Video games can get real lazy in their storytelling, falling back in clichés we’ve experienced a thousand times before. Clichés so well-worn and familiar, in fact, that you can probably guess what’s going to happen before it occurs.

Often that’s down to narrative taking a backseat to gameplay, and when you stumble across these lazy stories, it leaves you wondering why the game even had a plot to begin with.

That said, Super Mario Bros. managed just fine without deep storytelling. You’re a plumber. You need to save a princess. Job done.

Why are you a plumber? Why has Daisy been kidnapped? Who cares, crack on with this super-awesome platformer. And that's cool.

It's the games with narrative pretensions for the lowest common denominator that need to quit. The ones that deliver super-simplistic crowd-pleasers that appeal to, and are understood by, the broadest possible player base. So forget about nuance, forget about memorable character arcs - just hurry along to the next gameplay sequence where stuff gets blown up.

These are the absolute worst clichés in video games – you know, the ones that really need stop, like, right now.

Oh, and watch out for minimal spoilers along the way.
http://whatculture.com/gaming/10-storytelling-cliches-in-video-games-that-need-to-die

10. Killing The Cute Girl/Boy

Prime Offender: Titanfall 2, Final Fantasy VII

Need a quick and dirty emotional punch? Easy. Kill the super-loveable character - the one that audiences have grown to love over the course of a few hours.

It’s sad, when you think about it, that the only way developers think we can connect with a story is by offing the cutest character in the game. There are so many ways to create an emotional bond, to stir investment in the plot, that this just feels like the easy way out. It requires zero thought.

Zero effort. Just pick the best sidekick and write him or her out of the script – preferably with a death scene that callously plucks at all the emotional chords without ever putting in the hard work.

Typically, this occurs to show you just how evil the bad guy is (as if we hadn’t guessed), or to force the protagonist to act. Or both. This is base-level storytelling; the emotional equivalent of waking up and discovering it was all a dream.

9. Your Choices Actually Mean Nothing

Prime Offender: Wolfenstein: New Blood, all Telltale games

Video games are a vehicle for empowerment. We feel like the heroes, in charge of our own destinies and controlling what happens in the universe. Makes sense, then, to offer choices, right?

Choices, after all, are what separates games from every other type of entertainment (with the notable exception of choose-your-own-adventure books).

But so often in games, those choices turn out to mean… nothing whatsoever. They have no impact on the story, or offer differences so minor that it would’ve been easier not to give us the damn choice in the first place.

Look, it’s not easy for developers to create scenarios in which every choice you make has a genuinely different outcome – but some sort of worthwhile impact would be much appreciated.

8. Hold X To… [Do Something]


Prime Offender: Every Call of Duty game

Interaction is one of the key things in video games. But maintaining that while also delivering a decent narrative is a tricky thing to balance.

So what we end up with is a really stilted moment where to advance the plot, show emotion or carry out a scripted event – just about anything, really – is conducted by making us hold a button down.

‘Bam!’ Video game developers say, probably high-fiving each other, ‘We’ve just made our story engaging and interactive.’

Trouble is, gamers tend to do this sort of stuff on auto-pilot. Screen tells us to press a button, so we press it. We’re not thinking about why we’re doing it, or what our character is feeling at that moment, we’re just doing it to get to the next part of the game.

7. You Need To Backtrack To Move Forward


Prime Offender: Halo 3, Castlevania

This cliché is an example of both lazy storytelling and lazy level design – which is pretty much the double-whammy of cardinal gaming sins.

My cold heart sinks every time I realise that, having just fought my way through a level, the developers have contrived a situation where I have to go through the level backwards for story purposes: ‘We need to you stay here and protect the MacGuffin…’

From a gameplay point-of-view, it’s just tedious; from a narrative perspective, it’s wholly unbelievable. Because there’s never, ever, ever a good reason to double-back on yourself.

Most games don’t even have the good grace to modify the level, in order to show how the world altered due to the story. Would it kill ‘em to add a collapsed building, panicked civilians or a few cars on fire?

At least that would explain to us why we’re back-tracking, rather than just artificially inflating the runtime.

6. Boss Mutation

Prime Offender: Batman: Arkham Asylum, Resident Evil 2

In movies, there’s a rule that the bad guy always comes back for one last scare. In games, that rule has become ‘the bad guy always mutates for a second boss level.’

Doesn’t matter that it makes no sense in the context of the universe. Forget the fact that it doesn’t marry up with the plot. Just fight this guy one last time, not because the story needs this extra ten minutes to explain what’s going on, but because the studio thought it’d look pretty cool in the trailer.

It’s another lazy case of making a tired game last that little bit longer, when really, the credits should’ve already rolled.

5. You Were The Bad Guy All Along

Prime Offender: Bioshock: Infinite, Spec Ops: The Line, Heavy Rain

WHAT?! Me?! I’m the baddie?! I did not see that coming.

