Micamo

Personally, I love roleplaying in a sandbox environment. I just flutter about, sniffing the flowers that catch my eye and passing over the ones that don't. That I want to see what's there is motivation enough. The art of enjoying a sandbox game is the art of giving in to interesting distractions and the whim of the moment. The trick to building a good sandbox is to provide the player both with sufficiently interesting distractions, and have a high enough density of them so it feels like there's always something to be doing (also as insurance in case the player decides your hooks aren't as interesting as you think they are). The #1 mistake DMs make when they set out to have a "sandbox campaign" is to just drop the players on a complete blank slate world and say "Okay, what do you guys wanna do?"

The Sims = Purest RPG ever? The important part of an RPG, for me, is experiencing a good setting. You don't have to simulate everything, only the parts that are salient with regards to the themes and tones of the world. For example, getting pregnant and having a baby in Morrowind (yes, the mod exists) doesn't enhance that game because it's not what Morrowind the setting is all about. The Sims is a crappy RPG for me because the setting isn't interesting: I feel less like the explorer of a bizzare and exciting new world and more like a babysitter.

Counterpoint: Inquisitor is an "Action RPG" by any reasonable definition. You can find a long essay where I gush about how wonderful it is as a roleplaying game here. Don't confuse the mechanics the used to deliver the content with the content itself. That's like saying you can't be roleplaying if you're playing D&D with pregens. Planescape: Torment isn't an RPG by this definition. Roleplaying is a state of mind that needs to be cultivated very carefully, it's not some mechanical thing you can pin down and cut and paste into other games.

Well, let me respond to this with an analogy. Let's say you're designing a game. You say "Okay, in the real world there's no sweeping orchestral soundtracks everywhere you go. So in this game we're not going to have any music at all, just the character voices and sound effects." Now, this is a valid artistic choice to make. In the right game, this could even be a very effective choice: LIMBO has a "soundtrack" that's essentially different loops of random static for each area. It builds a very unsettling, uncanny atmosphere, as well as making the silhouette-only backgrounds feel bleak and lifeless compared to the exaggerated movements of the characters. However it's definitely not an effective choice for every game. Music is a powerful tool for creating ambience and tone. The right music can make a scene or level really powerful and memorable. And the wrong music can completely ruin it. If you decide to ignore music you're effectively denying yourself an entire dimension in which your game can be great. It's not something that should be done lightly. Character design is the same way: A striking, effective design can be the difference between your character being remembered as "The Nameless One" and being remembered as "30-something white male protagonist #462854791." There's a place for making everyone look like generic clones but fantasy RPGs probably aren't it. EDIT: Might as well weigh in my opinion on the bikini armor "debate." If the player wants to run around wearing three band-aids and a smile, I say let them. Non-player characters should for the most part be wearing reasonable clothing. Also, you know something Dragon Age did I really liked? If you run around naked NPCs will actually comment on it. "Look at the fool in his underpants!"

In her defense, one would think it normal for a race of immune-system-wrecked lifeforms to lead pretty sparse love-lives, and people are generally timid about things with which they are unfamiliar. Especially when you like your own commander and feel awkward about THAT on top of it. Just because cliche = "tee-hee, I'm a virgin" doesn't mean that "tee-hee, I'm a virgin" always = cliche. I haven't played through ME2 with MaleShep yet, so maybe that conversation with him is different. With FemShep though, her reveal of "I've never shared my suit with anyone before" comes off as really casual, followed by a winking "I'd share my suit with you anytime, Shepard." Tali *is* the type of person who would be timid about that, so this feels really out of character, and even more so because you can't romance Tali as FemShep, so why would Tali say something like that to someone she's not even interested in? My interpretation of it was that this conversation was intended to sexually tease the player, which is why I was so disgusted by it.

