Lephys

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.

Chrono Trigger style! 8D

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.

I understand how all that works, and I understand why you'd want that over one with gaps that has stuff displayed behind the non-gaps, that could potentially be the edge of the area, that could potentially require clicking or other direct interaction for transitioning. However, even after re-reading Wench's post, all I'm getting is "See, the problem is, you'd have to effectively make the actual viewable area end along the edge of the UI panes, rather than extending behind them, which is even WORSE, because it wastes even MORE space. In conclusion, this type of UI works in 3D games with adjustable camera angles, but doesn't work in a 2D game like PE." That's why I'm confused. Not because I don't comprehend the benefits of cutting the viewable area off at the edge of the UI, but because Wench seems to be claiming that that IS the problem: that doing that is bad and HAVING to do that is worse. I am befuddled.

But... the UI Wench was directly referencing as "problematic" was one that only took up part of the edge, rather than all of it. Either way, the parts of the edge that ARE covered by the UI are covered by the UI, regardless of whether or not it's ALL the edge, or only part of it. That's why I expressed confusion as to what would be an appropriate UI from Wench's point of view, since you'd typically say "well, allow it to have some gaps," just as you did. But... the one referenced already HAD gaps. That leaves "doesn't touch the edge at all" and "there is no UI."

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.

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!!!!!"

^ Maybe you have a magical device that sends objects back to your last camp area (town, if it's closest), but can only teleport non-living mass. Boom. You get stuff straight to your stash, but you can't access it until you actually get to where it is.

So you are bold... but are you also... daring? NEGATIVE UI! I want the UI to not only refrain from existing, but also for holographic projections to actually extend the non-UI gamescreen off the edges of one's monitor. u_u

Even against swords and warhammers? 8P

^ Alternatively, you could simply allow for a buffer zone, so that the viewable area/backdrop doesn't simply dead-end right at the edge of the transition. Very similar to how Fallout did it with its green-squares regions that you merely had to step in, or how Arcanum does it with its "Okay, you can just keep jogging further in this direction, if you want, but you're already within the area that lets you access fast travel." I mean, ANY UI that doesn't auto-hide or something is going to block off a portion of the screen. That's in the very nature of UIs. I'm not comprehending the "problem" here, unless your problem is with UIs that cover ANY edge of the screen. That would only leave UIs that just sit in the middle of the screen, or collapsible/nonexistent UIs.

I've always wanted to see a system revolving around faux estate. o_o

You know, I'm sure someone probably mentioned this already (it's hard to keep up with 7,000 posts-per-minute, haha), but it might not be utterly crazy to put the main little, er... "Game menu" button-cluster (settings, journal, character, inventory, maybe rest, etc.) at the top center, along with the text log. It would be pretty much as out-of-the-way as along any other edge of the screen, and you could have all the rest of the UI along the bottom, on a thinner sliver. Hell, the scripted events/dialogue interface components could even sort of bloom down from the little pod in the top center. I know, I know. I apparently love the word "bloom."

Yeah, it's like you said in one of the other threads recently... about how apt the term "situation" was. I think we love being creative, but we need a situation. There's a difference between obtaining some wood, and practicing whittling until you make something neat, and having a situation present itself that could be handled by something whittled, then choosing to obtain wood and whittle an effective device within the confines of that situation. There are plenty of games I play (like Terraria) with little-to-no sense of urgency in anything, and there's plenty of fun to be had in leisurely (for the most part), enjoyable gameplay. I don't think that in any way makes a game bad, but urgency/"situations" are a lackable thing. When they're not there, you lose something. Just like how, as you said, when things get unnecessarily restrictive in freedom/exploration, something is equally lost. In some games, you only get like 5% of a city modeled, and it just updates between quests or as time passes to reflect changes to the city. But, it doesn't even go far enough to represent actual exploration. It's so condensed, the narrative actually supercedes exploration and freedom. It's almost like "What need is there for freedom, when everything's RIGHT HERE?! 8D!" And, when that happens, I think something's quite lacking, as well. And, in terms of an actual RPG and what it entails, I think it relies heavily upon the balance between those, as neither is unimportant, but neither is really more important than the other. It's kind of like this: If you need light, and that's it, then you can build a big fire. Yay! It provides lots of light! Problem solved! But, if you need light, but ALSO need to keep heat to a minimum, well, now you might need to modify your fire. Enclose it somehow, or try to use less fire and better reflectivity or something. But you need SOME heat, or you'll freeze to death. You just need to control them both. If urgency/narrative is like light, freedom/exploration is like heat. And simply burning things doesn't necessarily balance the two very well. It simply requires more precision than that. Doesn't mean fire won't do the job, in some capacity.

