By John Walker on September 1st, 2009 at 11:30 am.
I’ve been thinking about quests. Quests in RPGs. More specifically, what I want from a quest. As we’re wandering through the ancient lands/secret base/alien world, there’s a fairly good chance a local is going to ask us for a favour, on our way to complete a larger task. I adore this structure, this idea of having larger and smaller aims, an important journey, but time for diversions. There’s something specifically soothing about it – a to-do list of adventures. But if I could pick my consequences, what would they be?
I don’t think it’s any great controversial statement to suggest BioWare does this best. However, their model is most people’s model, whether that’s their own kin at Obsidian or elsewhere, or any others, quests tend to combine a mercenary task with an emotional weight. Kill the evil space robot of Planet F to collect the Quantum Canon component. But do it because he murdered this woman’s son. That space bastard.
With Mass Effect 2 promising darker themes, more brutal stories and fewer fluffy asides, Dragon Age implying a hardened world of grisly fighting, and Alpha Protocol replacing good/bad choices with murky/murkier, this notion appears to be getting increasingly mature. What will be interesting to see, in all forthcoming RPGs, is whether there can be a sense of scale to match.
I think scale is the hardest thing to get right in such games. Take Knights Of The Old Republic as a useful example. KotOR sets up the most remarkable sense of scale after its opening few hours. You spend time on an occupied planet, an oppressed people caught between two evil forces, performing trials. Important to those you help – sourcing medical supplies for the free clinic, for instance, has huge potential impact for good – but made meaningless in the shocking destruction of the planet that quickly follows. It creates a sense of massiveness, or enormous consequence. But it is, of course, a fudge. You had no part in that – your actions were the smaller pieces on the surface, the obliteration hard-coded into the plot. Once it’s happened, you’re rushing around another planet looking for lost Jedi, convincing families to resolve differences or slaughter each other, and helping a woman find her droid. Again, important for those involved, not of huge impact to the galaxy as a whole.
That’s not quite fair. Looking for the lost Jedi carries quite a weight. Find her, and you can kill her on the spot (out of mad malice). Or you can aid her, bring her into your group of friends, and spend the next 30 hours travelling the galaxy with her. She can make a massive impact on your experience as a constant companion. Or she can be a corpse. That’s a fairly hefty decision.
But I don’t want my choices to always be life or death. And equally, I don’t want them to always be wrong or right. Sometimes these are perfect themes, but not always. I want to fathom a means to create a sense of scale behind my actions, without their being so dramatically thudding. I want subtlety, but impact.
I think the problem is, too often, that your choice is reduced to a binary switch, and whichever way you flick it, nothing changes. Return to the island/planet/space station, and the consequences of your actions are sat there, lifeless, whether they’re a corpse or a reunited mother and son. Talk to them and they might say, “Thank you so much for your help! Without my child would have died!” Return weeks later and they might say, “Thank you so much for your help! Without my child would have died!” The moment I was finished with them, they ceased to live. Their moment of reuniting happiness becomes something of a grotesque parody. Trapped in that instance, unable to move on with their lives, I might just as well have killed them both and robbed from their cupboards.
When I say “nothing changes”, that’s not strictly true. My experience changed, my memories of the events are constructed uniquely, and even though their existences are frozen in time, they’re how I left them. I’m not dismissing the impact of this at all. What I’m wondering is: can this get bigger without breaking a game?
I’m not entirely sure. RPGs must be the world’s biggest nightmare to build. Creating a series of choices, and yet at the same time a coherent and cogent game, with meaningful direction and strong narrative… I wouldn’t like that to be my job. Clearly the simplest solution to doing it well is to have choices make aesthetic differences, and player experience differences, but not impact the overall story in any massive way. The difficult part is to do this incredibly well.
I think, perhaps, the greatest example of doing this incredibly well is Deus Ex. The story has been told many times, but it bears repeating once more. Long ago when the world was young and Kieron and I were even younger, I called him from my home in Guildford to his home in the PC Gamer offices to discuss Deus Ex. We were chatting about various moments, sharing thoughts, and then I said, “Wasn’t it awful when your brother died?” Kieron replied, “My brother didn’t die?”
Of course it turns out whether you save older Denton or not, you still travel next to Hong Kong. I went there to recover a chip from his body. Kieron went there to meet his brother. I broke the news of his death to his girlfriend. Kieron went to see his girlfriend for other reasons. We both played exactly the same game, playing through exactly the same levels, but our motivations were dramatically different. Neither of us could perceive a game in which we would go to those places for any reason other than those we had at the time, creating the sense of something unique to our decisions and experiences.
I think this is possibly the most realistic structure. It is of course one that’s broken with a second play through (or a sneaky use of save games, like someone with six fingers and a thumb in their choose-your-own-adventure book). It also goes some way to creating an illusion that multiple endings aren’t about pushing a particular coloured button in a scene near the end. (Which oddly enough Deus Ex was more guilty of than most.)
So what is the quest that I want?
Well, I want all that currently exists. While the vaccination quest in Mass Effect that caused me to write a diatribe about morality in RPGs almost exactly a year ago was ridiculous, I want those weighty decisions put in front of me. However, I’d like to know the people involved, be troubled by an emotional connection, and have the opportunity to speak to experts on either side before making my feelings known, I still want those tough choices. And I certainly want the most obvious, “Could you deliver this parcel to the butcher?” quests, that turn out to be smuggling illegal magic spells for an underground cartel, and finish with fighting a terrible warlock. I want all that stuff to be there. But I want, when I’ve finished them, to see progress in the lives with which I was involved.
I don’t think this breaks the game. If I save the husband from the Gnarth Beast on Undersea Base 6, then I don’t want it to end when I inform his wife and she gives me her father’s anti-shark gun to thank me. Many games will have it set up so should you return you might find them both stood outside their house like garden ornaments, praising you on repeat every time you speak to them. But I want more. More I say! I want to return later and find they’ve had a fight and aren’t speaking to each other. And later still, their away on holiday. Come back just before the end and they’re she’s dying. I want their existence to continue, even though I may not be a part of it. Clearly should I have killed her husband and fed him to the Gnarth Beast, then these things wouldn’t be happening. Other things instead. Not huge changes, but progress.
Then elaborate on this. If I save the husband, perhaps he helps me in the final battle. It doesn’t change the ending of the game. It doesn’t enormously impact upon the fight. But he’s there, aiding me, a bonus. But that pirate I thwarted, returning all his stolen gold to the orphanage, he’s there making it more difficult.
It’s all about embracing the more trivial parts of the game and giving them consequence. It’s not about being unrealistic and demanding each choice I make creating another divergent path until the game looks like a fractal, coded by ten million people over a thousand years. It’s about not only creating the illusion that my path through the pre-determined narrative is unique, but flavouring that narrative with the consequences of my actions.
I find little in gaming more comforting than the quest log. For a person who never makes to-do lists, and is pitifully disorganised, having something so neat and structured is a pleasure and a security. Watching one get crossed off as I complete it, seeing entire chapters relocated to the list of completed tasks, it’s wonderful. What I want next is that list of completed tasks to be reminders of places to return, or hints of what’s yet to come.
01/09/2009 at 11:46 Bobsy says:
Hm. My problem with side-quests is when they’re poorly weighted with relevance next to the main task at hand. Bioware frequently tasks you with saving the world/galaxy/reality itself and then asks you to take time out of this most important of charges to solve relatively minor problems. I’m increasingly of the opinion to say stuff it to anything that’s not at least as important as the main quest.
Most glaringly this happened in Psychonauts on my first playthrough. The main quest was given such importance and urgency that it didn’t even cross my mind to take my time and explore a bit first. I suddenly found myself on the Asylum island realising I was in the home straight of the game and I’d seen barely a smidgen of the content up to that point. So I packed it in, took a couple of weeks rest, then started the game from the beginning again, properly this time.
Still. I shouldn’t have to, yeah?
01/09/2009 at 11:51 The Poisoned Sponge says:
I think the main obstacle for that sort of thing is the incredible amount of writing required for it. If you were to give consequence beyond the obvious to every decision you make as a player, that increases the amount of work needed for the game tenfold, because you’re effectively making a set of outcomes for every single piece of work you’d done previously. Really, I think that’s probably why we haven’t seen it.
On the flipside, I don’t see that as a problem we should have to encounter. The more freeform games become, the less this stuff should be scripted and written, to the extent where we get things becoming a little more random and surprising. I’m really waiting for someone to do a procedural RPG.
01/09/2009 at 11:53 Butler` says:
But I want more. More I say! I want to return later and find they’ve had a fight and aren’t speaking to each other. And later still, their away on holiday. Come back just before the end and they’re she’s dying.
I suppose it’s just developer relectunce to spend resources on what is essentially fluff — non-essential, peripheral stuff like this which may or may not enhance the player experience.
It’s a question of how far they want to go to create a dynamic world and a sense of wider scale complexity, but of course there’s a cost associated with doing so. And one no one, as of yet, is willing to pay.
01/09/2009 at 12:03 Nick says:
I don’t think the amount of writing required is the issue, although it may be a contributing factor – It’s becoming clear to me that the costs of providing content at the required quality (which these days means expert animation and full voice over) are providing a strong disincentive for studios to indulge in too much side-questery and more ‘impactful’ questing of the type we’re wanting.
You see it with each successive generation of Bioware games – increased production values, less actual content (compare BG1 and BG2 to Jade Empire, Mass Effect). Same with each successive Bethesda RPG (Daggerfall is more content heavy than Oblivion, which is more content heavy than Fallout 3). Those games which prioritise content over production values (Gothic series, for example) are generally seen as more niche and less successful.
The quality burden is now simply too great to support the kind of content generation that would be required to fulfill such desires, which is a real pity in my view. The market has spoken, and it seems to largely prefer action/RPG hybrids with top notch production values to anything else.
01/09/2009 at 12:04 simonkaye says:
I’m so with you on this stuff, John.
I remember in Oblivion – saving Kvatch was an incredibly big deal. Stage one responses were fine – “hey, aren’t you the hero of kvatch?!” – but that was it. The city was never rebuilt, the people there never moved from their spots, the refugees were never rehomed. It was frozen in time.
Real immersion has little to do with graphics – we have to feel like the world around us is responding and growing and operating independently.
The only two games to have REALLY got this right are, as you say, Deus Ex – and Blade Runner.
01/09/2009 at 12:08 John Walker says:
But Sponge, that’s exactly what I’m not suggesting. It’s not about writing 10x more game to account for all decisions. It’s about entwining decisions into the future of the game. If I kill Man X, Man X doesn’t show up in the end battle. And vice versa. It’s a small tweak based on a small decision. Lots more work, clearly, but not an improbable amount.
01/09/2009 at 12:15 Clovis says:
Dang, I wanted to complain about Kvatch! There is a similar station in Mass Effect 2 that never improved.
I want less clear cut decisions. The choices are always good, bad, or maybe neutral. How about quests that don’t have any obvious answer? And then, even if you pick the “good” option, you sometimes have an awful result.
01/09/2009 at 12:16 Heliocentric says:
Yeah, this is a problem. Creating a content for 1% of the audience or less. 4 choices each for one of 3 options, then you have 81 unique outcomes.
Do you write all 81 events out for all possible phases? When anything short of a player replaying, AND exploring will miss this content.
A small village you return to, or i suppose a space ship. With a population you rely on. But you would need a lack of quest heads for the density of event to be meaningful. Just a small population of well written multiple event characters who grow, age persist and ultimately die?
But then you must sacrifice scale. NWN 2 had a good answer, don’t let you go back to places there is not new content at.
01/09/2009 at 12:18 Rinox says:
Good read!
I found that The Witcher did a very good job at interweaving side- and subquests with the overarching personal, racial and political main plot(s). I don’t mean in a very radical game-changing way as in Deus Ex but in terms of creating a coherent world in which your actions on various levels start influening each other.
The game had a very natural way of coercing you into some personal and moral choices in smaller quests that ended up influencing the main storyline in one way or another. Very well done. Of course, I played it only after the Enhanced Edition came out so it may not have been as great on release.
Anyway, bottom line of good game design: choices are only interesting if they have real consequences. If the outcome of a choice is nil anyway, you’re better off pushing the playing along a linear path instead of offering him a frustrating illusion of choice.
