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[Humodour]

Exactly, gameplay mechanics all work together. As far as stealth, what about the guy who doesn't want to sneak and wants to go in with guns blazing? Giving him the same amout of ammo as the stealth guy would be limiting player choice. Different character builds should be able to account for stealth vs combat preferences.

 

...

 

I actually have faith in Obsid on this infinite ammo thing, but that made that's certainly one of the more exotic interpretations I've read of the benefits of infinite ammo.

[mkreku]

If you HAVE to have a mini-game in your game, please rip off the Paradroid mini-game! That's the only mini-game I've actually enjoyed playing of all the mini-games that have passed my way. The mini-game in Bioshock is probably the worst one yet since it wasn't always possible to win (I'd consider that a bug), it took too much time and required no actual skill. The mini-game in Oblivion was bearable since it was over within 5 seconds or something.

 

In Paradroid you had a small robot you controlled onboard a gigantic spaceship. The robots deteriorated pretty fast and to win the game, you had to transfer your robots AI onto other robots before your own robot died (either from being shot or just from deterioration). The way you did this was you rolled up to another robot and engaged it in a battle of AI minds! The screen changed from the ship with robots in it, to an overview of a computer chip, complete with rows of "legs" on both sides.

 

 

The goal of the mini-game that presented itself at this stage was to control the most amounts of legs (segments) on the chip, by using the connections your robot had at his disposal. The robots all had numbers on them, and a low numbered robot didn't bring as many connections to the battle as a high numbered one. Therefore it was really difficult to win such a battle with a 1-robot against a 249-robot.. (In the picture above, the yellow 249-robot has 4 available connections and he's wasted one. The purple 1-robot, the player, had two connections available and he's wasted both. The yellow side has 8 segments of the chip under control while the purple side only has 4, so the 249-robot is winning that game.)

[fastpunk]

@ Xard: The e-mails in Bloodlines were brilliant stuff for sure.

 

There was this one excellent puzzle in Kotor 2 that was basically just like that, although you'd have to run all over the place in search for good soundbits

 

There was another option. If you had a high enough persuade skill you could trick the HK droid to playback the whole code with the voice you needed cause the droid could imitate voices, like the T-101 in Terminator 2.

Edited June 30, 2008 by fastpunk

[Xard]

There was this one excellent puzzle in Kotor 2 that was basically just like that, although you'd have to run all over the place in search for good soundbits

 

There was another option. If you had a high enough persuade skill you could trick the HK droid to playback the whole code with the voice you needed cause the droid could imitate voices, like the T-101 in Terminator 2.

 

Or then you could just bash the console (for much lesser XP)

[fastpunk]

Or then you could just bash the console (for much lesser XP)

 

Really? Now that's cheap design. Didn't even notice you could do that. I went through that whole conversation with the HK droid. No regrets though, it was a good one. Those HK units have quite the personality.

[Xard]

Yeah well, there was often option for the "brute dump" approach. I took that with my first Exile. With my second I did it the hard way and was shocked by how much more I got teh XP. Then I read I could just persuade info out HK-50 and that's the approach I've often used since.

 

I think it was good design. If player roleplays "Conan" he should have option to use method his character would (if it is sensible that it would work which was the case here. Not all puzzles can be solved with brute force of course), but he gets much lesser rewards than player giving some thought and care for the matter

 

In friendly way for dump (or easily bored) players wanting to play smart character some puzzles were automatically cracked if you had sufficient INT - great design from roleplaying perspective (After all nuclear physicist should know damn about protons for example) - but Obz made one mistake - they were uniformally too low. I think the most usual limit for the easy solving was INT 14 which was with my characters after the first one nearly rule (because I like skillpoints and all that).

 

And it breaks part of Kreia's conversations. If you had INT 14 you just went "ZOMG - I KNOW YOU'RE HIDING SOMETHING" and then rolled in the whole thing about Kreia being Darth Traya and cutscene where Sion beated crap out of her. That was secret I had to work hard to get for nearly half the game!

 

INT limit should've been 18 instead of 14 for that *shrug*

 

anyway, this is off-topic...

 

 

edit: Gorth, could you delete my double post, please?

 

edit2: Thanks

Edited June 30, 2008 by Xard

[fastpunk]

@ Xard: I don't have a problem with this sort of shortcuts in general, but not in this spot. True, it's always good to have a choice. But bashing the console renders the convo with the HK droid pointless. Without that option, players would have been forced to talk to the droid and get some info in order to proceed... and the droid gives you some good context and a few bits of story, something rare in an otherwise combat-focused level. That's why I find this a dubious design decision.

