Some thoughts on urgency, consequences and parallel non-linear missions

[Stun]

Yep, that's a pretty good executive summary of the last 5 pages or so. I approve.

[Shevek]

@ogrezilla:

1. It was what basically what you said before you editted your post.

 

2. That is a quote of how Odarbi responded.

 

Stop the sophistry please. Stand your ground and argue your point. If you can't do that, its because the basic premise of the argument is flawed.

Edited September 22, 2012 by Shevek

[ogrezilla]

or because I am somewhere in the middle of the two points. Personally, I like timed quests. But if they aren't there, so be it. My bigger concern is that I really feel like immersion is lost when the game tells me I have to hurry but does nothing at all to enforce it. I really don't care if they fix it by adding timed quests or by writing the story to fit the game design.

Edited September 22, 2012 by ogrezilla

[Odarbi]

Stop the sophistry please. Stand your ground and argue your point. If you can't do that, its because the basic premise of the argument is flawed.

 

I have been arguing that timed quests would add to the game this whole time, and given examples of how it could be done so. I've never once strayed from that point. I never once said they were necessary to make the game fun.

[Torgamous]

I think I made a rather good one on the last thread. Planescape Torment didn't have them, therefore they're not needed for a masterpiece.

Planescape Torment also tended not to tell you that your quest needed to be done yesterday or the village would be destroyed. A lack of narrative urgency naturally leads to a lack of mechanical urgency.

 

2. The original games were NOT flawed for failing to have timed quests.

I disagree with this. When my stronghold was being attacked in BG2, the level of urgency to be found in the game (none) was very different from the amount I was told about (lots). I considered that a flaw at the time and continue to do so. If they didn't need me to come immediately they shouldn't have told me to.

Time management and moral choices can go hand in hand, they aren't mutually exclusive.

They are, however, unrelated.

You think that someone seeing a woman being carried off by a gang of orcs and deciding to open up a savings account at the local bank is unrelated to that person's morality? Just because something has, historically, been unrelated to a game's alignment system does not mean it's unrelated to morality.

[Stun]

I think I made a rather good one on the last thread. Planescape Torment didn't have them, therefore they're not needed for a masterpiece.

Planescape Torment also tended not to tell you that your quest needed to be done yesterday or the village would be destroyed.

It did actually. The narrative clearly projected the "Time is of essense" theme in Carceri (for example), in many of it's "bring order" quests. In one of them, You literally walked up to a situation where someone was on the block about to be executed. Yet nothing stopped you from walking away, taking care of some other quests, sleeping for 10 days in the charms shop, then coming back and successfully preventing that execution. You're also not told if the execution actually occured, if you decide to skip it and go face the Diva.

 

Instead, the choice you got was a moral one, involving whether to let the execution happen, or prevent it.

 

Edit: Actually, upon further contemplation, Planescape: torment is a better argument against time-sensitive quests than I first thought. The entire game is based solely on your moral decisions. Morality is actually tracked with a point system, and your alignment is constantly being affected by every single decision you make. How then, can a timed quest system work well in it, when you could find yourself in a situation where you honestly attempt to do a quest, but fail to finish it on time.... would your alignment take a hit as the game interprets the quest failure as: "you didn't care about saving Trist" Or, "you slacked off and Dimtree died as a result, therefore, +3 evil?"?

 

That would have outright ruined the game.

Edited September 22, 2012 by Stun

[Scryer]

Also, if you get sidetracked and missed the deadline, you made the choice to get side tracked that ended in your failure.

Or the game forced it, with an encounter/ambush along the way, which you couldn't avoid.

 

Though luck then, either reload from a previous point or accept the fact that just like in life the world doesn't go on pause for and you can miss that important billion dollar deal because you got a mad random case of explosive diarrhea on the way to the office and had to stop to take a **** on the side of the highway.

 

I think I made a rather good one on the last thread. Planescape Torment didn't have them, therefore they're not needed for a masterpiece.