01/09/2009 at 12:18 Lyndon says:
I think my major problem with the old choices and consequences is how they usually tend to get decided during dialogue screens instead of through the actual play. You know you’ve done the quest and then at the end when talking to the NPC there’s two options,
1.) Have your lollipop back kid
or
2.) Ha Ha you’re never getting your lollipop *Steps on lollipop*
Let me give you an example of what I want. I’ve been playing Fallout again, in that I tried to steal from the doctor in shady sands, he didn’t like that and a fight broke out I had to fight my way out blasting peasants as I went.
Once I’d gotten away, it occurred to me “Well I guess I won’t be going back to shady sands again…” Now that’s choices and consequences.
01/09/2009 at 12:20 Gap Gen says:
I think the linear RPG has to work quite hard to produce interesting consequences. Equally, a truly non-linear game is often going to be very hard to predict, due to chaotic dynamics – for example, if you save a baby, that baby could turn out to be Robohitler, or provide the one extra body mass that causes the bus to tip off the edge of the canyon, or whatever. I think there’s a huge gap in games for things that push the boundary of modelling people beyond The Sims, which could be interesting in its own right.
I think something like Deus Ex is very difficult to pull off from a linear design point of view, which is why most games with quests give isolated experiences. Deus Ex, equally, was highly successful in combining design and excellent writing to produce characters you cared about. For example, if JC died, you needed extra dialogue that said “I’m sorry about your brother” or whatever – rather than it just being a case of which objects populated the world.
Also, part of it is that Bioware has a distinct style of writing games, and I’ve complained about this before. I found listening to a lot of the detail in Mass Effect to be a bit annoying – I do prefer Half-Life 2′s show-don’t-tell approach, even if it means that the universe isn’t bulked out as much in the game. For example, in Mass Effect, I found the mission where Wrex just barges in and kills a guy who’s surrendered to be more interesting and affecting than any amount of wittering of your crew. The concept of a nomad space-faring race is interesting, but that sort of thing is why I read books and short stories – it’s not why I play games.
01/09/2009 at 12:21 Paul Moloney says:
I generally enjoyed Mass Effect, but the planetary side quests were spectacularly lame, more akin to arcade shooter power-up collections than attempts at story-telling. In fact, by trying to cram in lots of planets which had little or nothing to do on them, the game felt less “real” than it they’d simply concentrated on a few worlds, like KoToR. I hope that Dragon Age has a bit more to it.
01/09/2009 at 12:25 Rinox says:
@ heliocentric
Yeah, I think the only way to truly achieve such a world/game would be to build a program that can ‘think up’ stories of its own. Of course, that’s a helluvatask. Chris Crawford has his storytron, but afaik it’s still way off from the level of complexity we’ve come to expect from our modern RPG’s.
http://www.storytron.com/
01/09/2009 at 12:25 Stense says:
I’ve always felt that although the side quests Bioware put in their games are generally fun, they are all too often rather black and white in their choices. Obsidian on the other hand I’d say are much more skilled at presenting real consequences to your actions in a game. There is that wonderful bit in Knights of the Old Republic 2 where a beggar asks for a few credits, depending on your response, you get to see what happens to the beggar after he’s gone away. He doesn’t necesserily benefit from that free hand out. Another is in Neverwinter Nights 2, when you get a new companion called Shandra who will go with you everywhere. Later in the game you are put on trial and she has to testify on your character, and your actions she’d witnessed up until that point does have a great impact on her testimony. Thats the type of writing that I think suits itself very well to RPGs. Unfortunately, I’m not sure many studios have the time (or perhaps the skill) required to succesfully pull it off.
01/09/2009 at 12:28 Clovis says:
After giving this some thought, Bethesda may have been close to what you wanted. If they simply expanded their NPC AI you could get cool results. It is annoying that the couple you reunited are still standing in front of their house. If you had a complex NPC AI you could just “release” those characters back into the pool of non-quest NPCs that walk around and look normal. Now just add in relationships, break ups, death, children, whatever to that procedural NPC AI.
It would be cool to occasionally visit especially memorable NPCs to see what they are up to. I don’t know if an RPG can be fully procedural, but doing this doesn’t seem too bad.
Also, revisiting places in modern “open world” type RPGs should be rewarded. Kvatch should be rebuilt, and then there should be some new quests available. You’d never return to an old town in Final Fantasy, but it makes more sense in a modern RPG.
01/09/2009 at 12:34 Lilliput King says:
I know exactly what you mean. Once a quest is completed, there is no meaningful continuation – short term consequences, sure, but in the long term, everything turns out the same.
Baldur’s Gate had its share of lame, short-term consequence quests, but also had a couple of quests which mildly changed the course of the story, and had effects on the later stage of the game. It even had a rather snazzy penultimate end-fight where you gathered allies you may or may not have made earlier for an assault on a Vampire’s dungeon. They were all a bit of a pain in the arse and got in the way, but it was still nice to see your actions earlier on influencing who fought with you if anyone etc.
01/09/2009 at 12:34 Kieron Gillen says:
I think I’m with Bobsy here actually. Side-quests are… strange.
KG
01/09/2009 at 12:35 rob says:
Bobsy: “The main quest was given such importance and urgency that it didn’t even cross my mind to take my time and explore a bit first.”
This strikes me as good storytelling more than anything else. Things that exist outside of the main story add to the life of the game, I’d say.
The talk of urgency is interesting though. The concept of game-time is a real problem with RPGs, I think. Thinking back to Baldur’s Gate 2 – at the start of the game proper, your sister is imprisoned. Now, you can rush like hell to rescue Imoen, if you like – but to the game, it doesn’t matter how long you take to rescue her… and you’re also now in the middle of a city, with thousands of sidequests. Most people would say, ‘hey, Imoen can wait – I want to kill some dragons and level up a bit’.
Taking it on from Jim’s ‘what I want’, how about if you were urgently on the archetypal quest to save the galaxy – say Obi Wan appears to you in a vision to tell you that, yes, you, a farmhand from Space Norfolk is the only hope to save the galaxy. Your usual timeframe for this would be, well… you wouldn’t have a timeframe. When you save the galaxy, the game ends. It could take you 10 hours, it could take you 50.
But how about if you knew you only had 2 hours until the galaxy killing bomb exploded – If you don’t find and defuse the bomb in time, tough luck. Game over.
Now sidequests start to become more interesting…
What if you’re on your way to defuse the bomb, and a woman throws herself at your feet to say “You look like a hero! Please help me! Darth Tyrannosauras has kidnapped my children, he’s in the building over there, and he says he’ll kill them if I don’t pay him 20000 Space Pounds!” – typical sidequest stuff. Only now, maybe you have time to do this, maybe you don’t. Maybe it’s a trap and you’ll be ambushed? Maybe your conscience can’t let you leave two kids to die? Could you really just rush past a mother like that…
All of a sudden, the decision to do a sidequest becomes urgent and intriguing – not just ‘oh, I’ll get some more XP’.
Obviously this wouldn’t work ALL the time, but it’s an interesting thought nonetheless.
01/09/2009 at 12:35 Uglycat says:
Tsk, all you Kvatch complainers: http://www.tesnexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=15412
01/09/2009 at 12:36 Idiot says:
No mention of The Witcher, Fallout or Age of Decadence in an article discussing choice and consequence?
Glaring omissions.
01/09/2009 at 12:36 Paul Moloney says:
“There is that wonderful bit in Knights of the Old Republic 2 where a beggar asks for a few credits, depending on your response, you get to see what happens to the beggar after he’s gone away”
I’m looking forward to playing that once they finish the Restoration project, even if KoToR 1 is on my all-time list of Disappointing Games (I was unlucky enough to run into a whole bunch of bugs for side-quests meaning I couldn’t end them).
P.
01/09/2009 at 12:42 Lilliput King says:
KoToR ran impossibly slowly on my computer of the time and crashed periodically, but I recently played through it again and it ran pretty much flawlessly, and is still a great RPG.
Pretty much black/white choices and consequences though, as is Bioware’s usual way.
01/09/2009 at 12:44 Bhazor says:
Reply to Gap Gen
“I think the linear RPG has to work quite hard to produce interesting consequences. Equally, a truly non-linear game is often going to be very hard to predict, due to chaotic dynamics”
Give me chaos over linearity every time. The unhinged chaos you create in Boiling Point is a joy and means that there is always a consequence as the dozen factions jostle to see who hates me the most.
Reply to Nick
Pretty much my thoughts exactly. Its worth pointing out that both KOTOR games were one third alien gibberish and only a half dozen models and four or five talk animations. Neverwinter Nights 2 campaign was also primarily text based and all these games offer far greater depth than Mass Effect managed.
01/09/2009 at 12:47 Ginger Yellow says:
I thnk some of it is down to the cost/effort of writing and implementing meaningfully different outcomes – I’m certain this is how developers and publishers justify it to themselves – but frankly I think a lot of it is down to the reification of genre. It wouldn’t be much harder to write a 20 hour RPG with meaningful, intertwined decisions than it is to write a 100 hour RPG with traditional consequences. But RPG makers (and JRPGs are even worse for this) have generally constructed a strict dichotomy between story quests and side quests, playable characters and non-playable characters. It’s these dichotomies that really prevent the types of consequences John’s calling for, along with a strong desire to tell a particular story (or, with Bioware, a certain range of stories). An RPG about developing a character through a living world, where every quest is a “story quest” and every NPC is a person with desires and goals, would require a different mindset – more like what the developers are trying to achieve in The Sims or Kudos or even Harvest Moon – but is eminently possible.
01/09/2009 at 12:48 faelnor says:
For all its shortcomings and unevenness in writing, the way the main story, the secondary stories and the quests are woven in the Witcher is most satisfying. One of the best, if not the best, in RPGs since the Infinity Engine.
No mention here is disappointingly criminal.
01/09/2009 at 12:48 Dinger says:
Okay Walker, so you don’t want to rewrite every possibility, just build some continuity into the narrative to show the player matters. It’s a matter of inflection, as in the hypothetical case:
T1: A band of brigands has been robbing and pillaging the countryside for some time, and now is approaching the player’s home town. Player has option of A. Killing the brigands B. Convincing them they’re better off sacking that elven city or C. Telling the brigands where the town’s treasury is in exchange for a cut.
T2: Player’s elven sidekick (James) needs help convincing his nubile elven sister to marry a dwarf lord.
If at T1 player followed option (A), he says, “I’ve always admired your direct way of dealing with problems. Could you compel Ms. Sophie to trothe lord Winterbottom?”
If option (B), he says, “Your famous pragmatism cost the lives of a thousand elf-folk at the fall of Pommeroy, but now I think it be of service to elfkind.
If option (C), he says, “I can trust you to help out, for you can see the profit in it. But keep your hands off my sister.”
Little tweaks or not, it’s still a lot to debug, and it doesn’t demonstrably sell more titles. So economically, it’ll drive up cost for no return. Maybe the only way you can have a truly interactive narrative experience is with other humans in the loop.
That said, there’s already a huge economic problem in game design. If the game is 40+ hours, most of the content created is experienced by only a small percentage of players.
01/09/2009 at 13:03 Doug F says:
“Dang, I wanted to complain about Kvatch! There is a similar station in Mass Effect 2 that never improved. ”
Greetings, man from the future! Thank god you came back to warn us of this – hopefully it’s not too late for Bioware to fix this before the game releases next year.
01/09/2009 at 13:04 Jazmeister says:
I concur. Quests happen all the time in real life, but in games, they’re inflated to this formulaic nonsense with a fanfare at either end. I still think, perhaps naively, that the mandate of an RPG is “role play” – getting immersed, becoming involved, and feeling things.
Obviously, having someone say the same thing twice is already a fallacy (as is user-driven conversation – if I want to talk to you, I don’t run up and say “talk to me”, I say something first, and you reply. Maybe you say something to me, and I reply.)
I can’t help but think the high level art-chain is what bloats the dev time on these games. I’m not anti-graphics, not at all, but I think people like Eskil Steenberg and Adam Saltsman have the right idea here. Computers work by building on a library of subroutines – this is obviously why we have operating systems in the first place. If you’re doing the same thing twice, you’re not using the tools in the right way. L4D cobbles the zombies together from a series of faces. In games past, they’d be entire zombie models, hand-placed by the designer. Procedural gameplay seems to be regarded as this gimmicky thing – I think it’s secretly the key to overcoming this content-heavy obstacle that’s threatening progress industry-wide.
