gojira

IMO, thinking up good game ideas, ones that will really create truly innovative, exciting games is not all that different from thinking up ideas for a novel or film. The mediums are not really so different. Instead of a viewer/reader you have a "player", an active participant in the scenario, who would ideally have as much freedom to make decisions as a real person in the same circumstances. Creating a game is just like being a creator-god. First you need a world/setting for your characters to inhabit. Then you fill it with characters, one or more of which the player has complete control over, ideally making those characters into "wildcards" within the constraints of the world that you have created. Since the player controls their actions, any part of the story could be changed by them at any time. For instance, if the player decides to kill and eat one of the main characters in your story, how does that effect the plot? Did the designer allow for the possibility of not merely random killing, but cannibalism as well? This may necessitate the whole story changing to one where the player needs to escape from the police etc. Ideally an RPG would be this way, allowing the player to make whatever choices he wanted without ending the story. The story would change dynamically to accomodate whatever crazy choices the player might want to make, just like in real life. Since this is currently impossible to program, compromises in the number of allowable player choices is inevitable. Still, allowing for as many of these choices as possible would certainly make for an interesting game. It might require hundreds of different macro-stories consisting of thousands of micro-stories. This is the holy grail of "interactive fiction" I guess. The player actually creates the story from a large number of discrete story branches. There could be no "walk throughs" because every player would end up with a very different story. A sub-program, sort of an artificial Chris Avellone, which could create complete and well-written stories on the fly, in response to character actions would be ideal. Unless I'm mistaken, simple story writing was an area of AI that was specifically targeted by some, although obviously without much success. Something like a Cyc enhanced Rule Based System combined with some kind of Neural Network architecture to train by example and genuinely learn things in a more organic, less predictable sort of way might be a good start. Obviously just creating this sort of system would likely consume many times the budget of even a long dev cycle game. Also, why is it that game devs dropped text parsing as a conversational tool after the Zork text adventure kind of games? It was kind of fun to be able to type in simple sentences and have the computer understand. I would like to see some Natural Language processing going on in future RPGs. Why limit everything just to predetermined conversational branches? Aside from money and time, of course. Although a pretty good natural language parser could easily consume the budget for any number of entire games, the core tech could be re-used and even licensed to other companies. Even fake Eliza or MegaHal-esque kinds of conversations with NPCs would be a nice addition. I would like to see a version of Annah which could pass the Turing Test. Having said all this, it is difficult for me to imagine a better computer game than Torment (at least up until TNO met with Ravel). If you can come up with a main story and a setting as good as that, the rest should be easy. Yes, the combat could have been improved, although I liked it very much the way it was. It may not have been as strategically fun as games like BG2 or MM8 (IMO) when it came to the fights, and the graphics were laughable when compared to a game like Morrowind, but at least it gave you some reason to play besides leveling up. Don't even get me started on FedEx questing games. If I want to run errands, I can do that in real life and even make some money. I don't know when RPGs started to be equated with a series "quests", but it may have spelled the beginning of the end for them. For many game devs, its not even a question of whether their RPG will have quests, but merely a matter of what kind. After all, they need more than just a pretty world. They need to actually give the player something to do right? Imagine that. It's an easy way to avoid the fact that no one on the team can write their way out of a paper bag, as well as the cost of a real writer. I have a 5 year old nephew. The things that can keep him genuinely entertained never cease to amaze me. I'm not sure I could keep my dog from getting bored with some of them. He actually enjoys sweeping floors and vacuuming. Pretty much any kind of cleaning job is fun for him. Maybe it's a novelty thing. He hasn't done it before so it seems fun at first. I don't know. Everything is new and interesting when you're young I guess. All I really ask of game designers is that they think about the motivations and emotions of the player. Don't try to motivate me with money or power. Obviously a player wants to grow in strength (although too much power too quickly leads to boredom), but constantly being led by the nose to get yet another BroadSword of Fireballs or Boots of Infinite Speed can get tiring. I am a 30+ gamer and I need a better carrot (or stick) to keep me playing. In Torment I was motivated by all the mysteries I wanted to figure out. There was genuine suspense built up in that game/story by all of the fascinating possibilities to be discovered/figured out/remembered. I find that kind of motivation to be far more satisfying than the quest to become an uber-character which can kill any monster in the game in less than 3 seconds. Of course, if you are in this business only to make money, all of this is irrelevant. The quickest game cycle that can produce a saleable game (preferably to be finished with even quicker to make "modules" to be priced the same) is the way to go. And why bother with PC only games when younger, less experienced, less jaded, console players will pay as much for a simpler, cheaper to produce product. If you can then quickly port it to a PC you might earn a few extra bucks though. So it might be worth it. Feargus has denied that console games are really cheaper to make. That may be true if you are comparing apples to apples in terms of game complexity, but most console games tend to have simpler, more arcadish designs (due to their younger or more casual target market). So really the point is not PC vs. Console (assuming a hypothetical console with all the abilities of a PC), but complexity vs. simplicity or long dev cycle vs. short dev cycle games. For this reason I have a theory that experienced game developers cannot create great games. All it takes is one award winning but poorly selling game. (See the history of Looking Glass CRPGs for an interesting example). Humans really are fast learners. I think that Feargus really would like to make a sequel-in-spirit to Torment. He has said as much in the past. Based solely on financial reasons, I don't think he ever will. Why risk bankruptcy on a very expensive game with a more limited, hardcore audience. It's not like such games sell more copies. We all know what does sell more copies. Some of us just don't like to think about it.

