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[Superb Joe]

i posted abuot my favourite piece of toilet storytelling in the other thread, but heres another one that im not sure anybody is aware of. there is a bathroom in merry gear solid 2 where two guards are standing at  a urinal and are programmed to briefly check out each others peckers at timed intervals. those two guards each have a unique voice set, one is me and the other is arthur lee

[battlerager]

So is there a list or collection of instances of this "skulls in a toilet" phenomenon out there?
Like, screenshot examples etc. It'd be an interesting research topic.

[s0]

be the change u wanna see

[Manuel Magalhães]

no gods or kings

only skulls in a toilet

[Loop Gain]

Half-Life 2 made pretty effective use of graffiti.



Barista 2 had a fun, Pathways Into Darkness-inspired talking skull. The more talking skulls the better, I suspect.

[Bricabrac]

Has anyone here played Kairo? I think it's one of the best examples of envronimental storytelling ever.
Through puzzle solving, you understand you're slowly awakening an ancient machine. Lots of details, often in secret rooms, explains clearly who you are and what you are doing without a single line of text.
You just have to keep attention.

[Rat Casket]

i feel like the skull toilet is describing Fallout 3 and 4 specifically. those games are dumpster fires of "environmental story telling", along with the rest of Bethesda's RPGs.

in the case of more recent titles, such as Dark Souls 3 and Hyper Light Drifter, we get a lot of "guys standing near dead things" and you're supposed to be like "wow dang it sure is brutal out here".

i believe that Dark Souls 1 does this better than most games. for example, havels gear is hidden behind a false wall in anor londo. near it is an occult weapon, which was used to defeat the gods (Gwyn). havel was supposed to be gwyns buddy. when the player finds havel, hes locked in a tower and has gone hollow. the description of the key to the tower suggests that it was his "cell" where he was placed by "a dear friend".

so from this you can guess that havel got real rude at some point, and gwyn locked his ass up for being a jerk.

compare this to dark souls 3 where havel is standing near a dead wyvern (not even a dragon come the fuck on) and its like wow this guy kills dragons what a toughy.

[halk3n]

Is environmental storytelling the same as narrative architecture?

[ag radley]

compare this to dark souls 3 where havel is standing near a dead wyvern (not even a dragon come the fuck on) and its like wow this guy kills dragons what a toughy.

one interesting thing about havel in dark souls 3 is his gear's placement on lothric bridge by the stray demon. i still haven't figured out why it's there and why you get havel's ring from the demon's soul. and i have a hard time believing lothric would just have a friendly chaos demon guarding the bridge for them - i get the sense the demon may have been havel at one point (or at least a 'havel knight' from the same order, but i'm not sure about that) i kind of wonder if the havel you fight at archdragon peak isn't even the real havel, or if archdragon peak is temporally displaced from the rest of the world.

that said, i agree that dark souls 1 was better with this than 3. the occult weapon by havel's set is classic. but 3 does have some stuff, like the corvian item drops/aldrich's lifehunt scythe/painting guardian set/snowy irithyll suggesting stuff about the painted world merging with anor londo. it's not a single crystal clear example but it's still interesting how you slowly make that connection as you pick up more and more evidence for it.

i also like the way 3 has a few instances of enemies from different factions fighting each other (darkwraiths vs. ghru/wolfblood followers and the black knight vs. demons). it's not a subtle thing, but it is a form of environmental storytelling that gives you a better feel for the relationships between factions that 1 didn't do.

Is environmental storytelling the same as narrative architecture?

narrative architecture is a subset of environmental storytelling, yeah.

edit: actually sorry it depends on what you mean by that. if you mean like building architecture that suggests a narrative, then yeah, but if you mean the game itself as architecture for a narrative, then no, that would be closer to the idea of ludonarrative. ludonarrative is the story of what happened as you played the game that you would tell your friends about ('i did this, then that happened, then this happened'), and narrative architecture would be the practice of designing games to cultivate certain kinds of ludonarrative (environmental storytelling could still be part of this though).

[halk3n]

but if you mean the game itself as architecture for a narrative

Yea, this is what I mean.

So with that said, what about the magic circle? Would that house narrative architecture (everything you play in) and environmental storytelling would be everything outside of the circle (everything non-interactive)?

Kind of like a symbiotic resonance between the two to create a tangible story?

[krides]

I think that the whole skull/toilet situation got blown out of proportion. You can't really make a general rule out of it. In some cases, some things work better, in some other cases, some other things do. But the main point that I would like to make is that the fact that someone does corny graffitis that scream "exposition! look at this exposition!" is important, because it's an opportunity for making new cool things and, as such, moves us forward as an industry.

Take Undertale, for instance: it has this fantastic joke where you have the option to sell your crap to a vendor, but the vendor goes all "what am I, a pawn shop?" on you and refuses to buy the crap. This is a joke that works so great only because you have just spent 20 years playing RPGs where it's standard practice to dump all the loot you don't need on poor blacksmiths and tailors.

My point is, I don't know what's best. It depends on the game you're making. What I know is that people have done all of these things in the past, and it's really cool, because I can work with that.

[Slowminder]

i feel like the skull toilet is describing Fallout 3 and 4 specifically. those games are dumpster fires of "environmental story telling", along with the rest of Bethesda's RPGs.

in the case of more recent titles, such as Dark Souls 3 and Hyper Light Drifter, we get a lot of "guys standing near dead things" and you're supposed to be like "wow dang it sure is brutal out here".

i believe that Dark Souls 1 does this better than most games. for example, havels gear is hidden behind a false wall in anor londo. near it is an occult weapon, which was used to defeat the gods (Gwyn). havel was supposed to be gwyns buddy. when the player finds havel, hes locked in a tower and has gone hollow. the description of the key to the tower suggests that it was his "cell" where he was placed by "a dear friend".

so from this you can guess that havel got real rude at some point, and gwyn locked his ass up for being a jerk.

compare this to dark souls 3 where havel is standing near a dead wyvern (not even a dragon come the fuck on) and its like wow this guy kills dragons what a toughy.

In fallout 4 it's more like skull in bath with alcohol and gun. I swear, I saw this scene at least 4 times while I was playing it. It's just lazy gamedesign.