Schazzwozzer

Will Wright said recently, at a speech at SxSW (that dude is everywhere these days, I guess), that games can be particularly good at stirring feelings of guilt in its audience. This is as opposed to film or literature, in which we can empathize with depictions of guilt, but it's never our own. It's an interesting point, and the Orestes thing reminded me of that, what with the going crazy from guilt and all. I think perhaps it's exactly these kinds of internal moral dilemnas that games will one day be able to surpass film and literature in. The catch is of course that you can't quite just write it into a script, as it has to emerge from the player's own choices.

Whoa, I wasn't saying Mass Effect was going to give the player "wrong" dialogue options. In fact, I was saying that NO modern RPG is probably going to do that sort of thing anymore. There are a few PC-RPGs I've missed in recent memory, but the last game I can think of that commonly presented the player with "wrong" dialogue choices is probably Baldur's Gate II, the romance dialogues probably being the most notable example. Hah! Japanese RPGs did (still do?) this kind of stuff ALL the time. I recall Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, for instance, having almost exactly the sort of sequence you mentioned. But yeah, I grew up on console games, and those sort of completely false choices are so common as to be a cliche. It was like the developers were LAUGHING IN YOUR FACE every time you foolishly thought you might be able to alter the storyline. Then one day I went over to my friend's house, who had a computer, and played the demo for Fallout. And I was Never the Same Again.

I ultimately agree with the jist of this essay, but I'm a little puzzled at the why of it. Final Fantasy VII came out about TEN YEARS ago, and that is what I personally consider sort of the apex of the "look, games can be movies too!" movement. Essentially since then, and especially in the past five years or so, game design has been moving way the hell away from that. People don't buy those games anymore. People are buying games like GTA and Oblivion and Half-life 2 and, of course, WoW. And, while you can point to games such as Gears of War as being highly cinematic and highly successful, I'd argue that the cinematic nature is limited mostly to presentation and mostly leaves the gameplay unmolested. Also, a good deal of what you touch on has been thoroughly deconstructed and explored much more deeply in the whole Ludology vs Narratology debate. Meanwhile, the whole text-assembly thing has been worked on at length by guys like Chris Crawford and groups like Grand Text Auto. I'll readily agree though, and have argued in the past, that areas such as non-combat AI need to receive much greater emphasis in development, so as to better stimulate collaborative (emerging from interaction between the player and actual gameplay elements) storytelling. I remember a big ol' post on the old BIS boards wherein I ranted about how great it would be if every stupid villager in town were running something like The Sims AI. Of course, Bethsoft tried almost exactly this with Oblivion and failed, but still, a laudable effort and shows how forward-thinking they were.

I admire what Bioware is doing with the dialogue, myself. I think, since at least Warren Spector's time at Origin (mid-90's, working on games like Ultima Underworld and System Shock), in some design circles there's been a certain discontent with how games treat dialogue systems. I think the main criticism is essentially that it's not real gameplay of any depth; it's more like a series of puzzles, often where you're trying to guess what the designer thinks would be the right answer in any given scenario. This is part of why I think we've seen dialogue in RPGs gradually become much more... "safe" (some would no doubt say "dumbed down") -- there are less blatantly wrong dialogue options in today's RPG. So I think all of these systems we're seeing where developers are trying to give dialogue a more natural, less "boxed-in" feel and flow, Mass Effect included, are ultimately geared towards addressing the dialogue-as-gameplay dilemna. Also, you see Bioware working very hard on creating believable actors as well, apparently paying particular attention to the more nuanced things such as body language and facial expression. I'm sure it seems like "teh shiny" to a lot of people, but I think it's really very important to the medium of, let's say, "interactive storytelling". So I would say that too, is very admirable.

Evil options are for fat babies and should be abolished for any game beyond blatantly fairytale fare such as Fable. The idea that an RPG must allow the player to act out his or her sociopathic fantasies is a strange aberration in game design, either owed wholly to the popularity of the D&D license in the late '90s/early 00's or owed to some developer's misconstruement of the gaming public's love for the gruff, anti-hero (as opposed to shining golden lad). Provide at least one badass response that makes sense in the context of the situation/conversation, and the vast majority of players will be happy. I'm saying essentially that players want to be Clint Eastwood or Gregory House, M.D., a lot more than they want to be, I dunno, Snidely Whiplash, or the Wicked Witch of the West, or Hitler, or whoever. Or even Darth Vader, I bet. YEAH, THAT'S RIGHT, I SAID IT.

