I am trying to create a game that has a small plot (maybe more of a theme). The plot just describes why the characters are fighting each other. Other than that I have not fleshed out the story.
How important would it be to flesh out the story/characters for the game? Would it make the game more immersive?
Excellent writing is one of the primary selling points of some games - but it is by no means necessary. It can even be counterproductive in some situations.
There has been research into what aspects of video games players enjoy the most. One model is Quantic Foundry's Gamer Motivation model. Their research indicates that there are six primary aspects of a game that can draw a gamer in - and each individual player will be interested in some, but not all, of those aspects, depending on their own personalities.
The six motivations are categorized as "Action," "Social," "Mastery," "Acheivement," "Immersion," and "Creativity." Of these six motivations, players tend to be strongly interested in one or two of them.
And of these six motivations, the only one strongly tied to good writing is "Immersion!"
What this means for you is that you need to think about what type of game you're making. Read the article I linked and decide whether immersion should be one of the core focuses of your game or not. Quite frankly, if it isn't, then spending a lot of time on your game's story is a waste and can even potentially drive away the kind of players you want to target. There are in fact gamers out there who find stories to be annoying and want to get straight to the action!
I posted these examples in a comment, but I'll elaborate on them here. Three games with excellent writing are The Beginner's Guide, Undertale, and Bastion. To be maybe a little too honest, all three of these games get me to cry every time I play them because their stories are so powerful. However, this comes at a cost:
All three of these games have been received well, but they sacrifice keeping the player in intense action in order to tell a powerful story. This appeals to some players and pushes others away.
In contrast, Thumper, Sonic Mania, and Beat Hazard are three games that effectively do not have stories. In exchange, they drop the player into the action of gameplay almost immediately and have few moments in which the action lets up. This will appeal to a different type of gamer.
In conclusion, you need to decide which type of game you want to make, then decide which aspects of the game need to be focused on the most. Even if you are willing to polish every aspect of your game completely, telling a story almost requires you to take the player out of the action from time to time, which will push some types of players away. There's a tradeoff to be made, and it's important to make a conscious decision where you want your game to fall on that spectrum.
That said, it depends on the game. We don't have to know a back story in order to play Battleship, or fight zombies, or shoot bad guys on one side of a war, really. I don't need a backstory to play Monopoly.
But games that take off from fantasy role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons (before any electronic assistance) are driven very much by the back story of each character.
So yes, a good backstory can make the game more fun, the player is making the world safe for children and puppies and young love. You raise the emotional stakes and increase the impact of winning or losing.
Without the stories and imagination, D&D is just another very long form of Yahtzee. All you revel in is the luck of rolling 20, or the bad luck of rolling a 1, and the mechanical increases or reductions of "points" that mean nothing. It would be boring, too long, and nobody would play.
The logical answer is: IT DEPENDS.
Is it a platformer? Is it an RPG? Is it a shooter? Is it a big game like a AAA game, or just some test game for school or something?
Truth be told, if you are not required to know about the story to play or enjoy the game, even some of the most cliche stories might work, or even no story at all!
A game is art, the first thing to consider is to make it more enjoyable for most people to play it, then think of a story to SAY something, not just be there in the background. If you have a small game with great mechanics and some interesting story (please note: not an epic story necessarily), more people will love it an crave for more, if not, maybe is time to go back to the whiteboard.
Cheers mate, and good luck!
Some roles writing can play in your game:
Story as enjoyable content - this is story as one of the "main dishes" of your game, along with gameplay, creativity, etc. - part of what makes the game enjoyable is just watching / listening to / reading the story parts. Final Fantasy does this a lot, but the story has to be good, and works better when the music, voice, visuals etc. of those story parts are also very good. Story can be a reward in your game, something players seek.
Improving immersion - Often goes with the previous, but here it's about making the player engaged in the world and it's characters. But you can have good immersion without strong explicit "story" segments (other things that help: a believable, coherent world, memorable events, a feeling that actions have consequences; but also a lot of small details in the world: signs, dialogue, books to read, etc.), or storytelling segments without strong immersion (Ace Attorney comes to mind).
Giving something to discover - just like some genres of games can have a lot of places to explore, or a lot of items to collect, they can have a lot of books to read or NPCs to talk to. This is especially if "exploration" is something you want to be in your game; games that have more of an open structure, RPGs, etc. It's one way of adding immersion.
Making the game more understandable - this is almost more UX / Game Design than writing, but having good names, good taglines, one-line-summaries of various characters, places, etc. can make the game easier to navigate for players.
Giving the player feedback on his actions - if he feels other characters noticed what he did, if they seem impressed by his actions, or judge his choices, this will increase immersion and make him understand the game rules better.
