10 Annoying Narrative Video Game Clichés That Need To Die

6. Follow The Story Breadcrumb Trail

There is no redeeming aspect of fleshing out a backstory via voice messages and emails scattered around a space station, or with conveniently discoverable diaries left lying around, stuffed full of plot details, but broken into annoying little pieces. You end up spending the first hour of the game just figuring out what the hell you're doing there in the first place. This Hansel and Gretel breadcrumb trail has been played out in countless RPGs, action adventures and shooters which pretend to care about storyline - don't expect your average Battlefield blood-fest to bother you with such trivial nuances. A game like Doom 3 is a dire example, expecting gamers to sift through reams of pointless emails in the hope that there would be some genuinely important story elements hidden in there. It was even worse in Beyond Good & Evil, which was confusing enough to begin with, and actually demanded proper consideration of the various messages that came your way if you wanted to make head or tail of it all. BioShock handled it in a passable way, if there is such a thing, in that the audio files played on as an overlay while you carried on with your exploration, but the result is much the same.