glimpse the sun in the hope that you get confused and accidentally drop all your money? — and your options are: "Public Match, As God Intended" or "Private Match For Big Stupid Losers".
Then, when you set it to private and try to start solo, a window pops up, saying, 'Ha ha ha, sorry. Someone's clearly made a dreadful mistake. Surely you don't actually want to play a solo private match. Just click here and we'll set it back to public play so you can rejoin all the normal people.' But I didn't click that, and then the tip on the fucking loading screen was something about how playing multiplayer earns more rewards and doesn't make the little Baby Jesus cry. What the fuck is this, guys?! Am I on suicide watch?!"
"Now just because our story's themes, symbolism, and overall message is that technology sucks, this should in no way make a writer hesitate to give our characters all kinds of awesome cybernetic implants that turn them into super powered humans. This most definitely will not undermine our central thesis about how technology makes everyone miserable."
Obviously, it's hard to tell me what my character is like when I'm the one who's been controlling him. Is Franklin a gangbanger who dreams of more? Because I just watched him ditch a luxury yacht and throw himself into a shark mouth for a five-point achievement.
It's a little odd, even for a fighting game, that Luke is supposed to beat the crap out of his own sister with his lightsaber, although even leaping into the air and slamming it through her chest will always be a “knockout”, at worst. Ah, fighting game logic, where would we be about you?
Shadow the Hedgehog: I had no choice.
Danny: Really?
Arin: You had three choices, actually.
Danny: Yeah, multiple choices!
[later]
Danny: [as Shadow] "I had no choice... I super felt like it."
Danny: Really?
Arin: You had three choices, actually.
Danny: Yeah, multiple choices!
[later]
Danny: [as Shadow] "I had no choice... I super felt like it."
Lara Croft: "I bet all the cash in my pocket against your fancy gold watch that I can pick the best fighter."
[image of a cheap-looking watch appears]
Nerd: A watch? That you can sell? This?! I DON'T NEED THIS LOUSY STINKIN' TIMEX WATCH!
[image of a cheap-looking watch appears]
Nerd: A watch? That you can sell? This?! I DON'T NEED THIS LOUSY STINKIN' TIMEX WATCH!
"This is my first settlement, ahh, I call it Watermelon Island. Uhh, because if you look closely, if you look under this house, I actually have a lot of watermelons
in this house. Yeah. Ironically we're having a food crisis at the moment, with only '6 FOOD' right now."
in this house. Yeah. Ironically we're having a food crisis at the moment, with only '6 FOOD' right now.""You just gotta love the sewers of Castle Britain which are crawling with giant predatory rats and man-sized fucking cobras. And this is the instant you set foot off the ladder. You'd think Lord British would send a coupla guys down here every few days to try and keep the giant fucking serpent population to a minimum. He's let it go too long; at this point he needs to mobilize the regular army... WHOA! There's a roomful of lava, man! This is in the sewers, under the castle! Someone should tell British about the active magma flow running right under his throne—you know what, fuck him."
— Noah Antwiler on Ultima: Runes of Virtue
"To be clear, Sam actually does hug Cliff at this point; it just happens through a cutscene, forgoing interactivity which might have made it more powerful. It's not only that you don't get to initiate this reconcilliation, though. It's that you only get to do the opposite, by shooting at him."
— Matthewmatosis on Death Stranding
Death Stranding"The Last of Us Part II is actually an incredible example of how narrative achievements in games are undermined by their factory-built nature. On the one hand we’re supposed to believe that The Last of Us II is an unflinching critique of the cycle of violence, designed not so much to be fun as to be chilling. On the other it also has an ammo capacity upgrade as a preorder bonus, incentivizing an early purchase by making you better able to do the bad murders that the game says are bad."
"There's two sides to every story, and this story is about loss, and the destructive cycle of violence, and forgiveness, and we're going to explore those themes in gameplay by having you pop pills to get better head shots and more violent melee kills."
"It feels pointless as hell to try and roleplay as a scrappy outlaw on the run when you have a thousand dollars from doing a couple story missions. In Old West times, that was like three billion dollars! 'Oh I'm sorry, I'm a cowboy named Arthur Morgan? I thought I was the CEO of Apple, a.k.a. Bill Gates!'"
