duskwind

I think there needs to be a significant gap between games, either in time or space (ie 50 years later or the next country over). Planning for a direct sequel with the same characters puts too many limits on how much player choice can affect the outcome of the first game.

Or possibly because it's kind of a waste to go to the trouble of developing a romance and then disabling it for 50% of playthroughs for no good reason.

Definitely, as long as it's done properly. The epilogue to Mask of the Betrayer pissed me off; my character devoted the rest of her life to fighting alongside Kaelyn rather than buggering off back to Crossroad Keep.

At this point I'm not sure if you agree with you. Alternate quests if companions are dead is the sort of temporary branching that merges back afterwards you were objecting to earlier...

That's exactly the sort of thing I'm suggesting fixing. Shorter total game time, but different quests if your companions are dead. Though I don't think direct sequels are generally very practical for games that offer real choice, since there's too much work in adapting the beginning of game 2 to match the end of game 1.

Then why not read a book? If I'm playing an RPG, I want choices; obviously it's not possible to have unlimited freedom, but it doesn't have to be completely linear, either, and I'm willing to pay the cost of reduced play length to get more meaningful choices. It's not a matter of most choices in RPGs being illusionary instead of real, but of them having only superficial consequences; it's a spectrum, not a binary distinction, and it's possible to move further along the spectrum without going to the other extreme of every single choice completely altering all future events.

You could very easily have a companion death or betrayal earlier in the game radically change how the last hour plays out. Whether it results in you only being able to save half the world instead of the whole world due to their absence or interference, or more personal dialogues/cutscenes. Or if it's the single major point of divergence, half the entire second half of the game go off in a completely different direction. Or somewhere in between (you could have a companion that turns against you show up repeatedly to mess with your plans). And if branches are determined by the cumulative effect of multiple choices rather than just "choose now", you get to make a lot of meaningful decisions.

If you only care about the destination, not how you get there, sure. Though the consequences of earlier branches can come in to play later in the game. And it's possible for branches to be much more meaningful to the story than say the Hordes of the Underdark's "chose which order to do the mid-game quests, you won't have time for all of them" even if they do converge later. Another idea: branches don't need to be explicitly chosen at the branch point. Eg if you help someone early in the game, they might rescue you much later on so you get a chase the bad guy sequence instead of an escape from prison sequence (there could be multiple possible rescuers!), or a companion might or might not betray you at a certain point based on a whole lot of previous choices and interactions.

She has played Torment, and it's fantastic, but it's limited in other ways - your ability to customise the PC is extremely restricted compared to most RPGs.

But we've got a finite palette (the size of the trees the developers have resources to produce), so the wider the gamut, the cruder the distinctions. I'd rather have a few shades of light grey to choose from (with darker shades added by being presented with tough choices rather than just because the PC doesn't care about hurting innocents) than just black, white, and mid grey. Posterization gives much better results on a greyscale image than on a colourful one.

There's no need for a major choice to be right at the beginning. I'd generally expect the early stages of the game to set up what comes later, and you can't make meaningful plot-related decisions till you've gotten far enough for your PC to have an idea what the plot is. I'd suggest a couple of choke points in the mid game with alternate paths between them, and real branching out at the end. And the usual level of choices and reactions to past choices within each section (so the choke points would play somewhat differently depending on how you get there). Eg 5 hours [ two 5 hour options ] 5 hours [ three 5 hour options ] 5 hours [ four 5 hour options ] as a simple example of 60 hours content in a 30 hour game. It could be broken up in a more complex manner, eg an endgame with three 3 hour options followed by two additional 2 hour options in each branch (for a total of six endings)

I'd be happy if the game was shorter but more flexible. Instead of a 60 hour game where you do all the quests every time, how about a 30 hour game where half the content could be totally different depending on the choices you make?

I want as much player choice as possible too; but since I don't want to play the bad guy, any development effort spent on bad guy options is taking away real choices for me.

I'd prefer there weren't any. No objection to the idea in principle, but given finite resources, I'd much rather go with the assumption that the PC is a heroic type as the starting point, and offer more choices from that perspective. So real dilemmas for someone trying to do the right thing, rather than a whole lot of "do you want to: help for free, demand payment, or kill them and take their stuff?" Which doesn't mean there can't be the option for the PC to be tempted into evil, but it should be a more subtle, the-end -justifies-the-means approach and integrated into the story, not just a play style. In an ideal world, there could be a whole lot of options for all sorts of PC personalities (perhaps filtered by alignment for practicality), but a limited range done well is better than a superficially wide range where there's no real choice if you want to keep your character consistent.

I'm not my character. I like my character to be able to have romances the same way I like characters in books and TV shows to have romances.

That's the ideal, sure, but with finite resources, there are tradeoffs to be made. If we can't have a forest, a few large dialog trees are preferable to a big shrubbery. Also, it's great when companions interact with each other as well as the PC, and the work involved in that increases exponentially with the number of characters.

Yes, a small number of really well developed companions would be my preference, rather than a lot of shallow ones. Maybe with dialogue-free hirelings as a second level of NPC for those who like large/customisable parties; perhaps even let players generate their own hirelings. Stretch companion dialogue out over the whole game, rather than having them be "completed" when their loyalty score is maxed out. The potential for NPC death would be nice, a la Shandra in NWN2, but avoidable (generally at a cost, eg force the PC to chose between saving a companion and saving a village). The PC has plot immunity, but the risk of losing friends along the way raises the stakes nicely.

Make powerful spells take longer to cast. A high level mage can wipe out a horde of enemies in a single blast, but your fighters have to protect them for several rounds while they summon up the energy.

Yeah, buying relationships with items isn't the best approach. Have NPCs whose attitude to you changes based on your choices during the game, including but not limited to what you say to them and to other NPCs. And make all romanceable characters PC-sexual; there's no reason to limit options based on your character's gender.

Getting more powerful as you progress is great, but virtually doubling in power when you go up to level 2 is a bit ridiculous; I agree with starting out a bit tougher, particularly in hit points.