Linear vs non linear story

[Kjaamor]

That game was crap from start to finish in my opinion. Others may disagree.

 

For the record: Fallout 3 was a good game, but a terrible RPG.

[TMZuk]

 

 

The best stories in video games are always semi linear. Planescape:Torment, Mask of the Betrayer, Baldur's Gate 2, Witcher 2 etc.

On the other hand non linear stories are at best servisable (Fallouts, Arcanum).Until now at least.

New Vegas and Alpha Protocol are not famous for their stories. Not a flaw, as they had diffirent focus and New Vegas would be a poor Fallout game with a linear story. Fallout 1 is the same. Great game but noone played it for the story.

Yet Josh said in an interview that he would like to try for a nonlinear, find the waterchip approach. If someone can do this, is Obsidian, but until now they haven't managed it.

Your thoughts? What would you prefer for P:E? A story in the vein of Planescape:Torment and Mask of the Betrayer, or more open like Fallout or Arcanum?

I must disagree. In my opinion, New Vegas has an excellent story, as does Fallout 1 and 2.

 

Fallout 3 has a very weak story, and is at the same time extremely linear.

 

Notise i didn't even mention Fallout 3? It was intentional. That game was crap from start to finish in my opinion. Others may disagree.

As for the other Fallouts, it depends to what you consider story in a game. Some people consider setting or atmosphere and characters part of the story. In these parts Fallouts were excelent. But story? No. The first Fallouts had good individual stories for each area, but the game's main story was... what? Find the waterchip, you find it and traces of an evil horde enemy, go kill the master, the end. The story is as basic as it goes. I don't mean that as a critisism as the game's focus was elsewere for the start. But i haven't seen anyone say that he played Fallout for the story, or that the story was the best thing about the game, as i have seen people do with PS:T and MotB.

 

Okay, I take your point about Fallout 1 and 2. But then you can include BG in that list as well, the story was a very basic vengeance tale, combined with "fulfill your destiny".

 

Regarding New Vegas I must still disagree. Yes, it ends with the Second Battle of Hoover Dam, no matter what. But how you get there, whom your allies is and why you fight, that is a great tale, and especially as the play throughs can wary so much, it's almost like a different game.

 

MotB was epic as well, one of my all time favourites. PS:T ~is~ my all time favourite.

 

But in my opinion, New Vegas was the proof that you could take a non-linear story with many branches and many options, place it in a sand-box world, and still create an epic tale. The best of two worlds.

Edited April 26, 2013 by TMZuk

[Malekith]

 

 

 

The best stories in video games are always semi linear. Planescape:Torment, Mask of the Betrayer, Baldur's Gate 2, Witcher 2 etc.

On the other hand non linear stories are at best servisable (Fallouts, Arcanum).Until now at least.

New Vegas and Alpha Protocol are not famous for their stories. Not a flaw, as they had diffirent focus and New Vegas would be a poor Fallout game with a linear story. Fallout 1 is the same. Great game but noone played it for the story.

Yet Josh said in an interview that he would like to try for a nonlinear, find the waterchip approach. If someone can do this, is Obsidian, but until now they haven't managed it.

Your thoughts? What would you prefer for P:E? A story in the vein of Planescape:Torment and Mask of the Betrayer, or more open like Fallout or Arcanum?

I must disagree. In my opinion, New Vegas has an excellent story, as does Fallout 1 and 2.

 

Fallout 3 has a very weak story, and is at the same time extremely linear.

 

Notise i didn't even mention Fallout 3? It was intentional. That game was crap from start to finish in my opinion. Others may disagree.

As for the other Fallouts, it depends to what you consider story in a game. Some people consider setting or atmosphere and characters part of the story. In these parts Fallouts were excelent. But story? No. The first Fallouts had good individual stories for each area, but the game's main story was... what? Find the waterchip, you find it and traces of an evil horde enemy, go kill the master, the end. The story is as basic as it goes. I don't mean that as a critisism as the game's focus was elsewere for the start. But i haven't seen anyone say that he played Fallout for the story, or that the story was the best thing about the game, as i have seen people do with PS:T and MotB.

 

Okay, I take your point about Fallout 1 and 2. But then you can include BG in that list as well, the story was a very basic vengeance tale, combined with "fulfill your destiny".

 

Regarding New Vegas I must still disagree. Yes, it ends with the Second Battle of Hoover Dam, no matter what. But how you get there, whom your allies is and why you fight, that is a great tale, and especially as the play throughs can wary so much, it's almost like a different game.

 

MotB was epic as well, one of my all time favourites. PS:T ~is~ my all time favourite.

 

But in my opinion, New Vegas was the proof that you could take a non-linear story with many branches and many options, place it in a sand-box world, and still create an epic tale. The best of two worlds.

 

Oh, of cource it can. Or at least Obsidian can do it. But FNV was buggy. The more non-linear is the story, the most open the game, the more resources you have to spent to develop and then check and double check  every single thing. I don't know if for P:E that is a valid approach. 

