The Evolution of RPGs, Storytelling 64
Sessions held yesterday and today touched on the future of games and story in this new generation of games. Yesterday Microsoft held a panel with RPG veterans Hironobu Sakaguchi (currently working on Blue Planet), Peter Molyneux(Fable 2), and Dr. Ray Muzkya(Mass Effect). Between the three of them, these well known designers offered a view of the next step in RPGs. Sakaguchi in particular was vocal about his love of online RPGs, and there was some talk of differing player experiences the content-heavy titles genre. Meanwhile, on the heels of Phil Harrison's keynote, Warren Spector took the stage in a conference room to discuss next-gen storytelling. His biggest complaint was the linear nature of games today, and the sameness of experiences. Different talks, with insightful and similar conclusions.
finally (Score:2)
Re:finally (Score:5, Funny)
Hero: "Hello, bartender."
Bartender: "*sigh* I've been so depressed since my cat ran away".
H: "Wow, that sucks. Can I get a beer?"
B: "*sigh* I've been so depressed since my cat ran away".
H: "Yeah, I know. But cats do that sometimes. Who knows, maybe it'll come back. Now, how about that beer?"
B: "*sigh* I've been so depressed since my cat ran away".
H: "We've gone over that already. Beer? Please?"
B: "*sigh* I've been so depressed since my cat ran away".
H: "What the Hell?! Just do your job and get me a damned beer!"
B: "*sigh* I've been so depressed since my cat ran away".
H: "I KNOW that you want me to find the damned cat already! Fine! I'll find your cat! Never mind that I'm busy hunting down an evil sorcerer who intends on enslaving the entire kingdom. Cats take priority, right? If it's a cat you want, it's a cat you'll get. Okay? Satisfied? Now how about one for the road . . . the road I'm taking to find your cat?"
B: "*sigh* I've been so depressed since my cat ran away".
H: "That DOES IT! I'm just going to kill you and TAKE the damned beer. How's THAT sound, huh?!"
B: "*sigh* I've been so depressed since my cat ran away".
H: "Gaaaaaaahhhhhhh" *hack* *slash* *chop*
[Your reputation for evil has increased by 200. Townsfolk will no longer trade with you (yes, that includes beer)]
H: "Oh Krom-dammit."
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Resident Evil, etc. (Score:1)
NPC: "I really need some Medicine to clear up this infection, I can't go with you while I'm injured. I think there is some in the infirmary down the hall."
Player: [walks down hall, opens door to infirmary, then sees Locked Cabinet]
Game: "You need the Blue Key to open this cabinet."
Player: [Tries to chop cabinet open using fire axe]
Game: "You need the Blue Key to open this cabinet."
Player: [Fires shotgun at lock on
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well (Score:3, Insightful)
Its kinda hard to totally remove the linear nature of any game. Even MMORGP. If a game is good enough you wont even notice (Final Fantasy 3, 7)
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Same with most RPGs. They are just too bland and unoriginal. Can we have something besides a wizard, warrior and ranger dwarf, human, elf fighting orcs, dragons, demons t
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Planescape. I know, I know, it's how many years old now... but it still deserves playing now and again.
Obviously, we need more Modrons.
Linearity is cost-effective (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with non-linearity is that then you're paying to produce content that any single player is probably not going to experience. Sure, he can play the story over again to explore the different branches, but who except hardcore fans wants to do that? The challenge, rather, is to create mainly linear story lines that seem non-linear, by giving the illusion of choice, such as giving several choices that funnel back into the main thread. Another possibility is to give the player control over chronology: he chooses which parts of the story he wishes to advance when he wants. Both of these have applicability limited by the dictates of the story, of course.
The only place true non-linearity fits is when it's the primary selling point of the game. Sandbox games like the GTA series or world-based MMORPGs require non-linearity by their very nature (Of course, they also have storylines but those clearly aren't the main selling points). RPGs, though, are meant to be story-driven, and a story is primarily linear, since that's the way we humans experience time.
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This is pretty much what MMORPGs do already, after all. I doubt that all the players (or even the majority) are going to see the insi
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I have always learned that RPGs are not about blindly following a story, but about "what would you (or
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Maybe it's just me, but I would consider it perfectly reasonable to expect to play a game more than once, and I'm certainly no hardcore gamer.
