What really needs to be explored is the thoughts/feelings resulting from when the player acts instead of just filling in a hole in a finished story. 

what they should really do, is make an action game that's not-entirely-linear, with varied gameplay, for COOP. That way, you play with a few friends and plan (or not) how you play, leading to complex circumstances/interactions. Good AI would also help, if the game's supposed to be setting up interesting stories as opposed to simply arcade-type action.

By not-entirely-linear, I don't mean like MMORPGs or anything like that - I mean like Far Cry, (where there was really only 1 or 2 effective routes at any given time) except less linear (let the player decide to use vehicles or gameplay options for himself more often). 

http://softwarecommunity.intel.com/articles/eng/3978.htm 

I'm not just a pretty face you know. 

People don't tell their friends the next day about the canned storyline they sat and watched, or the narrowly-scripted combat encounter they were led through, they tell their friends about the spontaneous events that THEY made happen.

...or at least, you reasonably feel you made happen. The end of Portal is a great example here, though you don't tell your friends about it, it still felt special to you personally. 

I think one of the things that makes Portal work like that is the escape sequence. You have to make the decision to break out yourself, even though that's really what the designers intend you to do. 

...and then you realised that a) everyone else loved GLaDoS too and b) that GLaDos is an old lady. Brrr, so dirty.

HL2 was too scripted for me, I felt pushed from sequence to sequence all the time. Damn mapping!

Cave Story had a perfectly introduced story in my opinion. No long boring intro sequences with too much information to remember.

But then I think that games to not need to have a story at all. At least certain genres can do very well without. 

respect 

You spelled 'fundamentally' wrong. Your post is null and void. 

You spelled 'fundamentally' wrong.

incorrectly 

... dovetails with Warren Spector's prime directive of game storytelling: what makes games special is that the dialog can go both ways. They don't always have to do that (see games like hl2 or cod4) but the areas where they do (deus ex) is where the fertile ground truly lies.

So what do we all see in Quake, then? :P 

 

for story telling. 

being able to slow monsters down to a crawl or teleporting a few meters in front of you (through monsters)? 

teleport sounds best for me 

but you can only click on monsters. puzzles are about how to get out of a map without running out of monsters to telefrag in the right places. 

...a great idea. 

the gore fountain at each telefrag would be fun too... 

sounds like Redline (c) 1998 with up-to-date graphics, can't wait !!1 

- telefragging scrags in hard-to-reach places
- luring fiends into making leaps across gaps you can't leap yourself 

made a mod like this, where one of the weapons switched your position with that of any monster you hit - pretty awesome, you could make monsters fall in lava and stuff. Your gameplay ideas take the concept a lot further though. 

that is pretty sweet, especially if you have to telefrag a patrolling monster at a certain point on his path, and of course if he sees you he won't keep following the path... treating scraggs like a misc_teleporttrain basically. 

Was kind of done in the Wheel of Time gamef : there was a switch spell, was needed to get to certain areas during the single player game, or during mp, you could jump in a lava pit and quickly switch with an enemy, or also switch when you had multiple homing spells following you, thus they would follow your enemy instead. Was a very nice game mechanic. 

Okay:

"f'thagn."

How is it pronounced? Does it rhyme with "lasagna"? 

can someone give me the hard limits for q1 models? #verts, #faces, #edges?, anything else?