[Micamo]

As for the other Fallouts, it depends to what you consider story in a game. Some people consider setting or atmosphere and characters part of the story. In these parts Fallouts were excelent. But story? No. The first Fallouts had good individual stories for each area, but the game's main story was... what? Find the waterchip, you find it and traces of an evil horde enemy, go kill the master, the end. The story is as basic as it goes. I don't mean that as a critisism as the game's focus was elsewere for the start. But i haven't seen anyone say that he played Fallout for the story, or that the story was the best thing about the game, as i have seen people do with PS:T and MotB.

 

 

Only if you confuse quality with quantity. It wasn't super-complicated, but it was a lot more effective than the plots in a lot of games that were far more complex (Modern Warfare, Indigo Prophecy, Assassin's Creed, etc.). It does exactly the job that it was meant to do.

[Lephys]

I would just like to emphasize that I don't think "linear" means "you can draw a line between all the things you can do in a playthrough," but rather "you pretty much can't stray from a single line that makes up the story and always has the same shape/direction/length."

[cleric Nemir]

I would just like to emphasize that I don't think "linear" means "you can draw a line between all the things you can do in a playthrough," but rather "you pretty much can't stray from a single line that makes up the story and always has the same shape/direction/length."

Agreed,I understand and support the need of a story that has a main line.

But wouldn't you agree there's no need the choices that truly change the game story are,in most games,made at the very end rather than in the midgame? I would perfectly enjoy having my good/neutral/evil choice offered a lot earlier,that way I could approach the final evil (what else?  ) from different sides and with different intentions. If there was a crossroad point earlier that clearly defines one of these alignments,I could choose one and easily (add: gladly) follow it towards the end - and there I would consider law/neutral/chaos ending that suits me most. To me,this would be a perfect setting. Add the ToEE's different beginnings and sum t up as such:  begin differently based on alignment,arrive to midgame point that is same for all,end midgame with alignment-based choice that will define the endgame and make a final law/neutral/chaos end based on chosen good/neutral/evil path. Bonus on the replay value would be also tremendous,since alternate paths and choices would remain unknown.

[Lephys]

^ Definitely. I was only emphasizing, since it seemed some here were thinking of any game with so much as static story pivot points as "linear." All I'm saying is, you can have as many paths as you want, criss-crossing and leading leagues to the north and south, but, ultimately, you've gotta start on one side of the proverbial mountain range and end up on the other. Just because the game has a definite, consistent "forward" direction doesn't mean that it's restrictively linear.

 

Granted, every single step of the game doesn't need to be "you have to go here... then you have to go here... then you have to go here...". But, at the same time, you can't just let the path go anywhere, in whatever order and direction the player chooses. That leaves the story with little coherence.

[Melhelix]

What I'm hoping for are player-made choices that have consequences, both immediate and delayed, both superficial and plot-line shaking. Things that combine to create a dynamic epilogue full of a plethora of options. I don't mind if a game says go to Zone A (lvls 1-3) then Zone B (lvls 4-5) etc, I don't even mind if it is solve quest chain 1, 2, 3 in that order by talking to people X, Y, Z. I also don't mind if a game is far more open world and is all like, go wherever you want, if you are constantly dying try somewhere else! But what I really, really adore and what always stands out to me in games are the actual player choices with ramifications. From the way a conversation is handled, to how a quest is solved, or if a quest is abandoned, or if you killed someone, or even if you sold someone something. Even little tiny things like, "Aha! The town NPCs notice and react when I'm not wearing clothing! Or if I'm armed! Or if I just broke into their house!" Even if the choice is in the character generation and the NPCs take notice of your stats/religion/race/class/traits etc. Delayed consequences can also be really enriching to a story and add to the replay-ability. The moments where I go, "oh no! If only I had known Y was going to happen! Wow, X really mattered (and it was 3 hours ago)! I want to play this again and see what happens the other way." The epitome of this is of course multiple endings that describe your character's impact on the world around you. Essentially anything the dev-team can add to make it seem like the player's choices actually mattered is beyond amazing in my book.

[Lephys]

^ Yup. It's not about the dynamicism of the actual, physical journey, as much as it is about the Variance Spectrum. How the world and story are affected as you go, even if you're going the same places.

 

("Variance Spectrum" trademark pending... ... ... not really. )

Edited May 18, 2013 by Lephys

[cleric Nemir]

So the same places for all and different choices to be made at them? This is good. Add in the change to the area itself,for example a destroyed town or saved and prosperous after your character storms trough it with his decisions. I'm for it all,as long as it will make me want to play it again and see it all different.

[mcmanusaur]

 

You failed to provide an explanation of what "well-crafted" means.

 

 

The specifics are hard to describe, so I'm going to give you a frustratingly vague answer instead: Some of my favorite parts of fantasy novels are those maps the really good authors put in the front pages of the book. If you do it right, you don't even have to do any work in trying to get the reader to care about the place. They just look at interesting spots on the map and say to themselves "Wow, I want to go there!" They're already invested and engaged in the work before even reading the first sentence. The best maps don't need a story to justify them; They justify themselves.