/tin-foil-hat
01/09/2009 at 13:10 Ginger Yellow says:
“Maybe the only way you can have a truly interactive narrative experience is with other humans in the loop.”
The funny thing is that outside of perhaps Eve, MMOs fail even more spectacularly on this front than single player RPGs. Your questing accomplishments make absolutely no difference to the world – in most cases, not even for your own version. Usually, everything is reset once you’re out of the instance or public quest. In WoW, the only time there’s any real change to the environment is when Blizzard releases a content update.
It seems to me that grand strategy games are the best genre for this sort of narrative, and even there a lot of games fall short.
01/09/2009 at 13:12 abhishek says:
In the past few years, I’ve always thought that Bioware simplifies their moral choices a bit too much. Whether it’s dialogues, or quest outcomes, there’s always an obvious ‘good’ or ‘bad’ choice to make. You are essentially ‘farming’ the outcome of your choices in the form of light side/dark side points in KOTOR, renegade/paragon points in Mass Effect. While it’s not a severe criticism of their work, after playing The Witcher in which the moral implications and consequences of your choices are not immediately obvious, I do get the feeling that Bioware’s writing standards have dipped somewhat.
01/09/2009 at 13:21 Clovis says:
@Doug F :-P I wrote that too fast. I bet I’m right though! What is really funny is that I meant, “Mass Effect too”. That’s like the dumbest mispelling of “too” EVAR.
01/09/2009 at 13:24 Heliocentric says:
Its dawned on me that lots of games do do what you are asking for. From dwarf fortress, the sims. But more abstractly, pirates! and civ/alpha centuri. These games offer the persistence and the growth. In pirates i can expand the domain of the british and that matters.
A more recent example i desire a sequel for is hinterland, when the orc’s attack my village and my farmer dies he’s gone. Now if only they could pull back the pace of the game and have neural net ai express opinions on the matters.
A proper neural net conversation engine could do wonderful things with npc’s. They would talk about things they know about, you could even tell them things.
01/09/2009 at 13:25 Bhazor says:
I’ve always hoped for an rpg that takes less than 30 minutes to complete but it is meant to be played through a dozen times. Each time your choices mean you make mean you only see/hear a small portion of the story and characters will either die, refuse to speak to you or even lie right to your face. Also every dialog choice and decision would have subtle and unexpected outcomes. The closest I can think of to this is the opening to Fallout 3 and the choice on whether to take the gun or not and when to intervene.
I would also like a kitten that sings and a pillow that tells secrets about my enemies. I would like a lot of things.
01/09/2009 at 13:26 Sam Crisp says:
I remember reading in a preview of The Sims 3 that the neighbourhood you were playing in would evolve and change over time as you played as your family. I gathered that you could choose to interact with other families and that you would have some influence on them if you wanted to. For example, the people in the town would age, begin relationships, have children and die and you could leave them be or you could start relationships with them and have their children, potentially changing the future of not just their future generations but their day to day life. I don’t know if this actually happens in the game or if it is noticeable, but I really liked the idea.
Recently, I watched some gameplay footage of Heavy Rain for the PS3, which I think looks interesting (although I have never played Fahrenheit). In the video, the player character is a father and his son is watching TV. The player tells his son to do his homework and the child says he’ll do it later. The words NOW and LATER appear above the player’s head as dialogue choices, floating around with their respective key-presses (It also looks like conversations do not take place in a break from the normal gameplay and that the player can move around as usual while listening and choosing to reply, although I could be wrong). The player chooses NOW and he tells the son to do his homework and then turns off the TV.
In The Sims 3, you can take direct control over a child and tell them to do their homework or not, causing the possible consequences of staying up to do it, getting tired and being in a bad mood the next day; or getting enough sleep but getting in trouble at school. These choices are not major but affect that character in such a way that it could lead to any number of different things.
In Heavy Rain – although it more linear and scripted than The Sims 3 – you still have that choice, but you are role-playing as the father and your influence is made made indirectly. I could be wrong about all this as I have not played Heavy Rain and have only briefly played The Sims 3, but I am really fascinated by the potential this sort of game design has and feel that these two games should get a mention when discussing this topic.
01/09/2009 at 13:26 shiggz says:
I would say bioware makes more “movie-like” plot quests. However for my money many of the quests Bethesda are superior hands down. Im thinking specifically one:
where you realize two guys in two different towns look the exact same. If you talk to them and here there back story you find out one was adopted… it further you find they are twins, you find their old burned out house. then after escorting one through the forest to reunite you take them both to their old burned out house with there parents corpses. Then they start rebuilding the house and replanting garden as such. Come back a few days later and stuff i rebuilt i think there was even a few follow on quests. all from noticing two guys look the exact same and then digging a little deeper. BRILLIANT!
Yes i share your frustration that their is not more organic evolution to the quests effect on the game world. Some day today’s quests will look like yesterdays physics… ridiculous on stilts that such an empty lifeless untouchable background would be considered acceptable.
01/09/2009 at 13:34 kraii says:
!!!!!!!!
I’ve played deus ex at least 3 times, and I never realised you could save paul.
01/09/2009 at 13:34 shiggz says:
My idea for a game is a Medieval game no magic. You are in small town with a castle. Middle of the game you take over the castle and start rebuilding it , hiring troops, dumping all your extra weapons and stuff from adventuring into the armory and then troops use it… NWN2 dipped its toe in the water with this concept id love to see a game just focused entirely on it alone…. with no magic… soo sick to death of magic in games and moves. Basically the life of a prince in Medieval Europe from a first/third action view. Travel to far away towns to recruit blacksmiths and town guards etc etc.
01/09/2009 at 13:38 ghor says:
I think side quests would be generally be better if the main quest didn’t always have to be so epic. I’m tired of saving the world/galaxy/universe.
01/09/2009 at 13:38 suibhne says:
@John: “I don’t think it’s any great controversial statement to suggest BioWare does this best.”
Wait, really? Bioware might be the exemplar of the model you’re discussing, but they’re also one of the biggest offenders when it comes to just about every one of the flaws on offer:
laughably trivial sidequests alongside an epic “save the entirely multiverse nownowNOW” main storyline;
a central section that boils down to “visit X number of locations to retrieve X pieces of the thingy required to open up the last section of the game”;
a fundamentally binary approach to morality in choices of solution – and worse, a tendency to always equate “evil” (for PC’s options) with “street-thuggish” (i.e., “Give me an extra 50p for finding your styling iron, you scurvy dog”) rather than anything like real evil;
a total lack of independent reality in the gameworld, so quests represent the sole life in the world and that life ceases once the quest is complete; and so on.
What Bioware does well is storytelling, and they sometimes do that very well even with mediocre narratives. Their quest design has always and only been effective when it’s been a vehicle for that storytelling, but there’s the rub – their brand of “storytelling” means that the world exists solely for the player and there’s pretty much never an illusion of independent reality, either before or after you dispose of the three bunnies in the elderly couple’s garden (and whether or not you kill them, or trap and release for awesome Light Side points).
The Witcher is a good counterpoint because it matches narrative design and quest design. There are some fairly small sidequests in the game, but every one of them supports the central fiction of witchers in Sapkowski’s world: the game’s sidequests either relate to Geralt’s friends, or they relate to what a witcher would/should actually be doing as a freelance monster killer and general supernatural fix-it guy.
01/09/2009 at 13:42 toni says:
the witcher had many of the features combined you are looking for, no need to cite Bioware all the time since they have done only the same game with different textures since KOTOR.
01/09/2009 at 13:46 shiggz says:
I agree tired of saving world/galaxy with a 3 man team… its stupid. Save a city maybe, a town sure. We aren’t all little Napoleons; most of us would be happy just saving or helping the ones around us that we care about.
01/09/2009 at 13:47 suibhne says:
@ Bhazor: “I’ve always hoped for an rpg that takes less than 30 minutes to complete but it is meant to be played through a dozen times. Each time your choices mean you make mean you only see/hear a small portion of the story and characters will either die, refuse to speak to you or even lie right to your face. Also every dialog choice and decision would have subtle and unexpected outcomes.”
That’s somewhat similar to the approach being taken by Age of Decadence, aside from the game providing much more than 30 minutes of gameplay. It sounds like any given playthrough will “miss” much of the content, as the game will react very closely to your character build and your choices; many of the approaches to the storyline are incompatible with each other as you move through the game, particularly since it’s based so much on factions. Vince is going for a highly responsive (to player choices) game in which you might see 6-8 hours of gameplay on your first playthrough, then replay the game with a different character and set of choices and see an (almost) entirely different 6-8 hours.
Note that I just picked that time figure out of thin air, tho. I don’t think he’s hazarded any guesses about playtime; I just wanted to provide an example.
01/09/2009 at 13:50 toni says:
yeah, suibhne, I can’t agree more with your post. read it after posting mine, pretty much sums up my gripes with Bioware and I could not have put it better. There is no new “trend” in RPGs, just publishers+developers being late for the party that started decades ago.
01/09/2009 at 13:53 Ginger Yellow says:
I’ve always hoped for an rpg that takes less than 30 minutes to complete but it is meant to be played through a dozen times. Each time your choices mean you make mean you only see/hear a small portion of the story and characters will either die, refuse to speak to you or even lie right to your face. Also every dialog choice and decision would have subtle and unexpected outcomes.
Masq
01/09/2009 at 13:54 Hmm-Hmm. says:
I’m with bobsy here. I mean, the whole pace, atmosphere and intensity of the gameworld is often spearheaded by the main quest line. What you do, where you go. So it only makes sense that other things (quests/things to do) would have to be supporting the main quest or be sufficiently important on their own (to the main character(s)).
There’s obviously quite a bit of give and take, but Fallout did it well, with the starting quest having a timer. I mean you have plenty of time, but it’s basically a pointer saying “Don’t mess about (for too long) or face the consequences.” You still have freedom to do a lot of other things, but you can’t just ignore the greater goal forever. And, really, not enough other games do this.
01/09/2009 at 13:55 Byron_Black says:
I like the consequence system in the witcher, choices don’t effect the overal ending but do change the game. An example is helping the knight in the 2nd act will help you get through a guarded door later, whereas if you didn’t you have to bribe the guards to get through. Each time a consequence effects the game you get a nice little cut scene telling you what you did to cause this and how it could have turned out if you didn’t.
01/09/2009 at 13:56 abhishek says:
kraii : I’ve always found saving Paul is a challenging affair. When the suits burst into the New York hotel room, it’s probably the hardest fight of the game till that point. I always save up my LAMs and stick them right next to the door of the suite and that does some major damage to them, but it’s still a tough fight.
Don’t be surprised at learning new things about the game though. In my latest playthrough, in the New York section itself, I found, for the first time, that underground lair of sorts (the ones with the rotating bridges and what not). And this was after completing the game about 6 times now!
01/09/2009 at 13:57 Zaphid says:
As several people said before me, not mentioning Witcher when it comes to storytelling is criminal. That game made me enjoy sidequests even more than the main storyline, especially because almost every quest ended up with me saying: “Whoah, I didn’t expect THAT to happen.” Yet when you looked back, they made sense.
01/09/2009 at 14:03 GJLARP says:
Well John, it’s time you took a trip down memory lane and re-played Fallout 1. They don’t make games anymore, like they used to.
01/09/2009 at 14:10 Cooper says:
Peter Molyneaux (I think) once said that he would love to create a game based entirely in one small village. Allowing the writers to flesh out each and every single character extremely well – given there are so few of them – and allow for vast webs of connections and interactions between the few NPCs in the game.
This is something I would like to see. However, it may be that something like the Sims is actually better at creating that sense of ongoing-ness to NPCs and interactions, after the event.
Pathologic did something like the village example. In the background, NPCs would meet and do various things, and you might miss whole swathes of narrative because you were not at the right place at the right time. Then again, you may find massive intrigue in the tiniest of things happening in the background.
Problem is, Pathologic’s ‘ambient’ interaction between NPCs and the ongoingness of the world was defined by a set timetable, which had no effect upon the NPCs as they stood stock still in their locations…
01/09/2009 at 14:11 kraii says:
abhishek: I’ve killed those guys a few times, with the rocket launcher, but then I just left paul sat on the sofa and the story went on as though he had died from the killswitch thingy. At least I think that’s what happened, maybe my memory is just muddled.
