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.
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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.
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.
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”
Additional:
Essentially the perfect RPG is Outcast. Or at least an Outcast that worked proper.
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.
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?
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.
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.
@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?
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
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
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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….
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.
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.
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…
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)
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.
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.
@ 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’!
“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?
i just want to know what the top pic is. She reminds me of Lady Penelope – especially the eyes.
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.
PS// top pic it Bastilla from KotOR… i think…
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.
“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).
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…
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.
@ 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.
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
@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.
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 …
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.
@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.
@ 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.
…shouldn’t reply without refreshing. Agree with Kadayi.
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.
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.