anubite

Running away is an important game mechanic. If you can't run away from fights - if you mess up a fight, you need to reload the game because you have no other options. This is bad gameplay I think. Running away should always be a possibility. It doesn't have to always work, but it should work at least some of the time.

Actually, in KOTOR2 - in regards for the 'turre't mini-game. At least for that one where you have to shoot the soldiers running into your ship? Just let them all pass through --- you get to fight them aboard your ship, which gives significantly more experience. Just a funny little tidbit.

Dragon Age Origins has more than five ways to enter the game, though, I would agree it's about five 'main' ways. You can also tackle all of the game's missions in a non-linear way - you can do deep roads, then the forest, then the mage tower, or in reverse. Etc. Granted, at the micro level, DAO has almost no "multiple entrance" design. As I mentioned I think in a previous post, DA:O's level design is pretty bad. There are maybe five non-linear areas contained within each "dungeon". The entire game consists of you walking forward through a dungeon, killing everyone in sight and never deviating from the strategy of, "Aggro monsters. Spam AOE spells. Loot monsters. Walk forward." DA:O does not follow my sentence in my OP because a majority of game mechanics and level design do not give you multiple entrances. Some important ones do, and that's good, but they didn't go far enough. Mass Effect 1/2/3 are all very, very linear. Level design is hallway-room-hallway-room-hallway with no deviation in how you solve problems. The choices you make in the context of the story can be graphed very linearly. Although you are given the choice of geth, quarian and both, choosing any one of these choices has no meaning because A can go to B, C, or D, but B, C and D feed into one node, E, which carries on the story in a linear fashion, instead of offering another node which has more than one entrance, and another story node which has more than one entrance. So perhaps.... But I can see your points. I don't disagree to some extent, but I think my points are poorly worded now. I should probably elaborate on them, instead of trying to condense them into a single sentence. All rooms should have at least two entrances AND "bottlenecks" should be kept to a minimum. If you have multiple entrances to a room, but that room bottlenecks to a single hallway, then the choice was illusory to some extent. Talking practically though, we need to accept "bottlenecking". Unless the game is going to randomly generate content, we cannot expect developers to actually create scenarios that don't bottleneck at some point. The Witcher 2 "bottlenecks" towards the beginning of the game and allows it to branch more smoothly after that, which isn't bad game design, though, I think they would have been better served giving us a more linear game at a macro level, with more choice at the micro level (missions have multiple outcomes that effect future missions). A more accurately worded version of my first sentence: All areas in Project Eternity should have more than one entrance and all areas in Project Eternity should have at least two paths. If you have at least two entrances to each node and at least two nodes feeding off each entrance, then you cannot have a linear game.

I guess I just don't understand what you're getting at. Are you saying you want us to be able to visit several unique locations based on our choices in the game? Isn't that a bit excessive? I don't think Obsidian has the money to do that kind of thing. The best we can hope for is for the context and results of our choices to change how levels play out, rather than determine what levels/zones we even go to at all. And if because they spend so much time developing 12 unique caves, they have no time to make each experience inside each cave deep and varied, aren't you just asking for us to have the choice to pick one of 12 different linear experiences? Sure, you had the choice, and there's some 'non-linearity' to that. But... I think it's better to focus on the non-linearity of each scenario, rather than conflate the number of possible scenarois at a macro level.