What's important to me with character design (of EITHER gender) is visual storytelling: I should be able to look at the character, the way they carry themselves, and be able to tell something about them. The appearance should match the character's personality. Either that, or ironically clash with the character's personality, which is just visual storytelling of a different sort. From this perspective, I think that Isabella's DA2 design was (mostly) effective: When I look at her, I see someone who wants to appear much more confident than she actually is, who's down on her luck and wants to cling to an idealized past of semi-luxury (hence all of her tacky jewelry). As a character, this clicks. Isabella the character is an ex-pirate who wants nothing more to get back on a ship and go back to pirating. She uses her sexuality (both in her outfit and in her dialogue) to deflect others away from serious discussion with her whenever possible, but when the serious stuff can't be avoided she reduces to a little child begging Hawke to solve her problems for her. That's not to say I don't have any problems with her as a character: I think her dependence on Hawke was too much, considering Varric is the only companion who isn't Hawke-dependent; Even though he does get your help several times it feels like the relationship is one of mutual friendship and respect. Well, Aveline gets better at being independent in Act 3 but this is also where she basically becomes a non-character. In DA2 I felt less like the capable leader of a group of badass adventurers and more like the Only Sane Woman trying to drag around a bunch of psychotic man-children. My bigger problem with oversexualized female designs in games is that Isabella's the exception, not the rule: The only visual storytelling these designs usually deliver is "Boobies!" And even when there is a decent character underneath their sexualized design distracts from this character rather than enhancing and informing it. Like, I love Tali to death as a character, but honestly, what can you tell about her just by looking at her besides: - She's a quarian. - She's a female with the proportions of a human supermodel (besides, you know, the deformed hands and feet). Compare Liara's brilliant design: - She's an Asari. - She's a female with the proportions of a human supermodel (besides, you know, the blue skin and the tentacle-hair). And Ashley's brilliant design: - She's a human. - She's a female with the proportions of a supermodel (besides, you know, the terrible hair and weird pink armor). Unlike Isabella Tali's character has nothing to do with her sexuality. Well, except for that awful "Tee-hee Imma Virgin" crap from Mass Effect 2. Neither does Ashley's character, yet they're both visually designed with their attractiveness to teenage boys first and with visual storytelling second. Not Liara though. Her attractiveness to teenage boys was the only consideration in any part of her character.

To be fair, Dragon Age 2 was basically made by one developer who was kidnapped, locked in a basement, and told to make a 60-hour RPG in the span of one weekend or his family gets thrown into the wood chipper (essentially the same conditions in which the Mass Effect 3 ending was developed after the the Dark Energy leak). Given the extreme development crunch it was under, it's a miracle it came out as well as it did. It genuinely has some cool ideas in it and, for what it's worth, it could have easily been way, way worse. Now that I'm done being a Bioware apologist, I'd like to derail the thread to talk about something only tangentially related: I think Inquisitor has a really interesting interpretation of the idea of playing an "evil" PC. (For those who haven't played it, Inquisitor's an interesting game. It has a lot of rough spots but it's a game made by people with incredible passion for old school RPGs, and when it fails it does so because it tries something radically different that just doesn't work. Noble failures, as it were. I can't in good faith say that it's a good game, but I can say that it's a unique game. Personally, I ate it up, but it's definitely not for everyone.) In Inquisitor the world is ending due to a demonic invasion that people believe is caused by the rise of Heresy. You, the player, are part of the Inquisition and your job is to find, torture, and execute any heretics you can find to turn people back to the Faith. However, the game makes it perfectly clear right out of the gate that the demonic invasion has absolutely nothing to do with heresy and your nominal job is completely and utterly pointless. Furthermore, even if it wasn't pointless, doing your job correctly is impossible because everyone accuses their enemies of Heresy for their own gain, and there's usually no evidence as to who's actually a demon-worshiper and who isn't except the accuser's say so. The thing is the game lets you defy this and be a legitimate good guy. You're forced into the role of Inquisitor by circumstance and thus don't necessarily have any loyalty to the cause, so this is a perfectly valid way to play. Except that the game actively rewards being a bad guy. And not in the stupid Bethesda puppy-kicking way, either. In this world when someone sees a person trying to help them, they react with either suspicion or opportunism. If you try to go around helping people, they will take advantage of your kindness, compassion, and generosity for their own gain at your expense. On the other hand, using violence, extortion, and blackmail to get people to do what you want usually works out pretty well for you with no real downsides. Arresting people you know to be innocent just so you can torture useful information out of them is not only a valid tactic in this game, but it's rewarded. This dynamic is reinforced everywhere in the game, even in the very first conversation you have with an NPC: The guards outside the first town will refuse to let you in unless you go on a stupid quest to kill 5 bats outside the city walls, unless you just threaten to kill them in which case they'll open the gates with no further argument. (You should go kill the bats anyway though cause you'll need every drop of XP you can get: Yep, it's THAT kind of game...) Everything about the game points to one thing: Existential dread. You're a worthless, faceless, nameless nobody doing a futile, pointless, impossible task to try to save a world that neither wants nor deserves salvation. It lets you explore the mind of a cold, thoroughly evil sociopath from within because it temporarily makes you become one: You start to see the NPCs (who are actually really well-written and flavorful) as things you can manipulate rather than people. It's not even the fun kind of sociopathy where you run around mass-murdering random people like in Grand Theft Auto or something, at best it's depressing and at worst it's so overwhelming as to be emotionally numbing. And when you step away from the game you walk away with not only a deeper understanding of human nature but also a deeper understanding of yourself. And more relevantly it made me rethink the nature of "evil" choices in video games: The problem isn't that they aren't "nuanced" enough or that they're too cartoonish or whatever. The problem is most games don't bother to properly contextualize the choices they present and give them meaning. Take the (particularly bad) example of Neverwinter Nights 2: You can play a Chaotic Evil character in that game, but at far as the narrative is concerned you're Lawful Good (until the very end where you can side with the King of Shadows for the lulz) in terms of actions, Chaotic Evil characters just get to throw a tantrum now and then which accomplishes nothing but have a powerful NPC slap down the rails on you. The developers were clearly not thinking of what the choices they presented actually meant or the kinds of conflicts they set up in the mind of the player, they just put them in because, hey, this is a D&D game and D&D has alignment, so we have to put this in here because the players expect it. It's choice for choice's sake at the expense of ludonarrative coherence. (That the story is crayon-and-drool-on-construction-paper quality even when you do make the Lawful Good choices the designers assumed you would make doesn't help matters.)