 

The Mclaren F1 is to this day considered one of the best (if not the best) supercar ever made. It also had the engine hood plated with gold for cooling purposes and the driver's seat was in the middle (as in not on the left or the right) for balancing purposes. By your logic because it was a masterpiece all attempt at inovation in the car industry had to stop right there and then. "Hey should we put these new type of tires on the next Ferrari. They improve grip and reduce fuel consumption?" "No dude, the Mclaren F1 was a masterpiece and it didn't have them."

[Odarbi]

I think I made a rather good one on the last thread. Planescape Torment didn't have them, therefore they're not needed for a masterpiece.

Planescape Torment also tended not to tell you that your quest needed to be done yesterday or the village would be destroyed.

It did actually. The narrative clearly projected the "Time is of essense" theme in Carceri, in many of it's "bring order" quests. In one of them, You literally walked up to a situation where someone was on the block about to be executed. Yet nothing stopped you from walking away, taking care of some other quests, sleeping for 10 days in the potion shop, then coming back and successfully preventing that execution. You're also not told if the execution actually occured, if you decide to skip it and go face the Diva.

 

Instead, the choice you got was a moral one, involving whether to let the execution happen, or prevent it.

 

Which is then a flaw within Planescape: Torment's writing, because it's telling you one thing and not backing it up.

[Shevek]

The Mclaren F1 is to this day considered one of the best (if not the best) supercar ever made. It also had the engine hood plated with gold for cooling purposes and the driver's seat was in the middle (as in not on the left or the right) for balancing purposes. By your logic because it was a masterpiece all attempt at inovation in the car industry had to stop right there and then. "Hey should we put these new type of tires on the next Ferrari. They improve grip and reduce fuel consumption?" "No dude, the Mclaren F1 was a masterpiece and it didn't have them."

 

No, I think what he is saying is because the Mclaren F1 was a masterpiece, that if someone wanted to pay homage to that car, they shouldnt make the Mclaren F2 a compact hybrid car for the sake of innovation.

[Kaldurenik]

This topic... This entire thread... Do we honestly have people that argue for there to not be any consequences for your actions?

 

I guess im in the boat "If a "quest" say that its urgent then it should not wait around for you" boat. Lets say you go out and have a quest... You have now found a old ancient tablet that look like a map of a old tomb.

You decide that hey... Im going to go over there and loot the place and hopefully find some magical artefacts.

On your way to the tomb you find a dying guard / scout in the forest he tell you that you have to hurry and warn the village of winterspring because there is going to be a attack. You notice that the wound is not to old so you can still make it back to the village in time to warn them (after all its faster to travel in a smaller group then in larger group).

 

So anyway! You are like... Well nah... im going to the tomb because hey... that is where i was going in the first place. After all everyone know that games dont have any kind of consequences for not being in a hurry. So you journey towards the tomb and it take a few days + another day to explore the tomb and then you head back thinking "hohohoho im so clever now i will warn the town"... And then you find the town in ruins. Why? Because they did not get warned you CHOOSE to not warn them by walking of doing something else.

 

Now you can either have new choices dealing with this... Like... You find a little girl that have survived... She is crying that they took her mother away in a cage :'(. Now you can decide to head out and follow the bandits or whatever to see if you can free her mother... But you could also bring the child / find her a place to leave her at. Heck helping the girl might even cause you to be unable to find her mother due to way to much time passing.

 

 

TLDR:

Anyway i think that the world should "rotate" on its own. Not every time the player decide to "activate" something by dialogue. If you decide to run out and pick flowers instead of warning people / helping people then you made that choice... You should either be punished, rewarded and / or have new options open up for you then.

