mcmanusaur
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What's missing in most RPGs that have strongholds is ways in which it ties into the adventure. They're supposed to be bases of operations, but in most cases, they aren't. They are isolated places you return to in between quests to order an item or empty the party's coffers. If hostiles show up at the gates at all, these tend to be encounters you only have for the very reason that you own a stronghold - not those foes you were crusading against before your trip to the stronghold. Yes it's vague, or rather all-encompassing, and not falling within that means strongholds often are about as necessary as appendices. What's the point in owning a location that doesn't supply you with quests, items, or exclusive advantages (such as resting when it's not possible in the wilderness)? Exactly. That's why I don't see the need for shacks or manors in this game. Ah, so making the PC take the defensive sometimes rather than always the offensive? It would be interesting for antagonists to take more initiative outside of obviously scripted plot twists. I really try to avoid asserting what constitutes a "true RPG" playstyle, but personally I don't feel your answer to the second part is really in the spirit of role-playing games. Rather the mentality seems to be "anything that doesn't empower my character is pointless" which in turn sort of communicates "winning is all that matters". And once again we have the anti-sandbox brigade characterizing sandbox elements as pointless and irrelevant... 1. Why would anyone want something that has no purpose in a game? This isn't a balanced representation of the issue at hand. 2. Such "sandbox elements" exist in real life and certainly aren't pointless, so why should they be pointless in a role-playing game? 3. The purpose- which should be obvious- is that they should have an effect on the gameplay. NPCs should react differently to PCs who live in a shack and PCs who live in a manor, and different still to PCs who have no known residence. It might even be that certain communities refuse to interact with or trust a character who is known to move from place to place in the manner of a vagrant. Perhaps NPCs request that you invite them into your home for meetings, and your apparent social status thus affects dialogue. There is endless potential for RPGs with such elements if people can get out of the single-minded "must kill baddie" mentality. Now it might just be that this doesn't fall under "acceptable forms of gameplay" for some people who have trite old ideas of what an RPG should be (such as sequential dungeon crawls), but that's another matter. The roleplay mentality I'm acquainted with would say that a character's desire to own a modest home would be reason enough for doing so in a game. Perhaps it's time to let go of the naive vision of a fantasy setting as a place where there are always plenty of baddies lying in wait in conveniently scattered dungeons for traveling adventurers (who have little concern over normal considerations of livelihood) to stumble upon, and more of a place where characters live out their lives in most of the same ways that we do. Does no one else realize how ridiculous the former situation is when you think about it? Now, I'm not saying there shouldn't be any combat or dungeons or traveling adventurers, but why should a roleplaying game confine you to the most unlikely of roles? Because the setting isn't deep enough for any other role to be interesting? /rant -
Like I said, defending the stronghold is usually just busywork (although a lot of people seemed to have fun with it in NWN2). What I meant is that a stronghold serves the obvious purpose of keeping harm away from you. This just about never really happens in RPGs; the stronghold is on a map/ perimeter of its own, away from hostiles. There's a lot of untapped potential there. welp, if there's no gameplay in it related to combat, it should enhance gameplay in some other way. If it just sits there or serves as a gold sink with nothing in return, then yes, it's a LARPing element. Of course it can be a measure of the player's success, but then, it's the same as having rats for the player to stomp on at lvl 40 - no real relevance to the game but fun to watch for some. Can you clarify what potential you see in this? I'm curious. Also, "enhance gameplay" is a terribly vague phrase... owning property isn't an enhancement to gameplay, it is part of the gameplay because it constitutes a big part of the role people have in society. I think you confound narrative with gameplay, perhaps? Many people here seem to forget it, but the two are different, and narrative isn't the only basis for gameplay.
