Merin
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Posts posted by Merin
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While I'm all for content available only to certain situations....
in a party-based cRPG, especially where you can create new party members... this kind of feature (parts of the game accessible only to a certain class) will kind of be lost, or make people create the odd rogue or monk or whatever just to run off and see that content then drop said rogue or monk.
I do think there will be reactive parts of the game that will take into account / acknowledge your main character's race, gender, class, culture... but this is likely to be dialog reactions and options of what to say, small things like that. Nods to player choices in character design.
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Sorry, we are not "just going to disagree" about anything.
Yes, we are disagreeing. Absolutely disagreeing.
see? still disagreeing
I also think you have no idea what the gutter is or what Scot McCloud is talking about - so I suggest your read Understanding Comics.
I understand what Scot McCloud's "gutter" is better than you do.
Bold, declarative statement.
You said you understand it better than I do. Yep, that settles it. You said you understand it better, must be true. Because you say so.
And I managed to figure it out without reading that book, or anything else related to Scot McCloud.Wonderful! Great job! Did you want a cookie?
*looks around for a virtual cookie*
Clearly you understand the concept much better than a professional in the field of sequential art does about his own medium. Are you a savant, like Mozart? Were you selling comic strips to the syndicate when you were just a tot?
Understanding an author without having read him. There must be a name for that - for claiming to understand a subject with no research on it.... hmmm, concept is slipping my mind since all I can come up with are derogatory statements about ignorance, arrogance, bluster and hot air.
I guess it's time for you to educate me. Let's see, what is the gutter really about...
ALL it means is that certain details in your setting can be suggestive of much more than what you show explicitly in your foreground action. It doesn't mean you should make your audience wholesale imagine things that you didn't write, draw, film, design, etc.You were right, you do understand it better than I do! That's not what I got from Scott McCloud at all! Thanks, Game_Exile!
The fact that McCloud can spin this very mundane observation about storytelling and style into some overly elaborate BS about "gutters" only shows me that McCloud is a trashy thinker and that the only thing I should do with a copy of his book is throw it into a gutter (or use whatever other convenient method of waste disposal is at hand), not read it.Clearly! A man who's won Harveys, an Eisner and a Kirby is one who is mocked by his peers and disrespected by all in his field. Mr. McCloud has nothing on Game_Exile!
....
man, the snark came out heavy there - but sometimes some things are just so plain awful that the only thing you can do is ridicule them
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Now speaking specifically about PE, we are now taking on the role of a character in the vision of the writers.
No.
"You’ll create your own character" - http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/obsidian/project-eternity
Character Creation
At a minimum, players will be able to specify their main character’s name, sex, class, race (including subrace), culture, traits, ability scores, portrait, and the fundamental starting options of his or her class (gear, skills, and talents). We have not worked out customization details of character avatars, but we believe those are important and will be updating on these specifics in the future. - that's from Josh Sawyer.
So, yes we should be forced to have underlying motivations and goals that the character has, whether we chose them or not. Why? Because, otherwise you wouldn't have a game to play at all.....
So, uhm, what's the dev defined motivations for you characters in Wasteland? Curse of the Azure Bonds? Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines? Alpha Protocol?
I don't mean what is the story of the game. I don't mean what external forces are coming after you. I don't mean what are the pre-defined limits of the game and the starting position given to you. I mean underlying character motivations.
In Wasteland you are Rangers, sure, and you've been tasked with investigating the stuff happening in the area. But WHY? Why is Angela Deth (if you keep the pre-mades, even) a Ranger? Why does she do the job? What motivated her to try and disarm the bomb under Felicia's chair instead of giving the kidnapper what he wanted?
In Azure Bonds, why does your Ranger work with the party? Is he after money, does he like killing monsters... what is his motivation?
Your Brujah in Bloodlines is working with the Prince because the Prince orders it and you have to obey - but does she actually want to help the Prince? Maybe she's infatuated with him? Do you want to help out Nines because he's a fellow Brujah, or does she decide that the Asian monsters are more her liking. Where did Brian Mitsoda and the others at Troika give you the underlyng motivations for your Brujah making those choices?
Oh, right.
They don't. You do.
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It would make no sense for the characters own self motivations not to factor into the game world at all.
Who said the character's motivations shouldn't be?