[Umberlin]

Sometimes I wonder if the idea of the timer is the issue in the first place. If I can use some events in QfG III, or the main story of QfG II, is that while there were limiters you always had enough time to wander about and explore. The urgency in QfG II was separated by spans of days when the city wasn't actually in danger, and you didn't have more clues to go on, so you had time to do other things like work on your skills, explore the city, meet new people, buy cool stuff, join guilds related to your class and so on. When the fire elemental first pops you've had several days to explore and get your feet wet in other pursuits. The Earth, Air and Water elementals that follow do not all cascade into one another, but have spans of time between them to goof about and enjoy the game.

 

Sure, when the fire elemental was burning down the city, you had a time limit, but it was a large city, it wasn't going to do it in a single day, so you had a few days to figure out how to stop it. Yeah, if you failed and it went on for too long you'd get a scene of the elemental growing too large to contain and laying waste to all you tried to protect, but you had enough time that if you couldn't manage to contain it . . . it didn't feel like, "stupid time limit" it felt like, "I messed up, this is something I logically could have prevented in the time allotted." The time allotted being little enough to make things urgent, but enough in mass to work with.

[Scryer]

The Mclaren F1 is to this day considered one of the best (if not the best) supercar ever made. It also had the engine hood plated with gold for cooling purposes and the driver's seat was in the middle (as in not on the left or the right) for balancing purposes. By your logic because it was a masterpiece all attempt at inovation in the car industry had to stop right there and then. "Hey should we put these new type of tires on the next Ferrari. They improve grip and reduce fuel consumption?" "No dude, the Mclaren F1 was a masterpiece and it didn't have them."

 

No, I think what he is saying is because the Mclaren F1 was a masterpiece, that if someone wanted to pay homage to that car, they shouldnt make the Mclaren F2 a compact hybrid car for the sake of innovation.

 

Funny thing is that the spiritual successor to the F1 IS going to be a hybrid (not a compact though) because times have changed and it is only natural to try and improve on the original ideea. I hope that Project Eternity will try to do the same and improve the concept of the games it is supposed to pay hommage to.

[Odarbi]

The Mclaren F1 is to this day considered one of the best (if not the best) supercar ever made. It also had the engine hood plated with gold for cooling purposes and the driver's seat was in the middle (as in not on the left or the right) for balancing purposes. By your logic because it was a masterpiece all attempt at inovation in the car industry had to stop right there and then. "Hey should we put these new type of tires on the next Ferrari. They improve grip and reduce fuel consumption?" "No dude, the Mclaren F1 was a masterpiece and it didn't have them."

 

No, I think what he is saying is because the Mclaren F1 was a masterpiece, that if someone wanted to pay homage to that car, they shouldnt make the Mclaren F2 a compact hybrid car for the sake of innovation.

 

No, I'm pretty sure Scryer had it right on with what you quoted. Your analogy of "Making a compact hybrid car" would be like taking Baldurs Gate, and changing it into an FPS game. Making additions is not the same as completely re-designing.

[ogrezilla]

I just said it in the thread about graphics. But I really do wonder if the goal is to make a 2014 game that pays homage to games from the 90's or if the goal is to make a game that feels like it was made in the 90's. I hope its the former.

Edited September 22, 2012 by ogrezilla

[Odarbi]

Sometimes I wonder if the idea of the timer is the issue in the first place. If I can use some events in QfG III, or the main story of QfG II, is that while there were limiters you always had enough time to wander about and explore. The urgency in QfG II was separated by spans of days when the city wasn't actually in danger, and you didn't have more clues to go on, so you had time to do other things like work on your skills, explore the city, meet new people, buy cool stuff, join guilds related to your class and so on. When the fire elemental first pops you've had several days to explore and get your feet wet in other pursuits. The Earth, Air and Water elementals that follow do not all cascade into one another, but have spans of time between them to goof about and enjoy the game.