Yea that underground section is pretty cool, rescuing the friend of the dodgy arms dealer from weird experiments.
01/09/2009 at 14:12 shiggz says:
also, where is a new @#$#ing space game already. Wing commander/freelancer whatever. Oh whats that game world no time because WW2 remake 733 need to be made first..
01/09/2009 at 14:16 Lilliput King says:
OMG Ginger Yellow I was SO about to mention Masq. What’s funny is that it is exactly the game Bhazor said he wanted.
Worth a go if you’ve never played it, definitely.
01/09/2009 at 14:19 Gap Gen says:
Bhazor: Well, the problem of absolute freedom within a simulation rather than a written and directed storyline is that there’s no guarantee that your actions will have any impact at all. Would it be satisfying to rescue a child, only to have that child and his entire city sacked by a marauding army? Actually, this sometimes happens even in scripted games (saying which might spoil things somewhat).
More generally, a property of true chaos is the unpredictability of the effects of small changes to a system, or indeed the small-scale effect of large changes. It’d be interesting, but a directed story like Deus Ex is possibly more satisfying. It’d be interesting to see a non-linear game merged with some kind of Director, though.
01/09/2009 at 14:23 Kieron Gillen says:
Cooper: Spector, not Molyneux, if you’re thinking what I’m thinking of. Spector quote I remember describes it as a single city block rather thanb a village though.
KG
01/09/2009 at 14:24 Bhazor says:
Reply to Kraii
A silly glitch means if you leave through the window he dies. To keep him alive you have to leave through the front door of the hotel. Another glitch is that the suits won’t actually break the door down and will just sit in the hall being completely invulnerable which is what happened to me.
01/09/2009 at 14:24 Kelron says:
While not exactly an RPG, Arma 2 handles this excellently in the big open missions (when they work). For example, you have your main task which is to find and destroy the enemy camp. You also have side missions, such as arresting collaborators and investigating insurgent activity. These missions make sense, you aren’t being asked to take time out from saving the world to rescue a little girl’s cat, you’re soldiers in a warzone being issued multiple orders of varying priority. And depending how you handle them, completing these side missions can provide useful intelligence or other help with your main objective.
01/09/2009 at 14:26 Simon says:
I think a perfect example of what you are discussing is Chrono Trigger. Remember how in the beginning of the game, before even meeting an enemy you had the choice to steal and eat somebody’s lunch, help someone find their cat, and a few more things. HOURS later, way into the game, these people come and testify when you are on trial in court. Ultimately, even if you did it all “Right” (not stealing/helping the cat etc…) you still get sent to jail – But the people that you helped sneak in some secret items and health vials into your prison cell.
01/09/2009 at 14:27 Dinger says:
My point is otherwise. Current MMORPGs quests fail to be meaningful in a narrative sense because they have contradictory requirements. Imaging a MMORPG where only one player gets to be savior of the world. That’s pretty cool to think about, and would mean a lot to that one player and that player’s comrades, but for the other thousands of players, it would be pretty boring. So they make everyone savior of the world, and take all the meaning out of it.
But the world those quests exist in is another: it’s not the canned narrative everyone plays through, but the interaction among the players that makes it dynamic. The quest narrative in itself has about as much meaning as the original movie in MST3K.
In any case, by “another human in the loop” I was aiming more for the other side of the simulation, someone pulling the strings. At some point, it gets cheaper to have someone tell the story than to program a PC to anticipate all the nuances.
01/09/2009 at 14:28 disperse says:
I hate quests in open-world games like Morrowind, and Oblivion. For two reasons.
First, I am a bit OCD and hate to leave things undone. It begins to feel like a literal “to-do” list, more like work than fun.
Second, I want to tell my story. Quests force me to play through the same story as everyone else whether I want to or not. Maybe I don’t feel like going into a dungeon and recovering your family’s magical sword. Of course, I could ignore the quest, but… (see above)
See Living in Oblivion for an example of playing Oblivion while ignoring quests. I want an open-world game that encourages that kind of play.
01/09/2009 at 14:30 Persus-9 says:
The one thing I disliked about Mass Effect was the constance urgancy of the main quest line gave no opitunity to do any of the side quests without having your character act like a complete nutter who does anything while engaged in a race against time to save the galaxy. Fallout 3 and Oblivion were far better in that respect because in Oblivion you could do all the little things as an encore to saving the world and in Fallout 3 there just wasn’t the same sense of urgency except for the last three missions or so and there are points in the story where you just have a sketchy lead like you should look in Vault so-and-so but within the narative you have no way of knowing where that is so exploring and talking to various people is a good option.
01/09/2009 at 14:42 Bhazor says:
Aye I’ve played Masq and loved the idea but hated the characters and story and constant cheesecake. It was like playing a daytime soap made from bad doodles. Also my point about a half hour rpg is that it’s short enough that replaying never becomes a chore and you can play the whole thing in a lunch break and still have time to pop out for a sammich.
Actually my favourite part of Masq was the timed dialog/choice system which has been adopted by Alpha Protocol. Which is chuffing marvelous.
01/09/2009 at 14:48 pilouuuu says:
There IS one former strategy sand box simulator that is turning into RPG that allows you to complete quests and the characters will continue with their lives: The Sims 3.
Really, if they used the system of The Sims to make characters that live their lives, searching for food, having romances, getting older then RPGs would be much more interesting.
I’m surprised no one tried it and that TS3 which is considered a casual game is moving more towards RPG, which should turn it into a really hardcore adventure RPG when more Expansion packs are released.
Who can say that the Sims World adventures isn’t strongly RPG based? But the big difference is that you are completely free to do whatever you want in night and day cycles, within a full town and living through generations, something all RPGs failed to do. I admit that the narrative here isn’t very strong, but a game that is primarly an RPG could be brilliant if including ideas from The Sims.
01/09/2009 at 15:06 suibhne says:
I find it striking that nobody (including me ;) ) has up to this point mentioned XP rewards for quests. When I’m facing a silly sidequest in a game like Mass Effect, I reflexively accept it just because it’s an XP generator and therefore drives my character growth. From this perspective, tho, bog-standard, mediocre quests actually undermine the verisimilitude of the gameworld by, as we Marxists would say, heightening the contradictions (heh).
Basically, XP-based character advancement incentivizes behavior which is otherwise ridiculous from a narrative perspective (e.g. exploring tons of side planets to get awesome l3wtz right after the intro in Mass Effect, or tackling all the available sidequests before rescuing Imoen in BG2). To the degree to which quests (and sidequests specifically) function as the vehicle for that XP accumulation, they can undermine the sense of wholeness and purpose in the gameworld simply by not supporting it.
01/09/2009 at 15:21 Kester says:
Deus Ex is a good example to look at because the sequel got badly panned for doing by and large the exact same thing the original game got praised for: that is, having a linear narrative with a few minor changes in response to your actions that make you feel like your choices matter. So where did Invisible War go wrong?
First, people had already played the first game. When you’re not expecting to be able to affect the game world in any meaningful way, it seems huge that you can save your brother, even if it’s only superficial in the end. When you’re expecting to make those choices already, they’re a lot less impressive and the superficiality is what you notice. This one couldn’t really be helped.
Second, the first game was front-loaded with apparently meaningful choices. You got reprimanded by Paul and the quartermaster for killing indiscriminately, you reprimanded by Anna and Manderley for not killing everyone, you could save Paul from death, you could deal with JoJo in a variety of ways, you could choose to kill or save Lebedev, and most impressively – because someone had taken notice of something so trivial – you got reprimanded by Manderley for going into the women’s bathroom. All of these happened in the first third of the game. But there wasn’t really anything like this for the rest of the game, and I never noticed. First impressions count. Once it had been established that my choices were taken notice of and mattered, it felt like they did, even though the game stopped giving feedback.
Invisible War, on the other hand, spread out your feedback, and probably more importantly, didn’t give feedback on trivial things. If I’d been told off for wasting my time in the coffee shop or something, I suspect it would’ve had a big effect.
The third thing is that IW gave the illusion of too much freedom: it let you choose who to work for. But it was always possible to switch sides in an instant, so it felt a bit hollow. If you’re going to have a choice, there have to be consequences, even if those are just one faction refusing to work with you. The first game was very careful to only give you choices where outcomes didn’t affect how the world reacted to you, or that their reactions could at least be justified. (Thing is, IW clearly understood that choices have to have consequences: it was clearly laid out by the different endings, particularly the ‘renegade’ ending. Why this didn’t transfer over to the actual gameplay is a mystery.)
I think the lesson is that the feeling that you have choice is not the same as having choice, and the first is actually far more important.
01/09/2009 at 15:26 Ybfelix says:
Clovis:”If you had a complex NPC AI you could just “release” those characters back into the pool of non-quest NPCs that walk around and look normal. Now just add in relationships, break ups, death, children, whatever to that procedural NPC AI.”
This. But of course a believable “procedural NPC AI” is another serious problem.
======
A little off-topic. What about introduce a little randomness to consequences. Like giving the beggar 50 gp either keep him fed for a month, or you saw his corpse lying on roadside tomorrow, mugged and killed. At least this would be nice for replays.
01/09/2009 at 15:38 Ginger Yellow says:
It was like playing a daytime soap made from bad doodles.
It’s supposed to be like that. That’s why it’s fun. Sure, it’s not to everyone’s taste, and it’s pretty flawed. But I’m surprised more people aren’t trying something like it.
Actually my favourite part of Masq was the timed dialog/choice system which has been adopted by Alpha Protocol.
Farenheit/Indigo Prophecy had it as well.
01/09/2009 at 15:39 The Pink Ninja says:
“The moment I was finished with them, they ceased to live.”
I know this feeling oh so well. Characters, especially none-party ones, that you real like are something to be cherished beceause you only get a few brief moments, a few scene and lines of dialogue with them and then you’re gone forever.
Hell, even party ones. How many more awesome stories did Canderous or Black Whirlwind have to tell you?
At the moment my dream RPG is one that take place over several days of real time. Events occur for the most part in one way, unless you get involved, in which case their can be other outcomes. Once you’ve “completed” the game you get a flow chart showing all the things you did and the blacked out spaces showing not what you could have done, but merely there is stuff you can do instead on a replay.
That’s my way forward, focus on a few character in one setting rather than a whole world full of shallow guys and space filling fights.
Final Fantasy Ten gave me a similar feeling. You’re on a Pilgrimage that actually feels like a Pilgrimage. You’re accompanied from the starting village not only by the Party but by people from your village you travel along the way with you. This helped the save points and shops along the way feel like real stops on a journey. I always felt there was something very special in that, and losing those people made it feel lonelier, bleaker.
And Dues Ex’s push button choice was epic because it really makes you think about the right one.
01/09/2009 at 15:40 Rinox says:
The third thing is that IW gave the illusion of too much freedom: it let you choose who to work for. But it was always possible to switch sides in an instant, so it felt a bit hollow. If you’re going to have a choice, there have to be consequences, even if those are just one faction refusing to work with you.
Totally agree. As I said above, good design demands meaningful consequences from choices, if there aren’t any the player would usually be better off not having a choice at all than enjoying an illusion.
To take the Witcher again (mini spoiler): if you help out the non-human rebels/terrorists too much throughout the early part of the game, even just passively, characters associated with the Order of the Flaming Rose who were previously your friends and helped you out will refuse to have anything to do with you anymore. Their blacksmith will refuse to sell you stuff anymore, too.
All this without a warning, dialogue entry or pop-up text saying “if you help X you will fall out of grace with X”. But it just makes sense. In other RPG’s you can act like a rabies-crazed crossbreed of Hitler and Stalin on acid to everyone you meet during the entire game and still have people sticking up for you at the end. Doesn’t make sense.
01/09/2009 at 15:44 Rinox says:
“In other RPG’s you can act like a rabies-crazed crossbreed of Hitler and Stalin on acid to everyone you meet during the entire game and still have people sticking up for you at the end. Doesn’t make sense.”
To expand on what I said: in the original KotoR, I was playing through as a completely unhinged sadistic psychopath, but yet, for SOME reason, the jedi council decides to train me. I appeared before them, practically glowing with evilness, even told them I had no plans of being their pawn and wanted power above all, and what does the council decide? “We better train him” WOW. No wonder the jedi were virtually extinct in KotoR!
