mcmanusaur

Even TES: Morrowind was more interesting than most DnD-based games I've played in this regard; at least you had to look around for people who could give you that spell. I think you could easily broaden this to the notion that all "skills" progression should require the familiar experience component along with a more distinct knowledge component, which is something I'd really like to see.

In terms of the stronghold upgrade stuff, I have to admit I'm pretty ambivalent. Once it gets to a point where my character has a sizable property to their self, to me anything beyond that (including adding servants and services to the stronghold) sort of becomes unflattering ego stroking. I realize a lot of people seem to really enjoy that aspect, but I guess it's not for me; I'm more interested in starting small and being able to build your way up through alternative means to the usual combat-heavy loot-plundering route. I personally can't stand RPGs where one's character feels more important than the whole rest of the setting (or where one's character is the be-all-and-end-all at the center of everything), and the notion that my character is always guaranteed some specific cookie-cutter household if I complete a few quests is so terribly boring to me. That's why I really want to correct the common assumption that the only place for this kind of gameplay is in the endgame. I'm far less interested in stronghold management than I am in socioeconomic progression.

If you are talking about me then by this moment you trolling me, trilling is provocation to piss someone off, is my thread aboyt posibilitis of godlike race in eternity is pissing you of ? If it is then 98% of therds on this forum is trolling I believe he's referring to me. Some people just seem to get an incredible sense of achievement out of pointing their finger at others and moaning... I think the mentality here is something like "if you demonstrate a sense of humor once, you should never be taken seriously" or something. Anyway, hopefully this thread can be returned to the topic at hand rather than falling to the old trick of trolling people by accusing them of being the troll.

I'm sorry but I'm not too knowledgeable about the specifics of this race; is there much appeal beyond the obvious egotistical reasons to play a "Godlike"?

You are aware that when people refer to balance, they're generally talking about the whole of the game, and not specific encounters? Imbalance within encounters is fine and very preferable, as long as those imbalances balance out in the long run.

Disagree. An RPG doesn't need class equality to fully deliver the player choice you're describing. Or at least the Infinity engine games didn't. Despite there being nothing even resembing class balance in those games, they still managed to make Soloing any character build a completely viable route (for example). And They accomplished this in a myriad of ways. From magic items, to dual-classing, to multi-classing to the D&D rules system itself (ie. a stoneskinned opponent can still take damage from a flaming sword. The sheer number of classes, class abilities, class combinations, and spells was nigh infinite, etc.) In other words, to answer your questions of "what if I don't want a wizard. or a sword and board tank?", the answer is: don't use them. Again, I once soloed BG2, from beginning to end, with an armorless Kensai. And by chapter 3 he had become completely overpowered. In another Playthrough I rolled up a Sorcerer then took Viconia (a cleric) with me. Same result: it was a bit of a struggle early, but by about chapter 3/4 the game ceased being a challenge. The problem I have with rigid class equality across the board is that it makes the game feel overly restrictive and one dimensional in the course of multiple playthroughs. I mean, what's the point in trying out a different character class when you know the challenge will be exactly the same and the power ceiling will be totally unchanged? That, and what's the logic, exactly, in insuring that every class in an RPG is perfectly balanced? Is that the way it is in real life? Is the President of the United States equal in power to the burger flipper at McDonalds? Balanced and identical are two different things. Even if the level of challenge is the same, the experience can still be completely different since you must tackle the problems in different ways. And if you really want to have successive playthroughs at different difficulties, you can adjust the difficulty slider or even purposely gimp your characters in some way. Everything you're asking for is already in the game given such features, even if the classes are balanced as they should be. Meanwhile, if the classes are imbalanced as you wish them to be, then you would have large elements of the playerbase being penalized for their preference of playstyle. Let me know when they stick a fry cook class into Project Eternity because maybe I'll support your argument then. I'll refrain from saying anything about how it always seems to be players of certain classes that tend to want extra ego-stroking and special treatment...

Let's just get it over with and give everyone superpowers, eh? I like being able to play characters who don't use any magic, personally.

If we must have "successes" and "failures", can the cutscenes for the former outcomes look something like this?

Herp derp. I'm honestly not such a fan of hybrid mage-warrior characters who can also have non-combat abilities without sacrificing combat capability. Sounds a bit overpowered and conducive to samey characters in my opinion.

