User blog comment:Damac1214/Why Shooters Need Good Stories/@comment-1854594-20130516061406/@comment-3967954-20130516151752

@Magma-Man: The point of the blog is perfectly valid. Using Timeshift and Doom as examples isn't really a great choice (Timeshift got so-so reviews and didn't have great sales, and Doom was released at a time when shooters didn't have in-depth stories whatsoever).

XCOM is not a shooter. This blog is about shooters. Why bring it up? This blog isn't concerned with strategys or RPGs; that's a completely different genre with different conventions.

With Space Marine, it's a bit more complicated. I bought Space Marine because I'm a big fan of WH40k, and I have to admit I was a little disappointed with the storyline. However, if it had been taken away, the game would have been so much worse - I would argue that the combat was repetitive, and with no motivation to keep me going, I probably wouldn't have finished the game. If I wanted to batter enemies with no good reason, I'd play the survival mode.

I would completely agree with Damac on this one. It might sound radical, but I do think shooters these days need good stories. If Doom and Wolfenstein were released nowadays, they'd likely flop - they're little more than mindless shooting, which is nice in moderation, but grows tiresome without a reason to be doing it. It's kind of like taking the storyline out of an action film, and just leaving random disconnected scenes of explosions and violence - fun to watch for a while, but not ideal for a full 2-hour-long movie.

On a side note, I'm struggling to think of any single-player shooters that have been released recently which don't feature a storyline and have been big sellers or critical successes. I can name a few for the exact opposite situation - poor gameplayer but a riveting story - that have done well critically and in terms of sales. Spec Ops: The Line is probably the best example (though probably a bit of a cliched example by now). Spec Ops didn't really deliver in terms of gameplayer, but most players looked past that and appreciated the game for the story it told. The story alone kept people playing, whereas I doubt a game without a story could convince the player to keep playing after a prolonged period of time, even if it offered some of the smoothest gameplay around.