 

Likewise, the best settings in video games are the ones where I don't need a quest giver telling me to go visit someplace or talk to someone: I'm interested because it's there. The setting justifies itself.

 

Now, I'll be the first to admit, I'm a rather easy gamer to please. Give me a good setting, and I'll love your game in spite of basically all else. Bugs? Not a problem. Terrible gameplay? Don't sweat it. Vomit-inducing dialogue and voice acting? Meh, not a big deal. So long as you manage to keep me interested in what's over that next hill, I'll keep climbing over it no matter what it means I'll have to endure. It's why I'm such a rabid Elder Scrolls fan in spite of the series's mountain of flaws.

 

And the worst settings in games are the ones where the writer comes up with a plot line in their head, then everything in the setting is built purely in subservience to that plot. No place exists unless something important happens there except to provide a buffer of endless mooks for the player to wade through as they move from A to B (or worse, back from B to A). Nobody exists unless they have some piece of exposition to deliver about what you're supposed to do next. Everyone just apparently stands around all day waiting for the player to show up, and nobody ever has any problems unless they're somehow directly relevant to whatever storyline the writer has intended. And everything matches convention unless the plot specifically requires otherwise, or the writer is trying to be clever by "subverting" a convention with something just as played out as the default, or just using the default with a different (usually stupid) name.

 

Honestly? I'm worried this is the road Project Eternity's headed down. Maybe I'm being unfair because we really don't have that much info on the setting/story yet, but most of what I've seen so far has been a bad sign. The creative spark behind the Dyrwood seems to be "Well, 4/5 of the IE games we're using as inspiration were Forgotten Realms, so our setting can't be too different from FR. Also, there's guns, souls work different, there are cat people, we call bards 'Chanters', psions 'Ciphers', and Planetouched 'Godlike'." We're also told that the plot will have a big emphasis on "Moral Dilemmas", a fad that should have been discredited with Jade Empire. Furthermore pretty much all the updates we've received about the game, especially since the kickstarter ended, are about the mechanical and technical aspects of the game. Those are nifty and all, and it might just be that it's what they're focusing on in development right now, but I'm worried the reason they aren't talking much about the setting is because they think that nobody really cares about it.

 

That's not to say it's all bad news: I think the colonialism angle has interesting potential. I'm also happy to hear they're implementing these "dilemmas" through a reputation system where you choose between multiple factions to support rather than a morality meter: I think this worked out really well in New Vegas.

 

 

Also: I thought Planescape: Torment had an amazing setting. In fact, it was one of my favorite parts of the game. You don't have to be a TES/Fallout/Arcanum-like complete wide-open world game to have an interesting setting.

 

I share these concerns, but in response to the last bit I wonder how well you can experience a setting without having freedom to explore it... Is it simply imagining the parts of the setting that are closed off, and if so is not the ability to do so more tied to the player's imagination than to the quality of what the developers have supplied setting-wise? When you're forced to constantly focus on a particular plot or story it seems to shift focus away from the setting at large in my humble opinion; you're only interested in the setting in so much as it facilitates the narrative, whereas truly excellent settings should be of interest in and of themselves I would think.

Edited May 30, 2013 by mcmanusaur

[Lephys]

I share these concerns, but in response to the last bit I wonder how well you can experience a setting without having freedom to explore it... Is it simply imagining the parts of the setting that are closed off, and if so is not the ability to do so more tied to the player's imagination than to the quality of what the developers have supplied setting-wise? When you're forced to constantly focus on a particular plot or story it seems to shift focus away from the setting at large in my humble opinion; you're only interested in the setting in so much as it facilitates the narrative, whereas truly excellent settings should be of interest in and of themselves I would think.

 

 

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.

[Failion]

The best stories in video games are always semi linear. Planescape:Torment, Mask of the Betrayer, Baldur's Gate 2, Witcher 2 etc.

On the other hand non linear stories are at best servisable (Fallouts, Arcanum).Until now at least.

New Vegas and Alpha Protocol are not famous for their stories. Not a flaw, as they had diffirent focus and New Vegas would be a poor Fallout game with a linear story. Fallout 1 is the same. Great game but noone played it for the story.

Yet Josh said in an interview that he would like to try for a nonlinear, find the waterchip approach. If someone can do this, is Obsidian, but until now they haven't managed it.

Your thoughts? What would you prefer for P:E? A story in the vein of Planescape:Torment and Mask of the Betrayer, or more open like Fallout or Arcanum?

You can make a non liner game with a good story it requires more effort. If they added more dungeons and towns to adventure in planescape torment it will still have a great story. Some video game designers consider the game finished when they nailed the story down. I thought fallout had a great straightforward story it wasn't convulted in a world of lore like the witcher and planescape torment. I didn't give a hoot about geralt or the nameless one because hey are practically gods in their game worlds having to deal with first world fantasy problems lol.