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Linear vs non linear story
mcmanusaur replied to Malekith's topic in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
The specifics are hard to describe, so I'm going to give you a frustratingly vague answer instead: Some of my favorite parts of fantasy novels are those maps the really good authors put in the front pages of the book. If you do it right, you don't even have to do any work in trying to get the reader to care about the place. They just look at interesting spots on the map and say to themselves "Wow, I want to go there!" They're already invested and engaged in the work before even reading the first sentence. The best maps don't need a story to justify them; They justify themselves. Likewise, the best settings in video games are the ones where I don't need a quest giver telling me to go visit someplace or talk to someone: I'm interested because it's there. The setting justifies itself. Now, I'll be the first to admit, I'm a rather easy gamer to please. Give me a good setting, and I'll love your game in spite of basically all else. Bugs? Not a problem. Terrible gameplay? Don't sweat it. Vomit-inducing dialogue and voice acting? Meh, not a big deal. So long as you manage to keep me interested in what's over that next hill, I'll keep climbing over it no matter what it means I'll have to endure. It's why I'm such a rabid Elder Scrolls fan in spite of the series's mountain of flaws. And the worst settings in games are the ones where the writer comes up with a plot line in their head, then everything in the setting is built purely in subservience to that plot. No place exists unless something important happens there except to provide a buffer of endless mooks for the player to wade through as they move from A to B (or worse, back from B to A). Nobody exists unless they have some piece of exposition to deliver about what you're supposed to do next. Everyone just apparently stands around all day waiting for the player to show up, and nobody ever has any problems unless they're somehow directly relevant to whatever storyline the writer has intended. And everything matches convention unless the plot specifically requires otherwise, or the writer is trying to be clever by "subverting" a convention with something just as played out as the default, or just using the default with a different (usually stupid) name. Honestly? I'm worried this is the road Project Eternity's headed down. Maybe I'm being unfair because we really don't have that much info on the setting/story yet, but most of what I've seen so far has been a bad sign. The creative spark behind the Dyrwood seems to be "Well, 4/5 of the IE games we're using as inspiration were Forgotten Realms, so our setting can't be too different from FR. Also, there's guns, souls work different, there are cat people, we call bards 'Chanters', psions 'Ciphers', and Planetouched 'Godlike'." We're also told that the plot will have a big emphasis on "Moral Dilemmas", a fad that should have been discredited with Jade Empire. Furthermore pretty much all the updates we've received about the game, especially since the kickstarter ended, are about the mechanical and technical aspects of the game. Those are nifty and all, and it might just be that it's what they're focusing on in development right now, but I'm worried the reason they aren't talking much about the setting is because they think that nobody really cares about it. That's not to say it's all bad news: I think the colonialism angle has interesting potential. I'm also happy to hear they're implementing these "dilemmas" through a reputation system where you choose between multiple factions to support rather than a morality meter: I think this worked out really well in New Vegas. Also: I thought Planescape: Torment had an amazing setting. In fact, it was one of my favorite parts of the game. You don't have to be a TES/Fallout/Arcanum-like complete wide-open world game to have an interesting setting. I share these concerns, but in response to the last bit I wonder how well you can experience a setting without having freedom to explore it... Is it simply imagining the parts of the setting that are closed off, and if so is not the ability to do so more tied to the player's imagination than to the quality of what the developers have supplied setting-wise? When you're forced to constantly focus on a particular plot or story it seems to shift focus away from the setting at large in my humble opinion; you're only interested in the setting in so much as it facilitates the narrative, whereas truly excellent settings should be of interest in and of themselves I would think. -
A stronghold has the potential to be just that - a fortified place of retreat. Of course, this potential is hardly ever used; at best, strongholds tend to create more busywork by having you defend them occasionally. OTOH, you can often outfit them with craftsmen. A stronghold can really contribute to gameplay. A shack or manor are just places for you to play dress up/ larp. Oh yes, please make a tower defense mini-game in Project Eternity, how fun and challenging from a gameplay perspective that would be! Property such as shacks or manors are just another way to gauge your character's progression in a real (as opposed to the numbers on the screen) and free (as opposed to a stronghold that is presumably largely the same regardless of your character's identity) way. But apparently not because anything not relevant to combat-based gameplay just serves playing dress-up/LARPing...
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Allow us to fail Quests!
mcmanusaur replied to JFSOCC's topic in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
There's little need for such radical changes if we simply accept that both "successes" and "failures" have just about equal potential for future narrative. People often reload upon quest "failure" because it's not just a failure for the character but also for the player in that it objectively limits their gameplay experience by preventing them from taking part in future quests. I'm going to assume that's why players reload; because they know or expect that "failing" means they have less to play in the future. If each outcome to a quest has just as much viability for the future, there's little reason for the player to reload unless it's a matter of them not staying true to their character, in which case reloading is probably justifiable as the abilities of the player are separate from the supposed abilities of the character in roleplay. And if both "successes" and "failures" are equally viable for later gameplay, those labels themselves cease to have any value from the player's perspective. From the character's perspective they can still succeed or fail but it varies greatly between characters and thus there's not really anything to gain from identifying particular outcomes as "success" or "failure". -
Personally I am a bit tired of seeing non-combat activities labeled as the alternative means to combat, rather than the other way around, which is how it is for most people living in a society. There's arguably much more diversity in the former category, and the focus on combat relies on the rather artificial "reality" of baddies existing in dungeons for characters to crawl, which has somehow come to be seen as more essential to the role-playing genre than a realistic and interactive society.