How about this?

Ever play D&D? It's the default assumption for how human societies are different from other races. From the pathfinder core rules book:

Been done dozens of times and not once has it ever worked. We have so little understanding of the moving parts of the human mind and how it affects society that it's utterly impossible for anyone to make a reasonable argument as to which changes to our psychology would lead to what social consequences: It always comes down to "because the author said so." Functionally, "limited lifespans makes humans more driven and ambitious, so they win at everything" is no better for verisimilitude than "I like humans the best, so they win at everything." The real problem, as it often is in worldbuilding, is that you're starting with nonsense and trying to rationalize it. When you run into nonsense with your story, you throw that part out and start over, not cram in more nonsense to cover it up.

A big problem is that in the world of AAA development you have to have broad audience appeal in order to sell enough copies to make your money back, and this means audience alienation is a big concern for publishers. If you try to take a setting like Dark Sun or Carcosa or something and pitch it to your average AAA publisher, they'll laugh you right out the door. And until recently you were stuck with publishers if you wanted to make an RPG since indies can't get the budget needed to make something of the scale fans expect. This is why it took Kickstarter to get a sequel for Torment, and at least part of the reason why Ps:T didn't sell very well. Let's face it, most folk are perfectly happy with Tolkienian* norms and have no particular interest in changing them; People like us who want the weird stuff are in the minority. *I should say Faerunian norms, since the modern fantasy setting template has more resemblance to the Realms than anything in Tolkien.

Eh, the problem with Kai Leng is the same problem with all of Cerberus in ME3 (and to a lesser extent in ME2): They're what happens when your DM gets a woody for a pet NPC and decides to stroke it at the expense of the players' enjoyment of the game. Except even worse because in a video game you can control the PCs to a much greater extent. They're these massive idiots who somehow have infinite resources and succeed at everything they try because Shepard comes down with Cutscene Stupidity Syndrome. Actually, you know who he's just like? Ammon mother-****ing Jerro. At least you aren't railroaded into having Kai Leng join your party just after he murders Garrus.