01/09/2009 at 15:45 tekDragon says:
The problems with sidequests (and some main quests) you describe will be a pretty big burden for Western-styled open world/sandbox RPGs for a while. By their very nature the number of possibilities to accomodate varieties of outcomes etc. become astronomical very rapidly.
On the other hand the type of evolution from sidequests you describe has been present in more “linear” types of RPGs for quite some time. When you take away some elements of freedom from player characters you can control the story and enrich it in ways that just arent technically possible (in terms of forethought and manpower) in a fully open world.
Deus Ex is a great example. People’s playthrough of individual Deus Ex levels was pretty open, but the story was linear. This allowed the developers to give you interestig choices and have them propagate forward properly.
01/09/2009 at 15:49 Ybfelix says:
Come to think of it, no, it’s on topic, randomness is inherent in real world. Even if you make the same choice, there is no guarantee NPCs make same response. And the whole butterfly effect – deciding to visit one house make you too late to cure that sick child next door, and his father go to the dark side 5 years later.(And you wouldn’t even know the child had a chance, because in this play-through, the first time you get to the next house he is already dead). But I doubt many writers are bold enough to write/script events that have significant impact but players most likely won’t really get to “see” them in action.
Essentially, what if the protagonist is not the single driving force? How to make such a game? Some degree of randomness? Make hidden plot triggers? NPCs that capable of pursuing their own quests(and their fate intervene with yours)?
01/09/2009 at 15:56 Ybfelix says:
@disperse: OCD has prevent me from enjoying some games, too. (and I won’t play a game if haven’t get all currently available expansion/DLCs) , but, alas, I think OCDness is my own character flaw.
01/09/2009 at 16:00 Ybfelix says:
Essentially, what if the protagonist is not the single driving force? How to make such a game? Some degree of randomness? Make hidden plot triggers? NPCs that capable of pursuing their own quests(and their fate intervene with yours)?
—————-
ur, I just realized, did I just discribed a perfectly role-playing MMORPG? and I won’t play MMO:(
01/09/2009 at 16:02 Sprint says:
Have you guys heard much about Heavy Rain? It’s being made by Quantic Dream, the developers of Farenheight and is basically the next evolution of the interactive drama genre. It’s PS3 exclusive but it does sound like it’s set out to achieve the kind of reactivity from the world and the player’s actions that you were talking about John.
http://www.gametrailers.com/game/heavy-rain/2717
01/09/2009 at 16:06 Sprint says:
Oh. It’s not an RPG so this actually has nothing to do with what you were talking about does it? Bugger.
01/09/2009 at 16:06 yhancik says:
Oh such a delightful conversation thread. This is why I love RPS!
About the Sims, does anyone remember what was announced back then for LotR : The White Council (aka “Project Gray Company”) ?
The action takes place in a massive open world where you can go anywhere you want, and the characters in this world are powered by an incredible simulation AI based on the same technology used by the makers of The Sims 2. The story of the game is built around a series of Story Quests. You can choose to follow specific Story Quests, embark on a range of other types of quests, or set off on your own adventures in the massive open world environment.
It, unfortunately, got kind of cancelled.
~
Stalker, with some A-life freeing mod (the aliVe mod by DC-) was pretty interesting. When they had served their purpose, most “quest character” would be freed, and so they’d be able to live their own life in the game world, wander around or die.
In regard to main quest vs side quests, Stalker and a freed A-life could have done with a main quest. That wasn’t the most interesting part of the game. What was great was living the Stalker’s life. Surviving, gaining (real) experience (not XPs), finding your way, picking a side (actually it’s a shame you couldn’t play as bandits or military).
It still wasn’t perfect of course. It feels too much in SoC that some zones (the farm at the beginning, the car park and the factory at the garbage) will eternally be a fighting point between waves of bandits and stalkers. I wish there was a bit more of a real territorial war… maybe that was improved in Clear Sky ?
01/09/2009 at 16:08 Kester says:
@Rinox: It sound like we’re in agreement on this.
Bioware seem to be slowly, slowly, inching their way towards meaningful consequences, but it’s painfully slow. While the idealism/pragmatism split of Mass Effect was a big step up from the Jesus/Hitler split of their previous games, I just wish there had been instances where idealism just doesn’t work, and has bad consequences. But no, if either has bad consequences, it’s pragmatism, which makes bugger all sense.
01/09/2009 at 16:09 Kester says:
Oh, and it sounds like I’ll have to check the Witcher out. :)
01/09/2009 at 16:12 Lucas says:
Proper RPGs are my least favorite genre these days. Writing quality should take precedence over quantity. World dynamics and consistent logic beat narrative anytime. I’m always much happier playing a Pirates!, Space Rangers 2, or Mount & Blade. My fingers are crossed for the next Stalker installment.
01/09/2009 at 16:12 Ybfelix says:
@Sprint Must be my own failure to appreciate, but I see Fahrenheit (and from what revealed, potentially Heavy Rain) as glorified Gal Games :(
01/09/2009 at 16:16 Halbyrd says:
I found Masq to be incredibly frustrating, for two reasons:
1) The characters are completely unlikeable twats. They’re exactly the sort of shallow, uninteresting people I go out of my way to avoid in real life.
2) Masq suffers from the Zork problem–limited dialogue options hidden by a text parser. Sure, you can type in whatever you want…so long as you don’t exceed x number of letters per line. If you say something that isn’t on the hidden script, you’ll get nothing but slack-jawed “whuhuh?” responses. Even a simple request for coffee instead of wine near the start produced total incomprehension. In short, I felt like I was talking to a couple of moody, impatient, mildly brain-damaged children. If I wanted that, I’d go troll the GameFAQs forums.
01/09/2009 at 16:17 Rinox says:
@Kester:
Yeah, Bioware actually surprised me with Mass Effect’s “fuzzier” moral compass. Don’t get me wrong, I still like most of Bioware’s games and BG2 is one of my all-time favs, but yeah, when it comes to meaningful choices it’s not exactly a market leader.
I can wholeheartedly recommend The Witcher if you’re into morally grey RPG’s, especially now the game has been polished to near perfection with the (free) enhanced edition. It has some minor annoyances like every woman offering to dive straight into the sack with you which breaks immersion just a little, but massive game.
01/09/2009 at 16:20 yhancik says:
@Sprint: the problem with “interactive fiction” à la Fahrenheit is that, as much as I like it, it felt too “pre-written” to me.
Your choices have consequences, but you’re basically picking chapter numbers in a Gamebook. It’s enjoyable, but you feel the book too much.
And I think it’s a dead end, you’ll still have to write 200, 400, 1000 different solutions, and thus hire 10, 20, 100 writers.
I think the stories and situations should emerge from the gameworld, and thus I join all the people who mentioned AI and procedural generation.
And about that,
@Ybfelix : random would work, but only to some extend. Life isn’t random, it’s chaotic. I can say than in digital art, working with a set of rules is much more interesting than with random values ;)
01/09/2009 at 16:23 Halbyrd says:
@Ybfelix: yeah, Heavy Rain and Farenheit/Indigo Prophecy do have a fair bit in common with the visual novel genre. That said, why is this a bad thing? I always saw such games as the natural evolution of the Choose Your Own Adventure books, which I thoroughly enjoyed as a child. However porny their roots may be, VN games offer more in the way of meaningful choice than most big-budget RPGs I’ve played. True, this comes at the expense of more traditional sorts of “gameplay”, but this is unsurprising given that many of these games are one- or two-man affairs.
01/09/2009 at 16:35 Ybfelix says:
@Lucas: Indeed, consistent logic in writing/scripting should always be top priority!
The moment I step into Megaton in Fallout 3, Sheriff Lucas(heh) actively triggered a dialog, and options to ask about and offer to dismantle the nuke are immediately available. But I/my character didn’t even seen/heard of that thing! This simple dialog tree disorganization ruined my immersion for quite a while @_@ (And I didn’t “WTF what nuke”, because I KNEW there is a nuke, pre-release previews spoilers. Maybe this level of meta made it even worse)
And earlier when I killed the Overseer, got out of the room, Amata(she’s out of the room, didn’t witness actual killing, maybe heard) just kind of slowly “walked” toward me, suddenly stopped halfway and “You killed my father!!”, with a calm face. What, shouldn’t you rush into the room and check out your father first? But this is more of an engine flaw I think.
01/09/2009 at 16:47 The Bag says:
I’ve always hoped for an rpg that takes less than 30 minutes to complete but it is meant to be played through a dozen times.
Way of the Samurai
I’ve got a lot of other comments but no time at the moment, back later.
01/09/2009 at 16:51 Noc says:
I think the thing I’d really like to see in RPGs is not more branching quests and meaningful plot choices, but simply rather better combat AI.
The thing that’s been bugging me a lot recently is how much it’s taken for granted that “hostile” NPCs will attack you on sight and will continue to do so until you kill them. It’s telling that when things go south with potentially friendly NPCs, you don’t annoy them and they don’t try to kick you out of their house or they don’t use any of the means that their disposal just to be a dick to you . . . they “turn hostile” and try and beat you to death, and you have to kill them.
What I’d like is NPCs (especially ostensibly sentient NPCs, or even anyone that’s not explicitly a bloodthirsty monster) to have “goals.” Like “Drive the player away” or “Take his money” or “Annoy the crap out of him” or “get that Macguffin.” And constant things like “Avoid injury” and “stay alive.”
These goals’ll be generally communicated to the player, so they can interact with them. Someone wants you to go away? Leave and they’ll stop hassling you. Someone wants your wallet? Pull it out of your inventory and throw it at him, or behind him, and he might stop attacking you and scoop it up, and then, satisfied, depart. Threaten to destroy the Macguffin and he might back off.
(That last one’s probably more of a specific, scripted instance, but things like “NPC AI *wants* Item X” where Item X is “your money” or “Money in general” or “Any item of significant value.”)
This could be combined with a system of escalation, with NPCs being variously willing to escalate and having limits on how far they’re willing to go. Some might be annoyed enough to shove you around, but’ll back off when blades come out. Others might be bloodthirsty and eager to gut you at the least provocation. Injury is its own level of escalation: folks might be willing to draw a knife on you, but will lose nerve if someone (especially them) gets badly hurt, while another might throw regard for personal injury to the winds.
Even timid opponents might continue to escalate fights if they’re really, really angry. And everyone’s more willing to escalate if your back is turned, or if you’re obviously weaker than them.
And they’ll break off combat if they get what they want, or if they’re out-escalated. Someone shoving you around? Pull your your sword and they might stop. Bandit knocked you down, either bodily or because you’re bleeding into unconsciousness? He’ll take your valuables and depart. A villain who’s just appropriated his Macguffin from your bruised body will taunt you in a plot-relevant and scripted fashion and then depart. Folks who’re fighting you and stop will first back off and stop attacking you. If they’re satisfied you aren’t going to keep attacking them, they’ll lower their guard.
Just basic, procedural, non-dialog things. Tricky to work into AI, perhaps, but still something I’d very much like to see. And it probably also requires a system with nonlethal combat and persistent, meaningful wounds that don’t vanish if you take a nap for a few hours.
And not every combat would work this way! Properly bloodthirst opponents will neither give nor take quarter, and there’s no time to stop and talk on a battlefield. But this’ll make those instances actually relevant and meaningful, and the times when people attack you on sight and don’t stop until you’re dead a sign of something being very, very wrong as opposed to the AI just not being very good.
01/09/2009 at 16:51 Gap Gen says:
Kester: I think the third point was what did it for me – the freedom was fairly meaningless in DX:IW for the most part. There were some nice touches, though. Actually, I think the main thing that distinguished it from DX (aside from the nostalgia value you mention) was the relative lack of depth and emotional investment in the characters. Your partner buggers off after one short level, so the choice to kill her later is pretty meaningless compared to the death of characters in DX, who have more time to become developed. Equally, the discussions in DX were quite interesting, from the doctors arguing with desperate patients to talking to an AI about the nature of God to discussing the nature of freedom of government in the East and West. In DX:IW, you had a war between coffee shops and a really, really lame excuse for philosophy from JC.
01/09/2009 at 16:55 Ybfelix says:
Kind of conflicting here. I don’t like multiple choice without real meanings (diamond-shaped dialog trees, like Neverwinter Nights?), but every other choice having significant or far-reaching consquences is overkill, either.
