J.E. Sawyer

A person's title does not automatically reflect their influence on the project or team. This is especially true in the game industry, where titles change from company to company.

screeg: I think it depends on the conversation. If you approached the person, it is really you interrogating them unless you manage to pique their curiosity. In other circumstances (such as being ambushed by bounty hunters), it makes more sense for you to be put on the defensive, with the flow of conversation being dictated by the NPC. Jackalmonkey: I think that the reward of entertainment can be enough to justify certain choices. Clearly you remember that exchange with Renesco, so there you go: that's the consequence.

I think that as long as it's clear to the player that their choices are having an impact (even if incremental), that's all that's necessary. Reactivity above and beyond that minimal threshold will produce more appreciation from the player, but not every choice can move mountains.

Returning player to a root node first allows them to review the character's available dialogue topics in case there's something they haven't asked about, and I think that's good.

At work, we have a lot of rules for how to write. These range from punctuation (single-spacing after terminal punctuation) to spelling ("all right" vs. "alright") to structural (where a "goodbye" response should be relative to a "start combat" response and where that should be relative to a "friendly" response). Every project has a document (or documents) on the specific guidelines for that project. In spite of all the details, there are certain high-level principles that tend to be common. Okay, maybe it's just in my mind, but here are principles that I believe are important for writing player-driven dialogue in choice-heavy RPGs. * Dialogue should inform and entertain players -- inform them about the world and quests, entertain them with interesting characters and prose. If you aren't informing or entertaining, think hard about what you're trying to accomplish. * Write an outline. Really. Just do it. You should have an idea of where you are going before you set out. If you don't know where you're going when you write your conversation, chances are the player is going to get lost at some point. * Always give at least two options. At a bare minimum, you should always have an option that says, "Let's talk about something else," that leads back to a node where you can say, "Goodbye." You may think that your dialogue is riveting and no one could possibly want to stop reading/hearing it, but believe me -- someone out there does. * Never give false options. Do not create multiple options that lead to the same result. It insults players' intelligence and does not reward them for the choices they make. * Don't put words in the player's mouth. With the exception of conditional replies (gender, skills, stats, etc.), phrase things in a straightforward manner that does not mix a request for information with an emotionally loaded bias ("I'd like to know what's going on here, jackass."). * Keep skills, stats, gender, and previous story resolutions in mind and reward the player's choices. If it doesn't feel like a reward, it isn't; it's just a false option with a tag in front of it. Note: entertainment value can be a valid reward. * The writing style and structure are the project's; the character belongs to you and the world. As long as the dialogue follows project standards and feels like it is grounded in the world, it is your challenge and responsibility to make the character enjoyable and distinct. All of these principles exist to support this basic idea: your audience is playing a game and they want to be rewarded for spending time involving themselves with conversation. If it is a chore, is non-reactive, is confusing, or is downright boring, it is the author's failing, not the player's.

Male or female.

They're easy to answer and don't divulge any information that we are trying to keep under wraps.

When I started at Obsidian in July of 2005, I was on NWN2. After a few months, I didn't feel I was a good fit for the project and asked if I could work on another. I worked on that (other) project until Ferret left, at which point I rejoined the team (around March 2006). I was the lead from March until the game shipped in October. My initial work on the project was an Act II area designer on Illefarn Ruins, though they weren't complete when I transferred off. After I came back on I did typical lead designer things: coordinated people, revised existing designs that were no longer practical/possible, and cut a bunch of features and content so that it could ship in a reasonable time frame.

The amount of time Ferret and I were actually on NWN2 at the same time was pretty brief.

Not to diminish the significant contributions of many others on Mask, but George Ziets was really "the guy" who developed the story.

The IWD series was actually quite commercially successful for Interplay. Certainly Interplay had much more profitable titles (e.g. the BG games), but the ROI percentage for IWD games was very high. IWD was a workhorse series for Interplay. The games had short, high-pressure development cycles. They were fun games to work on, but PS:T had received such critical acclaim and so many of us (as I recall) wanted to work on Fallout 3 at the time that continuing work on the IWD series eventually became disheartening for some of us (me). Even if you can look at a game you've made and objectively say, "Yeah I guess that's pretty good," few people get into the industry with aspirations to make "pretty good" games.

It's something that many of us try, but few succeed at.