Except what you speak of is basically what I would call fluff. Multiple endings aren't necessary. Deus Ex and VTMB have a pretty linear story, with only a few quests that can have radically different results on your choices. What makes their design so beloved and memorable is the fact that most rooms have more than one way of entry. The other things you mentioned are covered in my first post. Re-read it. The first sentence of my original post was an attempt to summarize neatly how to make a game non-linear. What makes it so is not the end result of a mission, but how you got there. It's very nice to have branching stories and results of our actions that carry on beyond a room, beyond a level, beyond a zone, and into the end-game, but chances are, we can't expect developers to follow through on such design. What we can ask them to follow through is in a simple sentence like: Make sure there's always more than one way to get into a room. Now, an "entrance" to a room can be a dialogue, a disguise, a vent, a spell, a door, a sewer-cover, a window, et cetera - it doesn't need to be literal entryway, but the mere fact of having more than one way into said area is what's important. I think people would enjoy a game that gives them simply more angles of entry. Now, we can go one step and beyond, to say that entries into places should vary, or that our actions should carry on beyond a moment-to-moment basis -- but that isn't the essence -- that's a detail. You can't just have that and have a non-linear thing - you can have a setpiece game that varies how you walk into each setpiece, but the nature of having multiple entrances is what makes a game non-linear. You can have a "choose your own adventure" which gives you a plethora of choice but if each of those choices just branches off a linear roller-coaster, or if each of those choices bottlenecks into one, then I would say you don't have a game. For instance, The Walking Dead might be beloved by people for its dramatic scenes and characters, but it not designed how I would like a cRPG to be designed - none of your choices in the "choose your own adventure" of the first five episodes of TWD impact anything. Having different endings and having variety are not sufficient to introducing non-linear gameplay - they're good details to have, but I was trying to get down to the quintessence of it. Having multiple entrances is absolutely required to having a game that is non-linear. And non-linearity is important because PE is going to be a strategic/tactical game. Strategy and tactics have no meaning if the game is A to B. The following set of nodes is linear: A is start node A to B B to C B to D B to E D to G G is end node Non-linear is A is start node A to B B to C C to D B to D A to G G is end node If you can imagine these small node-based structures (where these graphs represent cause-effect chains, or, rooms connected to rooms, or even how character classes can develop), realize that in #1 there is a single direct path from A to G - start to finish. Despite there being choice in the first example, this nodal structure is deterministic. There is a single viable path to solve the graph. The second set is non-determinisic because to get to G we can do A-G or A-B-D-G. What makes a game a game, are the -. If the - in A-G has a "high" or "unique" cost to it, it might deter us to get the less direct route, A-B-D-G, if each - between each node sums to be cheaper, or provides some other benefit. #2 can still be 'deterministic' - but only if both paths are not equal. If the cost of A-G = A-B-D-G, then a player has true free will. Neither solution is punishing him. Now, we might want difficult paths to be chosen by players, these paths in a game might initially be more expensive, but they may have greater long-term consequences. This is also another aspect of a complex game, where players think in the long-term to solve a greater problem consisting of 1000's of decisions and "goal" nodes. This is where I'm coming from -- if we do not give players meaningful choice through options that manifest as "entries" - then we have a linear game. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTruYpxaqOA Threw that together to hopefully more visualize my point. It's rather sloppy, but I hope it helps a little.

You're looking at it from a macro level. If a level looks like this, it's linear game design regardless of whether you were nice or hurtful to a mage which got you a bad or good ending. If DA2's levels did not have linear design, they would have been much more tolerable even if they had grossly recycled assets.

Not really. Deus Ex and VTMB are not isometric, but the "action of crawling through a vent" is what's important, not whether you do it yourself or if the game just rabbit holes you into a new part of the level as a result. You're completely absolutely wrong. DA2 has you entering the same place from one entrance. Each entrance just recycles a different part of the same cave. This is not what I'm describing at all in my first post. DA2 is abhorrent and how you do not design levels. I am not describing at all. What DA2 is what we call "lazy" - what I describe in my first post is... argh let me get a video.

I don't see how this matter exactly. Whether he's fictional or not, characters serve a purpose in the story. Firstly, they are vehicles to drive the story. Secondly, they are a means to deliver theme and context to the reader. Vega doesn't really do either, or even if he does, he's just redundant, as we had plenty of characters to deliver whatever "down to earth message about Earth and being a human marine" lines. Vega was just purely, absolutely wasted potential. And at times, it's just hard to take him seriously, becaus he's just like we would expect a mexican-american marine to be. That's why I linked freaknin' airplane. Airplane is basically one big fun-poking at serials about world war veterans. "Oh macho grande was so horrible! Striker just couldn't get over it how he lost his whole squad!" The fact Vega is mexican makes it even funnier, because him saying "macho grande" would be soooo perfect.

Shepard is a soldier and talks like one no matter how you want to play him/her. But Shepard is also more than a soldier due to his/her seeming Jesus-like quality of "doing the impossible" and the fact he/she was risen from the dead. This makes Shepard at least 10% more interesting than Vega and tolerable as a result. There is something supernaturai about Shepard. Vega is about as fantastical as a rat in a fantasy RPG. Vega is not exceptional in any capacity and is so bland, were it not for his massive muscles, he'd be a wallflower.

While I do agree that branching paths or narration and choice and text and all that matters to beating linear game design. But, my main point is, you can almost crush it in one move: If you endeavor to make every room have more than one entrance to it, by that nature, it means things cannot possibly be linear, because there is always one other way to approach a situation. There is more than one way to do something. By committing to that basic design: more than one entrance, we can keep a development team on task with cohesion. If we think about games that are really powerful with player agency... they don't have many branching paths at all. Sure, VTMB and Deus Ex would have been better with more branching paths and varying story lines that diverge, the very minimum required to having a game that invites player agency is always having more than one way to enter a room, because by that very nature, we have more than one way to solve a problem.