[mcmanusaur]

 

I share these concerns, but in response to the last bit I wonder how well you can experience a setting without having freedom to explore it... Is it simply imagining the parts of the setting that are closed off, and if so is not the ability to do so more tied to the player's imagination than to the quality of what the developers have supplied setting-wise? When you're forced to constantly focus on a particular plot or story it seems to shift focus away from the setting at large in my humble opinion; you're only interested in the setting in so much as it facilitates the narrative, whereas truly excellent settings should be of interest in and of themselves I would think.

 

 

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.

 

 

I think urgency is an excellent concept to bring up here, and it sheds new light on the issue for me. Perhaps that is what most RPGs simply fail to cultivate in me as a player that would lead me to enjoy the more or less linear (or at least sequential) narrative approach to design. I've played a lot of RPGs, and I think I could probably count the times where I felt a sense of urgency in an RPG during a non-timed quest on the fingers of my hands. For the people who get that sense of urgency I can actually see how the sandbox elements might become a distraction.

Edited May 30, 2013 by mcmanusaur

[Lephys]

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.

[mcmanusaur]

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.

 

I'm not convinced the two are a direct trade-off though. There's certainly a trade-off between leisure and urgency in terms of player/character attitudes, but that is subtly different from the trade-off between options and linearity in my opinion. There are several sandbox survival games which have extreme freedom but nonetheless are very urgent due to the fear of impending starvation or something similar, and there are linear games like LOZ:OoT that don't seem very urgent at all. I think that you're very correct that urgency figures prominently in the mentality for design decisions regarding linearity, but I'm just not sure that it should. No one wants "Leisurely Hiking Simulator 2013" of course, but I don't think that a nonlinear/open-world game has to be that. In fact I'd say many of the times I've felt the most urgency as a gamer has been in the sandbox games where I wasn't sure where to go and how to survive (ex. first time getting dumped off at Seyda Neen in Morrowind), rather than in the games that railroad you along a central narrative holding your hand the entire way. But I guess that might be a subjective thing; some people might get really into the urgency of quests in traditional cRPGs despite the fact that the game is always waiting for you. I guess linearity is one commonly used approach to urgency, but it need not be the only viable one.

Edited May 31, 2013 by mcmanusaur

[Lephys]

I'm not convinced the two are a direct trade-off though. There's certainly a trade-off between leisure and urgency in terms of player/character attitudes, but that is subtly different from the trade-off between options and linearity in my opinion. There are several sandbox survival games which have extreme freedom but nonetheless are very urgent due to the fear of impending starvation or something similar, and there are linear games like LOZ:OoT that don't seem very urgent at all. I think that you're very correct that urgency figures prominently in the mentality for design decisions regarding linearity, but I'm just not sure that it should. No one wants "Leisurely Hiking Simulator 2013" of course, but I don't think that a nonlinear/open-world game has to be that. In fact I'd say many of the times I've felt the most urgency as a gamer has been in the sandbox games where I wasn't sure where to go and how to survive (ex. first time getting dumped off at Seyda Neen in Morrowind), rather than in the games that railroad you along a central narrative holding your hand the entire way. But I guess that might be a subjective thing; some people might get really into the urgency of quests in traditional cRPGs despite the fact that the game is always waiting for you. I guess linearity is one commonly used approach to urgency, but it need not be the only viable one.

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.

[mcmanusaur]

 

I'm not convinced the two are a direct trade-off though. There's certainly a trade-off between leisure and urgency in terms of player/character attitudes, but that is subtly different from the trade-off between options and linearity in my opinion. There are several sandbox survival games which have extreme freedom but nonetheless are very urgent due to the fear of impending starvation or something similar, and there are linear games like LOZ:OoT that don't seem very urgent at all. I think that you're very correct that urgency figures prominently in the mentality for design decisions regarding linearity, but I'm just not sure that it should. No one wants "Leisurely Hiking Simulator 2013" of course, but I don't think that a nonlinear/open-world game has to be that. In fact I'd say many of the times I've felt the most urgency as a gamer has been in the sandbox games where I wasn't sure where to go and how to survive (ex. first time getting dumped off at Seyda Neen in Morrowind), rather than in the games that railroad you along a central narrative holding your hand the entire way. But I guess that might be a subjective thing; some people might get really into the urgency of quests in traditional cRPGs despite the fact that the game is always waiting for you. I guess linearity is one commonly used approach to urgency, but it need not be the only viable one.

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.

 

 

Hmm... I see your point but I still don't think the two are necessarily at odds in essence, but there may be a third mediating variable. I'm afraid I don't really understand what you mean by urgency though... character death due to starvation is a fairly permanent condition, depending on the setting. I suppose you specifically mean permanent effects on the setting rather than the character, such as "if you don't go do this now, evil will win"? If so I can see what you mean, but I'm not entirely convinced that kind of "interactivity" would set Project Eternity apart; rather we tend to ask for multiple outcomes.

