What I miss in modern RPGs

[Tigranes]

A game world whose existence isn't limited to its relevance to the quest at hand.

 

Precisely. The type of freedom that is truly great is a consistency of the world, its interactivity, and lack of restriction. This is usually related to, say, a morrowind-style "go anywhere you want" or fallouty "multiple quest choices". But there's so much more. Let's take Baldur's Gate for example, and see how it could have expanded its offer of freedom. (yes, it wasnt that nonlinear anyway. bear with me.)

 

A great example is the D&D magic. If I have the power to disintegrate giant beasts and summon massive bears, why can't I collapse a staircase to prevent attacks? If I have 19 dexterity why can't I try to climb a wall or jump down from one level to the other? Why can't I use my bow to cut ropes from afar, but only as Method of Skewer Orc #16? So the point here becomes interactivity with the world and a sensible representation of the fictional game world. Some games have already done this to a point...

 

Let's say a quest in a game lets you build a bridge out of wood. That's great, it's fun. But after that, nowhere else in the game can you build a bridge, or even gather wood. That is the problem - most innovative interactions with the world are limited to novelty shows in particular quests and spots. I want to be able to gather wood and construct palisades or bridges anywhere, and actually have a use for them. That is the proper implementation of interactivity.

 

I had talked about the spells of BG; this is a case of a sensible implementation of the game world. Often, the game code divides everything into sections; for example, buildings are placed on top of terrain, they are two seperate things - floor tiles and paper buildings on top of them, in the case of a 2D game. This prevents the terrain and the constructions from being natural. The same is with sticking spells to a combat purpose, or limited non-combat ones such as Knock and Invisibility in BG. Fallout achieved this to an extent with the skills (Science, etc), and I will acknowledge that a much greater level of this than, say, Fallout or Ultimas would be unrealistic. Yet if Obsidian ignores this sort of advancement in the game world, the said world would turn out poor indeed - even if the story, rules, and whatnot are great.

[roshan]

When I played the RPG Ultima 7, I thought that this game was a perfect RPG. It was an evolution in terms of gameplay, graphics and storytelling.

I could hardly wait for the next step in that evolution, but it didn't come...

The only evolution that took place in RPGs was that the graphics improved.

Let me explain what I think was so great about Ultima 7.

 

First, you had the feeling of being in a world that felt alive. Every NPC had a real personality and every NPC hat a lot to say about himself and what was going on. There were no one-line-conversations. Every NPC had a daily schedule, they woke up in the morning, sat down for breakfast, opened the windows, walked to their shops, worked, got to an inn in the evening and back home to bed. And you could actually follow them around and watch them doing this.

 

Second, the interactivity was so great, no other game reached this level again after Ultima 7. You could move every objects around, you could use nearly every object and you could combine objects. You could buy flour from the miller, fetch water from a well, mix the water with the flour to get a dough and put the dough into an oven to bake bread. You could then sell the bread or eat it. This may not be important for the story of a game, but for the game itself as because of this interactivity you feel like being in a truly alive world, where you can actually interact with everything. Interactivity like this may be common in MMORPGs, but I don't like MMORPGs as I want to be the lone hero that saves the world in an epic story. But I also want to feel like I'm part of a "real" world.

 

Third, the world in Ultima 7 also felt alive as there were a lot of neutral animals. There were deer roaming around in the forests, foxes, butterflies, dogs, cats, cows, sheep, pigs, birds etc. You could actually hunt these animals to get meat which you could sell or eat.

 

Modern RPGs don't offer this experience. Only important characters have a lot to tell you, no NPC has a daily schedule and the item interactivity is next to non existant and every creature you meet in the wilderness is evil. I think that this is really sad.

 

I really hope and pray that one day, a RPG with the features mentioned above will be created.

i would love a new game that could incorporate all those elements.

 

ive never played ultima 7 but from what ur saying it sounds pretty damn good.

[Magnum Opus]

The type of freedom that is truly great is a consistency of the world, its interactivity, and lack of restriction. This is usually related to, say, a morrowind-style "go anywhere you want" or fallouty "multiple quest choices".

Consistency is a big part of it for me as well, affecting not only the roleplaying aspect of the game, but the gameplay aspect as well. There have been several examples of puzzles in games that I can think of whose solution just never occurred to me, simply because they required an level of interactivity with the game world that wasn't found anywhere else. To use your example, how are we to even suspect that we need wood to build that bridge to get to the next area if all the wood we've seen in the game up to that point has been nothing more than backgournd art and completely non-interactive? If the world is completely static, why would we suspect this one part isn't?

 

For me, I was just impressed with BG1's continuity when it came out. They gave me the sense that they just dropped me into the world and left me to explore it, with all the incoveniences and dangers intact. Walking across six large areas on my way to Nashkel was just expected; I didn't have a teleport spell or a horse to speed my journey, and once an area had been accessed, the overhead map provided enough gameplay convenience that I didn't get bored to tears walking all the way back. They gave me buildings to explore (building that for the most part didn't have anything to do the a quest, but just held citizens at night) and books to read. It didn't have the detail of U7's Britannia, but it was consistent and continuous.

 

BG2 tightened things up significantly. Areas didn't exist in BG2 unless there was something significant in them that related to whatever quest you were on, or, when they did exist (Small Tooth Pass and the North Forest) they stuck out like sore thumbs. I spent quite a bit of time rehashing old quests and NPCs in Chapter 6 looking for some mention of those areas in the dialogue, because it didn't seem to me that they'd put in those areas unless there was a quest involved in them; they hadn't done it in the previous 5 chapters; why start now? I could see why they did it that way from a DnD perspective: having that many high level foes in one continuous area would have been utterly absurd; but it also removed the player from the world a step. In what's supposed to be an RPG, I think that's a step in the wrong direction.

 

ToB continued that trend even more. There was no random wandering at all, and even the cities had been reduced in scale to facilitate the process of getting from one place to another. Moving from outside to inside, I was always left wondering how those architects in Saradush and Amkethran ever found room for the interiors, when the exteriors were no bigger than a doghouse. Good from the perspective of ticking off quests in your list on your way to greatness in as few steps as possible, but poor from a roleplaying perspective, IMO.

 

Maybe it was just symbolic of, or a necessary result of, your ascent to godhood, the world seeming smaller and smaller, but it didn't do anything for me from the point of view of being in the Forgotten Realms... I'd love to launch a fireball at a wooden shack in the wilderness and see it burn to the ground, but I think level of detail is a long way away yet, even if designers began showing an interest in creating interactive and immersive worlds from anything beyond a graphics standpoint. It's hard enough getting complex or interwoven dialogue trees and scripts to work right, never mind that kind of game world.

 

I'd still like to see it, although it does bring up another issue: how much is too much? Ultima7's weight and volume inventory management was workable for me, but I know quite a few people who thought it was just too inconvenient to use. Same with the food issue; is having to feed your people getting into too much micromanagement for a game? What about just making sure you've got enough food in your backpack and letting them feed themselves?