Wow, I hope I haven't actually said that because... lol? I designed the "original" (BioWare/BIS/IPLY) NWN website in late 1999/early 2000, but I'm not sure for how long it had already been in development.

Aram has not given his opinion on the new guns that have been revealed. This makes me cry.

Actually it is not me I just made that up to get attention.

It's me. I'm that guy.

Bayonetta on Very Easy/Automatic is easy by pretty much any standards, I think. It doesn't really get any easier than that. DMC4 has a pretty nice character progression/advancement system. Put those mechanics in a game with player choice and consequence and congrats: you have an RPG with great combat mechanics running at 60.

Mechanics are separate from content/tuning. DMC3:SE on "Japanese" standard difficulty is easy. DMC4 on human is also very easy. Bayonetta on very easy/automatic is a joke/basically just to watch cutscenes. Crank up the difficulty on them and they can all become very challenging. Also all of those games run at 60.

Ninja Gaiden and DMC3 are action games, not fighting games. I'm comparing them because they set the bar for those mechanics. Ninja Gaiden did allow camera control. Camera control vs. fixed camera is a non-issue as long as the camera supports the gameplay. Ninja Gaiden's controllable camera was, IMO, worse than DMC3's fixed/scripted cameras because you were effectively using the camera as an element of gameplay. As a further evolution of this, NG2's camera offered more control but was still worse than DMC4's camera, which I think is one of the best examples of (mostly) fixed/scripted cameras.

JE ran between 20 and 30 fps and came out one year after Ninja Gaiden and in the same year as DMC3. Just in case anyone wants to frame relevant competition in terms of mechanics.

More specifically, I think it's important that it is clear what the abilities/skills do, even if it's not explicitly stated. Personally, I think it's preferable that all upgrades show a tangible benefit that the player can figure out separate from a stat screen. While I don't think mathematical formulae need to be explicitly displayed, I do believe that for the designers' benefit and the players' benefit, it is best if it's made clear when statistics scale linearly or non-linearly. Assuming you're spending points on an unweighted scale, it's unfairly punishing to the player to invisibly scale purchased benefits at different rates.

They could have replaced Nuka Cola with Surge. Though I guess FO:BoS already did that with Bawls. lol

Character creation quizzes were used in a lot of the Ultima games and they seemed pretty popular there. I think it's important to note that system design isn't really about making things as we like them as much as it is about making things as our target audience will enjoy them -- both structurally and aesthetically. As such, we have to balance various tastes within a reasonable spectrum. It's impossible to make everyone happy, and attempting to do so is pretty much doomed to failure. We're not making games for dummies who hate RPGs but we're also not making it for PhD-holding 40k players.

I'm arguing against boring intros/CC processes, whatever form they may take. Clearly not everyone found Fallout 3's intro/CC process boring. All of the examples I've given were assessed based on what I viewed as their overall quality, not necessarily an endorsement or rejection of their fundamental structures. I'm sure that ME's CC process could have been a little more interesting/well integrated with the beginning of the game. I know NWN2's could have been way better. And while I'm sure F3's could be improved in a lot of ways, I still enjoyed it on my first time through. To be perfectly honest, while players like you and I and other folks on this board might be concerned with what happens on your second or third playthrough, we are in a very tiny minority. BTW, you haven't really lived until you've watched a non-RPG person try to dive into a D&D-based game like NWN2. It's like a steel-toed boot repeatedly kicking them in the nuts and calling them an idiot. YOU WANNA PLAY THIS GAME, DUMMY? HA HA HA YEAH RIGHT.

BTW, the way this was deduced is through Xbox Live's tracking. It can detect when you're playing a game and it knows what achievements you've unlocked. So if you've played a game and never received even the most baby "walk two steps forward" achievement within the first 5-10 minute, that's a pretty sure sign the person, for whatever reason, just turned it off before that point. I can see it happening for several reasons: * It's a rental, so the player really doesn't care too much about the monetary investment. * It was purchased with someone else's money/they are rich/money doesn't matter. * They buy a lot of games and sometimes never actually get around to playing some for more than five minutes (I do this). If you check my GamerCard (in sig), you'll see that I never got any achievements in Saints Row 2 or Enchanted Arms. Saints Row 2 has a mega crazy character customization process that basically exhausted me and I never picked it up again because I had like five other games to play. I did not find Enchanted Arms enjoyable. But I guess the joke's on me because the same people made Demon's Souls, which owns.