In the end, whether you're playing Baldurs Gate or Planescape Torment, your character had their own self motivations that probably completely differed from the person playing that character. Especially in Torment, the Nameless one had several motivations that I could of given a crap less about, but they were interwoven into the character. Even though through dialogue, the player is given choices to choose from, there is still a very underlying concept of the character that is built into the game from the start.No, they didn't. Well, yes they did, but not in the way you implied. They had the motivations you gave them. They were your character, inside of a setting and a provided background. Many DM/GM's will do this with table top games even - give you a setting and background and say "you are all part of this town" or "you are all mercenaries" - because the DM (or cRPG game) dictates parameters for your character to be created inside of doesn't equate to your character suddenly being predefined entirely.
There's zero. And there's a trillion. And there are nine-hundred ninety-nine billion nine-hundred ninety-nine million nine-hundred ninety-nine thousand nine-hundred and ninety-nine numbers between them. It's not either or - there's a whole range of options between.
So just because you can't decide everything about the character you make (what, you are telling me I can't make a Starfleet Science Officer in your Vampire: The Masquerade game? but I get to make my own character!!!!!) doesn't mean you don't make your own character. Some games can be pretty wide open (play Rifts, be practically anything) or pretty specific (play Frank's Buffy Campaign and you all have to be high school jocks) but you still are playing the character you shape to be your own.
As I had said before, PS:T is like Total Recall - Hauser didn't decide Quaid's motivations and actions. If you were Quaid in Total Recall, Hauser's actions and motivations are NOT yours - you, as Quaid, make decisions regardless of what Hauser did.
We play the role of the character as the developers have portrayed him/her to us.Not in IE games, no. Not even really in PS:T, though you are much more limited.
Though we have many options of dialogue to pick from there is not an infinite number of choices to be made, which means we inevitably are forced to choose one of the paths that the developers have written, total free play-ability, or sovereignty in this case of a character, just cannot work in a game such as this. In order for a game to be created where the actual character's motivations were non existent, they'd have to ship us a blank game.Zero. One trillion. And lots of room in-between.
if you ignored your characters own self motivations and purely played the character based upon your own self motivations, then you were not properly role-playingWait....
who was arguing for player motivation over player character motivation? I know there are players who play the game as themselves, making the decisions they would. It's a legitimate option, just not one I ever use.
But who was saying this that you are replying to?
Any true role-player will tell you this.Politely, again.... best to not be telling people who the "true" role-players are, and who isn't a "true" role-player. That's the kind of thing where you start to really insult people.
Now as blunt and bold as that statement is, it's true down to its core. That is the very fundamental of role playing, you assume the role of a character.Close. Role-playing games are games where you choose or create a character and make decisions for that character as you believe that character would. You can play pre-made characters (playing as the crew of Serenity, picking Batman or Superman in DC Heroes) or you can make your own characters.
For single player cRPG's there is a range. You can play something like The Witcher, where you are given a VERY defined character (straight out of a novel even.) You can play something like Daggerfall, where the ONLY piece of background forced on you is that you start out with a mission given to you by the Emperor, and there are ranges in between. You get some fuzzy areas like Hawke and Shepard - you get to choose some stuff, but a lot of who you are is pre-shaped and pre-determined.
You can take on the role of a pre-defined character, like Luke Skywalker, and play Star Wars acting as you think Luke would... or you can create your own character in Pathfinder and role-play the defeating-death obsessed gnome re-animator alchemist who is also a pyromaniac and actually hates practical jokes that you, yourself, dreamed up from whole cloth (well, as much as the Pathfinder rules and GM for the game grant you.)
Which is PE? From the Kickstarter - "You’ll create your own character"
Read pick from the characters we pre-created for you in that at your own leisure.
Saying that motivations should be based on what 'you' the player have stated that characters motivations to be, isn't truly rping that character.If it is a character you created, yes, it absolutely is role-playing that character. You created it - you are the arbiter of what that character's motivations are.
how do you even believe what you are saying?
It's very hard to move away from something that you want your character to do, but know in your mind that your character wouldn't truly do that, so you're then forced to properly role-play that choice, by choosing the path that your character would take, or you can choose to not role-play that choice and do whatever you want.Wait, what?
What your describing is the PLAYER deciding what the PLAYER wants to do (which, honestly, is legitimate in a role-playing game, as it's a GAME also, but bear with me) and NOT the PLAYER deciding what his CHARACTER would do.