It's a complaint about a fictional space soldier behaving and looking something like modern US marines. It's not. What is, is making him a full-fledged party member. Anderson is not a very good character for the same reason. He makes the whole tone of the mov- I mean, game, like Gears of War or Black Ops. Characters like Saren should be at the forefront of the game's story, giving us speeches about the nature of man or organic life or something. But instead, we get a 10%-futuristic-space-marine who serves no thematic purpose to the story or the world. Yes, yes, it's logical to have soldiers on board a military vessel, to talk to soldiers during a war, but when has Mass Effect ever been logical? I mean, c'mon. The main alien races are blue people, slightly-less blue people, and frog-giants. But if you aren't going to make Vega's story gripping (every time he talked about his past, I was just waiting for him to start talking like this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjBdFPyxuak ...then don't include him. When we could have had another Garrus, another Liara - I mean, not those exact characters - but those kinds of characters, with such alien things to talk and learn about... are what drive one's interest in the game. Not talking to generic military machos.

"Yes, it did. You have one question left."

Vega is worthy of contempt given this is Mass Effect. In place of Vega, we could have literally had any fantasy space alien or human you could think of. And instead we got another token space marine. A mexican-american space marine. Whose only reason for being was to appeal to that audience of people (you know, Call of Duty players?). That's why people make fun of him, beucase it's like BioWare's shooting itself in the foot with that character design. And before you rail me for saying that - go buy Black Ops 2, MW3, MW2.... or something. Anytthing. Put in the disc and start playing the campaign. James Vega would fit in perfectly in any of those stories. He's perfectly suited to deliver empty military jargon and the occasional nihilistic or mass-market-American-young-adult-male-commodified wise-crack. Would Liara or Garrus fit in with such games? Hell no! This is why Vega is so abhorrent. If I wanted to get a Call of Duty story, I would play call of duty. Give me characters that fit in a space opera BioWare. The characters people liked from KOTOR were HK47, Bindo, hell, even Carth fits in - even if nobody probably liked the guy. He at least contributed to the tone and heart of KOTOR1. Vega is like processed meat or cheetos. It's like, BioWare is realizing that its games have only appealed to a niche market of RPG gamers, and has decided, it would rather be Call of Duty, so one step at a time, it is casting off the things that made its game memorable - like the characters. Like their quirks or aesthetic. James Vega is an inoffensive light-brown man with a buzz cut, muscles, and a grey uniform. He is so generic and unpolarizing that he's designed so that your average consumer can't nitpick. He's a familiar face in what should be a world which at times seems unreal. And that role is unnecessary when we already have Ashley/Kaidan, Hackett, Human Military General X, and Shepard. Vega, in a vaccuum, is... well he's not offensive. His character is flat and fails to evoke anything. So he's not as bad as Jacob, who just comes off as annoying to me. He's not as bad as Kasumi (who just feels out of place in an anime-ish way). Or even Ashley (ME1 Ashely was interesting ME2-3 Ashley was not). So sure, BioWare could have done worse by making Vega annoying or trite or full of one-liners, but he feels like a limp attempt at another true-to-life soldier.

All* areas** in Project Eternity should have more than*** one entrance****. * = Obviously, we can tolerate a minority of areas having only one entrance ** = City, castle, forest, building, level, room. From macro to micro. *** = Two is minimum. Three or more is even better. **** = Entrance can be literal or figurative. An entrance can be a second door, or a sewer you can crawl through to get underneath a building, or using a roof, or using magic to teleport into an area, or using dialogue or a disguise or other unique thing to gain access into an area. Sure, having 100 entrances to one room would cease to make that room a room (maybe swiss cheese), so perhaps not all entrances should be "literal" holes in a wall, and perhaps we should limit the number of ways into an area, so that strategy is required. But having multiple ways to approach entering a part of the game, the more complex that game is by nature. Of course, this can extent to exits as well, but I think "how you got there" is slightly more important than "how you left".

I'd definitely like the idea of spoofing rat quests, by having us fight a giant, ferocious rat or something. Hell, make it a magical rat that casts spells. A wizard-rat? Maybe he's anthromorphic and can talk. Would be a fun spin on things.

