Gameplay and Story Segregation: Difference between revisions

* You'd think ''[[Retro Game Challenge]]'' averts this, because the story IS gameplay. However, the in-game games have some in-game cheats that don't work in free play mode, even though it's supposedly the same game both times. Most likely this is because in the story mode, you unlock new games by beating their challenges, and the makers didn't want players to miss out on the later games if they can't beat the challenges; but in free-play, you're just challenging your best performance, so cheats would make the scores inaccurate.

 

* ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' is rife with this trope, but one of the more nonsensical examples is in the Caverns of Time dungeons, where PCs are sent back in time by the Bronze Dragonflight to various famous incidents in past ''[[Warcraft]]'' titles. In many cases, most of the current playable races could not have been present for various reasons (Horde characters in particular, but also Night Elves and Draenei). So in those dungeons, those characters get hit with a illusion buff that disguises them as a Human for the duration of the dungeon. You would think this would make it an inversion of the trope, except that it also applies to Blood Elves—who all would have been Alliance High Elves in those days, and so could have been present for all these events. Turning them Human is just odd, when a simple eye color change would suffice. It's especially nonsensical in the Culling of Stratholme instance, where you see a variety of Warcraft 3 units represented at the front gate of the city, one of which is a ''High Elf Priest''. It turns specially weird when you take into account that classes aren't disguised in any way, so you can have Warlocks and Death Knights helping Thrall escape from Durnholde, shapeshifted Druids running about, and Humans casting Shaman spells. But no High Elves.

** The game is full of big examples of Gameplay and Story Segregation, but one of the biggest is illness death. In the game, four playable classes can remove curses and/or cure poisons and cast resurrection spells that will restore to life any player character they are cast on. But in the storyline of both tie-ins in other media and in the stories of the game's own quests, curing each type of disease or poison requires multiple unique components, death is feared like in [[Real Life]], and resurrection (not counting [[Came Back Wrong]]) is almost unheard of. For example, there's one quest in Northrend where you find a poor poisoned goblin and have to run around killing giant spiders until one of them barfs up a poison sac. Never mind that at least three classes can easily cure poisons, as well as anyone with high enough first aid has the ability to make antivenom out of those self-same spiders, or (by the game mechanics) if he died, four classes could easily resurrect him, and any engineer would have the ability to at least try.

* In ''[[Team Fortress 2]]'', the respawn system is canon (according to ''[[Poker Night At the Inventory]]'', Heavy recalls it as a series of nightmares). Also, each character's personality, weapons, tactics, and movement style are all closely related, and the relationships between characters in canon are related to how they interact in-game: gameplay nemeses [[Friendly Sniper|Sniper]] and [[French Jerk|Spy]] are bitter rivals (and [[Foe Yay]] targets) out-of-play, and popular in-game team-up Heavy and Medic are confirmed [[Heterosexual Life Partners]] and a [[Ship Tease|hinted]] [[Ho Yay|couple.]]

 

* ''[[EVE Online]]'''s completely player driven nature averts and/or outright deconstructs many of the things mentioned in the MMORPG examples above.

** Almost every MMO mechanic is superbly addressed and explained via some very elaborate and convincing-sounding tech lore. How can you constantly die? [https://web.archive.org/web/20150407220037/http://www.eveonline.com/background/cloning/ Clones.] How are you singularly operating a ship with effectively no crew? [https://web.archive.org/web/20090228231245/http://www.eveonline.com/background/eggers/ Capsules.] The backstory has become so in depth that it has sparked what you could describe as 'lore within the lore;' cloning has caused discussions about transferals of consciousness, and the fact that capsuleers can indefinitely clone has in-game, as well as outside consideration about the fact that since they have clones, can do anything, and cause large amounts of destruction, that capsuleers are effectively [[Mind Screw|immortal, sociopathic, all-powerful demigods.]]