That's beside the point. At some point, you're going to have free space in your pack that cannot be occupied by a sword, sticking out or not. And you're going to have free space on the outside of your pack that you can't properly lash a sword to, etc, even though you could lash SOMETHING there. It's the old "Fill a jar with rocks. Is it full? No. Now pour in pebbles. Is it full now? No. Now fill it with sand..." notion. Or, you know, like Tetris. Just because you have 4 blocks of space doesn't mean something that isn't shaped to fit in that space won't fit. Obviously, as I said, the grid is an abstraction of this. All I'm saying is that it's good to represent the fact that not everything fits into all spaces.

Understandable. I don't fault you for not slapping something so extensive into a mockup. 8P I was just thinking, along the whole "the UI fits into the setting and mood of the gameplay and therefore doesn't feel like a space age, out-of-place frame" idea, that you quite often have such detail put into readable inventory items and such, to make it appear as though you're simply reading the actual parchment/documents in the game world. So, why not the UI log area? As it is more notorious for vertical scrolling, I simply felt that an actual scroll-type functionality might be nice. It would still work the same as pretty much any other text log in any other RPG. But, you'd get that nice "Oooooh, this FEELS like I'm actually reading a log on some parchment!" effect that might help anchor the UI that much more.

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.

Yeah... just, something about the simple shift of the almost-the-same gameplay into 3D rather than having it in 2D seems to drastically affect the technicality-to-gameplay ratio. I mean, in Terraria, I can only spend SO MUCH effort and focus on creatively (and almost arbitrarily) designing and building things. Whereas, in Minecraft, I'd have to worry about 90% more space, just to build a basic house. Even though Terraria still lacks the real hard-hitting RPG elements of whence McManusaur speaks, it's interesting to me the effects of the sandboxy creativity sort of taking a step out of the spotlight in Terraria. Not to mention the 16-bit 2D sprite-style fluid animation just sort of uppercuts me right in the pleasant nostalgia bits. But, I don't know that there's really anything objective there.

I also very much like Karkarov's mockup. But, it does seem like there's not a lot of space to present character-specific info (such as status effects and such). They feel kind of group-hugged down there. That seems kind of like it favors right-handed people. That's not very PC. A good compromise would be to have the vertical character-portrait rail be in the center of the screen, so that neither side gets favoritism, u_u...

That's why I said you should pretty much be "forced" to know of it. You still have the choice of spending a couple of days doing something else, THEN tackling it (and maybe, for the sake of example, you can go 3 days without addressing it, then still have time to handle the situation at maximum "effectiveness" if you hurry, or you can tackle it immediately, with urgency, and not have to worry as much about getting everything you want done in time). It's just, if it's just a matter of "once you ask this guy about this situation, it suddenly becomes time-sensitive," then it's more like a little time-trial challenge than a situation that's actually connected to the rest of the game world. Basically, you know about the situation, and you can choose whether or not to start the timer on it. That should probably be avoided. If you know about something, and it's time-sensitive, it shouldn't wait on you (once you're aware of its existence).

What if your level in that class actually affected the conveyance of your appropriately related skills and experience that class encompasses? Like, if you just took one level, they wouldn't say "Ahh, I see you're a such-and-such!," but rather, "Maybe you've dabbled a bit in swordsmanship, but you seem a bit green." Maybe being level 5 in that class would garner a different reaction (that might actually affect whether or not the NPC shares info with you, etc... reactivity stuff), and being level 9 or so would change it yet again. So, basically, you could have a spot in the game where you're understood to be within a certain range of levels (maybe 8-10), and you've got the potential for this NPC to yield info/quests/aide/some awesome reaction, and you've basically got the reaction tiered based on your multiclassing choices. Took at least 8 levels of Ranger? You get the highest tier of reactivity out of him. Only took 4-5 levels of Ranger? You get less, but maybe he still does something spiffy. Only 1 level of Ranger? Maybe he hardly reacts differently at all. NO levels of Ranger? He just dismisses you as a candidate for ANY of that "chain" of reactivity. The number of tiers and such is all arbitrary example details. It's more the general idea of how to have more in-depth reactivity.