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Sadly enough I've spent a fair share of time on Minecraft attempting to tailor it to an RPG, and while it has some positive characteristics, there are definitely a few disadvantages as well. One, the character of the setting is childish and generally terrible (ex. Villagers, Nether dimension, Ender dimension)- and all of the effort the development team puts into such features is wasted. Two, many of the so-called "RPG elements" of Minecraft are rather poorly implemented (leveling, alchemy, etc.), and don't provide a satisfying gameplay experience to someone who has played legitimate RPGs. Three, the world is bare and empty save for the occasional procedurally-generated structure, and thus there's no sense of immersion in a larger world or society (you have to work really, really hard to get anywhere close to this even on a custom map). This in turn hinders the reactivity as you point out, even if there's an immense amount of freedom. I've given up MC, but if you could have all the sandbox aspects together with a properly designed world/setting and legitimate gameplay mechanics (and slightly better graphics I would optimistically hope), that wouldn't be too bad in my opinion.
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While I'm the OP and would love to see stuff like this in a game, we probably can't have such things because games like this tend to be very focused on a story-driven narrative, and by that I mean there's a defined "ending" and thus there will be very limited focus on the endgame. While features such as this could be worked into the resolution of the main conflict (ex. instead of doing quests to gain favor with an important NPC, you can wield your accumulated social clout within the world to sway him/her, and not just faking that through charisma-based persuasion), they're typically viewed by developers as "things we let players do for when they run out of other things to do" and thus are typically confined to the endgame. Hopefully at some point non-combat activities will be recognized as distinct playstyles in and of themselves and not just ways to avoid combat, as if the latter is the default, and perhaps then developers will take a more holistic view of how a goal can be achieved within a game world/society. On an unrelated note in response to the poll results, I get the impression people here don't place too much value on uniqueness of experience, if they don't mind choosing the same stronghold (or one of a handful of alternatives similar to Morrowind) on every playthrough. Personally I've never found this (nor the way player homes were handled in Oblivion or Skyrim where there's just a few predetermined buildings you can own) to be very fulfilling, but I suppose this is just another way that my sensibilities differ from others. For me easily becoming lord of a giant stronghold just leans too much toward ego-stroking and removes the challenge of having to gradually build your way up from a shack to a hovel to a cottage to a manor, etc.
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Excuse me for the necro, but this thread came up in a google search I ran, and I thought it was interesting since we really have yet to hear anything more about non-combat skills in Project Eternity. However, my reaction to the idea in the OP was that the outcome of this functionality essentially defeats the entire purpose of separating skills, and only serves as a cosmetic variation to the familiar system in which combat and non-combat abilities are drawn from the same resource pools (unless the two skill categories had differing marginal cost curves). In fact I'm not decided yet about whether combat and non-combat skills should actually be separate, and while I can see Obsidian's reasoning in doing so this thread mentions some decent arguments against that. This is probably one of the most challenging game design questions I've come across (along with the whole class-based vs. skill-based debate), and I do fear that having separate resource pools might encourage gamers to chicken out from ambitious character concepts given the wasted potential in a character who doesn't do both combat and non-combat (though I suppose that dedicated roleplayers would assume this penalty when warranted and at any rate this is a relatively small price to pay for the benefits of discouraging one-dimensional min-maxed characters).