 

Hypothetically story-driven games are more time-sensitive but in reality they're not; both story-driven and sandbox games wait for the player to some extent... Maybe in some specifically time-based games it's true, but with RPGs I tend to find that slower playthroughs are rewarded. They tend to work better than fast playthroughs in regard to both the planning and strategy that RPGs generally encourage over the run 'n gun approach and micromanaging loot, which can greatly affect your IG bankroll and therefore your character's success. Even if there's imagined urgency from a narrative perspective, I find that even the less open-world RPGs implicitly encourage a slow and deliberate pace, and what would an RPG really be without that? At any rate when the progression of the plot and the pace of the gameplay don't align is one situation in which immersion can break down, but that's another matter.

 

Still I don't think that having more choices necessarily means each of the choices has less consequence, and therefore their urgency should largely be preserved.

[Lephys]

Hmm... I see your point but I still don't think the two are necessarily at odds in essence, but there may be a third mediating variable. I'm afraid I don't really understand what you mean by urgency though... character death due to starvation is a fairly permanent condition, depending on the setting.

 

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.

[mcmanusaur]

 

Hmm... I see your point but I still don't think the two are necessarily at odds in essence, but there may be a third mediating variable. I'm afraid I don't really understand what you mean by urgency though... character death due to starvation is a fairly permanent condition, depending on the setting.

 

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.

 

 

I like what you have to say, but I'm just not sure how much it maps onto the differences between more and less sandbox-y RPGs. For one, once you introduce sandbox elements into the game you can always restrict certain options at particular times, but doing the reverse is much harder. In this way adding optional sandbox content to the game pleases some people and at worst other people can just ignore those aspects, whereas not including such content greatly restricts those who would utilize it. Now of course that's all very hypothetical and realistically development is somewhat of a zero-sum game, and I accept that people have a firm vision of what they want out of Project Eternity; I still think that people's outlook on RPGs in general is rather limiting. And anyway wouldn't the mature way to tackle the urgency problem be to not railroad players and force them to do things via the metagame but rather ensure that they are sufficiently punished within the game in the event that they don't do those things, if that makes any sense? A well-written narrative should create urgency and cause the player to commit without artificially restricting their movement, and if that's not the case it sort of suggests the narrative is lacking.

Edited June 1, 2013 by mcmanusaur

[Micamo]

I share these concerns, but in response to the last bit I wonder how well you can experience a setting without having freedom to explore it... Is it simply imagining the parts of the setting that are closed off, and if so is not the ability to do so more tied to the player's imagination than to the quality of what the developers have supplied setting-wise?

Well, like I said, the specifics are hard to describe. I think the best way to illustrate my answer to your concern is to tell a story.

 

I first tried Planescape: Torment when I was 12. Believe it or not, I actually didn't think very much of it. I started the game, saw the zombies, then I went through the mortuary and killed every zombie I saw. Then the dustmen started attacking me so I started murdering them too. When I got out of the mortuary I just wandered around the hive for a while, not really knowing what I was supposed to do or where I was supposed to go. I eventually gave up and put the game down, thinking "Wow, why does everyone think that was so great?"

 

Around 3 or 4 years later I decided to pick up the game again. This time, instead of killing all the zombies I saw, instead I talked to them first. Every last zombie in that mortuary has a unique, macabre description, and some of them have hidden goodies if you poke them in the right way. Then I talked to Dhall and listened to every last thing he had to say. Then I ran around the rest of the mortuary and talked to everyone and everything.

 

When I finally exhausted the content in the mortuary, I left through the portal and entered the hive. Last time I sorta just ran through it skipping everything, but this time I was more careful. I went around exploring every nook and cranny, and everywhere I looked I found nothing but creativity and soul. When I had finished the mortuary I was in love, but by the time I had finished exploring the hive and (finally) went to find Pharod, I was a slobbering fangirl.

 

The real problem the first time around, as I now realize, was that I was trained by other games that unless an NPC has a unique appearance or name, they have nothing to say to you, and that unless you're specifically told to go someplace it will have nothing of interest. I was taught that CRPGs were waves and waves of mooks occasionally interrupted by plot. I didn't find any of the magic in Torment because I never even thought to try looking for it. In other games the streets are filled with nameless clones to make the world merely look real, but in torment everyone has something to say and every object has a story behind it. Torment doesn't just enable scrutiny, it rewards scrutiny at every turn with a surreal, enrapturing atmosphere and fascinating, dare I say powerful writing and characters. It was almost everything I had ever really wanted in a video game.

[Eiphel]

The best stories in video games are always semi linear. Planescape:Torment, Mask of the Betrayer, Baldur's Gate 2, Witcher 2 etc.

On the other hand non linear stories are at best servisable (Fallouts, Arcanum).Until now at least.

New Vegas and Alpha Protocol are not famous for their stories. Not a flaw, as they had diffirent focus and New Vegas would be a poor Fallout game with a linear story. Fallout 1 is the same. Great game but noone played it for the story.

Yet Josh said in an interview that he would like to try for a nonlinear, find the waterchip approach. If someone can do this, is Obsidian, but until now they haven't managed it.

Your thoughts? What would you prefer for P:E? A story in the vein of Planescape:Torment and Mask of the Betrayer, or more open like Fallout or Arcanum?

