Rock, Paper, Shotgun

30/03/2012 at 18:39 Wizardry says:

@LionsPhil: I agree with that.

To anyone who doesn’t understand, ask yourself why there isn’t unique dialogue for every single point of intelligence, from 1 all the way to 10. You’ll realise quickly that it would require a monumental amount of dialogue writing on the part of the developers. Now ask yourself why each point in an attribute like strength affects how much damage you do in melee. You’ll realise that strength plays a part in a mathematical formula and thus scales without the need for additional work.

The problem with a heavy dose of dialogue writing and scripting can be pictured in a simple scenario. Imagine if each individual enemy in the game shouts out a line of dialogue for each point of damage you inflict upon them. So enemy A needs a unique line for 1 damage, 2 damage, 3 damage etc. Enemy B will also need a unique line for 1 damage, 2 damage, 3 damage. As you can see this doesn’t scale at all. The more grunt work an RPG needs in terms of content (dialogue) creation, the more restrictive the gameplay will be and you end up with magic numbers like 4 points in intelligence or whatever.

Having said all that, Wasteland did do things the Fallout way. A lot of skill checks were binary things scripted into quests as “quest solutions”. In fact, that’s why Wasteland was so influential. It was one of the first cRPGs to actually have scripted multiple solutions to quests. It was this aspect that inspired games like Fallout the most, even more so than its post apocalyptic setting. Having said that, Wasteland worked so well for the same reason the Fallouts worked so well. You still had freedom to do what you wanted and the freedom to do things in any order.

The big decline happened after Fallout anyway. Fallout suffered massively from being a single character game, but it was BioWare that pioneered the narrative heavy gameplay where you can’t run from the end of the game to the beginning of the game due to “story progression” that locks you in to certain places at certain times.

31/03/2012 at 00:36 Wizardry says:

Well, the game does lock you in that way of course, just like every cRPG I can think of. But it also locks you out of certain end game zones until you gain access to them. But the majority of the game world is open to you and you don’t have to do many things in any particular order. Some people go to some places earlier than others, for example. It means that the player themselves has to discover what they can and can’t do. It’s up to the player to make the decisions about where it’s safe for his or her characters to venture.

But my point is that it’s still a fundamentally different design than a story based game. In Wasteland (and Fallout) the developers didn’t consciously lock you in to a set of zones one after the other, with plot progression taking place in a fixed sequence. You were instead constrained in other less artificial ways such as the lack of information or your characters’ levels. This is far more flexible. For example, imagine being able to sneak in to a high level area early on in a game with a character that is good at sneaking. You can’t sneak in to Baldur’s Gate city in Baldur’s Gate until it’s opened up in a later chapter due to story reasons.

It’s basically scripting a game experience so that it follows a narrative versus giving the player goals and telling them to beat them in any way they can think of. Wasteland was sort of half and half in many respects, which is why it’s so well regarded. Same deal with Fallout. I just don’t want to see Wasteland 2 go the BioWare route, which, incidentally, is a route many of Obsidian’s and Black Isle’s later games went down. As much as I dislike the game for being an FPS, New Vegas actually did things the right way as it follows the Bethesda model that was conceived back in the early 90s when things were less crap.

31/03/2012 at 15:46 Wizardry says:

Right. But in Fallout, Wasteland, literally all the Might and Magic games and many other old-school RPGs there wasn’t a correct order as such. You tend to find a bunch of zones open at the beginning and perhaps one or two revealing themselves or opening themselves up near the end of the game, but out of the initial zones you’re free to pick and choose. Some zones may be harder than others, but by the time you’ve done one of many of the easier ones you’re usually strong enough to handle at least part of one of the ones sitting at the next level of difficulty, but at the same time you could be doing another one of the easy ones. In other words, the game just provides a world to you and lets you figure things out. You aren’t forced to go to A before B before C due to a progressing story.

Lothering in Dragon Age: Origins is a typical example of modern game design. You can only go there after Ostagar and before the rest of the game world. It’s a one time quest hub because for story reasons you can’t go before or after your first and only visit. Compare this to the first Might and Magic game, for example, where you can literally get to any of the towns in the game and subsequently any of the towns’ dungeons and surrounding wilderness areas within minutes of the start of the game. You won’t win the game quickly though, despite having access to most of the game world from the very start.