IN AD 2101, WAR WAS BEGINNING. THE KINGDOM OF GOOD FOUGHT THE KINGDOM OF EVIL, AN EPIC BATTLE WHICH WOULD LAST AEONS. FINALLY TH

If you absolutely, positively have to expound on your fantasy land's history, put it after an exciting prologue where the player is given control within the first minute of clicking "start". He will be that much more inclined to sit through it, and if the prologue hooks him, he'll actually pay attention to it. I'm a bookworm myself and enjoy a well-fashioned setting, and yet I seldom give text crawls a read. For a simple reason - I'm not going to cram my mind full of information on your world when I have yet to find out if your game provides a worthwhile gaming experience and won't get shut down within minutes.

Depends on the genre you're talking about. It happens. It happens a lot.

author=Neok
Anyone else like this? Typically, most intros will establish a setting, introduce the main character and his/her situation, then maybe drop you into a tutorial or two before finally letting you take proper control and explore the game. Am I alone in thinking this is the absolute worst way to hook your players?

I think it's more a matter of how the game provides the information before you take control, rather than whether or not it does it.

Taking too long or dumping too much information onto the player right out of the gate is definitely a poor way of handling it. Taking 5~ minutes to set up the fundamental information and establish who we'll be playing for the game is good if it's presented in an engaging and succinct way. A lecture is terrible, a demonstration is good.

For example, a lot of the Atelier games start off with a brief explanation of what "alchemy" refers to in the setting, gives a little information about the state of the town/country you'll be in and usually shows the main character going about their daily routine while telling you this, so you get to see the town a bit and see how they interact with people at the start of the game.

Atelier Rorona and Atelier Totori are good examples of this. It takes a little while before you actually get control of your character, but that time is well spent on giving you just the essential information, showing some nice scenery and giving you a feel for the main character. Within ten minutes, you'll have a basic grasp of their personality and their place in the world, and it's usually pretty organic instead of STAR WARS TEXT SCROLL OF IRRELEVANT INFORMATION.

Now I want to have a game start with "IN AD 2101, WAR WAS BEGINNING. THE KINGDOM OF GOOD FOUGHT THE KINGDOM OF EVIL, AN EPIC BATTLE WHICH WOULD LAST AEONS. FINALLY TH- Dammit, a random encounter!? But I was in the middle of my big dramatic speech!" :3

author=Neok
Buddy, you'd be surprised how often I have to start a game, setup a hotkey script to continually press confirm for me, then wander off and come back 10 minutes later so that I can actually start playing.

If the respective games are extremely gameplay-focused with a story just somehow shoehorned in, this is understandable. But generally, I have an extremely hard time understanding people who skip the narrative in games, especially in story-heavy ones. Often enough, games need to establish their setting in order to make the player care about what they do (gameplay-wise) and at the same time make the player care about the setting through letting them do something in it. It's not a one-way road, it's a combination of elements that should continuously enhance each other. If you ignore one of those, you shouldn't be surprised if the game fails to fascinate you - or rather, this is a failure on the part of an impatient player.

That said, especially in hobbyist games, nobody can expect the player to sit through hours of exposition just to find the game plays like crap. In addition, knowledge about a setting is usually much more satisfying when "discovered" or figured out by the player over the course of the game, instead of dumped on him at the beginning. That's why I believe walls of (non-dialogue) text as an introduction are just as bad as keeping your player entirely in the dark for hours. An intro is supposed to build up suspense and make the player feel involved, not to bore them into sleep.

The number of times on RMN I have heard people screaming that they can't understand why people are such babies these days and that story is the only reason to even play an RPG and that their backstory is vitally important and whatever other excuse is absolutely staggering. Beyond belief. I would go so far as to say that the "conventional wisdom" on RMN is actually to add as much story as possible, tossing the player directly into the cut scenes ASAP, and only introducing them to the gameplay (which is generally seen as nothing but filler to get the player to the next cut scene) only after they have been fully ensnared by the setting and plot.

Designers around here cannot fathom the idea that anyone would actually enjoy RPG gameplay. I have even heard people suggest that every RPG should have the option to make all the gameplay skippable - rather than the cut scenes. It makes me wonder why the fuck you'd make an RPG if you dislike them that much.