Well, I have a few thoughts about this. First, I hope there may be defensive as well as offensive combat skills, and perhaps a pacifist character could pour all their points into defensive abilities. This should always be an option to a "pacifist" character; however if you're goal is to make a "combat-weak" character then I suppose you're a bit out of luck. Second, what I hope the division of combat skills and non-combat skills means is that there are enough of the latter to have an interesting balance dynamic within that category. If we take traditional DnD-based games, there's really not enough "non-combat" focused skills to justify their own pool of experience; hopefully Project Eternity is more diverse in this regard and we won't be choosing between just five or six skills. Most importantly though, this thread may represent a misconception of what Project Eternity is doing, which is merely having independent pools for the combat and non-combat abilities. This is not to be confused with forcing character's to be half-and-half when it comes to this divide, and I'm not sure there's anything to suggest that's how it will be in PE. Rather, what we could see is that a non-combat oriented character never really levels up their combat skills because all the non-combat experience they gain can only be used to further level their non-combat skills. The reverse could also occur; a pure combat character only receives combat experience and thus never ends up having to pour resources into the non-combat skills because they've never gained any non-combat experience. In character creation they might indeed have every character evenly balanced with regard to the emphasis on combat or non-combat, but this changes as the character levels. You could think of it as having a "combat level" and a "non-combat level" that increase independently rather than having an overall character level. I'm not sure whether this is what Project Eternity is doing, but it would certainly solve the issue and we shouldn't jump to the conclusions that characters' combat and non-combat abilities will have to be equal.

I agree, but for me the pertinent question is from whose point of view an outcome represents "success" or "failure". In most games it's the developers' point of view, based on their assumptions of players' desires and behavior. For linear games and story-based narrative RPGs these predictions might be correct or at least serve the game's intended purpose, but the players' and characters' point of view should maybe also be taken into account. I suspect the players' POV is about what you have identified; as long as outcomes don't decrease the game's playability the player can live with them. The characters' POV is obviously more likely to vary, and while a character should certainly be capable of failing in their own eyes this should be dependent on the character's own priorities.

No, but I can agree with that synopsis. However, if the drawbacks of the "RPG" label prevent it from serving a meaningful and cohesive purpose, I say that there should be a new system of labels that do so, either to replace current terminology for the genre altogether or to introduce names for more specific subgenres. I for one can say I've seen an awful lot of frustration, misunderstanding, and animosity over the years due to this communicative deficiency, and I think it would benefit everyone to have a better-fitting word for their preferences beyond the ineffective term "RPG".

They're both most certainly far from what we want in P:E. That RPGness, with a world that seems to exist and fluctuate without even any player input, to keep the player on his toes. I just thought it was an interesting comparison, as they still possess the same freedom-to-limitation spectrum. Regarding the urgency/situation matter, I think even Skyrim is a good thing to observe. It has plenty in it that is pleasant (progression system, full open world exploration, etc.), but it all just seems to center so much around the player that it just feels like a 1 million ft2 playground. You know? How many different sets of swings can you try out (no matter how cool they are) before you just don't see the point in trying out swingsets anymore? You want something beyond that. Someone comes in and says "I'm tearing down this portion of the playground today, and putting up my own personal tower." Cool. Something's going on that you didn't have to invent or create. YOU get to react to THE GAME, all while it reacts to you, as well. Do you stop them from tearing it down? Maybe you find out what that tower's all about. Maybe you try to take over the project, and put up something different? Maybe you didn't get to check out that section of the playground yet, and you now feel the urge to go see if you would miss anything if they tore it down. I think that's the thing with freedom. If you have too much freedom, then you're not even required to react to the game. It's reacting to you, and that's it. I think we want things to have to react to. We want decision-stimulus. Again, not that Minecraft or Terraria are bad. They're good for what they are. Just like a linear shooter is good for what it is. You can't really compare it directly to an RPG like P:E, because it's not really even going for the same goals. Just like a puzzle game is completely different from either. But, they all need a balance of reactivity to you and bits that force YOU to react, with some degree of urgency. You bring up another important distinction here which is the difference between a reactive/passive sandbox and an active/dynamic sandbox. As much as I probably demand far too much, I find the former leans too much toward stroking my character's ego and I'm not really interested in that. A scripted narrative is one way you could give the world that agency, but ultimately in my dreams what I'd like to see is a world that simulates the changes in society, ranging from demographic shifts to economic trends to natural disasters to military conflicts to technological progression, etc. Imagine an RPG where families of NPCs age, procreate, and migrate over time; with enough imagination this could produce narrative in and of itself. Obviously this would require very robust algorithms (and is very far off from the current reaches of the genre), and some randomness could be mixed in to ensure unique playthroughs, but these are the forces that have generated what I consider the greatest narrative known to man, which is the narrative of our own species' history. Just like acting and being told what to do are different, being forced to react and being told what you must react to are two different things. I guess that's why I don't consider urgency and freedom to be a tradeoff.