I'll probably add more to this later, but I'd say Torment actually has a largely linear plot development. Whilst Sigil is pretty open, it's still fairly gated and with a distinct direction of flow, and once you leave Sigil things become pretty linear indeed. It's not wholly linear, but it's definitely on that end of the spectrum. On the other hand, of course, much of the story is not really about where you go and what you do, but who you are - and this area is highly personal, and malleable, and can be explored differently each time. The plot beats of Torment are linear, whilst the thematic and character development are not.

 

I'd also say I thought New Vegas was an absolute triumph of reactive storytelling, and managed to deliver a story which I found utterly satisfying and also personal to my character. I think it actually performs a remarkable trick of presenting a pacy, well developed, coherent and complex narrative whilst be hugely non linear.

Edited June 1, 2013 by Eiphel

[Lephys]

I like what you have to say, but I'm just not sure how much it maps onto the differences between more and less sandbox-y RPGs. For one, once you introduce sandbox elements into the game you can always restrict certain options at particular times, but doing the reverse is much harder. In this way adding optional sandbox content to the game pleases some people and at worst other people can just ignore those aspects, whereas not including such content greatly restricts those who would utilize it. Now of course that's all very hypothetical and realistically development is somewhat of a zero-sum game, and I accept that people have a firm vision of what they want out of Project Eternity; I still think that people's outlook on RPGs in general is rather limiting. And anyway wouldn't the mature way to tackle the urgency problem be to not railroad players and force them to do things via the metagame but rather ensure that they are sufficiently punished within the game in the event that they don't do those things, if that makes any sense? A well-written narrative should create urgency and cause the player to commit without artificially restricting their movement, and if that's not the case it sort of suggests the narrative is lacking.

Sorry for the delayed response. I was away for the weekend.

 

Yeah, I'm pretty analytical. It doesn't always provide helpful immediate results, but it does help me to figure out where to look and where not to for the heart of the matter. But, I do apologize when people are trying to have serious discussions on results, and I'm here going all "Well, let's look a the relationship between these things, and maybe that can give us a better idea of what can be ruled out and what can't, and THEN we can go from there! 8D!" Heh. I don't mean to be obnoxious or anything. It's just what my mind likes to do.

 

I don't think having sandbox content is bad, or automatically hurts anything. You're right in that people can just ignore it. But, see, people can't just ignore the narrative. If you can ignore the entire narrative (or even the vast majority of it), and it still develops all the while with you being highly significant to it, then there's something wrong. You can't be a major focus of the narrative AND just be perfectly fine when absent from it. "A bunch of things happen in the world, for like 75% of the game, and you just gather pine cones and investigate ruins. Then, for the last little homestretch, you actually come in and take part in the story itself." That's not very interesting. You can't go back in time to that village that was slaughtered and question that one guy about that thing only HE knew. You had to do it back WHEN. HOW you get the info from him, and whether or not you kill him, or let the village burn, anyway, is one thing. I'm not talking about making sure only specific things happen in the narrative. Just... the player should have to participate. I mean, that's why the game ends when you die. With you dead, the story pretty much writes itself from there, without you, and without you, everything falls to pieces, and not in the way that you wanted it to even when you have the freedom to make it fall to pieces in a controlled fashion. I mean, take any book you've ever read, and imagine that the main character, at key points in the story, just left wherever they were, didn't handle situations, didn't talk to people, and just went out exploring for their own personal gain. That doesn't make for very interesting narratives. That hardly makes for narratives at all, really.

 

And yes, the mature thing to do is not to railroad, but to provide narrative consequences for the player's lack of action/influence on the events and situations therein. But, see, the player's influence on situations throughout a narrative is very much a core part of an RPG. So, that's what I'm getting at. And I think the best way to handle the whole thing is with good design balancing. If you've got 10 hours of exploratory content (I realize it's hard to EXACTLY measure such things, as people can take more or less time exploring), then you don't need to have a narrative that demands all but 1 hour of your time in the game. No "Okay, you've got about 15 minutes between every quest!". And, again, I don't mean the game's literally set up so that there are timers in-between a bunch of linear quests. I just mean, you've got to have appropriate windows of NON-urgency. You know, "We need to make our way to Villethdale, to find such-and-such. We don't really have much to go on, though." So you're headed to Villethdale, but you can explore at your leisure, because we can assume your leisure isn't 752 weeks. OR, hell, maybe the party even comments on how long you're taking to get to Villethdale, after a couple of weeks (if it's a 4-day journey to Villethdale or something).

 

But, the player shouldn't be punished for simply taking part in the unknown provided to him by the game's own design for the sole purpose of being explored. Sure, it should tie into the world lore/narrative and all that, but, if it's not discovered or explored in any capacity, how can it really do that? You can have "If you had explored here, you would've found out about THIS" bits in the game, but again it comes back to balance. If you literally have to sacrifice narrative influence just to NOT sacrifice exploration that would have, in turn, allowed different actions/influences upon the narrative... well, now we're in a big scary loop of nonsense, haha.