LockeZ, I do think you are exaggerating and being polemical, yet you have a point. What you describe is the opposite extreme, with the people who want to skip every story bit on the other side. Both extremes annoy me, as they both defeat at least one vital aspect of most RPGs and many non-RPGs as well.
Story is great, yes, but players should not be deprived of the ability to actually do something either (except if you're making a visual novel, which technically is hardly a "game" in the traditional sense of the word). Part of the power of stories in games is that they allow you to actively take part in them, something no other medium allows for. So developers should use that strength to increase the impact of their story rather than treat them as two disconnected entities. And this goes especially for intros.

author=LockeZ
Designers around here cannot fathom the idea that anyone would actually enjoy RPG gameplay. I have even heard people suggest that every RPG should have the option to make all the gameplay skippable - rather than the cut scenes. It makes me wonder why the fuck you'd make an RPG if you dislike them that much.

Pretty much the reason why I think designers here need to look at their gameplay formula with a fresh approach. That is, instead of just adding in stuff because it fits the genre, think about what the game needs and WHY it needs it, and how is whatever your doing with your game going to be potentially fun. It's the reason I'm a little bit distrustful of RM games in general, suffice it to say. People develop these glorious stories but not actually applying the same care to gameplay.

But... yeah... On-topic. I almost thought this thread was a parody of Zero Wing when I saw the title, but yeah.

All I want to add is that you can screw up gameplay-oriented intros just as bad as narrative-driven ones. If anyone thought the intro of Zelda: Twilight Princess was bad, was because while it DID go less into overblown backstories and straight to gameplay, the gameplay it threw you in didn't really do a good job to teach your about the core aspects of the game, and instead threw in a bunch of frustrating mini-games before getting into the meat and potatoes.

My advice of a good game intro are as follows:

• 
  Don't throw everything at the player at once: This makes it all too easy to just confuse your players and turn them away from it. Yeah, gamers are not as patient compared to back in the day, but I think that's because we've been spoiled by games that gave us exactly what we wanted: to play a game, not read a visual novel. Pacing should exist as far as what knowledge the player has about your game world, or better yet let the expansive lore be something the player can choose to explore or not to. Skyrim is a game that does this quite well. The main quest only gave you general information as to whats happening in the game's world, while the entire backstory/info about races/lore and whatnot was spread across npcs and books that the player could delve into on his own time, without it all being shoved down his throat.
  
• Make the intro part of the tutorial: I really feel like these intros of this war and elves and blah blah blah is treated too much as a distraction from the actual game, and as a result it makes all the info you were bombarded with at the start feel irrelevant. Teach the player the core aspects of your game through your intro, thinking of it as more of a glorified tutorial. That throws the player into action right away while still carrying out your needed messages.
• Don't force players into your intro:I used to be confused as to why there is a "skip" option in some intro scenes, but now I know why: Players who already understand the game and are replaying it a second time don't want to be bombarded with stuff they already know. This can be kind of negligible, however, if the intro itself is actually capable of standing on its own so well that other players won't mind having to replay a beginning segment, though I can't really name any convincing examples off the top of my head.

I ran the numbers* and the actual worst openings are the great big mystery plot hook ones. Possibly with the Board of Shadowy Figures talking in nondescript terms about how 'it' is finally ready to do 'the thing' and their 'great plan' will finally ''come' to 'fruition' ' prior to evil chuckling. Or Chrono Cross, it started with some kid with a bandanna, Kid, and a luchador (!) beating up on some training dummies in some castle before getting a mysterious FMV of bandanna boy with a bloody dagger and Kid on the ground. Who cares though? The cast had about two lines and a nod to share between all of them. There's no emotional connection with the characters, the setting, or the narrative, only a cheap hook. I was more interested in the luchador that I never got to recruit because that's CC.

I'm not against plot hooks in the opening, you need something to get the story started and revving, but a promise that something (hopefully interesting (CC spoilers: it wasn't) ) will happen is an awful start.


As for the text crawl and other setting openers, I don't mind it as long as it is brief and serves its purpose. You need to establish the basics of the setting, especially for the fantasy or scifi genres, set your tone, and start getting the audience invested. It may not be the best way of doing so but I'll take it. Openings are fucking hard.



* sampling population: me

author=Housekeeping
Well, I didn't do a nation-wide penis inspection at the time, so I can only speak from personal experience being a twelve-year-old in the mid 90s.

Mode 7 was the greatest fucking thing when I was a kid playing Square's SNES RPGs. I'd fly around on Flammie or the Blackjack / Falcon going nowhere but the sky because it fucking owned.