In the April issue of PSM, there is a very insightful article entitled, ''REINVENTING THE FIGHTING GAME'' which is about reinventing the fighting game(duh!). In the article, storylines is one area where fighting games falls flat. So what do you think is the perfect storyline for fighting games genre ??

(blinks)

Fighting game with a story.

Right.

If Monopoly can be over 50 years old and still have no backstory, I think the fighting game genre will survive without getting needlessly "artistic". While I''m all for professional writers being hired where necessary, creating the backstory or "story arc" for a fighting game doesn''t seem to me to be "necessary".

Game design requires consistency of vision. As has been observed in the past, "Anything that does not add to a work of art, detracts from it."

And any backstory or story arc applied to a fighting game is going to be so pathetically weak that it will only detract. At best, entertaining backstories for the different fight participants can be created. More than that, and the framework of a sequence of fights will collapse under the weight of unnecessary verbage.

And finally, the players wouldn''t read it anyway.


DavidRM
Samu Games

I think mythical, mystical, and totemic themes have worked well for fighting games set in the past. It would certainly be possible to give each character a history that explains why they fight, and a little explanation of why there''s a fighting contest going on, but I can''t really think of any way that a complex plot could or should be combined with a fighting game. You could do accompanying but separate stories like Magic the Gathering has done.