 

Sure, when the fire elemental was burning down the city, you had a time limit, but it was a large city, it wasn't going to do it in a single day, so you had a few days to figure out how to stop it. Yeah, if you failed and it went on for too long you'd get a scene of the elemental growing too large to contain and laying waste to all you tried to protect, but you had enough time that if you couldn't manage to contain it . . . it didn't feel like, "stupid time limit" it felt like, "I messed up, this is something I logically could have prevented in the time allotted." The time allotted being little enough to make things urgent, but enough in mass to work with.

 

I get the impression that people sit there and think we, the pro timed quest camp, mean "Oh, you've only got 20 minutes of real time to do this quest!", when we in fact are talking like... days or weeks of in game time, or whatever would make sense depending on how urgent the quest is.

Edited September 22, 2012 by Odarbi

[Shevek]

Lets not get lost in analogies. They can turn the Mclaren into moped for all I care. Frankly, I don't see anyone convincing anyone else about this. The devs can make up their own minds on this, I think.

 

Ogrezilla: The devs have stated that want to update the graphics and make an edgier, more adult story using their own roleplaying system developed with realtime/pause combat in mind. This is the extent of the "updates" they have explicitly stated. Beyond that they have REPEATEDLY referenced past IE titles they wish to pay homage to. That is what we KNOW.

 

Maybe they will decide to throw in a bunch of new gameplay mechanics that will piss off half their backers but I somehow doubt that will be the case.

Edited September 22, 2012 by Shevek

[Odarbi]

Lets not get lost in analogies. They can turn the Mclaren into moped for all I care.

 

I guess timed quests won't be much of a problem with you then, will it?

[Stun]

I think I made a rather good one on the last thread. Planescape Torment didn't have them, therefore they're not needed for a masterpiece.

Planescape Torment also tended not to tell you that your quest needed to be done yesterday or the village would be destroyed.

It did actually. The narrative clearly projected the "Time is of essense" theme in Carceri, in many of it's "bring order" quests. In one of them, You literally walked up to a situation where someone was on the block about to be executed. Yet nothing stopped you from walking away, taking care of some other quests, sleeping for 10 days in the potion shop, then coming back and successfully preventing that execution. You're also not told if the execution actually occured, if you decide to skip it and go face the Diva.

 

Instead, the choice you got was a moral one, involving whether to let the execution happen, or prevent it.

 

Which is then a flaw within Planescape: Torment's writing, because it's telling you one thing and not backing it up.

LOL The problem is that Planescape: Torment is nigh-universally praised for its writing and role playing. It's held up as a standard even by Obsidian (check the PE trailer). Not to use an argument ad populum fallacy here, but that's how it is.

 

And the fact of the matter is that with its extremely heavy emphasis on every single quest decision affecting your morality and alignment, a timed quest system would flat out ruin the game. Players would be taking undeserved "evil" or "chaotic" hits simply because they got lost in Sigil or whatever and thus took too long to complete some quests, so they'd fail them and then the game would count it as a "you didn't care enough".

Edited September 22, 2012 by Stun

[Umberlin]

Sometimes I wonder if the idea of the timer is the issue in the first place. If I can use some events in QfG III, or the main story of QfG II, is that while there were limiters you always had enough time to wander about and explore. The urgency in QfG II was separated by spans of days when the city wasn't actually in danger, and you didn't have more clues to go on, so you had time to do other things like work on your skills, explore the city, meet new people, buy cool stuff, join guilds related to your class and so on. When the fire elemental first pops you've had several days to explore and get your feet wet in other pursuits. The Earth, Air and Water elementals that follow do not all cascade into one another, but have spans of time between them to goof about and enjoy the game.

 

Sure, when the fire elemental was burning down the city, you had a time limit, but it was a large city, it wasn't going to do it in a single day, so you had a few days to figure out how to stop it. Yeah, if you failed and it went on for too long you'd get a scene of the elemental growing too large to contain and laying waste to all you tried to protect, but you had enough time that if you couldn't manage to contain it . . . it didn't feel like, "stupid time limit" it felt like, "I messed up, this is something I logically could have prevented in the time allotted." The time allotted being little enough to make things urgent, but enough in mass to work with.