Eh, my opinion of Columbia depends on what the intentions behind it were. If it was meant to be taken seriously, it's the most cartoonishly stupid setting I've ever seen. If, as some commentators have posited, it was meant to be a satirical deconstruction of "darker and edgier" as a trope, then it's merely mediocre and ineffective at its goals. Either way, I don't want P:E to imitate it.

Personally, I really like dark settings when they're executed well. A well-executed dark fantasy setting can create a great mixture of horror and dread. A poorly-executed dark setting just tries to go as over the top as possible purely for the sake of one-upping other works. I'm not asking for Columbia or Golarion here.

Actually, since the stronghold is basically explicitly going to be based on Crossroad Keep, here's one lession I hope Obsidian learns from that game: Screw the friggin time limits on crap. - It's extremely unintuitive and meta-gamey in how it works. - It's very possible to accidentally screw yourself over because you're not doing it efficiently, especially because the way the time limit works is so opaque. It shouldn't matter what order you go around in building stuff and developing your troops, and it shouldn't penalize you if you just want to walk around the keep and look at the place without giving new orders to your subordinates. - It serves literally no purpose except to limit how much time you can spend dicking around the keep before you have to get back to doing the stupid, boring main quest chain. Dear Obsidian: If the "problem" with your side content is the players find it more entertaining than the main content, the solution is certainly not to forcibly drag them away from the side content and back to the main content, kicking and screaming. Let your players find their own engagement in the game. (I strongly suspect this happened in NWN2 because Crossroad Keep was tied into the plot, and with any luck Eternity's stronghold will be entirely optional.) Actually, now that I think about it, a couple more suggestions: - There's surprisingly little to actually do at Crossroad Keep if you're not building stuff (or if you've reached your time limit), and few of your companions have anything new to say once you get there. Giving your companions new dialogue options there and putting some NPCs around for you to chat up would have gone a long, long way to making the keep feel much more immersive. - I always thought it was kinda weird that you can't accompany your troops yourself on the special missions you send them on. It shouldn't be required, obviously, but I feel like this could have really enhanced the game if you were at least allowed to do it: Like that halfling village you can send troops to to help defend against a bandit raid. Also, I'm sure I wasn't the only one who thought following Daerrn and his group of adventurous kids around would have been much more entertaining than the King of Shadows crap.

I disagree: Random encounters aren't a solution because this kind of artificiality is a symptom of a larger problem: The problem of enemies being thrown in solely because the designers think the player will get bored if they go 30 seconds without killing something, rather than being properly integrated into the setting. So long as the enemies have a clear, good reason to be there (and why they'd attack you on sight) the encounter won't feel arbitrary whether it's randomized or not.

The post I'm referring to can be found here, though I didn't talk about Neverwinter Nights 2 in that post specifically suppose I should explain what I meant by my first statement in more detail: My problem with Neverwinter Nights 2 is that it's Forgotten Realms played as straight as it possibly can be. I've heard the expansions are better, but I haven't played them. I want to finish the original campaign before starting the expansions (I have a bit of OCD regarding experiencing parts of a series in order) and I'm in late Act 2 and can't muster the strength to power through the rest. The setting of NWN2 has all the traits exhibited by bad video game settings as stated in my original post. It feels less like a real place and more like a crappy, rickety amusement park filled with cheap cardboard castles and LARPers dressed up as orcs and elves. The game has many other problems (chief among them the nonsensical railroading), but what kills it for me is that I don't give a rat's ass about Neverwinter or Luskan, partially because of NWN2's presentation of FR and FR's defining role as the modern stereotype of medieval fantasy to begin with, and I believe that the latter is what lead to the former. Interesting and engaging places most often come about because of creative challenge, and with FR there are no creative challenges because the audience already understands everything important there is to know about the setting. There's nothing they need to put any effort into explaining or expanding upon or setting up as a mystery so all of the game's expository budget goes into the plot and none of it into making the world feel alive. And I fear that Project Eternity will have similar problems due to a lack of creative challenges in its design. The biggest thing that makes me worried is this: What this statement communicates to me is that the creative process behind the worldbuilding in P:E is completely backwards: Instead of starting with themes and conflicts and building the setting around them, they've started with a convention and then searched for ways to add some conflicts and themes they wanted to it. This means there's a real danger of, consciously or not, falling back on audience expectations to fill in the blank spots for you. Occasionally you still see good stuff produced this way, but it's rare: Most of the time this process churns out a me-too world more concerned with superficially setting itself apart from its source material than providing engagement on its own terms. I dunno, maybe I just overthink this stuff.