Let's try this - "motivations should be based on what 'you' the player have stated that characters motivations to be" != "something that you want your character to do, but know in your mind that your character wouldn't truly do"
Those are NOT the same thing.
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Without player character reacting to what happens in gameworld then the game and the gameworld will be like Bethesda's games where rest of the gameworld is just there for the player to play puppeteer and becomes completely superfluous and bland instead of giving impression that player character is part of the small world, it gives the feeling that world being there for the player and player character to toy with.
You have the player character react. It is your character you made. If the writer prescripts your character's reactions... it's not longer your character.
You act like how Bethesda does things isn't right. It is role-playing, perhaps a purer form than some of what more linear-story oriented games do.
Because you don't like having control of your character and imagining your character's reactions doesn't mean it's wrong. It means it isn't what you want. You want an adventure game, with some preset characters, that you can tweak the combat abilities of, it seems like.
I like action adventure games, too. Recently just finished Alan Wake, great game. Since it wasn't a cRPG I didn't expect to have control over who my character was nor his motivations, and I was fine with that.
But with a cRPG I want to control that part of the character. It is sort of the defining thing of what makes a role-playing game a role-playing game... not the stats, not the levels, not the loot, not the story, not the "choice and consequences" - all (okay, most, not loot) of that helps you define your character and control your character, but those are the TOOLs. The means, not the end.
They write that the player character makes a choice, or the player / player character makes a choice? Distinction is important.You are getting caught with the words and not the meaning - English isn't my native language. I obviously meant that they give a choice for the player either to save a baby or not but that should've been clear enough from my text.
So, if it's the player's choice how his character reacts, and not the writer dictating exactly how the character must react... I'm failing to see where you are arguing with me on substance.
I know the difference of singleplayer CPRG and RPG played with several players and GM very well - I played 3-4 years in the RP Server of the NWN where we had GMs/DMs - since you are so determined of playing your own character, you should try it - honestly.
I'm going to say this once, and be nice about it, as I think you may be giving what you think is a sincere suggestion.
I've been role-playing, create your character and run with it, for nearly thirty years. I've been playing cRPGs for almost exactly as long. I have been both a player and a DM in countless campaigns for D&D alone, not even looking to other table tops I've played. I've tried out many MMORPG's since Dark Sun Online, beta-ing many of them. I cut my teeth on Phantasie, Bard's Tale and Pool of Radiance. I know precisely the kind of games I want to play.
So, for the sake of future civility, please stop telling me what kind of games I should try. I would bet money you can't mention a kind of role-playing game that you have played I haven't tried (with me giving up the one kind that I don't want any part of - LARPing.)
The kind of single-player cRPG I like isn't some pipe-dream - it's the majority of cRPG's that have been made.
I can play table-top RPG's with other people. I played cRPG's, as Sylvius is oft to say, to emulate the table top experience without other players.
Where the roleplaying in single-player crpg comes in are the choices & consequences - how do you react to them, what choices you make, what kind of character are you playing (good, evil, creedy, selfish, neutral, etc), how do you interact with different characters and factions - which faction do you join in, which faction are you working against, which character do you help and which not, how do you react what happens in the gameworld such as the before mentioned situation with the Master A and then the game shows in the gameworld how the story/stories, gameworld, NPCs and your character shapes up in the said world depending on what you have chosen to do - and they show how your choices changes the NPCs, gameworld and the story - that's where the roleplaying in singleplayer RPG comes from....
Yes. And?
Wait, let me quote yourself back to you - "You're not seeing The Big Picture."
And by big picture, I mean big font -
I want Project Eternity to have choice and consequence.
Not from the stuff you have made up in your head - the stuff what happens, happens in the gameworld because that's how games work - the player character optimally has as many choices in the game as it's possible to do and choose from, and you choose from them depending on what aspect/varitation of character you want to play from the choices/options the devs have written for you - your character can't be anything more in the game and game world what the devs have written into the game.....
jarpie.
jarpie.
jarpie.
So, yes, the player's options are pre-scripted. His character can only be player defined, as far the game world will react to him or her, inside of the boundaries of what the game developers made possible. There are limits to what you can create inside the game rules and options.You are not disagreeing with me. You are writing long posts that say what I said with one small addition of trying to tell me that, somehow, I am wrong for saying that in a cRPG like PE we will be making our own character and not playing the dev's character.