To clarify, character death (in the sense of "You died," as in "your whole party died" to cover the possibility of controlling more than one person), isn't really permanent, because the game world in which you get a "game over" doesn't actually continue. You either never play the game again (in which case the game world is frozen in time, forever, as far as your playthrough is concerned), or you re-load and mulligan until you DON'T die. That's the kind of character death I was trying to cite. And, when I say urgency, I mean situational urgency. I'm all for the game allowing you to take your time (since the player is actually still interfaced with a game, and it doesn't make much sense to have a bunch of stuff that's supposed to take a long time to figure out/discover in the game, then have the game tell you to hurry up the whole time). But, specific situations shouldn't wait on you, once you're in them. I touched on this in the other thread, but, I think it's about the game forcing you to react, then reacting to your reaction in kind. If you take one of those out of the mix, you're left with either a game that never requires the player to react to anything, OR a game that never allows the player the freedom to explore, solve, and discover. It's kind of like singing and drinking: You can't do them both at the same time. So, you can't have constant singing AND constant drinking. To sing, you have to ease up on the drinking (and expect that less drinking will take place, in the given time), and to drink you have to ease up on singing. In terms of a game world, the more you design to be explored, the more time you expect to be spent exploring. Meanwhile, the more urgency you put in the game, the more time you expect to be spent swiftly reacting. You can't really slide them both to maximum, because they contradict at some point. Obviously, you can have a nice bit of exploration, AND a nice bit of urgency, if properly designed and blended. As far as choices goes (and linearity versus non-linearity in the narrative), the urgency/freedom thing is a different scale. If something requires your attention, as opposed to not requiring that you don't just frolic about and take your time making rubbings of ruin carvings for weeks on end whenever you so choose, then the very fact that your attention is required does not at all dictate the details and limitations of your interaction with that situation. There could be 17 outcomes, or just 2. Honestly, though, I think the outcome should probably be negative if you simply don't react at all to the situation (which is different from reacting to the situation, and actively choosing non-action in some particular matter, like a vote, or the elimination of a noble, etc). Anywho, I'm getting a little theoretical here, as I'm not really trying to dictate the exact amounts of things, or specifically how to design them and at which points to implement them into the game. But, merely, the relationship between two factors. I like what you have to say, but I'm just not sure how much it maps onto the differences between more and less sandbox-y RPGs. For one, once you introduce sandbox elements into the game you can always restrict certain options at particular times, but doing the reverse is much harder. In this way adding optional sandbox content to the game pleases some people and at worst other people can just ignore those aspects, whereas not including such content greatly restricts those who would utilize it. Now of course that's all very hypothetical and realistically development is somewhat of a zero-sum game, and I accept that people have a firm vision of what they want out of Project Eternity; I still think that people's outlook on RPGs in general is rather limiting. And anyway wouldn't the mature way to tackle the urgency problem be to not railroad players and force them to do things via the metagame but rather ensure that they are sufficiently punished within the game in the event that they don't do those things, if that makes any sense? A well-written narrative should create urgency and cause the player to commit without artificially restricting their movement, and if that's not the case it sort of suggests the narrative is lacking.

In light of the poll results for the first question, this thread is now more relevant than ever.

I second the sentiment that a party's residence could have an effect on how NPCs perceive you. I think I even suggested that in one thread. But, going from shack to mansion to castle is just another linear power progression of which there are so many in any CRPG... IMO it would suffice to go from "homeless" to nobles with a stronghold. Isn't that rather unrealistic though? How many people go straight from rags to riches in either a historical or contemporary context? Nobility and status isn't something you should suddenly gain from completing one quest; you should have to work at gradually establishing yourself within society.