 

I get the impression that people sit there and think we, the pro timed quest camp, mean "Oh, you've only got 20 minutes of real time to do this quest!", when we in fact are talking like... days or weeks of in game time, or whatever would make sense depending on how urgent the quest is.

 

If I remember the plot of Quest for Glory II took place over the course of a month, and you still spent something like three days in Rasier quickly running out of things to do with the entire possibility that the last day or two you were just wishing it would go faster and the guards would just come arrest you. I really do think that was the only time in the entire game that I felt the time limit, and not because it was approaching too fast, no, I wanted it to go faster. I used to turn the game time speed up to its fastest at that point.

[Odarbi]

LOL The problem is that Planescape: Torment is nigh-universally praised for its writing and role playing. It's held up as a standard even by Obsidian. Not to use an argument ad populum fallacy here, but that's how it is.

 

And the fact of the matter is that with its extremely heavy emphasis on every single quest decision affecting your morality and alignment, a timed quest system would flat out ruin the game. Players would be taking undeserved "evil" or "chaotic" hits simply because they got lost in Sigil or whatever and thus took too long to complete some quests, so they'd fail them and then the game would count it as a "you didn't care enough".

 

If you're spending 3 months resting because you're out seeing the sights instead of doing those quests, I really don't see what the problem is. You've clearly decided they're not important enough for you to deal with, and the game should reflect that. Its your choice to ignore the urgency of those quests, and you only have yourself to blame for that. "Getting lost" in Sigil and failing to find a quest that had a timer of 1 in game week means you were doing something wrong, or not actively trying to finish the quest. Maybe you should have stopped to ask for directions or something.

 

You still seem to believe Timed Quests need to have some sort of short duration real time clock. They don't. Measuring it in game time actually makes much more sense than using real time.

[Odarbi]

If I remember the plot of Quest for Glory II took place over the course of a month, and you still spent something like three days in Rasier quickly running out of things to do with the entire possibility that the last day or two you were just wishing it would go faster and the guards would just come arrest you. I really do think that was the only time in the entire game that I felt the time limit, and not because it was approaching too fast, no, I wanted it to go faster. I used to turn the game time speed up to its fastest at that point.

 

You kinda make me wanna check out the Quest for Glory games if I can ever find them somewhere.

[Scryer]

And the fact of the matter is that with its extremely heavy emphasis on every single quest decision affecting your morality and alignment, a timed quest system would flat out ruin the game.

 

In fact it could work quite well. Morality should be something of an instinct and work more with your real life morality system and not some words in the character stat screen.

 

Suppose you come across an unit of knights pillaging a village and killing everyone in it. The peasents beg you to intervine. You must decide fast or there won't be much of a village left. If your (the player not the player character) morality system is truly what you belive it to be you will decide under pressure and with little information what to do in accordance with your OWN morals and not what you belive the game wants you to do.

 

Being of the lawful good type you jump to help the wretches but while doing so you remember that you heard rumours about this village in that other village and supposedly vile things happen here. Without a limited time span in which to decide you could just do the 5 days journey back to the other village question the **** out the peasentry and learn that the knights are justified to kill those other peasents since they are a bunch of sadisctic child raping cannibalistic demon worshiping necromancer-clowns.

 

With limited time, being of the lawful good alignment you jump right in to bring justice and peace and universal healthcare to the miserable child raping cannibalistic demon worshiping necromancer-clowns and thus proving once again that good is stupid and the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

[Stun]

LOL The problem is that Planescape: Torment is nigh-universally praised for its writing and role playing. It's held up as a standard even by Obsidian. Not to use an argument ad populum fallacy here, but that's how it is.

 

And the fact of the matter is that with its extremely heavy emphasis on every single quest decision affecting your morality and alignment, a timed quest system would flat out ruin the game. Players would be taking undeserved "evil" or "chaotic" hits simply because they got lost in Sigil or whatever and thus took too long to complete some quests, so they'd fail them and then the game would count it as a "you didn't care enough".