It's like you just want me to be wrong, but can't find WHERE you can say I'm wrong.
If your sticking point, that you repeat ad naseum despite all your examples, is - "the choices/options the devs have written for you - your character can't be anything more in the game and game world what the devs have written into the game" - you aren't proving me wrong. You are defining the limitations of the medium. Those limitations do not prevent role-playing... they limit the range of role-playing allowed. As does every game system written for role-playing - rules limit what you can and cannot do inside a rules system.
At the sad state of repeating myself yet again -
In a perfect role-playing environment, each character would have it's own player so each character was super-realized and each character could react to whatever each other player said or did without limitations. And this is how simulations for group therapy and training exercises work, but let's not go there for now. With role-playing games, you aren't going to get that many people involved - you have a handful of players controlling their own characters, and as such their characters have the most reactivity and are the most realized... whereas all the other characters in the world are controlled by the GM, and therefore are less realized. Still, the GM can try and react to most anything the players do, so it's not so bad, just the GM can't spend lots of time fleshing out every other character in the world. Now you move to cRPG's, and the limitations grow. You don't have an active GM (in single player cRPGs), you have prescripted dialog and such for the NPCs before the player has even bought the game, let alone made a character. And because of the limitations of prescripted reactions, the player becomes limited in how many choices he or she has as well. The game developers have to prescript the options for the player.
I think this is very important from the devs in Kickstarter page: "Project Eternity will take the central hero, memorable companions and the epic exploration of Baldur’s Gate, add in the fun, intense combat and dungeon diving of Icewind Dale, and tie it all together with the emotional writing and mature thematic exploration of Planescape: Torment.", I've bolded the important part.The devs have said that player can choose from what culture the player character is from, and then the gameworld will react to it - this tells me that the player character probably won't be completely blank state like it was in Baldur's Gate 1 and 2, which you want.
What are you on? Do you think that the focus of PS:T is the limits on your main character when they mean when they say emotional writing and mature thematic exploration?
Really? REALLY? really?
You can, *ahem*, choose your gender, race, class, background.... and you say this is more limited than BG because they are giving you more options to help shape your own character?
"Excuse me, sir, I'm afraid our company must declare bankruptcy"
"What? How?"
"We have just split our stock shares 3 to 1."
"But... that's a good thing. That means the prices were so high for a share that the split was done to make buying and selling shares easier. Now more people can buy shares, more people can invest, the shares will go up in price.... this is a good thing!"
"Sir, each share is now only worth a third of what it was originally."
"But you have three shares of each on you had before, so it's the same... do you understand what you are talking about? We have MORE options now, and this is a good thing for the company."
More options in shaping the character the way you want it, jarpie, means even MORE ability for the player to make the character his or her own, and have the game react even more individualistically to the player's design.
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I loved IWD series intros, (in fact much better than BG's scenes, but I liked them too) but I can notice even action games didn't necessarily use cinematics...
IWD"s story (yeah, I said it!) was awesome and better than BG's story, IMO... but that intro and closing *shivers* were amazing!
Keyser Söze ain't got nothing on that.
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One of the best examples for visual inferences is from Hitch****. Take a picture of a man grinning, then cut to a baby and back to the man. The audience has a visual story from the pictures (typically of a dad looking at his child or something along those lines - fairly innocuous). Take the SAME picture of a man grinning but inter-cut it with a picture of a sexy, scantily clad woman now gives you a different view of the man's intent. The truth is the pictures may not have anything to do with one another. They may not have been taken in the same place at the same time; juxtaposition of images and the human brain's need to create connections is what creates the narrative.
Okay, that example is better than what I've been giving. Thank you.
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In a role-playing game, especially one where you are allowed to fully create your own character (as PE will be, in the great IE following of the greater cRPG tradition), the game writers should almost never write the player character's reactions.
They should, can and do write NPC reactions to the game world and the player character, and other game world reactions to the player character, NPCs and other game world events.
Actually they have to write the players reactions in dialogue to other dialogue.
Amentep, you aren't being this nitpicky are you?
Let me try again to explain this, and maybe you'll see where there is confusion.
ahem
So, yes, the player's options are pre-scripted. His character can only be player defined, as far the game world will react to him or her, inside of the boundaries of what the game developers made possible. There are limits to what you can create inside the game rules and options.Arguably there is no player reaction that the game makers didn't allow via creation (either intentionally or unintentionally).and so...