Sure. I'm not saying ambushes or traps or "materializing enemies" are bad - but it's very lazy when every fight is copypasta of this. Even if it's not lazy but actually intentional design, as I've already mentioned, it serves only to limit the number of viable strategies... and it even limits the number of strategies you can even physically execute. There's no concept of "pulling" monsters in DA2, because every fight you engage is on the enemy's terms, not yours.

In an "ideal cRPG" - entire societal structure wouid be simulated by the computer program. You might ask why such a thing would be even necessary, but an "ideal cRPG" we're aiming for player agency to merge with the story, to act on a virtual world. The only way to do this without having a human behind a curtain dictating events, is to simulate events. If you slay the evil Wizard, a human "game master" says the land is prosperous again, and can easily reflect this in the way NPCs react and how expensive items are in the market. If you slay the evil Wizard in a cRPG, a computer can change prices and NPC attitudes, but a lot of this content, when hardcoded, grows exponentially when we consider the fact we might want 10 quests about killing 10 evil wizards and we want there to be at least 2 different outcomes - one if you fail to kill the wizard (or choose not to) and one if you do. That's 20 hardcoded sets of information that need to be dolled out. If want players to have more than binary level choice, we've now doubled or tripled the amount of work that has to be done. Simulation can in effect, generate content. Now, I know this is frowned upon - nobody tends to find randomly-generated dungeons or worlds all that exciting or interesting, but in an ideal cRPG, we would have ideal functions which take in hundreds of variables. We would have systems that model human behavior in a world, economics, military and political spheres, et cetera - all of these systems interacting together creates a dynamic virtual world. And although creating all these systems could take a while, in the long run, they generate more and possibly better content than trying to hardcode a series of cause-->effect scripts. PE obviously cannot afford to do such things, but what the OP talks about is not necessarily bad. It's simply a matter of cost and scope. PE can afford to have a dynamic economy I think, where they have basic systems to simulate village economics interacting with large city economics -- it's something I wish Skyrim had done. But to put it simply, if PE lets us visit several villages, they could tie a "productivitiness" value to each village, which is determined by the number of happy, living villages and the quality of the surrounding roads. If you help bandits and evil Wizards, village roads are less safe, so city economies are less healthy, for instance. Such a system would take a little coding, but such seemingly "small" impacts from your quest choices I think add up and help ground you in the virtual world. VTMB doesn't have any simulation of that kind, but VTMB has the Masquerade, which simulates Vampire code. It also has a basic human and hunter system, simulating those aspects of being a vampire. It also simulates the need for blood, to a limited extent. These systems are all very basic, but none of them are hard-coded cause-->effect chains, they're systems that dynamically react. edited: wrong clip, gah can't find it In the brief clip above, because of the combat system causing low-life enemies to flee, and because of the basic civilian flee AI, a gun fight in a large city area goes out of hand and involves innocent people, which simulates what actually happens in real life. Obviously, VTMB doesn't have much simulation, but you can agree the basic simulation it has is absolutely necessary. If enemies statically stood around or were hardcoded to do specific things under specific circumstances only, things would seem jerky and odd, which breaks immersion.

That's not bad design, but, my concern is something I don't think people consider consciously much. I call it stat conveyance Pokemon, for instance, has no stat conveyance. What does HP do? Okay, maybe you can figure that one out, but Attack, Defense, Special Attack, Speed, et cetera seemingly do nothing! It's never explained outside the game's manual (if they even come with such things anymore) what these statistics do, yet the game works pretty well. I mean, I know Flamethrower does damage! And that's all I'm really worried about. Is Flamethrower a special attack or a non-special attack? A new player may have trouble deciding, but they at least get a good "feel" for a pokemon in spite of the total lack of textual conveyance. I would say that although pokemon obfuscates all of its number-based mechanics completely, it still has an okay amount of conveyance, or rather, the game is designed such that you never need to know what stats actually mean, except perhaps outside of HP/PP. This makes sense considering pokemone was intended for younger gamers. On the other hand, even older gamers have trouble understanding complex systems of equations. If we let attributes effect a plethora of things in non-standard ways (by non-standard, I mean "Strength effects X by 2, Y by 4 and Z by 7.5" - well, that's fine, until you have 8 stats and they each effect 3 different things with different coefficients or formulae of effect. You might say, "Who cares? This is a cRPG. The computer handles all that." But when I pick up an item in PE, and it says +2 strength, +1 climbing strength, or what have you, how can I actually determine whether +1 strength, +10 climbing strength, +10 damage is actually better? Dragon Age 2 had this problem. You need to convey what stats do in an elegant manner, or you need to make systems such that it isn't required to understand the computations that go into each stat's effect on combat and gameplay.

