Prologue Duration, Long or Short?

[Kaus]

Okay this is a simple discussion of opinions about whether having a short prologue before you can control your character is better than having a long story prologue before the actual start? what do you think guys?

And How Long is too long? How Short is short for you? 2-3 minutes? 4? Leave your opinion guys. 

Since I can't decide whether to bring a hard core storyline as an intro or make it simple and less informative.

This will also help the others gather information about story telling duration.

 

[Andar]

I think it depends on two or three different aspects:


1) any prelude should have a reason to be part of the story.


I don't consider forced tutorials as preludes or as part of the story - tutorials should be separate and optional.


If you make a prelude as part of an introduction and strip the player of control (instead of making it a playable prelude), then it should go exactly to a point where the story would give a reason why the player takes control now and not earlier.


2) your target audience and target game type:


Do your intended players are comfortable with watching only?


If you make an action RPG, forcing the player to sit through thirty minutes of story will not go well with people who want to play action RPGs


If you make a story-based RPG, then the people interested in such a story will probably be less satisfied if you place them in a town without prelude and without any idea what the story is.


3) How well the prelude is written


If the prelude is interesting and contains new information, people will watch it longer as if it was an eternal monologue about the story-cliche's that they heard three hundred times before in other games

 

[Milennin]

(to repeat myself from the removed profile status)

Nobody is going to care about your story before they've even gotten to play your game. This is why long story segments at the start of a game are hated. But if you want to start off with a long story introduction, at least provide something visually interesting, like pictures or event cutscenes with moving sprites.

A game that starts with a long introduction with text on a blank background that just goes on and on, makes me go like this...

 

[Kaus]

Thanks for the key points... I guess as long as its not boring and contains information about the game. Im trying to make it more clear to the players how the game goes so I will try to be more short as possible but informative. This really helps. Thanks.

I'm still open for other opinions tho, so keep them posted what you think about preludes. 

 

[Wavelength]

As a rule of thumb, go short.  Really short.  Five minutes is a good "maximum length" if you're a great storyteller and two minutes if you're a weaker storyteller.  Cut these in half if this prelude deals with something in the background story ("37 million years ago, a holy shard was split...') or "elsewhere" (like the faroff evil overlord's lair), rather than an introduction to the immediate action that's taking place.

There are always exceptions to the rule.  Persona 4 took about two hours to introduce you to the narrative before it gave you any real control, and while it got some flac for this, I found myself fully engaged during the whole thing.

 

[hian]

Keep it short if you really care about people playing your game, and you're not super confident in your writing,


graphical editing, and event scripting skills.


Most prologues don't contain information that you can't introduce as the plot goes along and it actually becomes relevant


to the main story-line. That's preferable in most cases. Show don't tell, and keep things on point.


Waffling on about stuff that isn't relevant to the point that the actually main portion of the game makes it apparent,


is bad writing.


Besides, if you really want to have it, you could make it skip-able and/or in segments which would allow the players


to decide for their selves whether or not to "waste time" on it - put lore in books that can


be examined along the adventure, or served it in intervals as small tidbits along with the dialogue of your characters.


Large info-dumps generally don't work well in any kind of media.


Another way to make a lengthy prologue more acceptable is to make it "retroactive" - that is to say, start the


game in "in media res", give the player 5-10 minutes to play the game first and make them want to have the gaps filled


in, before you kick off the prologue sequence that fleshes out and explains what is going on.

 

[Baka-chan]

And you should always give the player the chance to skip it (maybe add a relisten/rewatch function if they skipped it by accident). Either because they don't care or because they already played it once and don't need/want to hear it a second time.

 

[Kaus]

Good point! I'll just make an option for skipping, and making lores for reviewing. Thanks guys! really helped :3 

 

[Sharm]

Gosh, this thread started and finished quickly.  I still want to say:  SHORT INTROS!  Give me the absolute minimum I need and then give me control.  I don't care about the plot until after I've killed a few monsters.  If your game starts with scrolling text and only drones on about impersonal stuff like "500 years ago" or "Tensions between these countries" or whatever I will turn your game off and never play it.

 

[bgillisp]

My game takes a little time to set up, so what I've done is I've broken it up into some playable segments inbetween things. For example. I give a very short intro scene to set the mood, then show another quick scene to show you how the player got here, then its playtime. After you play for 15 - 20 minutes, then I have a couple more cutscenes to explain things on the way. I'd say in the end the intro takes 2 - 2.5 minutes to read before you get to do something.

 

[Kaus]

Gosh, this thread started and finished quickly.  I still want to say:  SHORT INTROS!  Give me the absolute minimum I need and then give me control.  I don't care about the plot until after I've killed a few monsters.  If your game starts with scrolling text and only drones on about impersonal stuff like "500 years ago" or "Tensions between these countries" or whatever I will turn your game off and never play it.

Hey I'm still open for opinions... just keep them coming. this will also help a few others who're a bit undecided in making intros short or long. And I will absolutely evade that scrolling text intros... 

My game takes a little time to set up, so what I've done is I've broken it up into some playable segments inbetween things. For example. I give a very short intro scene to set the mood, then show another quick scene to show you how the player got here, then its playtime. After you play for 15 - 20 minutes, then I have a couple more cutscenes to explain things on the way. I'd say in the end the intro takes 2 - 2.5 minutes to read before you get to do something.

As long as its not boring I guess... Maybe the players need to be entertain during those scenes, I'm thinking what to do to make it more interesting tho... what dya think?