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Actually, I think they're more similar than you may realize. Writing a CRPG is most similar to writing an adventure module. My favorite modules are the ones that, rather than crafting a plot for the players to experience, craft a situation. Make a location, fill it up with NPCs, decide what the NPCs are trying to do. Then drop the player in there, perhaps with a quest hook for the reason why they're there and what they hope to accomplish (e.g. "Find Pharod"), then allow the player to do whatever they want with what's there. Give advice for how NPCs will react to various things the player might decide to do, but then hand it off to the DM to do the rest. The main difference with a CRPG is you don't have a DM, you have to settle for scripts. This isn't as big of a difference as it sounds, though: Handled intelligently, a script can substitute a human DM very effectively within the assumptions of the type of game being played. Where you encounter problems is when the players decide to do stuff that's completely insane, or runs counter to the assumptions of the game. Like, a game where the players are all pirates trying to become captains of their own ship (ala Skull & Shackles), but then the players give up piracy and decide to run an orphanage instead. A human DM can handle this but no amount of scripting can. You're probably right, but I guess the one thing I would say in response is that I suppose even the concept of independent "modules" within the geographical/chronological scope of a game's setting have certain implications for game design. In real life I think we'd be hard-pressed to say that there is always a primary conflict or central narrative (are foreign relations, technological progress, environmental concerns, or social inequity more important than one another?), and one could argue that dedicated roleplay would be similar. I suppose one big thing I can take away from this discussion is that games and player expectations vary widely when it comes to the "span" or "width" of roleplay. Obviously the other variable at play, which everyone can mostly agree on, is "depth" and to some extent width and depth might compete for resources (but in another sense they could also be emergent with relation to one another). Perhaps then it would be useful in the so-called RPG genre to distinguish games in terms of specialized (whether focusing on combat or narrative or any other particular facet of RPGs) versus holistic roleplaying games. At any rate I think you're right that it's somewhat of an artificial intelligence question (and maybe even a step more complex for simulation of societies), but we're going to get no closer to finding the most appropriate algorithms to accommodate such complexities without developers being ambitious.
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Beyond good and evil
mcmanusaur replied to Auxilius's topic in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
Except emotions react to what kind of logic a man have. For example, if you're from a culture where women are inferior, their inferiority is logical and the emotional treatment evolves accordingly. No emotion involved, only logic dictated by culture, history, religions and other standards. Why do you think civilizations clash? Because their very core is different. Not to derail the thread (since it's mine) but immigration works best when the culture of the immigrant is similar to the culture of the country he wants to move in. You can do this in reverse. A common fetish in fantasy setting is matriarchy. Societies developed by women, for women, where men don't have positions of power. Pretty sure their ethics are different, so are their morals, and so are their ways of emoting. Otherwise, men would act differently. Sadly, I can't source this. Matriarchies are always done badly, like that DC Comics about a civil war or something. Urgh, it's basically mad women vs men everytime. I think the better matriarchy I've seen was in Sliders, and it was played for laughs. I guess there are subjects that can't be dealt with without looking stupid. Of course, a morality can just be impossible to understand for the human mind. That's incorrect in my opinion. Both emotion and reason simply translate people's values, which aren't necessarily logical or emotional by nature. Emotion and reason are just the means by which those values are converted into judgments or decisions, and I was merely stating the demonstrable fact that often emotion is the true mechanism even if after the fact we often attempt/manage to convince ourselves that reason was the process we used. Also... this thread is already incredibly off-topic to all manner of philosophical inquiries, just like the last morality thread. Just drawing everyone's attention to this tendency which apparently isn't fixed by creating a fresh new thread. -
Interesting find: http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RPGsEqualCombat and also http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SlidingScaleOfLinearityVsOpenness
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Bingo. I've run my PnP campaigns as fairly sandbox-y, in that I barely ever force the players to go anywhere or do anything. However I figured out maybe 20 years ago that to keep things interesting I have to keep them hungry; give them some burning issue to address. The nice thing is that with PnP it's a continuing back and forth with the players, which means that if things go well, they'll start to develop their own ideas about what matters and what doesn't, and then that can become the impetus for the story. But there has to be some at least somewhat hairy situation they're in. "You all meet at a tavern and decide to go adventuring" doesn't really work IMO. It's quite interesting to me how tabletop/PnP RPGs are such different animals than cRPGs, and I think that sort of gets at a lot of the issues discussed in this thread. While linear gameplay and railroading can presumably occur with certain DMs as well as in video games, I think in many ways the tabletop/PnP approach is closer to my ideal than restricted story-based cRPGs, although I don't really have much interest in active roleplaying every word my character says, which is the tendency I suppose.
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I'm not entirely sure what the big difference is there. Are first-person games inherently not RPGs then? Where exactly is your source for that?