 

So, in short (why didn't I just do it in short from the beginning? ), you can have both awesome exploratory freedom AND restrictive, reaction-inducing narrative structure, but it's highly difficult to have them both be the focus of the game (unless the narrative itself is about exploration, I suppose).

[mcmanusaur]

 

I like what you have to say, but I'm just not sure how much it maps onto the differences between more and less sandbox-y RPGs. For one, once you introduce sandbox elements into the game you can always restrict certain options at particular times, but doing the reverse is much harder. In this way adding optional sandbox content to the game pleases some people and at worst other people can just ignore those aspects, whereas not including such content greatly restricts those who would utilize it. Now of course that's all very hypothetical and realistically development is somewhat of a zero-sum game, and I accept that people have a firm vision of what they want out of Project Eternity; I still think that people's outlook on RPGs in general is rather limiting. And anyway wouldn't the mature way to tackle the urgency problem be to not railroad players and force them to do things via the metagame but rather ensure that they are sufficiently punished within the game in the event that they don't do those things, if that makes any sense? A well-written narrative should create urgency and cause the player to commit without artificially restricting their movement, and if that's not the case it sort of suggests the narrative is lacking.

Sorry for the delayed response. I was away for the weekend.

 

Yeah, I'm pretty analytical. It doesn't always provide helpful immediate results, but it does help me to figure out where to look and where not to for the heart of the matter. But, I do apologize when people are trying to have serious discussions on results, and I'm here going all "Well, let's look a the relationship between these things, and maybe that can give us a better idea of what can be ruled out and what can't, and THEN we can go from there! 8D!" Heh. I don't mean to be obnoxious or anything. It's just what my mind likes to do.

 

I don't think having sandbox content is bad, or automatically hurts anything. You're right in that people can just ignore it. But, see, people can't just ignore the narrative. If you can ignore the entire narrative (or even the vast majority of it), and it still develops all the while with you being highly significant to it, then there's something wrong. You can't be a major focus of the narrative AND just be perfectly fine when absent from it. "A bunch of things happen in the world, for like 75% of the game, and you just gather pine cones and investigate ruins. Then, for the last little homestretch, you actually come in and take part in the story itself." That's not very interesting. You can't go back in time to that village that was slaughtered and question that one guy about that thing only HE knew. You had to do it back WHEN. HOW you get the info from him, and whether or not you kill him, or let the village burn, anyway, is one thing. I'm not talking about making sure only specific things happen in the narrative. Just... the player should have to participate. I mean, that's why the game ends when you die. With you dead, the story pretty much writes itself from there, without you, and without you, everything falls to pieces, and not in the way that you wanted it to even when you have the freedom to make it fall to pieces in a controlled fashion. I mean, take any book you've ever read, and imagine that the main character, at key points in the story, just left wherever they were, didn't handle situations, didn't talk to people, and just went out exploring for their own personal gain. That doesn't make for very interesting narratives. That hardly makes for narratives at all, really.

 

And yes, the mature thing to do is not to railroad, but to provide narrative consequences for the player's lack of action/influence on the events and situations therein. But, see, the player's influence on situations throughout a narrative is very much a core part of an RPG. So, that's what I'm getting at. And I think the best way to handle the whole thing is with good design balancing. If you've got 10 hours of exploratory content (I realize it's hard to EXACTLY measure such things, as people can take more or less time exploring), then you don't need to have a narrative that demands all but 1 hour of your time in the game. No "Okay, you've got about 15 minutes between every quest!". And, again, I don't mean the game's literally set up so that there are timers in-between a bunch of linear quests. I just mean, you've got to have appropriate windows of NON-urgency. You know, "We need to make our way to Villethdale, to find such-and-such. We don't really have much to go on, though." So you're headed to Villethdale, but you can explore at your leisure, because we can assume your leisure isn't 752 weeks. OR, hell, maybe the party even comments on how long you're taking to get to Villethdale, after a couple of weeks (if it's a 4-day journey to Villethdale or something).

 

But, the player shouldn't be punished for simply taking part in the unknown provided to him by the game's own design for the sole purpose of being explored. Sure, it should tie into the world lore/narrative and all that, but, if it's not discovered or explored in any capacity, how can it really do that? You can have "If you had explored here, you would've found out about THIS" bits in the game, but again it comes back to balance. If you literally have to sacrifice narrative influence just to NOT sacrifice exploration that would have, in turn, allowed different actions/influences upon the narrative... well, now we're in a big scary loop of nonsense, haha.

 

So, in short (why didn't I just do it in short from the beginning? ), you can have both awesome exploratory freedom AND restrictive, reaction-inducing narrative structure, but it's highly difficult to have them both be the focus of the game (unless the narrative itself is about exploration, I suppose).

 

 

Don't worry; I appreciate your style of reasoning.

 

I guess the point I'm trying to make is... What if people could ignore the narrative? And instead of this limiting their character's mobility (if they're confined to a particularly linear part of the game) or freezing time until the player wanders back, this would gradually affect the state of the in-game world in a way that their character's (and not the player's) motivations were what led the player to resume participating in the narrative? Let the player see the results of their complacency, and let them decide if it's worth it or not. Allow the player to reenter the narrative at any point but their character's influence on the overall outcome would be reduced accordingly. Don't force the player into having a character who everything must revolve around, but rather give them the opportunity to have as much or as little influence as they like. I don't know; maybe I'm the only one here crazy enough to not want to be the constant center of attention in a video game world, but... yeah.