Oh definitely. I apologize. I failed to specify that what I meant was that, beyond a certain point the two are a trade-off. Zero exploration/freedom does not, in any way, help the sense of urgency any more than 30% exploration/freedom, for example. And zero urgency doesn't help freedom/exploration any, really. It's almost like you've got 2 sliders, each going from 0-100, and you've only got 150 points to "spend" to power them. Also, I don't think my talk of "urgency" was specific enough, either. I wasn't referring to gameplay elements which you must deal with (such as a goblin army attacking your "settlement" in Terraria), as much as I was talking about situations and reactivity. In other words, in the sandboxy games, the only urgency typically involves things that, if not dealt with, will result in annoying setbacks. The keyword being typically. Kind of like, "Oh no, combat! If you don't run away or fight, and continue standing around harvesting ore, you're going to die." Simplistic example, I know. But, that's not really a reactive, playthrough-molding situation that you can deal with to produce different outcomes, and that's what I was trying to refer to. Things you can't undo with enough time and effort. The kind of reactivity we want in a game like P:E. So, I'm not trying to claim that sandboxy/full-exploration games don't have ANY of that type of urgency. They just tend to not have very much, or to have only the immediate "deal with this or these non-permanent effects will happen and will be annoying." But, yeah, if you have a game that's non-stop urgency, all the way through a playthrough/story, then you have far less potential for exploration, as you literally have a limited amount of time to do everything. You can still explore a lot, but then you sacrifice all the potentiality for the urgency. You get a "bad" playthrough, basically. Not in the sense that there are certain player choices that are good and other s are bad (in dealing with situations), but in the sense that you basically had no bearing on the situations whatsoever. You reduce that aspect of the entire game to "this is what happens if you don't affect this situation at all," thereby making the effective story quite linear and negating reactivity, mostly. And if you've got a game that's all exploration and freedom, then to have oodles of focus on time-sensitive situations would be self-defeating. You'd be encouraged to both take your time AND hurry, simultaneously. That's all I meant. The very idea behind it all. Hmm... I see your point but I still don't think the two are necessarily at odds in essence, but there may be a third mediating variable. I'm afraid I don't really understand what you mean by urgency though... character death due to starvation is a fairly permanent condition, depending on the setting. I suppose you specifically mean permanent effects on the setting rather than the character, such as "if you don't go do this now, evil will win"? If so I can see what you mean, but I'm not entirely convinced that kind of "interactivity" would set Project Eternity apart; rather we tend to ask for multiple outcomes. Hypothetically story-driven games are more time-sensitive but in reality they're not; both story-driven and sandbox games wait for the player to some extent... Maybe in some specifically time-based games it's true, but with RPGs I tend to find that slower playthroughs are rewarded. They tend to work better than fast playthroughs in regard to both the planning and strategy that RPGs generally encourage over the run 'n gun approach and micromanaging loot, which can greatly affect your IG bankroll and therefore your character's success. Even if there's imagined urgency from a narrative perspective, I find that even the less open-world RPGs implicitly encourage a slow and deliberate pace, and what would an RPG really be without that? At any rate when the progression of the plot and the pace of the gameplay don't align is one situation in which immersion can break down, but that's another matter. Still I don't think that having more choices necessarily means each of the choices has less consequence, and therefore their urgency should largely be preserved.

Don't forget companions. Oh sure, we're just "hiring" those fellows from the Hall of Adventurers. "Wait, you want me to accompany you on a lifelong, against-all-odds adventure, in which we're all likely to die, or worse? Well, as long as the money's good. u_u" I have a feeling contracts aren't outside all of this soul-themed stuff. 8P "You there, companion! Run down that hallway and make sure there aren't traps! GO!" "But I don't wa-" "GOOOO!!!!!" Lol, how could I forget that the only thing capable of matching the number of baddies waiting to be punished is the pool of adventuring mercenaries willing to do anything if the pay is good enough...

