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Story Writing - The most undervalued facet of Solana Gaming.
Ever since I pre-ordered a #PSG1 from @playsolana, I've been thinking about the games I played on Solana and platforms like Steam and Epic. It's high time I ranted about the lack of great stories in Solana's Web3 Games.
First of all, as a disclaimer: I'm totally biased toward games with great storylines and writing. I've played hundreds of games in my lifetime and read even more books. Not to mention, I've invested thousands of hours in series, movies, and anime (yes, I said invested, lmao. I don't waste time. I own it; it's mine to do with as I please.)
Through my natural interest in everything related to humans and how they function, I internalized these stories a little differently than other consumers. I focused on the choices made and the consequences suffered or achieved. Similarly, I came to recognize the Hero's Journey way before I even knew such a concept existed. All of this led me to want to become a writer, which became the lens through which I looked at any medium of entertainment. So feel free to add some salt if my opinion is less palatable.
This introduction might have been a bit verbose, but I figured a disclaimer was necessary, just in case some of you knobs think, "I play Star Atlas, and it has an AMAZING story! How can you say there aren't great games in Web3??"
That leads me directly to the subject of Solana's Web3 games, which comes with another disclaimer: I haven't played a lot of Web3 games. And this is exactly the problem. Even though I've looked far and wide, most current games have a BARE minimum of story elements. If Star Atlas is the biggest game on Solana, looks smooth and everything, how come the first thing I see is "Buy a Ship"- and hints of grindable actions you have to take to get anywhere- that aren't linked to any context other than a few lines of text. If you remove the cryptocurrency aspect of this (or any other Web3) game, it would lose more than 90% of its players overnight. Additionally, all the published lore about Star Atlas will not even fill a single chapter of an average book- 2.5 pages on their wiki.
This is not to take a crap on this particular game, though, as the sad truth is that it has more writing than a large percentage of the other games on Solana. Also, I admit that many genres do well, even without a story. Take Satisfactory, for instance, which has only a bit of lore, but the gameplay is so fun that it is addicting AF. Even in that game, though, the story drives exploration. It makes you wonder and guess, and because of that, it beckons you onward.
A great story binds a player to a game. It should be on their mind every time they go to sleep. When I played games like Bioshock, Red Dead Redemption 2, The Stanley Parable, Or Hades 1, I literally couldn't sleep because the game kept flashing through my brain. Each of these gems is exceptional in its storytelling, completely unique in its depth and execution. If they integrated a Web3 economy, they would absorb all players from all chains in an instant. Well... not The Stanly Parable, but the others, 100%.
Seriously, even if you launched a game like Undertale on Solana, a pixel Art game that a couple of people could make within a couple of months—with added competitive gameplay—would absolutely smash every game in player numbers on Solana.
The essence of what I'm saying is that, right now, games focus too much on the economic aspect, graphics, and mechanics, then neglect the thing that binds them all together: a great story that makes people want to come back every single day. The company that succeeds in that, then adds a Web3 Economy to it, tokenizing in-game assets, will win all of Web3 Gaming. This is especially true since the real-life economy would pay for additional content, which could become whole story arcs over time.
I sincerely hope that once I get the #PSG1 in my hands, I'll get to play a game like Hades on it, with a Web3 Economy built in. I'd play that game for years if there were new story content every season that would provide context to fuel the grind.
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