The game designers (for a cRPG in the style of PE, the older IE games, etc.) give you options of what you character says or does. The game world (including NPCs) should react to your characters words and actions - words and actions that chosen by the player, not by the writers.What the game makers can't write (and shouldn't assume) is the players motive; my reason for face-shooting Vulpes will always remain my own.Yep, hence -
uhm, I quoted it above.
When I say they shouldn't write the player character's reactions, I don't mean they don't write the options you can choose.
of course they do
I mean they should NOT predetermine exact reactions for the player character.
Major example, one that burns me to this day and I'll never forgive...
Mass Effect 2's DLC, Arrival. In a cut scene, with no input from the player, Shepard kills 300,000 batarians. My Shepard I had played to that point would NEVER have made that choice. My character was torn away from me.
Decisions, character defining or simple, should not be made for the player character. The writers can only give so many options, but hey need to let the player choose which option... in a cRPG in the style of PE which (you get the point...)
....
So I think we're actually in agreement here, right?
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Ridiculously bad math is ridiculously bad.
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Forget the digression, though... don't you want to create a character and experience the 'verse with this music in the background?
Obsidian, make it happen!
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Skipping voiced dialog used to be a thing for me, but I've noticed the same thing you mention - in some games trying to skip the voiced dialog either skips all the dialog or makes for a very jarring experience...
so I end up having to deal with the impatient for the voices to finish.
It's not a major complaint, but it is there.
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"I agree. Although it`s not a shame to iligally download some titles (like Call od Duty or Battlefield)."
I disdagree. Piracy is theft. It's also immoral, illegal, and evil. There is no excuse for it no matter the game, no matter owner of said game, and no matter the situation the thief is in. It's inexcuseable behaviour and extremely shameful.
I can't help myself - apologies ahead of time....
http://tvtropes.org/...talPiracyIsEvil
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I can read so much faster than they speak, for one.
I have this issue too. Most of the time I'm done reading before the voice is even half way through talking, so I sit there feeling impatient.
Even regular dialogues this can come up for me. When they have the option, turning the dialogue subtitles off as much as possible helps because then I'm "forced" to listen instead of automatically reading because the text is there.
I'm not against narrated stills/cinematics per se, btw. I just like to see them kept to a bare minimum, like most such things. Start of/intro to the game, maybe one for the ends of a couple big "act" sections, and end of the game.And as mentioned, can sometimes work/be needed for certain things like dream sequences etc. Altho, IIRC, I didn't even realize there were dream sequences in BG1 for a while because I kept force-marching without resting a lot of the time. Heh.
I do the opposite. My hearing isn't the best, so I much prefer reading than listening... I sometimes miss words or phrases. On top of that it's rare for me to be in a silent, solitary location to play a game so head phones and avoiding distractions becomes an issue, where I can read the text at my own pace.
I always turn sub-titles on.
I think I played Mass Effect 1 or 2 once with sub-titles off. It did give a completely different, and not unenjoyable, experience. I prefer reading, but I can see the appeal to the cinematic approach.
In non-RPGs, in games with absolutely set characters and little to no dialog choices, cinematic games are things I can and do enjoy.
For cRPGs... meh, less voice acting, less pre-rendered sequences, less cut-scenes entirely, the better.
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I'll continue to keep the fire burning for the Obsidian Firefly RPG.
Eternal Flame.
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Yep. My vote does here too.
Actually, I don't even need voiceover — I can very well read a well-written text myself.
That's my general viewpoint.
Narration itself doesn't add much for me ... that's going to be dependent on whether I like the narrator's voice/intonation, and that's a hit and miss affair for most people. So if we're talking imagination here, I'd actually rather just have text and imagine a voice myself. Or really, sometimes, none at all if possible - I'd rather story/narrative be somehow integrated into the game itself in some way, rather than needing huge chunks of sudden exposition.
eg, there's the too many cutscenes ="I'll just watch watch a movie" aspect (which I agree with) but there's also the "then I'll just read a book" aspect. It's a fine line at times.
Portal 2 is amazing at the story being integrated into the background. Fallout 3 and Skyrim are pretty good at this too, if you are into this sort of thing.
I like that, but for a game like PE I'm all for the narrated scenes...
I'd much rather READ it than get the narration, too. Everytime the voices come out of nowhere in PS:T right now, for example, I get thrown. I can read so much faster than they speak, for one. For another the inconsistency is jarring most of the time.