@yhancik, Halbyrd: Oh, thanks! “chaotic”and “visual novel”, mmmh, nice shiny new English words!
01/09/2009 at 16:58 Joe says:
I’m playing Le Witcheur right now and I’m lukewarm on it. In fact, the obtuseness of some of the dialogue and quests caused me to ragequit last night (I’m hoping the tedious crapsack swamp area is an exception to the rest of the game).
My problem with its deferred-consequences mechanic is that the plot is so labyrinthine, it’s often hard to trace a clear line of cause-and-effect between your original choice and the eventual consequence (I’m thinking of the Squirrels when they come to nab the cargo in Act 1, and what subsequently happens to the dwarf banker in Vizima).
On the other hand, it is sincerely bent on being serious and unique, in a way I haven’t seen since Torment. And the shades-of-grey world means that you can make choices based on which people / factions you happen to like, rather than being obliged to fit an arbitrary definition of good or evil.
Well done whoever mentioned Crono Trigger, that’s exactly what sprang to my mind also :)
01/09/2009 at 17:05 Tyrone Slothrop says:
While I refute the notion that Bioware has made a decent RPG after KOTOR, I do believe there is a central failing simplicity to decision-making in modern RPGs.
Simply, that your character and by extension yourself are too well-informed in your decision by stock characters who are largely transparent in motivation and substance. Basically, I want to be lied to, manipulated, deceived, betrayed, put-upon and have distortions of the ‘truth’ shouted at me by stakeholders. I want my decision-making to be truly taxing and require thought, inquiry, discovery and genuine consideration.
01/09/2009 at 17:07 phil says:
Amongst the weirdest thing Sentient did, asides from the painfully complex conversation system that involved constructing whole sentences using the up down keys, was making the main quest the dullest part of the game. Just randomly wandering round the space station, encountering stories and building the impression that the place was a living environment, like shadowing the hateful doctor on his rounds or the unmasking the (cat robot? difficult to tell due to the polygon count) assasin was far more entertaining than actually saving the place. Perhaps Fallout 3 took it’s inspiration from it.
01/09/2009 at 17:30 Dante says:
Fallout 3 dabbled in this a little. I won’t spoil anything, but let’s just say returning to Tenpenny Tower after finishing the quest can lead to something… unexpected.
01/09/2009 at 17:38 M.P. says:
Good read, interesting comments thread. For me the most crucial thing to get right in an RPG is integrating the side-quests into the main storyline.
The Baldur’s Gate games did it well. Some of the plot devices they used were kinda cliché’d and tired (“We need to get more money together before we can tackle the evil wizard” etc.), but they pulled it off because of the setting: there was nothing weird about having bands of adventurers wandering around acting like a FedEx +1 for random people, because it’s D&D and that’s what people do in that setting. You even meet other bands of adventurers during your adventures. But if you’re a galaxy-faring spaceman on an urgent mission to save the whole galaxy, it’s somewhat implausible for you to stop and find the lost droid of every Tom, Dick and Leia you meet on every single backwater planet. Bioware have gone a bit too “epic” in the plots of their most recent games, which takes away a bit from plausibility of having the freedom to wander around and talk to everybody – which is of course where the best content in the game is!
Other games that do it well are Morrowind, because the main plotline there only emerges gradually, so it’s not hanging in front of you like an epic purple carrot. The open world also makes it easier to get sidetracked and potter into a dungeon or pick up a couple of sidequests on your way to the next plotline milestone. Planescape: Torment also does it well, for the obvious reason that you have no bloody clue who you are and what you’re supposed to be doing, so talking to random people and exploring whatever avenues of interest open themselves to you is actually the best way to progress and recover more of your identity!
01/09/2009 at 17:58 Ginger Yellow says:
Noc: that’s precisely the sort of thing I was talking about above, but with considerably more detail. The good news is that sort of AI is increasingly common, just not in RPGs. You see it more and more in strategy games and sometimes shooters. And then of course there’s the Sims, which is built around the concept.
Unfortunately, RPGs are generally still stuck with traditional if-then scripts, and very basic ones at that. Hopefully as goal oriented AI becomes more widespread and understood, RPG developers will adopt it, but like I said, there seems to be an awful a lot of intertia in RPG development.
01/09/2009 at 18:08 Kester says:
@Gap Gen: I know it’s not a popular opinion, but I’ve always been of the opinion that the writing was generally better in IW than DX. You’re right in saying the characters are less developed: indeed, the plot in general feels heavily cut from what it was intended to be. Thing is, I never found the characters that interesting in DX. They were all one-dimensional, regardless of how much time you got to spend with them: combine that with some of the worst voice acting put to screen, it never drew me in on those terms. (It succeeded on pretty much all other terms, though.) The philosophy stuff is personal preference: I found the bits about what it is to be human in IW really interesting (particularly talking with the Omar).
You’re right to talk about characters though: I think in essence, this is the key to all quests being believable really. Do the characters draw you in? Does the plot draw you in? If yes, you’re going to fill in the parts you don’t see, and you don’t need to have people turn up later to confirm what you did. The designers just have to avoid egregiously breaking the illusion (such as in IW) for these people. There are always going to be those who aren’t going to be drawn in anyway, so it’s more about not breaking it for those who are.
01/09/2009 at 18:28 Noc says:
@Ginger Yellow: Yeah. I also feel like the Friendly/Hostile NPC thing is also a formal feature of the genre? It’s expected and very much part of the way we’re used to navigating around RPG spaces. Much like how we expect to find extra health and ammunition lying around FPSs, or something.
I don’t think either the escalation system or basic goal behavior would actually be terribly difficult to implement? Escalation’s basically just a switch between various AI modes of varying aggressiveness.
The really tricky part, I imagine, would be making it look believable and natural, and communicating NPC’s shifting attitudes and stances in a way that doesn’t look artificial and awkward. Also integrating these sorts of NPCs into plots, since even without plot-based choices you’ve got a significantly broader range of potential outcomes from encounters.
01/09/2009 at 18:34 Joe says:
“there was nothing weird about having bands of adventurers wandering around acting like a FedEx +1 for random people, because it’s D&D and that’s what people do in that setting.”
Worst excuse ever!
01/09/2009 at 19:10 Harlander says:
(Daggerfall is more content heavy than Oblivion, which is more content heavy than Fallout 3)
I can’t speak for the relative content-density of Oblivion and FO3, but Daggerfall? Sure, it’s got a lot of content; a lot of randomly generated, frequently repeated content.
01/09/2009 at 19:31 Aisi says:
If this website were a lady, I would marry it. Thanks, everyone.
01/09/2009 at 20:10 The Bag says:
some random thoughts:
After giving this some thought, Bethesda may have been close to what you wanted. If they simply expanded their NPC AI you could get cool results. It is annoying that the couple you reunited are still standing in front of their house. If you had a complex NPC AI you could just “release” those characters back into the pool of non-quest NPCs that walk around and look normal. Now just add in relationships, break ups, death, children, whatever to that procedural NPC AI.
That’s relatively easy, we can do that and Bethesda can certainly do that but it’s communicating that to the player that’s hard. And with so much of these things it comes down to is it worth the time & resources to make such a thing (there’s loads of stuff I’d love to do but the people making the calls on it decide my time would be better spent elsewhere). I was one of the sim coders on Fable 2, our system allowed NPCs to be picked out of the sim and used for the script and dropped back in the world to continue to live their lives afterwards.
One of the issues with this is those writting sim and those writing the quests want fundamentally different things. They’re very specific and we want our AI to live its life making it’s own choices. The two are written separately and although they co-exist in a game they don’t mesh very well. It could be done very well by some good planning and choices up front that would allow both sides to get what they need out of the system.
To bring it more towards what John is talking about wouldn’t necessarily require more content, just more focused content. It doesn’t have to be everyone but the continued existence and use of some would make a big difference – take, for example, the couple you can help bring together in the childhood section of Fable 2, why aren’t they in it later, why can’t you see the consequence of your actions on them, why aren’t there more quests involving them? It’d be simple to do but I’ll bet it never occurred to anyone because that’s not the way it works in games.
We have so many games about consequence but you very rarely get to see the long term effect of your actions on the NPCs you interact with – you see immediate effects but not the long term.
It’s something we should be looking at more, something that would help players engage more with the worlds we’re creating, make the NPCs more than just a collection of polys there to kill or get something from. It’s not just a problem with the side quests, we tend to throw players into the main quest right from the start, the player doesn’t know about this world, the player doesn’t care about it.
Could we not just let the player exist in the world for a few hours, dick around, explore the world, do ‘side’ quests, become immersed in the world. Can you imagine just being part of Oblivion for a few hours, competing in the arena, joining the dark brotherhood, exploring the countryside finding all sorts of quests, etc. Then suddenly there’s an Oblivion gate…
I think Persona 3 & 4 are well structured in this manner, although definitely not open world RPGs, the main quest/plot is introduced near the start but then time is taken establishing the world and your place in it.
I agree with Warren, I’d love to work on a game with a small but highly detailed area – less breadth more depth, unfortunately games are going the other way at the moment. If you had a game that took place over a set amount of time you could put resources into things like building proper relationships, having a different conversation with NPCs in the bar every night. We have the bandwidth to do such things, it’s all about where we focus.
We need to go back to the old Origin motto ‘we build worlds’ which was we create a world not a film set, but the way we tend to do quests & events at the moment in these games we create worlds and then stage little plays in them with all the lack of depth that goes with it.
01/09/2009 at 20:13 Ginger Yellow says:
I don’t think either the escalation system or basic goal behavior would actually be terribly difficult to implement? Escalation’s basically just a switch between various AI modes of varying aggressiveness.
The really tricky part, I imagine, would be making it look believable and natural, and communicating NPC’s shifting attitudes and stances in a way that doesn’t look artificial and awkward.
Yeah, I think that’s the crux. I can imagine that having goal based AI could easily lead to broken/confusing AI unless it was tested rigorously and constrained appropriately. Also, I can’t remember who it was, but there was a feature on AI in games recently where a developer pointed out that it’s less important to have “good” AI than it is to have predictable AI, where the AI behaves in response to the player in ways that the player can understand. Communication is a huge part of this – Relic, for instance, massively increased the amount of verbal feedback during playtesting of CoH so that the player could understand why units were doing what they were doing.
01/09/2009 at 20:41 Bhazor says:
Reply to Ginger Yellow
Oh what’s with all this talk about balance and realisitc behaviour? Lets have Dwarf Fort/Boiling Point style emergent madness surrounding the main quest line. My favourite anecdote from Dwarf Fortress was best told by the games announcement system
“Brian Helmcleaver has gone berserk
Brian Helmcleaver has destroyed a building: bridge
Brian Helmcleaver has drowned”
01/09/2009 at 20:44 Bhazor says:
Additional:
Essentially the perfect RPG is Outcast. Or at least an Outcast that worked proper.
01/09/2009 at 20:48 Weylund says:
I’m going to go play Mount and Blade, using a mod that lets me conquer my own kingdom. Want dynamic quests? How about *creating* dynamic quests for your warband leaders? “He fought well… I’ll give this castle to him.” And when I go back to my own castle, deep inside my territory, some of my new knights will be waiting to complain about the tax situation.
Love it.
Oh, and Pirates!. Love that game to pieces… a far more effective “RPG” than KOTOR, in my opinion.
01/09/2009 at 20:51 Weylund says:
Also, I haven’t mentioned SEAL Team in a while. Dynamic campaign, create a character, take him through a few tours in Vietnam, when you kill a postmaster or whatnot if effects missions six months down the line. Maybe scripted RPGs (by which I mean, RPGs with scripts) are their own worst enemies?
01/09/2009 at 21:00 Ginger Yellow says:
I never said anything about realism. As long as the behaviour’s understandable, it doesn’t matter how nuts it is. To go back to the examples above, it’s no good giving an NPC the goal of wanting your wallet or wanting you out of the house if that goal isn’t communicated somehow, directly or indirectly. Otherwise the NPC just seems to be attacking you for no reason.
01/09/2009 at 21:30 WCG says:
Great discussion!
When it comes to quests, most important for me is to SEE the results of my actions. If I run the bandits – or orcs – out of a town, I want to return and see the town rebuilding. Yes, Kvatch was a very good example. I loved it when I was recognized as the “hero of Kvatch” (at least, the first few dozen times). But nothing ever changed at the site itself. That was quite disappointing.