 

If you're spending 3 months resting because you're out seeing the sights instead of doing those quests, I really don't see what the problem is. You've clearly decided they're not important enough for you to deal with, and the game should reflect that. Its your choice to ignore the urgency of those quests, and you only have yourself to blame for that. "Getting lost" in Sigil and failing to find a quest that had a timer of 1 in game week means you were doing something wrong, or not actively trying to finish the quest. Maybe you should have stopped to ask for directions or something.

 

You still seem to believe Timed Quests need to have some sort of short duration real time clock. They don't. Measuring it in game time actually makes much more sense than using real time.

If we're gonna argue that the only way to fail a timed quest is to miss by 3 in-game months or some other massive number, and that by 'timed" we mean "you have a couple of game weeks to finish them", then the entire notion of such quests being timed is pointless, as there's no Urgency in a quest that gives you 2 weeks to complete, and no real importance to slapping a timer on any quest that allows for such forgiving leaway.

Edited September 23, 2012 by Stun

[Stun]

And the fact of the matter is that with its extremely heavy emphasis on every single quest decision affecting your morality and alignment, a timed quest system would flat out ruin the game.

 

In fact it could work quite well. Morality should be something of an instinct and work more with your real life morality system and not some words in the character stat screen.

 

Suppose you come across an unit of knights pillaging a village and killing everyone in it. The peasents beg you to intervine. You must decide fast or there won't be much of a village left. If your (the player not the player character) morality system is truly what you belive it to be you will decide under pressure and with little information what to do in accordance with your OWN morals and not what you belive the game wants you to do.

 

Being of the lawful good type you jump to help the wretches but while doing so you remember that you heard rumours about this village in that other village and supposedly vile things happen here. Without a limited time span in which to decide you could just do the 5 days journey back to the other village question the **** out the peasentry and learn that the knights are justified to kill those other peasents since they are a bunch of sadisctic child raping cannibalistic demon worshiping necromancer-clowns.

 

With limited time, being of the lawful good alignment you jump right in to bring justice and peace and universal healthcare to the miserable child raping cannibalistic demon worshiping necromancer-clowns and thus proving once again that good is stupid and the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

OK, I'm trying (honestly trying) to apply what you're saying to PS:T, but I'm getting nowhere. (Well, there is One situation similar to what you're describing, where you have to decide whether to save the governor of a town or save one of its hermits, or Both. But they're both standing in the same place and it's literally impossible to incorporate a time limit since the entire situation happens in a paused cutscene lol)

 

Can you give me an example of, say, how timing the "retrieve the bronse sphere" quest would benefit PS:T. Or how the "Solve the Foundry Murder" quest would benefit from being timed?

Edited September 23, 2012 by Stun

[Torgamous]

Can you give me an example of, say, how timing the "retrieve the bronse sphere" quest would benefit PS:T. Or how the "Solve the Foundry Murder" quest would benefit from being timed?

They wouldn't. The execution you used as an example earlier, however, I think would have benefited from either timing or just if it noticed that you'd turned around and walked away. After all, you can't tell me that walking away from an execution isn't a clear choice regarding what you want to do about the execution.

 

 

If we're gonna argue that the only way to fail a timed quest is to miss by 3 in-game months or some other massive number, and that by 'timed" we mean "you have a couple of game weeks to finish them", then the entire notion of such quests being timed is pointless, as there's no Urgency in a quest that gives you 2 weeks to complete, and no real importance to slapping a timer on any quest that allows for such forgiving leaway.

Do I need to drag out my Thieves' Guild example again? The urgency is that there actually is going to be something bad if you blow off the quest. It doesn't need to come from a timer on the top right telling you you only have ten minutes to save the princess, as long as the princess isn't still in the same situation after you do everything else the game has to offer.