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Oh yea, that was annoying for stealth players. It was way worse in deus ex:HR. The company for dhr tried to blame another company that worked on the ending as the culprit, but it was the original company that sighned off on it. One of the devs said they wanted a big action fight to make you feel you accomplished something. um...what? If you go through the game 90% with stealth, you do NOT want an action fight...grrrrr.
It's rare that a game will let you get through the final encounter without fighting something, but it clearly can be done. KotOR did it.
Fallout has this with the Master, too.
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Merin, since you are against reactivity and showing/asking motivations from the player (or want to keep them at minium at least), and especially making the player to react to the gameworld.
Let me try and make this abundantly clear. Forgive the excessive dramatics of the next sentence, but I'm hoping it might be memorable and could possibly stick...
I want Project Eternity to have choice and consequence.
Of course the game has to react to the player's actions. Furthermore, of course in a role-playing game the player's choices about his or her character and what his or her character does in the game world matter, and the game should have reactions to the player.
I have never said otherwise.
Red herring. Look it up.
translation - stop believing what you see others say about me, and please stop adding to the misdirections - read the red bold above, and accept that I'm not advocating lack of game reactivityHow they could deal with any themes concerning for example, friendships or how the souls affect the behaviour unless they write player character reacting to the other characters and what happens in the gameworld, also if they wouldn't give player any motivations to choose from how they can deal with the soul possibly influencing the choices you make?
... avoiding the temptation to argue that themes could be presented in so many very different ways, knowing full well some sentence will be grabbed by somebody and used, out of context, to create an army of straw men that even fire could not stop ...
In a role-playing game, especially one where you are allowed to fully create your own character (as PE will be, in the great IE following of the greater cRPG tradition), the game writers should almost never write the player character's reactions.
They should, can and do write NPC reactions to the game world and the player character, and other game world reactions to the player character, NPCs and other game world events.
If for example they write that player character makes a choice,
They write that the player character makes a choice, or the player / player character makes a choice? Distinction is important.
like Tale said either to save a baby or not, and then they show player character remembering the soul's past lives or talking about the soul influencing that action, wouldn't the motivations be important in dealing with the choice and not just the actions since they are dealing with the themes that does soul and its history influence the player characters and NPCs behaviour?No, you really do mean the writers saying what the player character decided, and writing why they did it?
In a cRPG, especially one where you can create your character in the way of IE following the great tradition of cRPGs letting you make your own character, the writers should not be dictating to me my character or my actions. Stuff like KotOR or PS:T, in the Total Recall method of "here's a unique character born from the mind-wiped husk of a previous villain", is a special case of that's not your character the stuff they relate to you, it's the personality of whom inhabited your character's body earlier.
Digression aside, I reject the scenario because I don't believe PE should be dictating my character's motivations to me.
I'll give you an example: The PC and the NPCs are discussing does the soul influence their motivations and actions, and since the PC is the one doing the (most) choices concerning what the group does, then he must be one of the main points in the discussion so there has to be motivation behind the actions since otherwise the whole theme is worthless because soul would be influencing his motivations behind the actions and not the actions directly - and how they can write lines for the NPCs (like the people in the world who are studying the effect of the souls) having the view of the PCs actions unless they know the motivations also?
Let me try and pick out the salient point in here, and feel free to correct me if I've missed it -
How can the game writers create reactive dialog for the NPCs if they haven't dictated ahead of time the PC's motivations?
The same way they've done it for all the other IE games where NPCs spoke to the player's characters - by first giving the player enough options to reasonably represent where most players would like be playing their characters from (what number of options is the trick - too many and the game takes way too long to write, especially if these options keep branching.... too few and you get Mass Effect 3 where you can choose to say yes in a nice voice or yes in a mean voice) and then crafting NPC responses to those options.
In a perfect role-playing environment, each character would have it's own player so each character was super-realized and each character could react to whatever each other player said or did without limitations. And this is how simulations for group therapy and training exercises work, but let's not go there for now. With role-playing games, you aren't going to get that many people involved - you have a handful of players controlling their own characters, and as such their characters have the most reactivity and are the most realized... whereas all the other characters in the world are controlled by the GM, and therefore are less realized. Still, the GM can try and react to most anything the players do, so it's not so bad, just the GM can't spend lots of time fleshing out every other character in the world. Now you move to cRPG's, and the limitations grow. You don't have an active GM (in single player cRPGs), you have prescripted dialog and such for the NPCs before the player has even bought the game, let alone made a character. And because of the limitations of prescripted reactions, the player becomes limited in how many choices he or she has as well. The game developers have to prescript the options for the player.
