Nowadays, games are being made in different genres and genres themselves are expanding and growing through the years. Every genre has some frameworks and standards that your game couldn’t be created unless you consider these rules. Aside from frameworks, in any genre, you will see a different type of balance between main aspects of the game, including story, gameplay and creation of world. Some genres require more emphasize on gameplay than other sections, while some other types of games are completely story-driven in a way that gameplay has a little role to play within the title. It depends totally on the vision of developers and how they describe games, which for people like Miyazaki and Ueda has been defined with a high priority for gameplay and creation of world.
During an event in Croatia with attendance of Hidetaka Miyazaki and Fumito Ueda, the two directors talked about how they see the balance between main parts of a game and which one comes first when they start to build a project. Ueda believes that even when you have a great plot in your mind, story is the last thing that joins to development process. He said:
Games are organic, there may be changes in tech that can be applied, informing the story.
On the other hand, director of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice says creation of a world and designing levels influence the story, so its not a proper decision to start from the story at first. Miyazaki believes that gameplay is the soul of a game, and should be shaped up at first, then the other parts will find their place within the game. However, the man behind Dark Souls trilogy would love to work on story-driven titles like Red Dead Redemption 2 as he stated. Meanwhile, he thinks he should try to improve his skills in communicating the plot within his team, as most of the time they don’t exactly know what they are working on.
When we look at Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, it’s more story-focused than Dark Souls trilogy and Bloodborne, so its possible to see next From Software games to feature more engaging stories.
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