Oh wait, yes I did. Because the ‘you were the bad guy all along’ cliché, or its cousin, ‘It was your fault all along’, has been done to death in video games.

It’s an attempt to add a Shyamalan-style twist to the proceedings; a rug pull in which everything you thought you knew – about the game and yourself – is a filthy lie.

That’s dandy if all the clues cleverly hint at what’s really going on, but it’s become a fallback for some games, designed to inject some extra tension at the expense of believability. What’s worse is when this cheap cliché is used to develop a character arc for someone who, beyond being an avatar for the player, has no real personality.

4. "This Is Super-Urgent" But…

Prime Offender: Fallout 4, Mass Effect 3, The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim

From a storytelling perspective, one of the major problems with open-world games is the fact that you have both the main questline - and about a thousand side-quests.

Take Fallout 4. Your son’s been kidnapped. That’s kind of a big deal, unless you’re literally the worst parent in the world. You need to save him, but – Ooh, look, this guy wants me to kill some bandits. And I need to build a house. And…

Ultimately, the player’s actions don’t match the loosely established character of the protagonist. As a game, that’s great – Bethesda can throw as many diversions as they want at us.

As a narrative though, it fails, because no parent is going to collect random junk when their kid is being held against their will - unless that parent is Dr. Henry Jones Sr. teaching his child self-reliance.

3. Your Sidekick’s Awesome Until…

Prime Offender: Mass Effect 2, ReCore

You know how it is. You assemble an awesomely powerful team who can kill and maim thousands of evil-doers over the course of the game and then…

And then, right out of nowhere, your companion struggles, goes down (and quite possibly dies – see ‘Kill the Cutie’).

That’s weird, because just minutes before this dude or dudette was kicking serious ass. And now, just because the story demands you save them, suddenly they can’t put one foot in front of the other without taking damage. It doesn’t fit their character, and it doesn’t fit with the hours of gameplay you’ve just sat through. Your companion, alas, has been cursed by the plot.

2. The Enemy Knows Where You Are Because The Story Demands It

Prime Offender: Outlast, Resident Evil, Alien Isolation

Event triggers in games aren’t new. It’s a way of advancing the story based on a gamer’s actions. You complete a puzzle or section of the map, which tells the game to activate an enemy.

But while some games give a believable reason for a bad guys to locate you – you know, you make a noise and disturb them – some games are so keen to propel the plot forward that the simple matter of silently picking up a key causes an enemy that wasn’t in your vicinity to suddenly appear.

Cue the unfair jump scare and a boss fight.

And gamers cry, ‘How the hell did he know I was there?’ He knew, friends, because the story demanded it. Which is pretty cheap, when you think about it.

1. You’re The One And Only Hero Because… Reasons

Prime Offender: Mass Effect, Deus Ex

Some are born great, some achieve greatness and some – almost invariably in video games – have greatness thrust upon them. In the real world, heroes tend to be one of the first two (you know, soldiers, leaders, philosophers, that sort of thing).

Out in videogamesland, pretty much anyone can be a hero, for just about every contrived reason you can name.

Usually this involves in them cartoonishly stumbling and bumbling into a MacGuffin that enhances their lowly human powers, or they witness an event that miraculously transforms them from Joe Schmo into Joe Hero. It’s a lovely, lazy Mary Sue piece of fiction.

Because in games, champions aren’t always born; they’re created through manufactured plot points, allowing gamers to identify with this apparently ordinary individual in extraordinary times.

Lalasticlala Seun Mynd44

Well....there are some things that won't change

I'm guessing this is one of em

@op if those developers try remove each and every kind of cliché you've mentioned in their next releases, how exactly is it going to look like.. Lol!

Because i remember super Mario having to avoid or kill every bad guys who tends to come out of nowhere and then escape a big bad cat who you can't do anything to harm before getting to the princess.

I almost forgot he(big bad cat) also shoots fire that can kill you with a single hit or sometimes send his minions to you.. See! You are the sole hero in super Mario, unless you choose to play as Luigi, who doesn't seem to watch your six whenever you're not playing as him.

Can you give us and example of a game that doesn't have all you've mentioned..

Okay, I'm gonna defend the 2 of my most favorite games on the list Bioshock: Infinite and Spec ops.

A. They are well thought stories and considering the number of games out there ratioed with these, the concept is hardly anything remotely close to a cliché

B. The stories aren't even similar.

C. Booker wasn't a bad guy, his alternate was.

Cliché that should fvcking die is fighting huge and massive a$$ monsters. Especially in Japanese games

Lol, you really want the game developers to go broke

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Open world games with lots of repetition when it comes to missions need to go ...just saying .

tobianthony:
Open world games with lots of repetition when it comes to missions need to go ...just saying .

What repetition and what would you suggest?

LucemFerre:


What repetition and what would you suggest?

I couldn't finish assassin's Creed black flag cos of repetitions. It just felt like I was doing the same thing over and over again.