 

Right. 

I remember an amazing prologue. It's 3.56. It's perfect.

It's about an italian game made with rpg maker 2003.

Wow this is some interesting samples.

*watching*

the second one feels like im watching a cartoon. is that really an RPG. That's an interesting animation done there. I wonder how it was done or is it just a video file played. 

 

[bgillisp]

As long as its not boring I guess... Maybe the players need to be entertain during those scenes, I'm thinking what to do to make it more interesting tho... what dya think?

Probably depends on what is going on too. If you info dump the entire lore during the scene, no one is going to remember all of it. In my game, most of the scenes are either discussing to figure out what is going on, or the bad guys plotting, so, since it is relevant to the current story (and usually short and under a minute each time), I'd say it works.

Though, I will admit I have a 7 minute cutscene I just wrote that is 1.5 hours or so into the game. Still trying to see if there is much I can out of it, but I don't think I can remove anything as it has 3 key plot events one after another.

 

[Andar]

What I've done sometimes in (not yet finished projects) is making the prologue playable by giving the player control of other actors.


One story required seeing how the guild master got the quest that he'll pass on to the player? Make the player control the guild master, and let him go through his day until it's time to call one of the guild members, then change the control to the player hand have him get the quest that was set up in the prologue.


No need to watch the guildmaster preparing if the player can play that sequence himself.

 

[Nebuerys]

Keep it short, simple and straight to the point even if the game's story is intended to be complex. I find prologues to be somewhat in-game versions of the game's "setting section" from the download page. It's there so that the players know what the game is about and not everything that happened before the heroes began their journeys. It's a given that every player who presses the new game button for the first time is ignorant of the game's setting, and it might seem ideal to give him/her every juicy bit of info right from the start, but that's definitely not how to teach people anything. After all, you can't teach a kid how to do calculus if he still doesn't know first grade math. He'll probably end up hating calculus if he were taught the wrong way.


Avoid throwing in too much unnecessary names or overly descriptive events which are, at the beginning of the game, almost irrelevant to the player as these will no doubt be forgotten within a few minutes of playing. Build the story/lore through the gameplay proper where the player is experiencing and interacting with the story's elements first-hand.


Stick with something like "For 100 years, twelve kingdoms have fought over the land", than "For almost four-hundred moons, the kingdoms China, Japan, Somalia, Bolivia, Norway, Tuvalu...etc have fought bloody wars for the possession of the Steel Throne..." It's confusing and overwhelming, so instead of force-feeding the player every relevant information, give it to him one-by-one through certain parts within the gameplay itself and make him say: "Oh! So Norway is one of the Twelve Kingdoms! I'm glad that I spoke to this old lady. I wonder what the rest are." If this builds up interest, he will actively seek the rest of the information through the gameplay, making the storytelling a mechanic in itself.

 

[Kes]

My shortest prologue cut scene lasted about 47 seconds before the player got control, the longest about 3 minutes, though that involved several map changes, different characters appearing, and what was generally considered to be a gut-wrenchingly emotional bit.  I consider myself a good writer, so it's not that I need to keep things short because otherwise my weaknesses would show; I keep them short because I think that is the best way to engage the player from the get go.  I cannot stand scrolling text telling me about what happened generations ago - let me find that out as I go along.  Neither do I want to sit through 15 minutes of what is effectively a visual novel with no choice branches.  I think one of the arts of starting a game is to discover how to draw the player in so that they are interested in what is happening to this character as quickly as possible.

 

[Sharm]

The funny thing is nearly every VN or KN I've ever played has started in media res.  Starting with an info dump is bad even in a visual novel.

 

[Neo Soul Gamer]

It's funny because I thought that long scrolling prologues were "the thing". I thought I was one of very few that disliked them.

This is really good feedback.

 

[Alistair]

I'd definitely say short prologue. Of course it depends on how well it's written and how interesting one makes it but it's still kind of tiring if you know nothing about the lore and you just suddenly have to watch a bunch of people in a random world do weird things.

Instead of a long prologue, how about making it short, introducing your players to the lore while they are playing and making meaningful cutscenes afterwards. If your players know the story a bit, chances are way higher that they will actually pay attention to the things you write. Otherwise they may just skip through the text.

 

[lohenien]

In the game I'll be starting with for MV, the player will choose a gender and class then start the game from that vantage point. The training section will be a porthole into one aspect of the world and each one will ssend the player to the same full starting point with a different perspective.Each class will get a short prologue that lets players know a brief concept of the area they live in and what their class is based around. Beyond that it's up to the player to explore the area for more backstory or move forward.

 

[OtakuD50]

Long backstory prologues are usually a no-no for me for one main reason: there's a good chance that the main character (and thus, you) isn't interacting with anything during that time.  I like for there to be as little time as possible between starting up the game and being able to make my first save - with the only exception being that it would be silly to outright start the game able to move my character and having zero establishment of ANYTHING.

Just look at Chrono Trigger: it takes half a minute to take control of Crono, and all you know is that you live with your mom and you're excited to go on a fair that starts today.  When starting a new game, that's all you really need.  You know who you are and you know where you need to go, and it only took about 20 seconds of "prologue."  The rest of how the world works unfolds organically from there.

That's not to say long prologues can't be good, of course, but it depends heavily on presentation.  I think the Final Fantasy 4 intro is very effective at what it does because the focus is almost entirely on Cecil and you quickly learn what he does, who he does it for and how he feels about it all in a way that doesn't feel like blatant exposition.