Firstly; we should talk about what is narrative? Basically narrative means something that tells a story, a novel, a drama or a narrative poem. Generally, narrative word using for books, movies or TV shows but in this article, we are going to talk about how we can tell a story in video games.
A lot of video game hosts the story inside. Even if you play a multi-player video game, this game even contains a narrative. To give an example, even PUBG takes its story from an old film, in which people try to survive by killing each other on their island.Not all video game stories need to be inspired by a book or a movie. There are also non-existent stories before video games. God Of War is one of the most powerful examples of these. The story is about the problems a semi-god character with other gods.
The Uncharted and Last Of Us series developed by Naughty Dog has become one of the most important works of our time in video games.
When we look to the world of video games, we can see that the best-story games have adventure video games with a linear flow and a TPS camera angle (No offense Half-Life, you're always going to be special). This can give you an idea of the best gaming structure for story games, but with the recent indie video games, we've seen great stories in different types of games, most of which are 2D platformer games.
2D games such as Celeste, Inside, Undertale, To The Moon have very good storytelling.
Of course, there are independent games made with slightly higher budgets. What Reminds Of Edit Finch, The Vanishing Of Ethan Carter is there are few of them.
Telling a story in video games is more difficult than telling stories in movies or Tv shows. Gameplay time is much more than others and during this time you should give to gamers a pleasure with your game mechanics, as well as you should make the player wonder about your story and enjoy learning too.
There are a lot of things to watch out for, the first is that if your game mechanics aren't good, it doesn't matter what a good story you're talking about, because it's not a movie, it's a video game.
In video games, the story can only be told using text, but in this case (if any) your dialogues and story should be very interesting. Nobody wants to read the long or unnecessary dialogue.
Remember, your Quests within the game must match your story; while writing the story for a video game, you need to write the story in the main quests and side quests. You can't write a video game story like a novelist.
Video game scripts are similar to other scripts, most of the times gameplay are usually not included in the scenario.
I'll drop an example for you in below.
Call of Suarez Scripts
DragonShard Script
other examples:
Sample Quest Design
It is my first article in there, also English is not my native. Please write a comment if you saw a mistake. Thank you for reading.