In fact, I would say the opposite, that a linear game increases the problem of paying for development that a single player doesn't experience - since with a linear game, I have less desire to play the game more than once, in which case I will miss o
A lot has changed (Score:5, Funny)
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Exactly nothing has really changed. Give me an RPG with no leveling up, a storyline that is actually effected by my character, and a goal more creative than "kill the big evil thing"
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An RPG with no levelling up is equivalant to Commander Keen - a fixed charater throughout the game. Not a problem by itself, but such games are stereotyped to be "mindless action" with no plot.
A storyline affected by your character does appear from time to time - but there's ultimatly one main storyline which has slight variations. More often than not, "Alternat
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Four groups of 99 berzerkers (Score:2)
Ignoring the past (Score:3, Insightful)
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Maybe it's just me, but pretty much all the stories I've ever read were linear. Well, except for those Choose Your Own Adventure books.
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Sure you can. After all, unless you are playing Nethack eventually you will kill the monster and go home to live happily ever after. With any RPG I have ever played it was never a question of whether or not I would win, but how long it would take, and how many twists and turns would I encounter on the way. Seriously, how is that different from a book?
Nethack is only different because you are essentially guaranteed to lose.
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If I want to read a book, I'd really much rather read a book than play a video game. Books are better written, tend to have more complex and interesting
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I agree with you that RPGs should be less like a book, but that's hardly the case. When you talk to your friends about whatever RPG you happen to be playing they invariably will ask things like, "ave you made it past foo, yet?" or "have you killed bar?" Why is that? The answer is patently simple just like a book every RPG is ridiculously linear. At best in some RPGs you can skip over subplots, but you can do that in a book too.
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That's Not His Name (Score:3, Informative)
Just give me a worthy Fallout 3! (Score:2)
Arcanum 2 would be nice too
nonlinearity does not imply quality (Score:5, Insightful)
Marle: Crono, let's save the world! Yes/No?
While answer = no, repeat question until answer = yes
Now really, what kind of additional experience do you get by being able to say no? Do you see Lavos blow up the world and then the game telling you sorry, that was the wrong choice? Does that even add anything? In Breath of Fire 3, you can choose to either fight the Goddess or get locked up in a box for the rest of your life. Here you're allowed to make that choice and the game basically tells you 'whoa that was dumb, you lose!' and then you get to go through the same 30 minutes unskippable sequence again if you want to answer differently. If the choice is so dumb that no one would possibly ever want to go on the other path, then it might as well be a single choice.
Now if in Chrono Trigger when you choose to not save the world, the story shifts to Magus, who continues his plan to summon Lavos to 600 AD and now his plan won't be messed up by the heroes because they quit. Then it might make sense to have the choice to give up. If you give people the choice to branch, there has to be meaningful content on either side of the branch.
And even if there is content, it's hard to balance it so that they're at least both attractive. Let's say you're on your generic journey to stop the world from being destroyed, and some random town asks you fix their bridge and put your world saving quest on hold. So you want to make this nonlinear and actually a choice. So what's the drawback for not saving the town? Maybe another town gets nuked while you're doing this? Maybe some guy on your party decide you're a fool and leave the party forever? Maybe the boss actually becomes more powerful since you're slacking and the final fight is now twice as hard?
But then what do you get back for giving that up? More insight on a character's past? A piece of inexplicably powerful item? No matter how careful you are, you'll usually end up with one choice that is still better than the other, so that choice will get picked as the 'right' one anyway.
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Mod parent up! (Score:2)
Exactly! I'd mod you up if I could.
To expand on the grandparent's example, suppose you're on your way to save the world and a village asks you for help with some unrelated problem. The choice here isn't about what gets you the biggest advantage later in the game, it's about what kind of character you're playing. Are you playing someone who only cares about the final goal, or
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and the story is dull.
in fact, a non-rpg with linear history i played some time ago was what most ressembled "experiencing a history" to me. Wing Commander II.
You could get emotive responses from you wing man, no matter that it was linear, it realisticly affected the game play in a cool way.
