Quote:
Originally Posted by RainingLemur
Of course, there was also a Call of Cthulu game that came out on PC and Xbox, and that was a pretty cool game (although there were some minor faults). It was nifty to see some of the Lovecraft stuff make it into a game.
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Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth was great, and clearly made by people who loved the stories. It was particularly effective at evoking the atmosphere of the stories in the first section where you didn't have a weapon and had to run away from any dangerous situation.
There are lots of problems with suggesting that games can offer similar experiences to books (or even an experience that replaces the book). Bugs completely kill immersion for the gamer. How do you deal with the problem of gamers of different ability being able to access the whole story? What about the dilemma of how much freedom to allow the gamer versus how scripted to make the game. If you make it too much of a 'sandbox', the gamer might completely by-pass the experiences you wanted them to have. If you make it too 'on rails', they won't feel like they have been controlling their own destiny.
Video gaming is an industry that accepts terrible voice acting and script-writing, both of which are major problems if you're looking to compete with books.
For me, Bioshock is one of the only games that has been fairly successful at providing an experience that compared with reading a book. Fallout 3 was pretty successful, too, and I can agree that The Witcher compares favourably to most fantasy lit.