Note that like "fun", "immersion" is a bit of an emergent property of a game, that can happen for different reasons, and gameplay is usually more important than story for that (though good graphics, writing, animation, etc. can turn a boring hack-n-slash into the exploration of a living world). Minecraft is an example of an extremely immersive game with no (game-provided) story or writing. And Angry Birds is a good game that doesn't particularly try to be immersive.
I only really enjoy games with stories. Like Fallout 3,new vegas, 4 and so forth. Skyrim was another. They have so much content that they had to use in game books to hold it all. They are open world so you can go anywhere at any time and do almost anything.
Depending on what kind of game it is the story can be critical to its success. I find games where you go in just to shoot things up, rinse, and repeat not worth playing.
Many games have extensive backstories, but do not actually use words to tell the player about them. They rather represent the story in form of game mechanics, the design of the environment and game entities and in form of scripted events.
For example, imagine this player-experience:
The player walks through a city. There are piles of rubble on the streets. Many buildings are damaged by scorch marks and bullet holes. Some are just ruins. People in ragged clothes walk through the streets. Their gait is slow and ducked. There are flags with an emblem everywhere, but in contrast to the rundown city the flags look clean and undamaged. There are armed men in dark uniforms standing at every corner. Their poses are dominant and intimidating. They have the same emblem on their chest as the player sees on the flag.
The player passes a group of civilians standing with their hands at a wall, surrounded by a group of uniformed men. One of the uniformed men frisks the civilians. When the player approaches, one of the uniformed men pushes the player away. When the player approaches again, they attack the player.
How much backstory is in that game segment? A lot. There was a war going on, and it was ugly. This city was recently occupied, and now the citizens are facing an oppressing regime. They are suffering.
How many words are used to tell the backstory? Zero. It's all told through visuals and mechanics. The development team might have an extensive backstory section in their design document which explains what happened in great detail, but the players never reads a word from it. The purpose of that document is to help the developers to keep the narrative of the game consistent.
I will talk about videogames as a media. Videogamesstrong point is interactivity, so a good game will communicate almost everything that has to say to the player with interactivity. Think of Journey or the first Dark Souls, they are communicating with you through gameplay design, and the other aspects like visuals, ost, or text are mere accompaniements. They must reinforce what the game is trying to say, but couldn't be the main focus.
That is the real way to develop the game as a new way of art, focusing on what makes ir special. So, answering to your question, we can see two kinds of writing:
Things such as scripts, stories, short texts, chapter histories. This kind of writing from other media like cinema or literature, are the less important. No game needs a sentence if you can master interactivity and visuals, as a movie doesn't need a script as long as you have good direction and acting. This kind of writing is just decoration and not the main way to communicate, so you don't need that high skills.
This is what is important. You say that you want to show players that there is a war in your world. You must know how to write for yourself this world. How is the world? What is the developement level of the civilizations there? Who are the characters? Is the war already started? Who started it? What heroic things happened during the war? And before?
You must be capable of writing all of this to you, on an informal and clear style. But with this you must be capable of stablishing ways to play the game, feelings you want the users to have, the visuals and the sound. The experience.
So I think that you don't need way too many writing skills but creativity and be able to see, hear, or touch what you are building when writing. Other kind of literature in videogames is just lazyness.
Everything Amadeus said, but there's a pitfall if the story tells the person playing a character something about the character that means they relate to them less.
["Jack Bauer thinks a person under physical duress will tell him the truth rather than what he wants to hear? The idiot. I'm done with him."]
If you can avoid that, the quality and depth of the writing will make the game much more appealing.
Generally speaking it doesn't really matter much. Unless the story directly impacts the decisions players are making in your game, you're better off sticking with a generic "they're the red team and we hate the red team!!" background story.
It's easier for you and the people playing it won't be annoyed by having to skip through pages of meaningless text.
Good writing is always a plus for a game (unless the game is of the kind that doesn't use writing at all... think 2048 or Minesweeper). The thing is, good writing doesn't always mean detailed writing.
If the game is a visual novel where the dialogue is the whole gameplay, then you bet there's a lot of writing you need to do. If you have an adventure or role-playing game that relies heavily on interacting with other characters, you get close to that end of the spectrum, too. In games of this kind quality of the writing makes an important part of the player's experience.
If, on the other hand, you're making a tower defense game, then maybe the player isn't too interested in getting through a lengthy intro before every level. Something well-written for the mood will be great, but keep it on the brief side. In general, in games where you need to pause the actual playing for a scene of the story, make sure the interruptions aren't too long. A player that just can't get to play is not a happy player.
And if your game is a FreeCell Solitaire, just shut up and deal the cards.