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Agreed,most probably the truest RPGs are ones that give us most choices. And the games that actually do this? Well,by constantly adding more options that enrich the game mechanics we seen would seem the right course in evolution. It is a goal yet to be accomplished,but with no doubt the goal developers should always bear in mind. I'm not sure though; I think to some extent modern RPGs have inherited things like a disproportionate focus on combat (which in turn leaves less resources for other mechanics) from as far back as the earliest days of DnD. There are also other ways in which RPGs are regressing in my opinion, such as the recent trend toward streamlined/simplified mechanics, or the cursory treatment of player agency in the form of black-and-white moral choices. At any rate I'm not too aware of any developers aggressively pushing the envelope in this regard.
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Allow us to fail Quests!
mcmanusaur replied to JFSOCC's topic in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
I strongly agree with this; "success" and "failure" are linear and prescriptive terms that only have value in so much as there is a particular long-term goal in mind, and this may or may not be the PC's actual goal (emergent gameplay should be nurtured rather than discouraged). -
Beyond good and evil
mcmanusaur replied to Auxilius's topic in Pillars of Eternity: General Discussion (NO SPOILERS)
If we're going for realism, what should influence the moralizing system of most characters is likely emotion, rather than logical reasoning or abstract ethical principles. Psychological research has demonstrated that often times our "philosophical" arguments are merely post-hoc rationalizations for what we feel deep inside us. -
I would agree that choice is probably the central pillar of "RPG-ness", but to me it begs the question how much choice is enough (or too much)? Should your character be able to financially support themselves via tradeskills instead of adventuring? Should you be able to purchase property, or control your character's diet, or spend your time romantically pursuing other characters? Obviously this varies between games, but if player choice is what defines an RPG, is the game that gives you the most choices the truest RPG? That is the question I intend to raise in this thread, as the mechanics and/or narrative of Infinity Engine games somewhat limit the player's choices (nothing against Infinity Engine games for being what they are, but perhaps their RPG-ness is limited). Where are the games that actually do this?
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I'm indeed familiar with the GNS theory, and I took some inspiration from the Bartle MMO thing as well. While the GNS theory has its merits, for being a theory that lumps people who play RPGs into three camps, I think it is a bit incomplete. For one it's a bit less applicable to the games themselves (than to the players and their attitudes), but it's also a bit of a false "trichotomy" I believe. I don't think think as a player you can escape any of the four elements of design; you simply choose what kind of narrative or mechanics you prefer, and your preferences for each are relatively independent from each other. I suppose you're correct that I would fall under "Simulationism" in that theory, but I think the important aspect of that you're not accounting for when you say that the Sims is the perfect simulationist RPG is that there is no (or very little) sense of setting, which I suspect would prevent my immersion (though I've never played it). Also, it is the game that should ideally simulate a social backdrop for roleplay, rather than having the player do all the simulating (which would distract them from "their" character).
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It does... but I think the interesting question is, what is the relationship between freedom and roleplay? There is one obviously, since without any freedom there's no agency, and with no agency you're reduced to a more or less passive observer of the story. However I'm not at all convinced that more freedom always leads to more roleplay. I'd sum up the essence of roleplay as "tough choices." Choices become tough if they're limited: if any choice you make has trade-offs, sometimes tragic ones. These kinds of choices emerge naturally out of crisis situations, and crisis situations emerge out of story arcs. A sandbox with maximal freedom kind of takes the edge off those choices, since by definition you'll have the choice of walking away from the situation. So I see the relationship between freedom and roleplay as something of an inverted U curve -- no freedom, no roleplay, 100% freedom, no roleplay, with the sweet spot somewhere in between where you have agency but your choices are fairly strongly constrained by your circumstances. This can be done in an open-world game too, but to pull it off it needs to constrain your choices in other ways than writing it into the script. Otherwise it just becomes a hiking simulator. Oblivion didn't appeal to me at all, and I didn't even play Skyrim for this reason. I