And although I enjoyed The Witcher, I was disappointed that my choices led to similar bad results, no matter which I chose. That really made the choices themselves unimportant to me. I suppose that was meant to make the game “gritty,” but instead, it just meant that the choices themselves seemed meaningless. (Note that I haven’t played it since the game was first released, when there were horrid load times to enter even an unoccupied shack. So maybe some of this has been changed with the upgrades.)
And I guess I don’t care about the sense of urgency or distraction from the main quest. But mostly, that’s because I absolutely DON’T want time constraints in quests, and because I often enjoy wandering around, exploring, much more than following the main quest in the first place.
01/09/2009 at 21:32 geoff says:
@Kraii and @ abhishek
cant believe paul denton can be saved!!! what happens then in hong kong etc, does paul die later from killswitch? seriously dont understand how this can work but dont have time to replay it. who is pauls girlfriend aswell?
01/09/2009 at 21:42 Ruler of the Interwebs says:
In the end, quests will always be about the reward at the end. It is one of the primary reasons we play games; at the end of the quest, our character will be improved in some way or another. It’s what keeps us coming back to quests when we know it’s going to be a parcel quest. We don’t care because we know it involved reward and growth at the end. No matter ho well-scripted and intuitive the writing and pace of the quest is, if there isn’t an outcome of grwoth and reward, it won’t be compelling. I mean, that’s what most of WoW is all about. Mindless questing towards a goal of growth. Story is nice, but it’s just icing in the cake.
-Ruler of the Interwebs
01/09/2009 at 21:43 Ruler of the Interwebs says:
In the end, quests will always be about the reward at the end. It is one of the primary reasons we play games; at the end of the quest, our character will be improved in some way or another. It’s what keeps us coming back to quests when we know it’s going to be a parcel quest. We don’t care because we know it involved reward and growth at the end. No matter ho well-scripted and intuitive the writing and pace of the quest is, if there isn’t an outcome of grwoth and reward, it won’t be compelling. I mean, that’s what most of WoW is all about. Mindless questing towards a goal of growth. Story is nice, but it’s just icing in the cake
-Ruler of the Interwebs
01/09/2009 at 22:23 Bhazor says:
Reply to Ruler of the Interwebs
Hey, speak for yourself. I do quests to explore the story and world of the game. What you get out of them is up to you.
01/09/2009 at 22:24 sinister agent says:
I can’t help but think that such a choice-consequence string would be much more viable and rewarding in a game without much globetrotting, and instead of 200 cases of generic npc x giving a mission, you’d have maybe a dozen characters whose lives you could influence over time in a limited environment.
Deus Ex did this best with the Rentons, I thought – the father and daughter who owned the hotel. The permutations were really interesting and quite poignant in parts (and of course, in one case led to the immortal “what a shame” line). I can imagine a game where you played as a tenant in the hotel or a regular in a bar – maybe you’re a hitman and between missions you go here, whatever – but while there, you could influence these people through conversation, buying them drinks, starting fights, etc. Smaller, but more detailed might give better results than bigger, but more simplistic. Sometimes big games become the victim of their own amibiton like that.
01/09/2009 at 22:43 Shalrath says:
I’d really like to take STALKER’s random NPC’s and put them in a real RPG. I imagine the possibilities would be absolutely insane.
01/09/2009 at 23:06 Joe says:
I just finished chapter 2 of The Witcher. Will shortly be uninstalling. Evidently, the quest system is carefully designed to generate arbitrary confusion and a billion loose plot ends. And don’t get me started on NPCs who you can only talk to at a certain time of day. If the first rule of gaming is to avoid sadistically tormenting the player, this game fails comprehensively. And yes, the consequences are all of the “your actions had grisly unforseen outcomes under a grey faux medieval sky” type. Severely unimpressed!
01/09/2009 at 23:16 Janto says:
I’d agree with Noc on the combat AI issues there is absolutely no reason why in games where you’re up against intelligent or even just emotional opponents in combat social skills and abilities shouldn’t be options. It shouln’t be a case of Talk, fail diplomacy etc. dice roll, Fight to Death. You should be able to use your wit to insult your opponents or your deception to make them think you’re in better or worse shape than you are, or that you don’t have what they need, you should be able to intimidate them into not acting or running away, and so on.
01/09/2009 at 23:29 Dav says:
On the “Save the galaxy, but first, could you rescue my kitten?” front I think the difference between Baldur’s Gate and its sequel is pretty stark. In the second game, as noted, I’m morally obligated to go rescue my “sister” from extensive torture; running around doing sidequests (except for the one quest or so necessary to get to her) is clearly evil (though the game doesn’t really care.) In the first game, you have a lot more narrative freedom; you obviously want to not die to the assassins chasing you, and ideally you’d like to find out what’s going on, but it doesn’t require any particular effort to have a reason to wander off and explore.
01/09/2009 at 23:30 Jim Reaper says:
I think the whole quest system needs shaking up. Get rid of the distinctive beginning, middle and end. Have quests interject half-way through, hell, whisk me off to the other side of the world! Just take me by surprise. I rarely get a real sense of adventure from RPG’s these days….
01/09/2009 at 23:35 Gap Gen says:
Kester: It’s entirely possible that my memory of DX and IW are skewed – I’ve not played them back-to-back ever. Certainly, the voice acting is worse than I remember, but then in those days it seemed ambitious to me to even have a game like DX with every line of dialogue spoken.
01/09/2009 at 23:50 jalf says:
I can’t believe no one have mentioned the original Fallout yet. The very first main quest you’re given is on a timer. You have 200 days to find a water chip. I think that was a great way to deal with the issue. The sense of urgency is there (especially at the beginning, when you don’t know how much time you’re going to need, if 200 days is even going to be enough), and like you say, it makes side quest that much more interesting. You’re actually spending precious time on them, time that might just cost you success in your main quest.
At least in principle. In practice, of course, it turned out you had heaps of time, and once you figured that out, you could do all the side quests you wanted. But the idea was good.
02/09/2009 at 00:30 Bret says:
Sinister:
YES! The Rentons were what I was going to bring up. Tons of tiny sidequests, ignorable entirely, with primarily emotional rewards, that steadily continues to have interesting consequences…
That you can end at any time with pointless random murder. Ah, the GEP gun…
02/09/2009 at 00:32 matte_k says:
Neverwinter Nights 2 had an interesting effect that emerged depending on how you play-at least the first time i came up against it. Spoiler ahead though:
When you get to the end fight, whichever characters from your pool of companions you haven’t used much, or “lost influence” with, if you like, will turn against you. Qara did it to me, citing the fact that I was always holding her back (due to my lawful good alignment, no doubt). But, when I died and so had to reload from before this point, I decided to strip her of all useful kit to make her less of a threat. And the main villian took note of this, even mentioning it in dialogue “as though you knew she would turn on you” in the next scene.
Completely unexpected, and gave me the realisation that at somepoint during all the questing, I could have changed that, could have kept her on my side. But would someone else leave?
Also, the quests for the Castle Building in NWN2, or Raven Rock in Morrowind’s expansion Bloodmoon. There’s a whole TOWN that builds up around your choices in that, without impacting on the main quest in any way. Your minor choices having a permanent mark on the game world (even if the NPC’s stop having new stuff to say when you’ve built it all)
02/09/2009 at 04:16 Clericsdaughter says:
Bioware’s games are certainly not without their flaws, the completely black/white moral dichotomy being a prominent one. And studios like Bethesda are much better at creating dynamic worlds where things happen seemingly without input from the player, and the player also has more opportunities to physically affect things. But here I am, drooling over the thought of Mass Effect 2 and Dragon Age, itching to get my hands on some sweet, sweet Bioware RPGing.
Why is it that their games are like crack cocaine to me? There’s lots of things that I like about them, and a few things that drive me crazy, but I have to admit that the main factor is really the companion NPCs. Bioware has a knack for creating characters that I want to go out and experience the world with, and have them react to not only my adventuring decisions but also to the emotional changes my character goes through, maybe going through some changes of their own. BG2 did this best–at every major plot event, and many minor ones, your buddies would chime in and tell you their take on things. Also, Yoshimo would occasionally pickpocket something from a random confused noble, falling-down-drunk guards would hit on Jaheira instead of talking to you, and Minsc, witnessing an injustice, would charge off to punish the wrongdoer without asking your permission. I can see how this would be annoying for players with certain styles, but for me it did more to make the world seem alive than anything. Taking my companions along for the ride, and seeing how it changed their lives, made the journey ten times more enjoyable.
I can’t get this with anybody else’s games. MMORPGs are more like quest-based chatrooms than immersive gameworlds as far as I’m concerned, and Fallout 3′s half-baked robotic NPCS made me feel terribly, terribly lonely despite its well-built environment. I wish Bioware wasn’t the only Western company that put a lot of effort into making their NPCs emotionally relatable, but there you have it.
02/09/2009 at 07:16 TooNu says:
So many opinions allready dug in so deep about this.
Side quests should not interupt your main quest. If the main quest was perhaps a bit more complex, or larger in enviromental scale it would perhaps nulify the need for additional tasks. However, if your main task takes you through a torture prison, then sure help the poor bastards out.
Just don’t make that a hefty time consuming distraction.
On the other hand, side quests for awesome weapons rule. Lilachor I am looking at you.
02/09/2009 at 08:02 Rinox says:
@ TooNu
I may be an intelligent sword, but I’ve had no formal edumication.
Can we go kill something now, huh?
How about now? No?
Come on let’s kill something NOW!
mmmm…. now?
What about now?
Now? Please? Pretty please?
I don’t know what you were expecting, but as a sword I’m pretty one-dimensional in what I want.
Can we go whack something now?
Let’s whack something eeeeevvvvillllll….
Why don’t we go kill that over there?
You know, I was a Moonblade once.
You really need to clean me. I like to shine!
Are we going to kill something now, maybe? Huh?
You know, my last owner always said I was sharp and edgy. He was such an ass.
I don’t chop wood. I am not an axe.
Now! Now! Kill something now!! Yeah!
Booooo-ring!
(sigh)
(double sigh)
Wanna go kill that over there? C’mon, let’s kill somthin’!
02/09/2009 at 08:54 Sonic Goo says:
“Side quests should not interupt your main quest.”
Maybe you just think that because there is such a huge chasm between them. The main quest is the actual game and the side quests are just filler. Maybe the solution would be to make the side quests more relevant? More like subplots to the main story? Maybe even let them influence the main storyline a bit? Like if you did side quest X, you have advantage Y or flavour event Z happen later on in the main quest? Maybe?
02/09/2009 at 08:59 destroy.all.monsters says:
i just want to know what the top pic is. She reminds me of Lady Penelope – especially the eyes.
02/09/2009 at 09:32 bill says:
I really dislike sidequests. I always want to say no to them. It always feels like an artificial barrier that’s placed in your way.
It’s the same in adventure games, when you have to jump through a large number of hoops to convince someone to help you… but in real life you’d just hit them with a brick.
I’m of the opinion we need some form of Gamesmaster AI, that allows us to do that kind of random stuff, and then generates some story to match… making it all by hand is a huge waste of effort… which leads to it being horribly limiting.
02/09/2009 at 09:36 bill says:
PS// top pic it Bastilla from KotOR… i think…
02/09/2009 at 10:08 Wizlah says:
I generally want two things from sidequests – the first being what john mentions above – the idea that they have some persistence within the world, and the second being that they help you explore the world within the game.
I recently played KoTOR for the first time, and liked it fine, but the dilemmas posed in the sidequests didn’t always feel like stuff that would necessarily happen within that world, and it’s made me a bit lary of mass effect, in truth. The bot/woman thing on the jedi planet was a well thought out issue within the universe, but others seemed more arbitrary. I would like the characters in the sidequests to tell me something more about the world I’m travelling in. I think, from hazy memory, that the rentons in Deus Ex are a good example of this, but I could be wrong.
And I think what several people have said on here about bioware is correct – when they write well, they write good dialogue for the main npcs, and flesh them out well, but the atmospheric writing (for want of a better word), always seems more arbitrary. It feels like you could be plonked down anywhere. I want to go back to baldurs gate again, but I find it problematic that the forgotten realms setting is fairly generic and that biowares writing doesn’t make it a more compelling and interesting setting. I could be wrong, but I feel where bethesda got away with things in Morrowind (and to a lesser extent Oblivion) is that the world is so well visually realised and unique from a first person view, it means that the more arbitrary nature of the sidequests feel a part of the environment, and less bolted on for xp/development/artifact’s sake.