So, yes, the player's options are pre-scripted. His character can only be player defined, as far the game world will react to him or her, inside of the boundaries of what the game developers made possible. There are limits to what you can create inside the game rules and options.
But you still create it. You still choose the dialog your character speaks. And all the nooks and crannies that aren't covered by the character creation system you can imagine to help add the height to Harry Potter or the style of shirt that Frodo is wearing (referring to books, movies, reader vs. writer vs. movie director visions of characters, etc, from earlier post.)
Games used to (some still do) give you bio blocks to fill in your character's biography. Clearly the designers meant these to be YOUR characters, not their characters.
Now, this is important - they have to show the motivations in the context of the gameworld how it (the world itself, characters etc) react to the motivations and the actions of the player character or otherwise dealing with the whole theme is moot because there would not be points of reference to which compare player character's motivations and actions vs. the gameworld for how the writers want to deal with the theme in the gameworld.
The player character's motivations shouldn't enter into the design of the game at all, with the exception of what the player choose to have as his character's motivations.
The game designers (for a cRPG in the style of PE, the older IE games, etc.) give you options of what you character says or does. The game world (including NPCs) should react to your characters words and actions - words and actions that chosen by the player, not by the writers.
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Cries of this being anything elitist or wrong....
tempest, teapot, mountain, molehill, windmill, Quixote....
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Its an analogy to comic art. Comic art is a series of sequential images that tie together to form a narrative; because it is static image the reader's imagination has to fill in the action going on between the panels. The area between the panels is referred to as "the gutter" between panels, thus the imagined connection between panel A and panel B is what the reader invests in "the gutter".
Precisely. It's a concrete example, easily visualized. You can see the space between the panels, the gutter, and so it's a very easy analogy.
Another example is when someone reads a book, like Harry Potter or Lord of the Rings, and imagines what Harry or Frodo look and sound like. The author guides you, with descriptions of features and voice, but ultimately your imagination shapes their character based on your personal preferences. When you then see the movie casting, or even just hear an full cast audio production, many people are often mildly to majorly disappointed. Some don't care, but many prefer their version of the character than the director's (or voice casting director's) version. This is where you get the oft-said adage "the book is better than the movie" - for many, it's because how they imagined events suited them much more than the director's vision of the story.
Not everyone prefers books to movies. And not everyone prefers silent protagonist, create your own character to pre-designed, pre-determined, voiced and set appearance character in games. But many do (in both instances, prefer the former to the latter.)
From a video game perspective, this might be something like in BG2 when your party is traveling for a day (or so) from Athkatla to Umar Hills (IIRC), the player might assume, conjecture or imagine that the party might have conversations, or camp, or whatever during the trip that happens between "gather your party to venture forth" and arrival in Umar Hills. The trip doesn't exist in the game, only in the mind of the player.
That's a pretty direct comparison to the gutter, yes...
but I'm also speaking about all the things the game can never show. What do your party members talk about around the campfire? What kind of breakfast do they eat? What do they do in their down time? Who are their parents, best friends, what are their hobbies? Do they take good care of their weapons, or wear them out and just replace them? All these details are best left to the player's imagination - UNLESS they serve some very specific story point to give that information to the player. Like, you know, whom your daddy is in Baldur's Gate or whom your best friend was in KotOR.
Other people will play the game and not assume anything happened during the trip since for them the game only exists based on their explicit input and what they see. This is where comic art storytelling and video game storytelling differ, since comic art storytelling can't exist without an assumption of action happening that you don't see, whereas I'm not 100% sure the same can be said for video games (although certainly there are those who do "expand on the action" that could happen "off-screen")And it's also why much of this is often best left to the player. Many players may not care about their character's motivations. Many cRPG players are in it for XP, loot, killing things, and not making choices in-character. And that's absolutely fine. You have to balance things, pick what to show and what not to show.
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Only bug I remember in AP was one where at a certain point after loading a particular area, I could backtrack and a door should have closed behind me, but didn't so you could walk off the map.