agree strongly. Screw moral dichotomy, let's have shades of gray instead. Again, I agree that the "defeat the King of Shadows" trope is hackneyed and unnecessarily limiting. However, I'm not sure that a scenario of finite limits is a bad thing per se. I like resolution. The alternative is a world that just goes stale and you stop playing because you get bored. I prefer a rousing finale to that. Another +1 on the ego-stroking, good-vs-evil, heroes, and villains. There are other stories that you can tell also. But I do find that to role-play without any story becomes thin gruel. Don't get me wrong, I like simulations as well, but in them I don't role-play. I was really hooked on Dwarf Fortress for a quite a while, but I don't think of it as a role-playing game, precisely because there's no story arc, even in adventure mode. Any role-playing you do has to be "larping." Its strengths lie elsewhere, and IMO it exemplifies both the strengths and the limitations of sandbox games rather beautifully. I guess what I'd say is that while more freedom does not necessarily need to more roleplay, more freedom correlates with more roleplay potential, and it's up to the player to utilize that potential. I don't think there's really any stark dividing line between "tough" choices and other choices, as really it just has to do with the kind of roleplay one is looking for, which varies from player to player. There are choices that entail tradeoffs in almost every genre of game, including more sandbox-oriented games, though you are correct that this tends to require conflict. What I'm arguing is not for the absence of conflict, however, but the reliance on hero-focused narrative arcs (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hero_with_a_Thousand_Faces); conflict can equally occur on a social level and roleplay shouldn't require a preexisting narrative structure. From what I've seen the real issue seems to be how relevant choices are to the game's narrative. For me there's nothing stopping people from roleplaying in a sandbox world, but the impression that I'm getting is that people don't really like having to creatively start from scratch themselves. And it's not as if characters are exempt from the influence of important events in sandbox games; they simply have the option of choosing not to participate. Thus it's really the player-driven aspect that deters people, rather than the wider scope. Certainly the persistent world tradeoff is not necessarily a good or bad thing, as it all depends on how story-driven the gameplay is, but I think that games in which there is no "endgame" in that the world does not effectively persist beyond the resolution of the main conflict (and instead cuts off to credits or something) aren't the most fulfilling.
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So I mulled this over a bit and came up with a sort of theoretical framework to classify the design philosophies of RPGs and action/adventure games, which is probably incomplete. It consists of four elements of RPG design that can each be measured across two axes, similar to a Cartesian coordinate system. I tried to represent a lot of the distinctions brought up in this thread's discussion, while making sure that the axes for each element were mostly independent from each other (at least theoretically). I also left out factors such as time period or level of magic/realism that have more to do with a game's genre (fantasy or sci-fi) than they do with RPG design. In no particular order, we have: Element: Character Axis 1: specialized or versatile (with class-based systems on one side and systems that stroke a character's ego by letting them be best at everything on the other side) Axis 2: customizable or predetermined (how much of the character's past life is predetermined so as to fit within the story? must you play an orphan for example?) Element: Mechanics Axis 1: combat-focused or holistic (on one side you have pure dungeon crawls, and on the other you have emphasis on anything ranging from tradeskills to relationship drama) Axis 2: skill-based or strategy-based (real-time or turn-based? reflex-based twitch gaming at one extreme, and intensive min-maxing number-crunching at the other end) Element: Narrative Axis 1: linear or interactive (self-explanatory, with a more linear game having less player choice, and games utilizing a moral dichotomy somewhere in between) Axis 2: story-driven or persistent (is there a single main conflict that the character must overcome to "beat the game", or simply a web of loosely related questlines?) Element: World Axis 1: open or restricted (how much of the world can you explore? are you confined to areas that are directly linked to the central narrative, or can you travel freely?) Axis 2: dynamic or static (how much influence does your character actually have on the world around them? how much is society simulated? sandbox games at one extreme) You could therefore hypothetically classify all RPGs by plotting them along the two axes for each element, or conversely display one's design preferences by shading in certain regions for each of the four elements' graphs. Can anyone think of anything I've left out?