The strong parts of those games were the characters and (what Obsidian did with) the setting. That's their strong point, though they don't have a perfect track record with it: What the hell happened with the Neverwinter Nights 2 original campaign? Just about the worst thing I can realistically see Obsidian doing with Eternity is doing a retread of that, and the scary part is there are plenty of indications they're already going down that path. (But I've already had that rant in another thread, so I won't repeat it here.) Well, two things. First, I'm not talking about the type of divide that exists between, say, Thief 2 players and Starcraft players. Obviously, they're not trying to cater to both of those crowds at once, that'd be pretty absurd. They're making a (mostly) 2D isometric class-based party-based RPG with unvoiced dialogue trees and character creation, that much is certain. But there's room for a ton of variance within this template: How open is the world? What are our interactions with our companions like? How much time do we spend killing things vs. talking to people? What's the structure of the main quest like? How much content is put into the main quest and how much of it is put into side quests? The list goes on and on. To give an example of this problem I'm going to illustrate the conflict behind just one of these points of variation: Should some dialogue choices give the player an objectively better or worse outcome for having chosen them? Side A says that these kinds of dialogue choices encourage roleplaying because they force the player to stop and think about what they're saying, considering the situation as if it were real. This improves the player's immersion in the game and makes clicking dialogue options have a lot more weight and meaning. Side B says that dialogue choices are the method by which the player expresses their character's personality, and by making some choices "wrong" what you're really doing is punishing players who are roleplaying characters who really would make that choice in that situation, thereby robbing the player of agency. From this perspective such choices discourage roleplaying rather than encourage it. While both sides are valid you cannot possibly do both in a game: You can either punish some choices and reward others, or don't. Whichever side you pick, the other side will be unhappy. The second problem is that a focus on providing nostalgia is one of my biggest fears for how Project Eternity could go horribly, horribly wrong. I think Jerry Holkins described the problem of nostalgia best: "It's never 'as good,' because it can't be. 'As good' wouldn't satisfy you, now, because you aren't the person who was satisfied by it anymore." What I'm worried about is P:E will try to be as good as the Infinity Engine games, focusing too much on imitating the surface elements and style of those games and miss the true core of their engagement. The core of the engagement of the old IE games was not to be found in the isometric style, the prerendered backgrounds, the D&D 2E ruleset, the RTP gameplay style, or the Forgotten Realms setting; it's in something deeper than all of those.

1. My concern is not that Obsidian doesn't know "what the fans want." We're definitely not going to see something made by people who are completely disconnected with their fanbase like, say, making Project Eternity into a Gears of War-style shooter. My concern is Obsidian is not aware of its own strengths and limitations as a developer and will try to build a game that they are completely unfit to make. 2. Our only real information channel to what's going on in the development process are the very vague and sparse update posts we receive. This is nowhere near enough information to give meaningful feedback on a game, especially not of the type needed to make a well-polished combat system. So most of the posts you see in the mechanics section of the board is "I think it'd be cool if we had X" or "I think Y sounds dumb." This stuff is not a suitable substitute for a rigorous playtesting cycle, something I very strongly fear the game won't have. 3. What's worse is that, for designing a game, this kind of advice is almost worse than useless. You can't judge a book by its cover, and you can't meaningfully judge game mechanics by the concepts behind their design. For example, pretty much all of their hard work and effort put into Dead Money with making the Ghost People "frightening" and making searching through the area for resources "important" was completely nullified by the inclusion of the Bear Trap Fist. You pick one up, then the ghost people all go down in a single punch, and suddenly all the tension and atmosphere is gone and the environments go from carefully designed resource caches to a rat maze of pointless corridors and way too many annoying mooks. And don't even get me started on how much of a horrible failure the radio and hologram "puzzles" were. 4. Even if this advice could be useful somehow, there's no consistent voices here. You need look no further than the romance "debate" threads to see that different people want Project Eternity to take very, very different directions, and there's no real justification to go with one direction or the other except that either way you're gonna piss a ton of people off. I'm worried Eternity will be remembered as a terrible game not because of anything in particular that it did, but rather in that it tried to cater to everyone at once and ended up satisfying no one.