 

Anyway, thread hijack over.

[Patrick K Mills]

I'm not Xard (noshizzle?), but hacking should be like Uplink: Hacker Elite, only in smaller, concentrated doses. What I find fun in Uplink is that it's got several ways of hacking. An example I like is - make a prank call to the target's house, tape his voice and then play it back into an audio security system so that you can bypass it.

 

I'm curious if you could design a smaller version of Uplink to use for hacking and have it still be fun(ish) and fast enough that it can be played in 30 second doses. I pose this challenge to you because Uplink is one of my favorite games of all time and I've thought hard (I'm paid to think hard about games, it's crazy) about how to accomplish the goal above and I come up with almost zilch.

 

Uplink is a fun game because it's hundreds of systems interlinked with one another in novel ways that ultimately are displayed to the player in very small, concise doses. It's like a Jenga tower, remove one system and it's a weaker game, remove two and the whole thing might collapse. Even though it may just look like a single, simple structure, it's actually pretty complex. Uplink is a wonderful example of how to create a small, systems driven game- it is not a model on how to create a minigame that can be slipped into a larger game. If Uplink were to have a meatspace component the entire game would need to be designed around both systems so that they were deeply interconnected. If I want a minigame I can't just boot up Uplink everytime I want to hack someone's email.

 

A minigame is not necessarily intended to be fun. This is a conceit I have been guilty of in the past. A minigame is intended to interrupt the regular gameplay for very short periods of alternate gameplay. In the best of cases they actually aren't fun, but are deep enough to provide room for player skill to interact with character skill, unobtrusive and part of the simulacrum so that they don't take you out of the game, and fast. Lockpicking in Splinter Cell and Thief 3 (and our game, I think) are good examples of this. Bad examples- well, lots.

[Xard]

A minigame is not necessarily intended to be fun. This is a conceit I have been guilty of in the past. A minigame is intended to interrupt the regular gameplay for very short periods of alternate gameplay. In the best of cases they actually aren't fun, but are deep enough to provide room for player skill to interact with character skill, unobtrusive and part of the simulacrum so that they don't take you out of the game, and fast. Lockpicking in Splinter Cell and Thief 3 (and our game, I think) are good examples of this. Bad examples- well, lots.

 

Well, that's actually reassuring

 

So Patrick, have you thought about letting us drag bodies?

Edited July 1, 2008 by Xard

[Patrick K Mills]

So Patrick, have you thought about letting us drag bodies?

 

Actually, yes.. It's a feature I like in most games it is in, but it's just not a feature that, at this point, we feel is really worth the time to put into *this* game. We may change our minds down the road when other things are coming together, but it's not something that will be changed based on forum posts or online petitions. If we do it we'll do it because it's right for the project.

 

Obviously, I'm a fan as well as a designer, and when other developers are working on games that I'm excited about I can get a little wrapped up in my own pet ideas and features. I've got a running model of Fallout 2 and Dawn of War 2 running in my head and it is totally awesome. But, ultimately, it is the people at Bethesda and Relic who know the game best, who are the closest to it, who know the systems, technology, and vision better than I do, better than I could. And so I just kinda have to sit back and trust that they will do what is right for the game.

 

Obviously, if they mess up, I'm disappointed and don't buy the product. Maybe they would have been better off if they had listened to me, maybe not. Maybe it would have been, but my ideas couldn't have been implemented, or some technical limitation I'm unaware of makes it more trouble than it is worth. All project development is a balancing act of one sort or another, and if you pull on one thing something else is going to have to give somewhere.

 

The point is that it's important to remember that the product being made isn't the same as the product in your head. So while dragging bodies, or ammo management, or whatever, might sound totally awesome and JUST RIGHT for the game you imagine, it might not be right for the game that actually exists.

 

As more information about the game comes out I, and others, can be more specific about why we chose to do one thing over another, I wish I could say more now, but we're still in development. Things can change and misinformation can be disastrous. Additionally there is the whole developer/publisher/press/community information flow pipeline that has to be respected.

[Humodour]

We may change our minds down the road when other things are coming together, but it's not something that will be changed based on forum posts or online petitions. If we do it we'll do it because it's right for the project.

 

I'm glad to hear that.