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It is true that even if a game's mechanics were as perfectly conducive to roleplay as possible, not all players would role play, because that is indeed a choice on the part of the player. However, that doesn't mean that there is no relationship between mechanics and roleplay; that just means the goal shouldn't be to force players to roleplay, and I don't think anyone has really suggested that. Rather, for me the goal for RPGs should be to support players' ability to roleplay in as many capacities as possible, and at any rate the exclusion of certain mechanics tends to have greater potential to hinder players' ability to roleplay than the inclusion of those mechanics has potential to force players to roleplay, if that makes any sense. In other words, not supporting a particular aspect of gameplay (food for example) might limit how holistically one can roleplay (or at least that leaves it to imagination, which isn't fulfilling for many people), but having food in-game doesn't force people to role-play (if anything it just forces them to recognize it as a mechanic, but often times that inconvenience alone seems to be enough reason to omit features). Thus, the fact that different games foster RP in different people is either due to player choice (which can't be helped) or the fact that different games have different mechanics, which foster different kinds of roleplay, which in turn appeal to different players. That said, there's nothing saying that such mechanics can't be integrated into a single game that might foster RP for multiple kinds of players, and I believe so-called role-playing games have somewhat of a responsibility to err (within reason of course) on the side on more roleplay freedom in comparison to action/adventure games, which might easier justify leaving out something that is irrelevant to the main conflict of the story. Therefore the RPG-ness of a game can be said to depend upon how broad its mechanics are, as this is theoretically correlated with the amount of players in whom it encourages roleplay of some kind. A true sandbox game will have extremely broad mechanics, and thus extensive potential for roleplay as long as the players actually choose to do so.
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While we've seen quite a few recent RPGs such as those you mentioned that feature open worlds and free exploration, most of them aren't true sandbox games in that there is little interactivity (as opposed to something like Minecraft where you build your own house). Unfortunately I have yet to discover a series that is innovative in that regard, but at any rate I think it's important to recognize the difference between "open world" and "sandbox". For me the thing with branching narratives is that they tend to have a very limited set of options (often just two for games that utilize a moral dichotomy), and they tend to be restricted to choices relevant to a single conflict. That's just not very deep as in real life there are always multiple conflicts that we deal with, and if roleplaying is the focus then the same should be true for characters. However, you are right to identify emergent agency/choice as a primary issue here, and personally I find that among the most fascinating aspects of gameplay. As you suggest and I state in my last post, I suppose the ultimate question is whether there's a particular story in mind, or whether people and society constitute the extent of a story. In my opinion though, non-player-driven storytelling is not something that really distinguishes RPGs from action/adventure games (if anything I would say the latter emphasizes it as much if not more), though strong narrative is apparently very important to people here judging by the poll results so far.
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What you say is true, but I think that even having a main conflict that a protagonist character is forced to address (no matter how many choices they have regarding how they go about addressing it) limits roleplay freedom somewhat. It may still be a worthwhile tradeoff, but it does mean you can't have 100% roleplay freedom and 100% narrative cohesion at the same time. Personally I find the whole moral dichotomy aspect of player choice to be rather hackneyed and not entirely fulfilling, and I think that's about the bare minimum when it comes to roleplay freedom. Something along the lines of Fallout with multiple story arcs is closer to what I envision, but importantly I believe that the notion of evil villains serving as the main conflict that the player ultimately resolves is something that may not be conducive to holistic roleplay, because then it becomes a scenario of finite limits (it ends when the villain is killed). Perhaps the "main" or larger story arc that combines the smaller plots should instead be the progress of the greater society that one's character belongs to in overcoming circumstances of nature, technology, or other societies. While an individual dedicated antagonistic serves as a nice foil to the protagonist for narrative purposes, more often than not it leads to a more or less black-and-white battle of good versus evil, and also the sense that the resolution of that battle concludes the game, and for me a consistent world is also conducive to holistic roleplay. My conviction that modern RPGs do far too much ego-stroking also pertains to the question of whether it should all be about heroes and villains or social development.
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That's a good way to put it I think. I'm not too much of a hardcore roleplayer myself (LARPing doesn't appeal to me, and RPing the words my character says in dialogue is of limited interest to me), but oddly/sadly enough the most serious roleplay experience I've found has been in games like Minecraft. What that kind of game really lacks though from an RP perspective is interesting mechanics and any semblance of rational worldbuilding/lore, of course. But it shows you that for pure RP the sandbox elements are quite crucial, and emphasis on combat isn't necessary. The greater problem with that medium is that there is no social backdrop to the interactions of the PCs, and I suppose the ultimate ideal would be a sandbox/open world game that simulates an authentic social backdrop to a player-driven narrative. Somewhere along the lines RPGs seem to have been taken hostage by linear/preordained narrative and a focus on combat/action over other aspects of characters' lives. In terms of narrative, perhaps the most that developers interested in fostering holistic roleplay should do is provide as many optional story arcs as possible for players to choose between, without putting a disproportionate amount of emphasis on a single main conflict.
