On the Process of Effecting Mass 55
Dean Takahashi, of the San Jose Mercury News, has up a lengthy interview with Mass Effect project director Casey Hudson on the almost four-year-long development of the title. The two men go into some detail on BioWare's approach to game creation, as well as discussing the numerous technical and storytelling leaps they made with the game. "Hudson said, 'One thing I'm hoping people see in it is how much more there is for a player to make decisions on. It makes it really hard for us to develop, given the customization that we make possible in the game. For example, from the beginning, you are not pre-made as a character. You can play Commander Shepard. But you can also create your own character, male or female. You can choose your special abilities. Those are ways to make your game different and unique. These are things that make it much harder for us to make the game so that it is consistent all the way through, given your choices.'"
Dean Takahashi is a Microsoft mouthpiece (Score:0, Insightful)
Well, that's the real problem (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is that, until someone invents an AI GM that can at least pass the Turing test, what you ask is simply not feasible. Someone has to design and code all those states you changed.
I mean, let's pretend we design a game where each quest truly changes the game's world.
E.g., you can decide that instead of saving Bastila on KOTOR, you capture her and sell her to the Sith. (Sure, _Malak_ would probably kill you if you ran into him face to face, but there's no reason you couldn't go be the dark apprentice of some Sith who's never anywhere near Malak.) And the game branches from there. Taris is never destroyed. You never get the Ebon Hawk, even, since the Sith lift the blockade and Canderous doesn't need you to get off the planet. You never fly to Dantooine to become a Jedi. Etc. Let's say the whole story can fork like that at any point.
Well, now let's say we allow only 3 solutions to each such point: good, evil, don't do it. (After all, it's unrealistic that I _must_ do something at any point in the game.)
After the first such quest, there are 3 possible paths. The next one multiplies them to 9. Then 27. Then 81. Then 243.
Sounds good, right?
Well, it would, if the devs had infinite funds. In practice you can look at it more realistically like this: they'd have to code 243 outcomes and 1+3+9+27+81=121 quests, just to give you... a chain of exactly 5 quests. And you'd think "gee, this game sucked, it had a whole 5 quests."
Alternately, if they made it a completely linear game, you could see all 121 quests. And probably think, "bestest game evar! It had more quests than KOTOR 1+2 combined."
For the same development money, the linear solution will actually be the better game.
The problem with that branching is _literally_ that the chain you see is a logarithm of the total number of quests they have to code. Which gets shittier with each level you add to that pyramid. Adding a 6'th quest to the chain seen by the player, in a truly branching game would raise the number of quests you need to code by another 243. It's a mammoth cost and effort just so the player sees a total of 6, no matter what kind of character they play.
Worse yet, most of that immense number of branches will never be taken by anoyne. Most players play consistently all good or all evil, at least on the major issues. Branches and quests that would be only visible if you play good once, evil twice, neutral once, and good again, would be seen by maybe 0.1% of the players, so they'd be a major waste.
That, in a nutshell, is why everyone avoids branching like the plague.
KOTOR didn't truly branch either. Heck, even in Oblivion or Morrowind, open-ended as they are, the story doesn't really branch. The world, in fact, doesn't change much as a result of your actions.
What good designers really do is
A) contain the effects. Sure, they might tell you that you just got the Republic kicked off Manaan, but it won't influence the rest of the game at all. Yeah, you just got told that you gave the Sith a major advantage, but it's not like now they'll finish the conquest before you reach the Star Forge.
B) create an illusion of having some consequence. Sure, you'll get an alignment number, NPC's talking about you like you're Mother Teresa or Jack The Ripper, etc, but that's all an illusion that doesn't influence anything else.
Basically that way they can give you all the quests and a number of ways to solve each, without the possibilities exploding out of control. The trick is to keep it all an illusion.
Re:You mean "affect" (Score:3, Insightful)
Learn what words really mean before you try to be a grammar nazi.
whoosh....