"I remember when the first game came out, and people were furious that you had to kill the doctors and make Joel do the bad thing. But that's the shit that I love. I actually really like that these games don't give us a lot of choice. It is a little heavy-handed in some scenes, but this series is not about us, the player, it's about the characters. If Ellie gets attacked by a dog and almost dies, she will kill the dog to survive. You don't get to spare the dog because Ellie wouldn't spare the dog. We as an audience have become far too comfortable with the idea that our choices are the one thing that matter in video games. Some games really benefit from taking choice away from the player to contextualize the character's role in that world. If you were allowed to do a pacifism run of this game, then this scene would be absolutely ridiculous. This is similar to a problem I have with Metal Gear Solid V. In that game, you're playing as a bad person. However, you can go the whole game without killing anybody. But at the same time, the game is still gonna treat you like a bad person, so there's kind of a disconnect. I'm not doing bad things in the gameplay, but the story doesn't really care."
"In another game, Japan here declared war on me for no reason at all, with no units or plan of attack. So three years later, he just asks for peace!....Which is really a problem of interface affluence: players wouldn't notice how bonkers the AI is if they didn't make so many unskippable cutscenes telling you how bonkers the AI is being."
— Super Bunnyhop on Civilization VI
"Hey, is this Bob from the gameplay department? Yeah, this is Mike from the story department. Listen, I know the game's almost done, but I think we're actually gonna kill off the protagonist's girlfriend... uh... pretty early in the game, so you're gonna have to replace her after the warehouse scene. Uh, just some disposable female character will be fine, clothing is optional."
— Blimey Cow's "Five Problems with Modern Video Games"
"For the third fucking time, scripted sequence versus gameplay! Never the twain shall meet!"
— Elizabeth in the Playthroughline Script of BioShock Infinite
Booker deWitt wanders around in awe, observing the racist population as they throw machine gun ammunition in the trash and stare silently at nothing. But his sightseeing is cut short when a policeman tries to grab him and he's forced to explode a thousand heads with a giant rotating hook in self-defense. After exploding enough heads, Booker is taken to an alternate reality where the underclass of Columbia has risen up in rebellion. "These revolutionaries are as bad as their racist oppressors", says the deadliest serial killer in the history of human civilisation, "because they are violent."
— Brendan Patrick Hennessy's plot summary of BioShock Infinite
of BioShock Infinite"The Boss of Saints Row 2 has a bit of a split personality. Throughout the campaign he's a always on edge lunatic and at times, utterly terrifying. This is who you're supposed to be, this is the main star of the story, this unmitigated psychopath. However, the open world Boss is a bit out of character than how they're portrayed in the story, where we have a number of unique, over the top, and downright silly activities to play. In the context of the story, this is all out of place [..] You could argue that the Boss being out of character in the open world of Saints Row 2 completely breaks the immersion of the story it's trying to tell, but this is precisely the same problem every open world game goes through."
— Flippy, My Ideal Saints Row 5
Kelly: So...this is Riddick with his teacup! Yeah, you could be that. You could do that scene where he places the teacup down and they guy's like "You gonna kill me with what, your bare hands?" "No, I'm gonna kill you with this teacup."
Monty: What a dark...what a dark subclass to be in a Humblewood book!
Kelly: I know. Picture your cute little critters murdering people with chairs.
Monty: Oh my god, it's like the Woodland Friends are having tea, and they just look at you and be like "you think we're unarmed. We're not. You think we're cute furry animals. And we are."
Monty: What's for lunch? You.
Kelly: It gets funnier the more I think about it. Like this is such, this is such a messy and violent subclass. For Humblewood!
Monty: No!
Kelly: Ain't nothin' humbe going on!
Monty: No, no!
Kelly: And that's not a complaint.
Monty: No, not a complaint, it's fantastic!
Kelly: it's not a flaw, it's a feature.
Monty: Like if you thought this was a cute, cutesy campaign setting...
Kelly: You're smasshing a bear bottle and stabbing somebody with it!
Monty: It's just a squirrel!
Kelly: Oh, the squirrels are violent this time of year!
"If your narrative and your core mechanic are at odds with each other, then that means your main character is a hypocrite."
— Walt Williams, lead writer for Spec Ops: The Line