To echo on what Diagoras was mentioning, we are already starting to see this with alternative monetization methods. Software as a service, microtransactions, and so forth. Certainly, a service-based industry is much harder to "pirate". That is side-stepping the issue, though not all industries can (or even should) be service-based. Steam I don't think would be quite as successful as a subscription service, but does many things to correctly tackle piracy, even if it's just one big annoying DRM itself.

Legion had to die because he lacked hardrive space or something, if I recall correctly. A shame they didn't have any spare thumb drives for him to back up his personality core.

SWG comes from a different time (how many people back then had computers capable of running a game like that, internet connections, and a willingness to spend $15) and was very profitable for SOE until about 2005. Overhaul was their effort to rekindle subscriptions, but it just backfired, killing the game faster. SWTOR was also the most expensive MMO, if not game, ever created. The fact it lost most of its population in three months should be enough to suggest SWG was much more successful, if profitable. Though I admit, such conclusions are difficult to reach without hard numbers.

Alan, the people on Forbes who talk about video games are bloggers. They represent a wider category and hardly represent Forbes as a single entity. I'm pretty sure Erik Kain has spoken up against Day One DLC, while other writers on Forbes have pardoned or encouraged it. There's no real consensus to be reached. The main problem with the ending I think is the developers waned an "Artsy Ending" but they failed to realize Mass Effect is not "artsy". During Mass Effect, how many times did the camera zoom in on Miranda's rear? Not that art can't be sexual, but the tone all along was never philosophical or metaphysical. Well, Harbiger was, but they abandoned that characterization of the Reapers from ME2 through ME3 until the end. That's I think what got people upset. That, and the Gears of Warification of ME1. I mean, ME1 had potential to be pretty interesting - mix "space magic" with guns and you could have a cool battle system. But instead we got hallways and more hallways ME3 had a few interesting early zones that were psuedo-open, but they didn't even try to stick with that sadface. The end of ME1 even had some interesting gravity mechanics and level twists (the whole level turning upside-down). But these kind of things were never employed throughout the rest of the series - the level design was very static and narrow and I think that's what hurt... well, it hurt me the most, but I don't think most people who played the game were sensitive to this, though they may have noticed it on a subconscious level.

Galdur's Bate III? Do you think they could get away with a name like that? Somehow I doubt it. The name is probably going to be soul-based, since that seems to be the theme of the project. Eternal Souls? Oh but then From Software might sue It can't have Scrolls in the name, unfortunately. Soul Scrolls doesn't come off the tongue easily though.

SWTOR is a special exception. I was very excied about SWTOR until I saw the game. You know, it's hard to take a game idea seriously when Jedi are now standing in back rows like priests, holding their green lightsabers like doo-hickeys, healing tanks that are shooting laser-guns. I sighed, because although KOTOR/KOTOR2's combat was nothing to write home about, it was at least different from that. I think a real SWTOR mmo had potential, look at how SW Galaxies turned out, a great game that was actually about a community, it was an MMO. SWTOR was a super-instanced themepark. PE will not be a mmo. Though it may borrow more elements from TOEE than we expect, given the people who are developing the game.

I don't think simulation is misplaced in an RPG. Computers are apt at simulation as well. Adding more detail and addressing the "commoner" element of a psuedo-medieval society could be effective. It depends upon how this effected, but I'd say it really matters what PE's theme is about. It's about souls, I'd guess? How do souls factor into economy, city life, oppression, the means/mode of production, et cetera? If we need to examine the suffering of a city populous, then I would agree that focusing on the civilian aspect of medieval life is prudent. Mount and Blade does this by letting you visit the "fiefs" and villages that surround the great cities and castles. You can do favors for the villagers and take note of their living conditions. You can defend them from bandits and ask them questions about their life. Although it isn't deep, I'd say M&B does what you're talking about effectively. There is also a simulation aspect involved - each village contribues goods and men to a kingdom every so often. If villages are destroyed, then the economy is shallowly simulated. Kingdoms have less able bodies and less resources. The price of food and goods goes up and you can exploit this by going to other kingdoms, buying goods from the market, and selling them at a gouged price in war torn cities. i would say this simulates things fairly well and probably was not too expensive to implement from a programming/resources level. It is something that could simply be added with modding though, so I'd argue making sure there are assets for us to visit villages is not a bad investment, but actually simulating the economy is something that could be left for modders.