Ever wish you could explore more of a game's story...

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Beyond all of the action and background centering around the game's main hero?

I find that looking at all of the Duke Nukem games, I find I'm getting bored with Duke himself. He's fun and all, but sometimes I want to go beyond what only Duke sees in Duke Nukem:3D and Duke Nukem Forever and look at the world itself. I know that something awful has happened while Duke was out fighting aliens while in game 2 (right before DN3D happened) but how did it start and what did it look like? How long was it going on?

I guess I would say that I would like to have a game told from the perspective from a ground soldier or policeman, and not from an overpowered super soldier. I want to feel like my life could be over any minute, or that I get to see my police buddies get mutated by some grotesque alien. Something dark and interesting, where the tables could be turned on you at any second, and you could get turned into an enemy mook, which would equal just as big a game over as death would be.

Whenever I mention something like this on a Duke forum, I get told, "But it's a Duke game. It's supposed to be all about Duke!"

Does anybody ever feel this way about wanting to explore a gameworld, and not always from the titular hero's perspective?

As a Crash Bandicoot fan, I've always wondered how different the games would be if I were to play as Cortex, the main antagonist of the original (I don't count Crash Twinsanity, as Cortex was forced to join forces to save world from the destruction he wanted to execute himself). The annoying part about it is that there were at least two games planned with this nature and both of them got cancelled in their early stages.

It would be cool. I think one of the great weaknesses of Skyrim is that the entire game revolves around you, the whole world's entire raison d'etre is... you. Somebody came out with a mod, I seem to recall, that let you play as a party member to the Dragonborn, rather than the Dragonborn himself. Cool idea, I thought. Not sure how it'd be executed.

Imagine what the world of GTA would be like if you were one of the random schmos running around rather than Claude/Tommy/CJ/Nico? It'd probably be terrifying, knowing that at any moment the "hero" might run you over. Or one of the prostitutes? *shiver*

It'd be a challenge to do it and make it fun. Most companies would basically just substitute your character for the hero, thus making you into yet another stereotypical badass and completely missing the point. See Dishonored's attempt at looking at the story through different eyes.

Sometimes I wonder what happened between Mad Max and Mad Max 2, to make them so different from each other...but then, those kinds of stories usually explain way too much and just kill the magic of the thing. Sometimes it's nicer to just wonder.



I thought Gearbox's expansion packs for Half-Life did a pretty good job of it, though they were all pretty short. It was neat to sometimes come upon a place you've been before, and then see Gordon off in the distance flying past.

I still need to play through Decay, though. I tried the PC port of it a little bit (by myself), but I didn't get very far.

I used to love playing a heavily modded version X3: Reunion in non-story mode as a ‘bankrupt assassin’ or the like.

Mods like ‘Race War/Race Response Fleets’ really make the game universe come to life in a way that does not necessarily revolve around the player. It was a lot of fun to be zipping around in my tiny scout ship, just minding my own business, when all the sudden a bunch of Corvettes, Frigates, Destroyers, and Carriers jump into the sector and start slugging it out for their own reasons… All I could do is run like hell, hide, and watch the battle from a safe distance.

Then, after the battle, I’d go in and look for salvage. Once, I managed to claim a derelict carrier that way… I did not have any money or resources, so it took a llloonnnnggg time to refit the ship. Nevertheless, it was a lot of fun.

I wish Willow from Don't Starve had a backstory. I have so many unanswered questions about her: How did she end up in the Don't Starve world? Why are there burning houses in the background of her profile pic? Is she physically supposed to be a child, or is she an adult with a childlike personality? Given that the game's creators are constantly updating with new stuff (including glimpses into other characters' backstories), it's not unreasonable to think that some day they might flesh her out some more.

Speaking of fleshing out characters and backstories, I wish that there could be an Ace Attorney spinoff where Franziska Von Karma was the main character, complete with flashbacks. Not only would I love to play as her (she is my favorite character), but maybe then it could give some insight into exactly what kind of father Manfred was to her. Yeah, I know that there was a flashback case in Ace Attorney Investigations where they had some interaction, but fan theories still vary considerably between "he was just strict" to "she was probably abused". What's scary is that the theory that Franziska was abused almost makes sense, considering her severe insecurities and the fact that Manfred had virtually zero redeeming qualities during his limited "screen time" in the games. Obviously, I'd like to be proven wrong, because I love Franziska and I hope that her upbringing wasn't soul-crushing like a lot of fanfic likes to speculate that it was.

I wished on Kotor II TSL that I could take over or lead the galaxy and turn it to some purpose. That and a choice of different groups of allies at more parts of the game.

Final Fantasy games...
the Starcraft games...

there's also some movies and tv series that i wish to have seen more of...

I've actually wondered what it would be like if someone made a game where the player character had the perspective of an underpowered NPC that had to deal with being on the opposing end of the dynamic of balance in an RPG or any of its derivative genres. Essentially, every encounter in the game would have the odds overwhelmingly stacked against you then, so you'd have to worry about working around that.

Of course, this is more of a meta thing with gameplay as opposed to a narrative switch, but I think the principle is basically the same.

That's why gets mods for games that make them super insane difficult

I think that this might be why I often have a fascination with horror games, as they more than any other genre tend to have hints to other story elements than the standard game. You can see a picture of what things used to be like, find messages left by others, blood trails or corpses of others, separate delusions or eccentricities for different villains as a representation of what is wrong with the setting.

If I really enjoy a particular game I tend to really do my research and find all the trivial knowledge I can find on it. One that I tend to come back to is the Legend of Zelda universe, looking up all the theories and observations, the Hyrule Historia was a must buy for me. My favourite subjext would to really try and explore the different possibilities of is Majora's Mask, the game in essence has number of themes that come off kind of vague, the Happy mask salesman is never properly explained. Who were the dark tribe? Why was a design that looked a lot like Majora's Mask appear in artwork for Ganondorf in Twilight Princess?