I'm not convinced the two are a direct trade-off though. There's certainly a trade-off between leisure and urgency in terms of player/character attitudes, but that is subtly different from the trade-off between options and linearity in my opinion. There are several sandbox survival games which have extreme freedom but nonetheless are very urgent due to the fear of impending starvation or something similar, and there are linear games like LOZ:OoT that don't seem very urgent at all. I think that you're very correct that urgency figures prominently in the mentality for design decisions regarding linearity, but I'm just not sure that it should. No one wants "Leisurely Hiking Simulator 2013" of course, but I don't think that a nonlinear/open-world game has to be that. In fact I'd say many of the times I've felt the most urgency as a gamer has been in the sandbox games where I wasn't sure where to go and how to survive (ex. first time getting dumped off at Seyda Neen in Morrowind), rather than in the games that railroad you along a central narrative holding your hand the entire way. But I guess that might be a subjective thing; some people might get really into the urgency of quests in traditional cRPGs despite the fact that the game is always waiting for you. I guess linearity is one commonly used approach to urgency, but it need not be the only viable one.

Indeed. I honestly can't see how something can pose as a roleplaying game if the operative conception of "property" never extends beyond what one can carry in one's backpack...

Well, the more focus there is on full exploratory freedom, the less focus there is on actual story urgency. It's like having timed quests versus no timed quests. If nothing ever limits your ability to freely just roam wherever you please and archaologically grid-mark every inch of every place in the world, then obviously nothing's really going on in the world that requires you to do something better with your time, or to in any way limit your rampant, leisurely exploration. They're just... opposing forces, and the best we can do, I think, is to try and achieve a good balance. Basically, urgent things take time, and full-freedom exploration takes time. So, you can't do both, really. Not in parallel. Not to the fullest. You can handle urgent things, AND explore, side-by-side. But you can't investigate an entire city while urgent worldly things are occurring. Simply put, a world that always waits on you loses a bit of effectiveness as a world. So, it's understandable that, if exploring about 60% of every inch of things is the maximum thing feasible, it's a little silly to design 100% of every inch of a world, in the form of a fully explorable area. I think urgency is an excellent concept to bring up here, and it sheds new light on the issue for me. Perhaps that is what most RPGs simply fail to cultivate in me as a player that would lead me to enjoy the more or less linear (or at least sequential) narrative approach to design. I've played a lot of RPGs, and I think I could probably count the times where I felt a sense of urgency in an RPG during a non-timed quest on the fingers of my hands. For the people who get that sense of urgency I can actually see how the sandbox elements might become a distraction.

Lol, then wait and come back after you've played it for two years... 2 years is a lot of value for money TBH I don't expect to be playing Project Eternity for that long. Fair enough. As I said there's little arguing that Minecraft is pretty good at what it was originally meant to be, but for me the "RPG elements" are lacking or a bit out of place at best.

I'm not intending to plug anything, as I just stumbled upon this today, but this seems to hit on a lot of the things discussed in this thread (and has some similarities to Minecraft in terms of being voxel-based and procedurally generated). That said I'm a bit skeptical about their answer to the "narrative vs. freedom" question and unfortunately the general character of the game seems a bit juvenile. Even so it's reassuring to see some developers taking the risks of infusing sandbox and RPG elements, even if we have yet to see this is in a convincingly mature context. http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/nerdkingdom/tug-1 I guess it ultimately begs the need to distinguish between what might be called "empty" or true sandboxes a la Minecraft/Terraria and clones (where the emphasis is on the PC forging new civilization in a more or less empty and usually procedurally generated world) and "full"/"social" sandbox games (which still allow roughly the same degree of interactivity but there is a functioning society that exists before the PCs arrive). And then both of those could in turn be contrasted with open world games like TES or to a lesser extent GTA, which don't have too much interactive dynamism. It is the setting and context that the former empty kind of sandbox games lack to me, and which I think could work as a substitute for the traditional story-based narrative. I guess ideally what I'm looking for is not strictly a "story" or a "sandbox", but a "situation".

Lol, then wait and come back after you've played it for two years... Nah, but it's good at being a more or less "pure" sandbox game; I just find its stated "RPG elements" to be a bit underwhelming. That and most of the new features added are slightly watered down versions of popular mods, which have yet to be properly supported by the developer. I have spent far too much time playing it to call it crap, but at some point you become eager for something more.