Considering Obsidian's two most recent attempts to make Deep and Interesting game mechanics (Alpha Protocol and Dead Money) I think Project Eternity needs a tactical combat focus as much as Obsidian needs to be bought out by EA.

In that case, why do you say Dragon Age is a single-arc narrative? There are at least 4 self-contained arcs in the main quest alone (5 if you count the Ashes as separate from the retaking of Redcliffe) that are all a part of the overarching connection of "Kill the Archdemon and end the Blight." Bah, I'm getting into a debate over definitions. The real question I think you're trying to ask here is "Should Eternity have a big twist/reveal in the middle that completely changes the direction of the plot?" And as to that question, I don't know. Having a big reveal in your story for the sake of having a big reveal in your story is often a mistake: See any M. Night Shyamalan film: It has to be woven carefully into the other events of the narrative in order to work. Furthermore, I'm not even sure if the question is a right one: It frames the discussion as if we were talking about a novel, or a movie. Game narratives are qualitatively different, and deserve to be treated as such.

I'm not saying that having giant-feathered-dinosaur-inspired monsters wouldn't be awesome and all, but I don't see much point in calling them "dragons." It'd be a bit like if they had tentacle-faced space aliens and then called them "Elves."

In Ocarina of Time your goal is "Stop Ganondorf" in both sections, it's only the circumstances for doing so that change. Compare Fallout: New Vegas where your initial goal is "find Benny and get the platinum chip" and later becomes "Win the second battle of hoover dam." Does New Vegas also count as a "double-arc" narrative, or is there some important difference? (I haven't played enough of any Dragon Quest game to compare.)

Well, I think there's a difference between liking/disliking a person and liking/disliking a character. Companions who I dislike as a person are okay, it's ones I dislike as a character that I don't want to see in the game. What's the difference? When I dislike a person in the game, I'll go out of my way to disrespect them and do things they won't like, and I get satisfaction from interacting with them this way. Good example: The council from Mass Effect 1. They were the completely functionally useless and whiny figureheads of a creepy racist galactic autocracy, but they worked because this was intentional on the part of the writer and they weren't set up as hypercompetent, benevolent rulers. Great example: Ignus from Ps:T. He was a dangerous psychopath, but I let him follow me around anyway, as irresponsible as that ultimately turned out to be. Why? Because I legitimately felt bad for what my previous incarnation did to him, and I hoped that I would get a chance to somehow make things right. But when I dislike a character in the game, my hate is directed not at the person the character is supposed to represent but at the writer who made them. My immersion in the setting is broken and I can only interact with them in this weird, metagamey way. If I like the rest of the game, then at best I'll forgive the writer and just try to ignore the problem. At worst it can cause complete narrative collapse and utterly destroy my ability to enjoy anything about the game. Example: Sis from Alpha Protocol. Okay, so she's a 14-year old (maybe older, I never read her dossier) punk chick with dyed purple hair, tight jeans, and a stupid jacket, and somehow she's a dual-pistol-wielding badass who is somehow Albatross's "bodyguard." Oh, and for maximum sympathy points, she's an orphaned mute. It's not only an implausible idea but it runs completely counter to the tone of everything established about the world prior to this. Maybe her character has some sort of payoff later, but I'll never find out because Sis's introduction was the point where I decided to quit playing.

If you want an example of a game where survival mechanics actually make the game better, Don't Starve is a great one. The premise of the game is that you're stranded alone in a randomly generated wilderness and you see how long it takes for you to die. The hunger system does a lot of things right, but I think the most important aspect of it is that to get food, you have to expose yourself to risk. In a permadeath game. The player then has to choose how much risk, or rather, what types of risks, to expose themselves to. The tensest parts of playing the game are when you have to make choices like: It's getting late and you're running low on food: You've got enough food in your belly to make it through the night but two bad days like this in a row will kill you. Do you go home and hope for better luck tomorrow, or do you keep foraging and risk getting stuck out away from camp at night?