Only bug I had was immediately on release when I installed it there was some graphics card inconsistency that forced me to drop a setting one notch below optimal for the game to run without horrible stuttering graphics. Bug was fixed in a day so or, if I remember correctly, and having to play at sub-optimal graphics settings is actually pretty normal for me in PC gaming.
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You didn't even answer his question, why not just imagine the whole thing yourself? Write a line or two about it in the character's bio and you're all set, right? Because that's what you usually do anyway, you said so yourself.
Hint - you can't have the gutter without the panels.Hint more, I'm lost in your devious analogy. English not my first language and all that jazz...
You (again, general, not you specifically) also presume that when I say that the gutter is the best part of the comic that I somehow am saying that I don't want the panels that surround the gutter.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Understanding_Comics - "Closure, reader participation between the panels"
http://www.epinions.com/review/Understanding_Comics_by_Scott_McCloud/book-review-431B-4A6E317-3910B824-prod4?sb=1 - “The art of comics is as subtractive an art as it is additive,” McCloud writes. “And finding the balance between too much and too little is crucial...” (page 85) Figuring out exactly how many panels are needed to tell a story, as well as how to arrange them, is not a simple thing. Allowing an audience to make their own assumptions about what happens in the gutter can make the story more engaging, but “as closure between panels becomes more intense, reader interpretation becomes far more elastic. And managing it becomes more complicated for the creator.” (page 86) If an artist describes every action in mind-numbing detail, utilizing hundreds of panels, he risks losing the interest of his audience. If he’s too vague, it’s more likely that the readers will misunderstand what he’s trying to say."
Merin saying that you should imagine the entire game and the game shouldn't show or tell anything = red herring
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You didn't even answer his question, why not just imagine the whole thing yourself? Write a line or two about it in the character's bio and you're all set, right? Because that's what you usually do anyway, you said so yourself.
Hint - you can't have the gutter without the panels. -
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in order to have them challengedWhy is it that people always demand to bring with them their prejudices in games?
Meh. The people I see don't seem to want that.
I've seen a rising trend of atheist and religion-haters to demand that fantasy games give them option to kill gods, burn down churches/temples and basicly tell religious folk how they suck.
I could argue that religion "haters" might have some ground to stand on, but really I'll side with saying tolerance (to all beliefs) should be the watchword.
And personally, Im fed up with the mathaphyiscal mumbo-jumo.
I had enough soul-searching and exploring the afterlife/soul/death with PS:T and MoTB to last me a lifetime.
I never re-played those games because they left me...drained. Bored in a way.
I wasn't drained after them, but I am growing a bit tired of games that focus on "your soul" so that aspect of PE is not winning any points with me.
I'm personally quite tired of the anti-trope humor. It grew old excessively fast in PS:T, a game which all but demands you talk to a ridiculous amount of people, that most people you talk to mock you for talking to everyone - people want to talk about passive-aggressive.
Next thing we'll have a game where you have to kill everything in sight while being lectured on how horrible taking a single life is at every moment. 
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Alpha Protocol is an awesome game, and is pretty far up there for favorite games. It certainly is one of the most replayed games I own, right up there with Icewind Dale and Freedom Force.
Identifying unknown items in PE
in Pillars of Eternity: Stories (Spoiler Warning!)
Posted
I'd rather there be no lore skill nor identify spell for magic items, nor a need to drop 100 gold at a store to find out what it does.
For certain special items, maybe you need to take it to a hedge wizard or scholar or temple to have them tell you what it is, as part of quest lines or some such... but the extra step of casting spells or spending gold to learn what your recently hard-won treasure can do has never added anything to the game for me.
In most of the games I've played, and all the games I ran, you just know what the items were. Quicker and more fun IMO. In the table top games with identify crap we'd collect a huge bag of crap, then spend like an hour as the "designated knowledge arcana, detect magic and identify spell" guy would make all the rolls. What a horrid waste of an hour - but if he hadn't gather them, and cast the spells each time we found an item, a horrible waste of resources.
If Identify and Lore (to identify items) is in the game, it'll be a minor annoyance at worst to me. I just don't think it adds to the fun at all.
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I'm all for chanters, or maybe even priests or wizards, having special lore abilities that can tell you about the world and stuff at certain points - you need to get that exposition anyway, might as well feel special about the news by adding a [Lore] tag before the info dump.
But having to spend resources on the treasure you acquired? I'd rather not.