[Wrath of Dagon]

Yes, I liked lock picking in Thief 3. Made you feel like a real thief. The funny thing is, everyone seems to hate lock picking in Oblivion, but it's almost the same except it requires more skill, so I liked it, although it could get frustrating. As for bad examples, for the love of all that's holy, don't put in the button mashing mini-game from Mass Effect, what a horrible tedious waste of time and a constant reload mechanism!

[mkreku]

So while dragging bodies, or ammo management, or whatever, might sound totally awesome and JUST RIGHT for the game you imagine, it might not be right for the game that actually exists.

If you count the times you've played a game and thought "Damn, this game has way too many features, it would have been so much better if only THIS and THAT would have been removed" versus the number of times you've played a game and thought "Damn, this game lacks a few features, it would have been so much better if only THIS and THAT had been added", I think you'll see a pattern emerging.

 

Maybe body dragging wouldn't have made much sense in Doom (for example) but I'm sure I'd been able to have fun with it anyhow. Maybe build morbid towers of bodies? As I see it, you can (almost) not have too many features in a game, as long as the interface is clever (most often situation sensitive).

 

Did you ever play the game Boiling Point (best played patched!)? Did you know that that game was made by a team of 13 (!!) people?

[Alvin Nelson]

If you count the times you've played a game and thought "Damn, this game has way too many features, it would have been so much better if only THIS and THAT would have been removed" versus the number of times you've played a game and thought "Damn, this game lacks a few features, it would have been so much better if only THIS and THAT had been added", I think you'll see a pattern emerging.

 

Sure, but then the question becomes "why are we taking time to implement a feature that makes no sense in our game?" That time spent on an anomalous feature could be better used somewhere else.

[Wrath of Dagon]

Yes, development always has to prioritize, time and resources aren't infinite. For me it's interesting quest design, fun dialog, being able to make decisions that matter. Everything else is just gravy.

[Musopticon?]

Gameplay is "just gravy"?

 

Wouldn't your time be better spent on playing something like a visual novel or a choose-your-own-adventure book instead of an action rpg, which defines itself by it's synergy between roleplay and gameplay?

[Wrath of Dagon]

Gameplay is "just gravy"?

 

Wouldn't your time be better spent on playing something like a visual novel or a choose-your-own-adventure book instead of an action rpg, which defines itself by it's synergy between roleplay and gameplay?

What I'm describing is gameplay. Since when do visual novels or adventure books let you participate in dialog? How do you do a quest in those games? There are other things which flow out of those priorities. For example, you need combat or some other way to provide challenge, else you can't design an interesting quest. The combat has to be fun, but it doesn't need to be as excellent as combat in a game that completely relies on it as the main gameplay element. Making decisions that matter implies that there has to be narrative elements you make decisions about. Fun dialog implies interesting characters, you can't have fun dialog with a dull character, etc. Edited July 2, 2008 by Wrath of Dagon

[mkreku]

Sure, but then the question becomes "why are we taking time to implement a feature that makes no sense in our game?" That time spent on an anomalous feature could be better used somewhere else.

If you read the last sentence of my previous post, the one you replied to.. here, I'll quote it again:

 

Did you ever play the game Boiling Point (best played patched!)? Did you know that that game was made by a team of 13 (!!) people?

I anticipated the response would go along the lines of prioritization, which is why I provided the above quote.

 

Thirteen people made a game based on their own in-house engine, complete with a huge open-ended world (streaming maps), driveable cars, boats, tanks, helicopters, airplanes etc., running, jumping, swimming, diving, drinking, dancing (!), shooting, sneaking (yes, a working stealth feature!), five different factions (all with their own line of quests!), destructible environments, inventory management, upgradeable weapons, a full-fledged RPG character development system, tons of different weapons, a 20-30 hour main story, anti-aircraft missile systems (!), dialogue trees, hidden bikini babes, cars that you have to fill up with gas and change tires on, binoculars, extended ears (!), 25x25 km of detailed gameworld, gang wars, ambushes (both vehicle and on foot), day-and-night cycle, weather system, one of the most clever quick save systems I've seen and so on and so forth.

 

Boiling Point was a disaster when it came out, with leopards flying above the tree tops and cars disappearing when you turned around. But the sheer ambition shone through even then! When the final 200 MB patch was released, the game became a gem.

 

It's all about ambition, and I, for one, would much rather play the original unpatched Boiling Point than a super-polished Pong.