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Let's say you have a choice of losing character A or character B. This means both characters have be at least comparablely important, and the loss of either is felt throughout the rest of the game in non gameplay terms. Offhand, I can't even remember a RPG where the loss of any characte
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Fahrenheit/Indigo Prohpecy was great in that aspect, while the overall story was a
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Tales of Symphonia semi non linear style (Score:1)
Sessions held... where? (Score:1, Flamebait)
Where were these sessions?
Zonk, can you at least get the journalism questions answered in the summaries, if you're not going to bother with typos and mispellings? The critical one here is "where?" (I think we got the "who?" and "what?" ok.)
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The most recent generation of games... (Score:2)
RPGs have massively broken out of the old mold in the last few years. No longer do we have something that's just a step above a computer game on paper in terms of narrative
Psychic detective (Score:2)
yeah, well, excuse me for not being excited (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem is that computers are still computers, dumb as shit, and that coding is still coding, an amazingly labor intensive task requiring a high degree of skill and a proffesion were throwing more people at it don't help.
Coding is expensive, if you want a dozen armour models/textures you can put a dozen artists on it. A dozen coders working on the same code just does not work.
Computers are dumb. Well they are. Comic/manga readers might be familiar with CBZ/CBR archives, nothing more then zip/rar files renamed. Yet most downloads still come with the zip or rar extensions meaning YOU have to tell the computer to open it with a comic reader rather then your regular archive reader. It don't matter wich OS or file explorer you use. NONE of them can tell a image archive from a regular archive. Humans on the other hand can do it in an instant just by the name alone.
Amazing!
This matters in games. There is NO magic that allows NPC's to adress you as female/male. Someone somewhere has spend a lot of time writing a lot of if(x) then Y else Z statements to deal with the fact that you were given a choice of sex. What sex to play, geez. Don't get your hopes up, you are still a CRPG player.
The more choices the more IF statements and it goes up in the way one of those curves go up that go up faster then the other value increases. Logo something (and people say playing computer games improves your brain)
NWN2 suffers from this in a bad way. You have so many choices that even the main story can't cope and you end up with the ultimate weapon being a sword. Nice, my monk sure could use that. Your wizard didn't like it much either?
It is even worse, in all the talks about the dwarf becoming a monk never once was the fact mentioned that I was one. Or did the thiefling mention I was a thiefling.
For that matter as you gained more potential party members the interaction between them in the game became less and less. Not because it wasn't designed, simply because at location X where A and B were to have a discussion you had A and C in your party so it never triggered.
Free, non-linear play doesn't make it any easier, playing a monk I offcourse build the monestary. I kept checking back to see if that dude was finally going to offer me some training. No deal, told to come back later.
Yeah great, was there something there after I got fed up? More linear play would have prevented a dozen checks and lots of frustration.
I wonder what could then be done in NWN2 had axed half the choices and instead fleshed out the remaining content more. Say that you had only first party members. Would they then have been able to get a lot more interaction. Might you have been able to influence anyone else then the dwarf to change proffesions.
A gameboy game solved that nicely, despite a HUGE party from wich you had to select a cast for battle ALL characters were present during cut scenes even if they had been critically wounded in a previous fight (not killed just not available for future combat missions). The game still had the problem that certain paths could only be opened in combat with the right character but that was usually hinted at in the briefing.
NWN2 totally did that in the wrong way. It FORCED you to take certain characters while at the same time punishing you (by not showing interactions) for not choosing the magic combo. I am not talking about the female that became a fixed member of your group, that worked, but those quests you had to take for instance bishop with you.
What about freedom to roam then? Well that was what Oblivion had. But in order to prevent you to be killed to easily OR find nothing a challenge things had to scale. So in the beginning even remote areas were a cakewalk and later on you would face thugs on imperial roads in million dollar outfits demanding loose chance.
Now compare this to the far more linear, less freedom, Planescape Torment. Areas were locked off, stopping you from going to far too fast, you couldn't p
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One solution I can see to h
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R-P-G (Score:1)
*Warning: I don't have any specific message in mind, and I'm just trying to include whatever responses occur to me. My thoughts may be a bit disjointed.*
IMHO, the neccessary quality would be that the presence of you, the player, creates a uniqu
Dynamically Generated Stories (Score:2, Insightful)
Blue PLANET? (Score:1)