I've no love for WotC and have in fact had a commercial project on which I was working canned due to stylistic incongruencies with their approval department, but I don't think that this adherence-to-the-sourcebooks argument holds much water. Look at D&D Online, which is, in an awful lot of ways, a comparable game. Honestly, the fact is that it's just really effing difficult to do faces well. If you get one little detail off, the whole thing can end up looking wrong (you've all heard of the whole Uncanny Valley thing, right?). I think this is largely what happened with a lot of NWN2's faces -- certain details and features are off. With the elves specifically, I think it's the eyes, and with a lot of the faces more broadly, it's the skeletal structure, like the cheekbones and such (much of this has to do with the normal mapping, which is often too detailed). The head models are also really quite complex. They've got to do a lot of things, like lip-synch, move their eyes, and express some rough approximation of emotion. This is a fairly new thing in games, a development that's only started to really pick up in the past few years, and not every game is going to be able to pull it off like Halflife 2. Finally, I'd bet they just didn't have time to go back and polish things up. There's a lot of art in NWN2 and there's only so much time and effort to go around. At this time, it's an immutable rule of game development that you're always going to want to put more in than you can actually achieve. What can ya do? IN CONCLUSION, I think trying to pass the buck off onto WotC or saying that it's inconsequential cheapens the work that Obsidian's artists did put into this game. It's entirely fair game to criticize their work. At the same time, I think you've got to cut them some slack, and keep things in perspective. This game was made, after all, by mere human beings, a species widely known for their fallibility.

That interview is my first glimpse into the actual story behind Black Hound and I'm pleased to hear that the narrative revolves around a character (May Farrow), instead of some great magical macguffin.

The idea is that Bethesda announces Fallout III and millions of the type of people who would sooner use torrent than pay for a $10 game, wondering about this series called Fallout, go and torrent the two preceding titles. And that's why all of a sudden there are a billion downloads of the Fallout games.

I bet you could make it so that the game uses 2d image portraits instead of the 3d heads it uses now. At the very least, it'd take some editing of the UI xml files though. I think it's wiser to stick with the 3d heads though, myself. To get the character models to adequately resemble those characters in the portraits would require some really high quality custom head models, and if they were of so high a quality, ya might as well let the game use 'em as the portraits.

That's really incredible. Even if the numbers were in some way massively inflated, it remains incredible. Does this say more about the Fallout franchise though, or the gaming public's love for Bethsoft? HMM.

I wonder how they're planning on handling companions, if they plan on doing them at all. If they do go with a first-person game (as seems likely), and it's full real-time action, they're placing themselves in the same realm as the modern FPS, which means, I think, that they're going to be expected to implement some honestly decent AI. Like, you know, taking cover and actually working as a team and such. I don't know that Bethesda has any experience with such complicated AI. I'd like to see them get the whole Radiant AI system in shape so that it can actually be made to do something interesting too. Also, for the sake of dogmeat, they need to hire some writers gorrammit. As I understand it, two of their best writers left before the werewolf expansion pack for Morrowind (one of whom was responsible for all of the crazy, cryptic, occult-type stuff in Morrowind that I think worked very well) and they seem to have never been replaced. You could REALLY feel the absence of any literary-minded designers in Oblivion.

Torment sorta did this. The level cap wasn't necessarily low, but the game certainly rewarded the player with a lot of neat little bonuses. Just off the top of my head, bonus HP for letting Eivene stitch you up, bonus to pickpocket skill for letting that guy in the hive work his thing, and the improved Zerth spells from Dak'kon's unbroken circle. This also served nicely to encourage "roleplaying".

Was just poking around Sammael's website. It's pleasing to see that Black Hound apparently has a "leitmotif". Too many games never try to express or even be informed by any greater meaning or message, instead being content to present a series of small and typically disconnected vignettes. Re: low levels, low loot. Done well, the fame/reputation/epithet system should probably offset any feeling of a lack of advancement/rewards/carrots. Also, low level characters are significantly more interesting to develop in NWN2 than, say, BG1's AD&D rules. And with the equipment materials (darksteel, adamantite, etc) and all that jazz, a designer has greater variety of loot to throw at players beyond just typical increments of +1, +2, etc. Btw, I've just been playing through BG1, with expansion, myself. I'm near the end of the game and I believe everybody has at least one +2 weapon and I think I've got a few +3 items in there too.

It's always exciting to see professional devs striking off on their own to knock out a little mod work and doubly so here, due to the history behind this specific project. I still have this image hanging around on my hd. NEVAH FORGET. Pity you can't use some of the old art n such, seeing as how it's terrific and all.

