Michael Blaker’s Video Game Tuesday: Video Games or Visual Novels?

Michael Blaker
Game Industry News is running the best blog posts from people writing about the game industry. Articles here may originally appear on Michael's blog, Windborne's Story Eatery.

Hey all, I’m back with yet another question for all you readers. It’s all about whether top developers like Quantic Dream make visual novels or full video games.

Quantic Dream?: Yes, we all know that Quantic Dream is one of the most well-known developers for making games with deep stories and settings. My question is thus: Does Quantic Dream develop video games or are these actually visual novels as some people have suggested? I have to agree that while what they make is really good, most of the time their titles are actually visual novels.

Let’s look at Quantic Dream’s Beyond: Two Souls. It’s graphically impressive, but there’s not much gameplay. It’s mainly just quick time events and the dialogue choices you make to advance the story path. So, I think that Beyond: Two Souls is really not a video game in the strictest sense. There are some moments where you can actually play as the main character and perform various actions like moving around a room, but there’s not really many. And even in those moments, the player is given very few choices. There’s not much for them to do except for hitting buttons at certain times to make a story choice.

One of their other titles, Detroit: Become Human, is similar although there is a bit more gameplay in that one. However, you are locked into different scenes and still have limited choices, so it’s still more into the visual novel territory. Maybe it doesn’t really matter as long as players are having fun, but it’s something to think about for this week’s Video Game Tuesday.

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