I am trying to think of games where I haven't had that ability, assuming a sufficiently high lockpick skill. There are just so many that let you do it. Even Baldurs Gate gave you this ability I think. You aren't by some chance a consoloe RPG player (the enemy)? Would it bother you if the only "consequences" of opening the door were to find a nearly identical interior to every other door in town complete with a nearly identical occupant doing something, well, nearly identical to all the rest? This is the only reason why perhaps not every game gives you that option. There isn't all that much point. Although, I do agree it should be there. In addition to being able to open any door, Elder Scrolls: Arena also gave you the ability to knock out sections of a dungeon wall (some kind of spell I think) and traverse to whatever is over there. Even if the wall is multi-blocks thick it let you "drill through" to whatever was on the other side. I agree that it was a cool ability which they had to remove in Daggerfall presumably because of the totally twisting, non-linear dungeon shapes in the newer game. Or maybe they felt it unbalanced the game.

Sounds like you haven't yet tried Morrowind then. Although the character/monster models suck in that 3D Studio Max kind of way (amazing how much more "real" sprites can look), the scenery in Morrowind was the most amazing I have ever scene in a computer game, if you have the hardware to display it. So you may want to try it if you can find it for free and have a high end graphics card. As far as TB goes, I'm of the opinion that both limited RT and TB should be implemented if at all possible. I don't agree that this is inherently not doable. Having two viable fight modes adds to the replayabillity. Having said that, true TB (as in FO) or true unpausable RT (as in Morrowind) are both bad choices IMO. If I had to pick only one I would choose TB, because RT allows for no strategic fighting at all and that is part of the fun of a CRPG IMO. When RT is implemented very well (Ultima Underworld, Arena (maybe), Might and Magic 8, Arx Fatalis etc) it can be fun, but the lack of strategic options is a significant weakness. But a good pause and play implementation in combination with quick spell, quick attack options seems to retain most of the strategic aspects of TB while also retaining the excitement of the fight. If the pause is instantaneous enough, it leaves you the time you need to make decisions and prepare just as much as TB. I found fighting in FO to be fun (although it wasn't very strategic as compared to games like BG2 or Might and Magic 6-8 in TB mode), but the slowness of the action made it feel more like a game of battle chess than a real fight. The adrenaline rush is just not quite there. Plus, quick kills of much weaker opponents are not possible in true TB.

That must be the oddest RPG definition that I have ever heard, and I have heard some strange ones. I do realize that action games generally limit your choices to where to go and who to kill, and in a very limited number of ways, but even the most complex and immersive CRPGs to date limit your options to specifically those choices that the designers foresaw, which amounts to not all that much more than your choice of who to kill or talk to (and any resulting dialogue choices). I guess this limiting aspect of todays game design is what motivates Bethesda, MMORPG devs, and other fans of so called "open-ended" play, but solving it will require either some huge advances in how games are played or a truly massive project to produce a game world where any possible desire of any possible gamer has been thought of and coded into the game. At the moment this is just science fiction. Bethesda did randomize dungeons in Daggerfall and even Arena I think, but real life is not actually a random collection of the same features. So that just created monotony as opposed to an immersive real world kind of experience. A game that incorporates some kind of wetware neural network AI to literally change game/story features as you play to accomodate infinite possibilities would be a wonderful advance, but it hasn't happened yet. I guess the closest thing would be a DM. Maybe that's what you're really saying here: that an RPG without a live human DM is not really an RPG at all. If that is the case, then I guess NWN would be the only computer game in history to qualify as an RPG. AFAIK it is the only "CRPG" to make use of live DMs. OTOH, most of the actions that a DM might allow would not be reflected in the computer displayed game world. It only achieves this freedom through the "cheat" of incorporating PnP play into a computer game, so these actions will only occur in the imagination of the players just as in PnP.