I always find it funny how readily fans attribute the quality of an RPG to the writing skills of those involved. RPG fans just love to think that their favorite games are really intellectual and have these fantastic storylines and it's the storyline that makes the game so great and superior to other game genres. But I don't agree. The way I see it, KotOR succeeded for three simple reasons. 1. It's Star Wars. 2. The gameplay (combat) was not particularly demanding. It was accessible. Lots of people could play and enjoy the game. 3. Unlike virtually any other console RPG ever, the game asked the player, "hey, what do you want to do?" and when the player responded, "I want to be a total badass," the game didn't stop him. Did the average player really take note of how cohesive or effective the storyline was as a whole? I don't think so. Honestly, I think that the value of the plot in any video game can be measured directly by how effectively it puts new play space and content in front of the player. Basically, the average player couldn't give a damn about why he's going to some exotic planet, just so long as it's interesting when he gets there. Characters are the only aspect of a game that I think can still be driven mostly by writing skills and, while the game's characters were certainly a part of why KotOR was a success, it was, I think, not amongst the most important. And even then, a video game character can still be made effective by a cool visual appearance or a memorable behavioral quirk. Solid writing is not necessarily a requirement, depending on what the character's purpose is.

Regardless of who she is, I'm very pleased with the character concept art we've seen thus far. I felt it was really quite lacking in KotOR1, with many characters being rather physically indistinct. I'm hoping to see Torment-quality character designs.

Whoo, all good ideas, I think. I tend to really like this idea whenever it pops up in a game. I feel that giving the player a piece of property and saying "this is yours" is an effective and relatively easy way to inspire a sense of investment in the player. In KotOR2, I think that a "stronghold" would ideally take the form of the Ebon Hawk. However, it would need to be fleshed out much better than it was in KotOR1 in order for the player to really perceive it as valuable. For one, adding more to do when aboard the Ebon Hawk would encourage players to spend time hanging out there. Ideally, the player could also be prompted to make decisions about the Ebon Hawk that would show tangible results. Maybe allow the player to take on non-party passengers? Upgrade its systems? Eh, who knows. I think that the idea of a database is a great idea. Making it accessible through the Ebon Hawk would even be conducive to the ideas I've already expressed in this post. News broadcasts would be a nice touch as well. I could imagine them being implemented like the public news terminals of the first Deus Ex game. Y'know, I seem to recall that there was some sort of Encyclopedia feature in store for Jefferson, in fact (though I could be wrong). And Torment had the rather extensive NPC and Monster database. So it would seem that the BIS guys understand the value of such supplemental fiction. I won't touch on this one too much, but forcing the player to take actions that he or she does not want to take is just bad game design. Hopefully KotOR2 will minimize such situations, especially when they involve such character-defining actions as killing children.

I don't know how Lucasarts would feel about this, but, you know, Lucasarts put out a Star Wars racing game some years ago and I doubt that it's still making them any money. It'd be cool if that could somehow be adapted into KotOR2 as a stripped-down version. I've only ever seen it played (never played it myself), but it looks modern enough to not seem out of place and I can't imagine that it could be any worse than the KotOR 1's goofy swoop racing rubbish. Maybe it'd even feel more like actual racing with other drivers on the track. Can't imagine that it would actually happen, but it'd be nice. Might even constitute a minigame that's worth playing because it's actually enjoyable in its own right.