 

Obviously this is all quite ambitious and perhaps even unrealistic, but I feel that it's a worthwhile ideal. Maybe most people wouldn't consider what I'm asking for a true RPG due to the importance they place on central narrative, but I'm at a loss for a better term. I'm probably repeating myself but it's just a matter of whether you think the character's role that the player plays should be confined to what is relevant to the game's narrative, or whether the role is wider than that. On a slightly different note, I'm not really sure how I feel about games whose urgency/pace changes back and forth as you progress through the narrative. And the last bit I'm not sure I understand fully.

[Lephys]

Don't worry; I appreciate your style of reasoning.

 

I guess the point I'm trying to make is... What if people could ignore the narrative? And instead of this limiting their character's mobility (if they're confined to a particularly linear part of the game) or freezing time until the player wanders back, this would gradually affect the state of the in-game world in a way that their character's (and not the player's) motivations were what led the player to resume participating in the narrative? Let the player see the results of their complacency, and let them decide if it's worth it or not. Allow the player to reenter the narrative at any point but their character's influence on the overall outcome would be reduced accordingly. Don't force the player into having a character who everything must revolve around, but rather give them the opportunity to have as much or as little influence as they like. I don't know; maybe I'm the only one here crazy enough to not want to be the constant center of attention in a video game world, but... yeah.

 

Obviously this is all quite ambitious and perhaps even unrealistic, but I feel that it's a worthwhile ideal. Maybe most people wouldn't consider what I'm asking for a true RPG due to the importance they place on central narrative, but I'm at a loss for a better term. I'm probably repeating myself but it's just a matter of whether you think the character's role that the player plays should be confined to what is relevant to the game's narrative, or whether the role is wider than that. On a slightly different note, I'm not really sure how I feel about games whose urgency/pace changes back and forth as you progress through the narrative. And the last bit I'm not sure I understand fully.

Well, I'm glad, because I really have no intention of wasting people's time, or simply cluttering up a forum, even though I sometimes feel I'm doing just that despite my efforts.

 

And I think you've got a splendid idea there. I must admit... I didn't realize until now, but I've kind of been restricting my comments to the "assuming we're designing P:E here, within the scope of similarity to the structure of IE games and such." I'm not against your idea at all. I LOVE stuff like that. Who could say whether or not that would be feasible? I think it's definitely worth trying. I really don't know that P:E should try it. Not to such an extent, at least. And, on that note, I just think that there's still a "too much" threshold, you know? I mean, look at a typical narrative (like how I made an example of a static book narrative), and how it develops to the end. If you don't take part in the first 90%, you're not going to have the same effect with the last 10%. It's like... meeting someone and marrying them the next day. You have no relationship with that person, even if you have 1 day's worth of seeing really awesome things. There's no personal connection there, between the characters and the narrative, and, in turn, between the player and the narrative.

 

That isn't to say that I don't think there shouldn't be sections of the narrative during which EXACLTY what you've said should be true. I think there should be a BROADER sense of connection to the overall narrative, rather than a constant, step-by-step connection to the narrative. I think that kinda comes back to the simple "Linear versus non-linear" topic at hand. I don't advocate a strictly-linear narrative/gameplay-experience in an RPG (or, really, in most genres, although it still has its value in several). But, at the same time, you have to make sure you don't run the risk of not even having the story be DIRECTIONAL at all. I mean, if you're building an enclosure, and you never ultimately follow the pattern of having the walls meet up because you just build them off in random directions, you end up with not-an-enclosure. That's not to say only enclosures are good, and open structures are bad. It's just... a narrative is kind of like an enclosure: No matter what shape you make it, or how big it is, or what different sections are made of, or how it shifts as you go, it's got to at least retain the basic structure of a narrative. If you wind up with "Some stuff just randomly happened, depending on what the main characters did, and it didn't necessarily even lead anywhere or develop into anything specific," then you don't really have a narrative. You just have a record of arbitrary, disconnected events.

 

But, anywho, I'm getting a little overly analytical. I like the idea, and I hope it's considered and explored, honestly. The aspect, at least, in P:E. I don't want everything to be "No, you HAVE to choose, to either help this village or attack it! You CANNOT ignore it!" I think the game benefits highly from mutually exclusive branches via choice, including in-action in specific areas. I don't think everything should wait on the player. But, nor should EVERYTHING just not care whether or not the player engages the content or not. I mean, obviously 100% optional would be terrible in a narrative. But, I couldn't tell you at what percentage it's feasible and doesn't shatter the nature of a narrative. There are wayyyy too many specific factors at play. It would basically require some game design experiments (which I think there should just be some think-tank somewhere that does that, just to record data and functionality and such, and figure out what works and what doesn't in a load of various ways).