IMO, this is why the Witcher’s sidequests hold up well – the developers did a sterling job plonking you in a distinctive slightly different medieval environment, so when you have to go fetch for the 50 millionth time, it doesn’t feel so generic. in this regard, their journal on all the different monsters you meet as you do your principle job as a witcher worked well – I never felt like I was just offing another beastie – there was background and depth there.
there’s a lot of folk here saying that the depth of the content in sidequests is just a function of economics, but I’d beg to differ. It’s about good craftsmanship. it’s about careful planning out of the writing process. as the bag said – you don’t need to find out about saving the world and you being the chosen one from the get go (again, morrowind pretty much tells you to go off and explore for a while, and then get back to the spymaster – and the nature of the big quest is such that it’s not time constricted and so this is feasible). And the nature of the main quest should be more carefully thought out within the world as a whole. Fallout is great from this point of view, because it develops the main quest from simply sorting out the water supply to considering the larger situation at hand and what the vault dwellers should do. and from an economic point of view, that pays dividends in the long term because the strong following that games like fallout have always generate new interest (or it would if publishers worked harder to hold onto their IPs and benefitted from profits 10 years down the line).
I don’t want to talk down bioware’s achievements, but I do feel that it’s become a generic approach, a template which you can just bolt on within a universe, make it look pretty and off you go. Like the bag said, the key is to build worlds up from the ground. Then exploring within them using side quests becomes that much more engaging.
02/09/2009 at 13:04 Melf_Himself says:
“Then elaborate on this. If I save the husband, perhaps he helps me in the final battle. It doesn’t change the ending of the game. It doesn’t enormously impact upon the fight. But he’s there, aiding me, a bonus. But that pirate I thwarted, returning all his stolen gold to the orphanage, he’s there making it more difficult.”
This is pretty much exactly what happens at the end of Baldur’s Gate II ^^
Also, expecting the whole world to live around you is a massive task, it’s much easier to code the world as a fridge light (only on when you look at it). I think when you ask for a game system that is too large, what you end up with is a buggy mess that is pushed to release early (e.g., MMO’s).
02/09/2009 at 14:49 story_gamer says:
One of the things I’ve been thinking about, time after time, was something that we used to do with our old pen-and-paper RPGS.
Rather than having a predetermined set of quest objectives, instead, we’d pick from a possible list of probable outcomes.
So, for instance, a side quest would be to help a Scientist escape a evil mega-corp.
Once you did so, if you ever met him again, or went back to him, he’d either help:
A. By offering information to your main story quest
B. By asking you for help looking for parts
In a more fantasy model, you’d have something like:
A. User saves farmer from evil goat-pig monster
B. Farmer goes home, spends time with wife
C. User comes back to farmer, farmer thanks user, and asks for help building a new barn
D. Farmer asks for wood
E. User brings wood
F. Farmer asks for nails…
etc..
Each additional sub-quest would be somewhat pedantic and wouldn’t make a huge or possibly any impact on the main story-line. However, they could still be generated algorithmically, and offer experience. Not to mention, immerse the character in the world.
This becomes somewhat more complex with MMORPG’s, but could still work well.
For instance, the first player saves the farmer from a goat-pig monster attack.
The next player may find the farmer clearing out rabbits from his field.
The next player may help the farmer from an attack some other creature…
The point being, the farmer is situated in a ‘state’ system, to which other players may see the farmer in a different ‘state’. The complex state matrix can be generated algorithmically…
Needless to say, I’ve yet to see a system explore these specific mechanics. Some come close (such as NWN2 and Fallout 3). One of my favorite things about Fallout 3 was hearing about the changes I made to the world from Galaxy News Radio shouted out by 3-dog. It *really* immersed you in the moment…
02/09/2009 at 15:59 Kadayi says:
Mark me down as another bemused by the complete absence of any mention of The Witcher, and the fact that it CDProjekt takes Biowares model and builds upon it, so that player choices do have real and lasting consequences.
02/09/2009 at 19:09 Joe says:
@ Kadayi
Examples of “real, lasting consequences” in The Witcher? I’ve had several consequencey bits and none were properly world-changing. All were boring.
http://witcher.wikia.com/wiki/Decision_Checklist
Spoilers, obviously. But these are pretty conservative and minor changes. Deus Ex and Torment did it a lot better.
02/09/2009 at 19:12 Patrick says:
Soldak (Depths of Peril) is building a pretty impressive quest-and-consequence system into their next game. The quests will be randomly generated in each town,
- “hurry and save the fort” quests will actually require you to hurry or the fort will be destroyed
- killing the leader of one side of a conflict might leave the other free to pillage the town
- fetch quest can turn into double crosses, then chain into kill the foozle, save the town, etc.
- the consequence of someone dying is… that person is dead. They might have been a quest giver, merchant, object of another quest, but now they’re dead. End of story.
All of this done procedurally each time you get to a new town. Of course, it’s just a blog post right now, but even if they only deliver a minimal level of this kind of dynamic town building, it looks really promising, with plenty of room for unexpected events.
http://www.soldak.com/Blogs/Steven/Our-quest-system-is-unique.html
02/09/2009 at 21:43 Kadayi says:
@Joe
That you end up in the high tower of evil fighting the overmaster of Kahzuraknak is pretty much the route of all RPGs, all that is distinct is that how you get there. The manner in which The Witcher does things means that your choices cannot be easily reversed because the payoffs to them do not occur instantly, but generally a few hours further into the game. The same cannot be said for Biowares games, where almost every difficult decision can be easily reversed by simply heading back to your previous save. Subsequently there is no weight to the decision making process in Biowares games because of this. Even with the latest teases from Bioware about Mass Effect 2, I doubt very much that ‘Shepard can die’ really is going to rely upon more than the player been offered a choice of saving themselves and watching their companions and a planetful of puppies die, or doing the right thing and dying a heroes death and encourage you to reroll come the final chapter.
The other advantage to The Witcher is that it doesn’t subscribe to the idea of external judgement when it comes to decision making. Whether you choose to help or hinder someone, or let them live or die, the game isn’t assessing your actions against an arbitrary measure to determine your
saintliness or badassery, like some overseeing approving/disapproving schoolteacher (or Peter Molyneux). This lack of assessment is a good thing, because it encourages you to think about what those choices are rather than simply choose whatever is going to garner you the most Renegade or Paragon points and the subsequent achievement.
Sorry you found The Witcher boring, but it is less the storyline that I am referring to (opinion is always going to be divided on such matters) but more the unfolding of the game as a playing experience. Certainly Deus Ex shares some similarities, but I don’t think it holds up to be a strong as strong a model given how few deviations there are in comparison.
03/09/2009 at 00:09 Petrushka says:
I read this discussion, then the older one that John linked to, and followed the trail from there to an old discussion of Vampire: Bloodlines. It sounds like a fantastic RPG; oddly enough I had not heard of it, or maybe just hadn’t paid attention because it sounded primarily like a horror game and I don’t usually go for horror games.
However, I just thought I’d point out, in case anyone else was in the same position, that (a) Bloodlines is available on Steam, and (b) a new version of the unofficial patch was released just over a month ago. Time for me to try it out. But so much to do, so little time …
03/09/2009 at 02:14 malkav11 says:
CD Projekt (The Witcher) and Obsidian (everything so far) have both been significantly more adept at making interesting, consequential decisions available in their games than Bioware. And Bioware’s matrix isn’t Jesus/Hitler. I’d be okay with that. It’s Jesus/mercenary who occasionally has a psychotic streak.
I will say that Mass Effect did a pretty good job of having sidequests that were actually relevant things to do despite the overarching plot urgency. (Not on the station, for the most part, but then I don’t think there was any urgency there.) And when I say sidequests I mean the ones on the plot planets. The random Mako-exploration worlds were terrible across the board.
03/09/2009 at 15:36 WCG says:
Hmm,… I’m amazed at the praise for the decisions in The Witcher. I guess we all want something different, don’t we? I loved the game, but I was very disappointed that my decisions DIDN’T matter (in the sense that nothing I could do would improve the situation). I remember trying to avoid taking sides, in order to act as a rational peacemaker, and it just turned both sides into my implacable enemies. If nothing you can do will help, since bloody violence is inevitable, why is your decision at all meaningful?
No, I like the more black-or-white decisions, probably because I like to play the hero. If my characters are basically good guys, trying to do the right thing, they should be able to make choices that reflect that (likewise, if they’re just selfishly looking to grab whatever they can get, which is a more realistic definition of “evil”). And their decisions should have clear consequences. They should have an impact on the gameworld, for good or bad.
03/09/2009 at 16:18 Geoff says:
Fable 2 has some excellent touches on this concept – helping the organized crime folks when you’re a kid, or helping the sheriff, leads to an entire neighborhood becoming an underworld slum vs up-and-coming luxury town.
But also the usual shallow “be ultra-good to earn goodness points vs be ultra-bad to earn badness points” thing.
03/09/2009 at 16:20 Geoff says:
Also, I’ll throw in that I think the problem is scope. As mentioned above, Spector wants to narrow-focus down to a city block. But most open-world questy games these days (Fallout 3, Oblivion, Mass Effect, etc) see bigness as a bullet-point feature.
They want to show off how huge their world is – and that’s not a bad thing in-and-of-itself. You can understand the appeal, and it helps develop a sense of grandeur. But the necessary compromise is a lot of cut-and-pasted buildings and quests and a lack of depth in the characters and story branches.
03/09/2009 at 20:44 Erica says:
“there’s a lot of folk here saying that the depth of the content in sidequests is just a function of economics, but I’d beg to differ. It’s about good craftsmanship.”
I honestly believe that craftmanship is a function of economics. I bet most game developers would LOVE to create what we all want. Its just, do they really have the thousands of people and infinite man-hours to do it.
We’re getting there, I think.
03/09/2009 at 21:28 Kadayi says:
@WCG
But you do realise that one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist right? The whole point about The Witcher was it put you in the situation of having to choose a side, neither of which particularly could claim the moral high ground. Generally this is more true to life. The history books might be written by the winners, but that doesn’t necessarily make them any more righteous than the vanquished. Even the most despicable people in History thought that their path was the path of honour and glory. Its only really in fiction that evil exists as an ambition.
03/09/2009 at 22:21 Rinox says:
@ WCG
Maybe it’s the fanboy in me speaking, but I think the Witcher’s ending is rather fitting given its musing on inevitability, free will and the possibility of true neutrality. But that’s just my interpretation.
03/09/2009 at 22:22 Rinox says:
…shouldn’t reply without refreshing. Agree with Kadayi.
04/09/2009 at 14:56 The Bag says:
I honestly believe that craftmanship is a function of economics. I bet most game developers would LOVE to create what we all want. Its just, do they really have the thousands of people and infinite man-hours to do it.
It’s not necessarily about creating more content but being smarter about the content we create.
03/01/2010 at 12:52 Chuck says:
Great Read!
This will be spoilers to anyone who hasn’t finished Mass Effect, BTW.
“It also goes some way to creating an illusion that multiple endings aren’t about pushing a particular coloured button in a scene near the end.”
My biggest gripe with ME, which I’m currently playing through for the 6th time in anticipation of the sequel, is exactly this: 2 endings. That is all. ALL that stuff you went through, ALL the people you saved, ALL the people you killed, ALL the people you allowed to be killed, ALL the planets you visit, and 2 endings. It turns out in the end that the ONLY choice they give you in the game that actually affects the outcome is “save the council, or let ‘em die.”
I dearly hope the sequel takes more of my actions from number 1 into account. I let the Rachni Queen live. Didn’t mean a damn thing in number 1, but maybe in number 2 they’ll return as allies, or start another war. Will Helena Blake still be skulking about? Will I catch her running a slave ring? Will she provide me with information or weapons in gratitude for taking out her cohorts? Can I use the moon base to train my team, now that it’s little VI problem is all sorted out?
Damn it! I took ALL THAT TIME, wrestled with ALL THESE dilemmas, and all that ultimately mattered is whether I want the council to kiss my ass, or Anderson and Udina to kiss my ass in the final cutscene.
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