Unfortunately, the character development system is kind of hopelessly screwed up in its most basic elements. The system treats the ability scores (STR, DEX, INT, etc) as though they are all equal in worth and this is obviously not the case. Unfortunately, I doubt that it is within Obsidian's power to, say, collapse INT and CHA into a single score or turn them into derivative stats. WotC would probably have a problem with that. In any case, any effort to better equal out the six ability scores would be beneficial. The development system also seems to suffer from the delusion that a player can talk or hack his way through the game. This is also just not true. The only solution that is universally applicable is combat; a player can fight his way through the game and, indeed, has to be able to fight in order to complete the game. In my opinion, KotOR 2 needs to accept this and adapt accordingly. Combat will always be the primary solution. As such, there should be no class that is incapable in combat. Ideally, all classes would be equal in combat. This was more or less true of the three jedi classes (they were all adept in combat, merely in varying ways), but was not true of the mundane classes, specifically the Scoundrel and, to a lesser extent, the Scout. All other solutions (persuasion, hacking, stealth) should be acknowledged and accepted as secondary solutions. The player would be presented with opportunities to choose these solutions, but would never be required to use these skills to complete the game. Since a distinction would be drawn between combat and the secondary solutions, I think that it would be prudent for the character development system to reflect this. Feats and Powers would deal specifically with combat and Skills would deal exclusively with secondary solutions. This was mostly already true in KotOR1, but the Awareness and Treat Injury skills kind of step into the territory of combat or, at the very least, do not facilitate any kind of secondary solution so directly as, for example, Persuasion or Computer Use do. Personally, I would turn the Awareness and Treat Injury skills into derivative stats (Reflex save determines Awareness perhaps, etc). Since all classes would be equal in combat, I think it would only be fair that all classes gain equal skill points (INT modifier taken into account, I suppose). It's admittedly somewhat vanilla, but it would result in more balanced characters. You wouldn't have pure skill characters (Mission, T4) that are impotent in combat, but would have a roster of characters, all capable in combat, but specialized in different skills. You're more likely to make use of the secondary solutions if every character has at least one skill that he or she is good at. And then it's just a matter of making sure that the skills are all inter-balanced. The designers would need to keep track of how often each skill can be used and the rewards for using them, maintaining a general balance amongst it all. I think that's about the most balanced the character development system could get without significant core alterations.

I liked that many of KotOR's environments, especially on Manaan and the Mystary Planet, were quite nice to look at. It almost just felt like a giant tease though, since so much of it was hands off, don't touch. More than once I found myself wishing I was playing a platformer or something so I could jump around and climb all over everything. That vast sea on Manaan was just calling for me to go swimming, damnit. Probably the best thing about the game though was that it was, in many ways, nicely streamlined. A lot of the fat from similar games had been trimmed. For instance, I assume that Star Wars pnp uses a resting system. I think it was a good call to eliminate any kind of resting system and force the player to use items (though it gets thrown off balance once the player gains the force healing power). Unfortunately, in streamlining, some things became overly restrictive, mostly the player's ability to interact with the game world and its occupants. I thought that the NPCs in the Infinity Engine games were dull, but at least you could pickpocket or attack them if you so desired.

Virtually any power to influence the game (whether it be the narrative, the environments, or the character within) that is put into the player's hands is a good thing. The ability to influence the game (including characters) in a way that does not feel believable or consistent does admittedly harm immersion, but that does not necessarily mean that it does more harm than good. Ultimately, it's about abdication of authorship. It's about setting the stage and then letting the player tell the story that he wants to tell.

If you're looking to find the past credits of these guys, try a search on Mobygames. Great site. Looks like they're mostly Interplay guys, by the way. And, not to get off topic, the BIS concept art (and seemingly the stuff for KotOR2) is indeed very awesome stuff. I know that I'd certainly much rather stare at it while loading an area than the boring KotOR1 loading screens. Or, a lot of games have galleries which can be unlocked after completing the game. Just a couple thoughts.

Meh. I think you've missed a terribly important one in player choice or "agency" -- basically, the player's ability to influence the game's environments, entities, and narrative. I think that that was the real reason for KotOR's success. There was an entire population of console gamers who thought RPGs were all about more or less watching a set of characters and embedded narrative that was completely pre-determined (a la Final Fantasy). KotOR came along and offered what was, to them, an unparalleled amount of influence over the characters and narrative. It wasn't just about watching, but making decisions that, in some cases, were quite meaningful. And what the hell is "storyline" anyway? Is it just the designer's plot and narrative? Can it include the "unofficial" narrative that emerges through the gameplay itself? Does it include things like theme and setting? Can it be construed to include the player's choices? It's far too nebulous a term for my tastes.

Yeah, I think you're right. I also recall a quest on Kashyyk in which one was to hunt down a group of Mandalorians who would only appear if the player's group did not have weapons equipped. You're correct that many RPGs do not bother with even giving their NPCs basic concern for their own belongings. I couldn't say why this is, but it's certainly something that's fully possible given current technology. To name a few that have gone this extra mile, the later games in the Ultima series (starting with Ultima VI, I believe, in 1990), Fallout, Gothic, and, as mentioned above, Morrowind all have featured anti-theft NPC AI. In fact, on the topic of anti-theft AI, this is something that KotOR is capable of. I recall that in the sand people's village, if you open one of their stupid wicker baskets, the entire population will turn hostile. I imagine that the reason this wasn't implemented elsewhere in the game is because nobody could figure out any appropriate reaction behavior. It wouldn't be very fitting, after all, for a family in Taris to attack you because you stole their medkit, so you have to deal with the question of, should they run away? Where to? Is it practical? Etc, etc.