The thing is, being able to effectively delay the start of a timer on a timed quest somewhat defeats the purpose of the timed quest in the first place. I think the best implementation of timed quests would be to simply hardcode in timed situations that begin when you arrive "at" them, no matter what you're focusing on or what quests you "start" or don't. What I mean is, simply, that, if you arrive at the city of Weldwif, and there's some hostage situation going on, then the timer should effectively start when you enter the city, not when you go ask Lord Hegglespledd about his kidnapped daughter. Basically, the whole "this quest is available now" thing assumes the coincidence that that quest/situation happened to be in-effect at the same time you showed up to potentially handle it in a variety of different manners, so, having the quest timer start when you start the playthrough (and just have this hostage situation happen on the 7th day of the 2nd month, regardless of whether or not you even get to the city by then) just seems pointless to me, within the context of a coherent RPG. But, yes, the details and factors surrounding that situation would need to be designed accordingly. It should be quite easy to at least learn about the existence of timed situations (since the timer started when you entered the city gate), even if you still have to do a lot of digging and go pretty far out of your way to effectively handle the situation within the given time frame. And the timing of them would have to be balanced accordingly. You wouldn't want 7 timed things to be happening side by side, but that's not to say you wouldn't ever want more than one at a time going on. This is why I very much like the basic idea behind the passage of time (sort of the advancement of the world around you, mainly displayed in the "progression" of available dialogues and quests and NPC locations/behaviors) being directly related to the completion of understood-to-require-some-time quests. Basically, if you run around outside the town for a week, nothing actually advances (except for specifically time-sensitive situations). BUT, if you spend 4 days handling a quest situation, now things have progressed. People all say "Hey, it's really great how you handled that situation," or "I hate you and can't believe you botched that so badly," etc. But, they're acknowledging that you did something that obviously required more than an hour or so, so the game abstracts the reactive passage of time, even if it took you a longer or shorter amount of time to actually tackle the quest/situation.

I never really even got started on Minecraft. It's too... Sims-y to me, but without even the Sims progression and such. It feels like too technical of a game. Like most of the focus is just on sandbox for the sake of sandbox. Granted, I've never actually PLAYED it, so I reserve full and complete judgement on it for such an occasion. However, I am currently rather enjoying Terraria. It's still sandboxy, with the focus mainly on exploration, progression, and pure gameplay... er... action, for lack of a better word. But, yeah, if you've never played Terraria, and just for extra context on this particular topic, I highly recommend it. I started getting a little bored with it when I had done almost everything there was to do in the first "half" of the game. I had one boss left to tackle (The Keeper of the Underworld), and I finally tackled that boss, which queues "hardmode" (which is ill-named, since it makes it sound more like a difficulty, when it's more like the 2nd tier of gameplay that washes over the world). Now, I'm pretty hooked again. Of course, I'm playing on Difficult instead of Normal, so I drop all my stuff every time I die, and things in hardmode are QUITE THREATENING. 8P I digress.

A) Nice! B) This made me think of an idea. I really like that parchment-like text log area, and I think it would utterly rock if, instead of just looking like a static piece of parchment and having a magical, transparent box that scrolls the text inside, it were actually like a scroll with a vertically-repeating-yet-seamless parchment-surface background texture, and whenever you scrolled, a simple animation actually made the scroll appear to literally scroll (the tops and bottoms would roll in the same direction, as if you were actually reading through a scroll). It's not a big deal, I realize, but the idea 'twas sparked, and I felt the need to pitch it.

I wasn't implying that a grid was necessary. It's obviously a visually intuitive abstraction of volume management. So, yes, simply having those two properties for all things would handle things quite well, too. Just, if there is a grid, then rather than having RIDICULOUSLY tiny grid-squares to fix the "my inventory is full from 16 individual tiny items" problem I pointed out, I just figured those could not even register on the grid, and simply be limited by stack or something. But, yeah, with volume, you could even have things in different containers, which would be nice. Instead of an item simply called "berries," you'd have a certain AMOUNT of berries. 'Cause, what the hell is 2 berrieses? I had 1 berries, and the icon is a pile of berries. But now I have 2 berrieses. WHAT'S BERRIESES, PRECIOUS?! You could have a jar of berries, or a pouch of berries, or a thimble of berries. The jar and pouch and thimble are always only going to contain a certain amount of something, no matter what it is. They only have so much volume inside them. Of course, when you get down to it, the problem with volume is the shape of things. Maybe your volume limit is 6 ft3 or something, but that doesn't mean you can fit 6 shortswords in there if they each have a volume of 1 ft3. If you melted all the short swords down, and poured the molten sword liquid into the bag, and it didn't burn the bag, magically, THEN you could use all the volume. That's the only thing a grid handles that a sheer-numbers volume limiter doesn't. You can have an axe that takes up 6 squares (2X3), but if you can only free up a 1X6 space in your inventory, or a 4-square bar atop a 2-square bar, you can't fit that axe. Even though the axe's sheer volume would fit, the axe, because of its specific shape, is not going to efficiently utilize the free space in your pack.