[Hell Kitty]

I don't remember how the quick save worked in BP, what was so clever about it?

 

I enjoyed BP well enough, but I'd gladly take polish over ambition when ambition gives me stuff like copy/pasted environments and constantly changing accents. Boiling Point could have been as big as STALKER. Okay, maybe that's pushing it, I guess we'll see when White Gold comes out.

[mkreku]

It had three rotating slots for the quicksaves. Every time you pressed quicksave, the game overwrote the oldest of the three slots so you always had the three newest quicksaves available. No matter how many stupid things you did, the chances were that one of the quicksaves would be able to bail you out.

[Redfield]

It's all about ambition, and I, for one, would much rather play the original unpatched Boiling Point than a super-polished Pong.

 

I'm sure any former members of Troika disagree with that statement.

[mkreku]

It's all about ambition, and I, for one, would much rather play the original unpatched Boiling Point than a super-polished Pong.

 

I'm sure any former members of Troika disagree with that statement.

Actually, I think they are the ones that would agree with me. They had the ambition, which clearly showed in the games they were able to make. Unfortunately they bet on the wrong horses and crumbled. I wouldn't blame their downfall on their ambitious goals, rather on their inability to make attractive settings and their marketing skills. It's all speculation though and I'm sure you'll disagree.

[LostStraw]

It had three rotating slots for the quicksaves. Every time you pressed quicksave, the game overwrote the oldest of the three slots so you always had the three newest quicksaves available. No matter how many stupid things you did, the chances were that one of the quicksaves would be able to bail you out.

I've seen this feature in other games (never played BP) and loved it. Any game that has a quick-save feature should use a system similar to this

Edited July 6, 2008 by LostStraw

[Patrick K Mills]

Did you ever play the game Boiling Point (best played patched!)? Did you know that that game was made by a team of 13 (!!) people?

 

Not only have I never played it, I've never heard of it. That should tell you something about being over-ambitious.

 

I'm also not entirely sure what you are advocating here, you seem to be suggesting that we should every feature we think is cool, regardless of quality or suitability. I mean, if the Boiling Point guys can do it, why can't we?

 

I counter that a single case doesn't prove a trend, on top of that, the game you mention was, by your own admission, a failure at market. Now, I personally do not want to lose my job over a feature or suite of features that would be totally sweet but also totally unneeded and we don't have time for. Better to polish a smaller, solid product than have a 6,000 hour long game with trillions of moving parts that is "best played patched." To be completely honest, we, as a company, have been there, done that, and I don't think we're really interested in developing that reputation any more than we already have.

 

EDIT: Yeah, that quicksave feature is cool, seen it in a few other games as well. I've been playing Heroes V recently and they also have a series of 10 rotating auto-saves each turn.

[mkreku]

Not only have I never played it, I've never heard of it. That should tell you something about being over-ambitious.

Not really. It tells me nothing more than that Halo is more known than Planescape: Torment. I put no other value in the fact, I'm not a share-holder.

 

I'm also not entirely sure what you are advocating here, you seem to be suggesting that we should every feature we think is cool, regardless of quality or suitability. I mean, if the Boiling Point guys can do it, why can't we?

Close, but not quite. How many people are you? 30? 50? I (and many others) were impressed by Boiling Point (quote from 8/10 review):

 

"Put it like this: This is probably one of the most enjoyable piece of early-Beta code that I've ever played. You want to damn Atari for releasing it like this. However, you also want to hail them for spending money on something of Boiling Point's ambition rather than the safe option. After all, if this sells nothing, the lesson publishers will learn won't be "Don't release unfinished games" but "Don't invest in ambitious ones"."

 

Source: http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=59379

 

I counter that a single case doesn't prove a trend, on top of that, the game you mention was, by your own admission, a failure at market. ... Better to polish a smaller, solid product than have a 6,000 hour long game with trillions of moving parts that is "best played patched." ...

They (Deep Shadows) are working on the sequel right now so I'm not sure how much of a failure it was at market.

 

Anyhow, everyone chooses their own path. All I am saying is that I appreciate the wild ambition of Boiling Point much more than the next stale-but-polished Bioware product. A middle-ground would be the best way to go, in my opinion. Aim high instead of playing it safe, just don't go insane with features. I believe you need to take risks to win big.

 

Oh, and if a team of 13 can produce Boiling Point, I'm sure a team of 50 can make "a 6,000 hour long game with trillions of moving parts", no problem.