World Events Triggered by time.

[Erez]

In most computer games, the player is allowed to roam free and take things at his own pace, knowing only certain actions will trigger world events, in a rare few you have events triggered by the passing of time.(mostly older games)

I think that A to activate B mentality, occurs mostly due to the developers wanting to make sure the player doesn't miss on any content (Essentials NPCS also suffer from this issue).

In life one of the most valuable assets we have is time and how we are going to utilize it.

I think that having a gaming world where big events a triggered due to the passing of time will increase the feeling of urgency when roaming between quests, and give a higher incentive to avoid less important tasks.

 

It can also work in a free roam world, where you mostly just want to do you own thing by making it feel more alive.

 

Take New Vegas for example, lets say you wanted nothing to do with the war between the Legion and NCR, and decided you just wanted to be an adventurer, time will pass and the world will change depending on your choice, or lack of choice. 

 

A good example for a timed world event is Fallout 1 with the Vault Dweller.

 

So what do you guys thinks?

 

Do time triggered events have a place in computer games and if so how could they best be used?

[Sofaking]

While an interesting idea, I have two main objections. Firstly, it sort of destroys the reason that open world sandbox games are appealing. And that is your ability to play at your own pace. If you want to spend forever wandering around doing side quests and collecting all the gnome statues you can. You’re not pressured into the story until you’re ready for it. As soon as you begin requiring the PC to participate in the story in order to avoid missing it you take away the free roam and story as options and make them a choice one or the other.  You also have an issue with pacing. How do you properly pace a game so if the character arrives early, let’s say two weeks for something, they don’t just feel like they have to sit around and wait? A properly paced story makes the character want to play it because they want to find out what happens next, not because it’s just time to do story mode.

 

My other objection is this seems like something very hard to actually program maybe even impossible. With each event on a timer, the result of which creates a story branch, which affects other branches and you have branches on branches it just becomes a huge mess to script and program. Sure you could half ass it and make a bunch of the events cookie cutter but that defeats the idea. So what if you miss some events and are there for some others. Do the NPC’s react differently if you’re just now showing up halfway through than if you’re well known and have been there. Could you imagine having to program this so the character knows what is going on, is caught up on any backstory. What about if the NPC’s get angry because you started with them, missed a deadline, and now react poorly towards you. How do you program these to make sure the character doesn’t dead end the story because of a mistake?  

 

Fallout was probably doable because you had one timed event which affected an isolated area, the vault. There were some other impacts but there was only one

 

“Take New Vegas for example, lets say you wanted nothing to do with the war between the Legion and NCR, and decided you just wanted to be an adventurer, time will pass and the world will change depending on your choice, or lack of choice.“

 

This could still be a choice made in a non-timed manner. Let’s say you arrive in town, the mayor asks you to help defend against the legion and your response is “Sorry this isn’t my fight.” And the next time you show up it is overrun. You could even refresh this event over the course of time to show an ongoing war between the towns and Legion. You could do certain timed events that say do mission X in X days. But you would still need to start them. Otherwise each town would have things expiring before you could get to them and you would miss quite a lot.

Edited July 2, 2014 by Sofaking

[Enoch]

The example from Fallout was relatively player friendly and worked fine (for me), but this brings to mind other examples-- Wizardry VII and Quest for Glory 2-- where time-triggered events were a source of either pure frustration or waiting around for something to happen.  Neither of which makes for especially fun gaming.

Edited July 2, 2014 by Enoch

[Amentep]

I'm not crazy about timed events, to be honest. I understand, logically, their appeal but they're off-putting to me when playing a game to feel like I *have* to do certain things by certain times, or I'm no longer allowed to enjoy my game/have to start over.

 

It may not be realistic, but its what I like from games.

[Oerwinde]

I think they have a place. Sidequests with a sense of urgency. If someone runs up to you in desperate need for you to help and you agree then walk off to another city, you should fail that quest. People aren't just going to sit in an alleyway being mugged for 3 days while you finish an errand.

[Amentep]

In those kind of instances, yeah I agree.

[Sofaking]

I think they have a place. Sidequests with a sense of urgency. If someone runs up to you in desperate need for you to help and you agree then walk off to another city, you should fail that quest. People aren't just going to sit in an alleyway being mugged for 3 days while you finish an errand.

 

Yeah, but those are already available in games. I was under the impression the discussion was about the triggering of the event. In your example the PC triggers the event and the time is when the event expires. 

 

Like the Fallout example, the game starts you with a 150 day time limit to get the water chip and save the vault. The game in the theoretical example would also start you with 4 days to save Shady Sands from the rad scorpions and 15 days to kill Gizmo before he takes over Junktown. All these are triggered and start counting down the moment you start the game.

[Humanoid]

I don't think they play well with time compression seen in almost all CRPGs. When a minute ingame passes in a couple real-life seconds, the sense of urgency can get all muddled up. You wander around a little and get involved in a couple minor skirmishes and oops, suddenly it's night. When were you supposed to meet that NPC again? All of a sudden you find that it's optimal to just throw the rest of the day away and instead use the wait function to stand at the meeting point for 12 hours instead of productively using that time, because accidentally missing that specific point in time would be an even larger penalty.

[nipsen]

I think they have a place. Sidequests with a sense of urgency. If someone runs up to you in desperate need for you to help and you agree then walk off to another city, you should fail that quest. People aren't just going to sit in an alleyway being mugged for 3 days while you finish an errand.

"Until evening". You will be able to complete two errands, three if you choose the quickest way, but not four. You have to choose between going south through the ghoul-infested ruins, or going through the snow-covered mountain path to the west. One will be risky, but might save you time. The other will be slow, but you are certain to arrive later than you would wish for.

 

I always put in things in short quests as well when people run around doing too many silly things. "Yeah, you just missed him, he had too much altar-wine and said he was on his way to the [inquisition's main chapter CRITICAL LOCATION], and you can just about /exactly/ manage to reach him in time if you go to this CRITICAL LOCATION FOR THE QUEST right now.

 

Same with always coming too late, no matter what.

 

Also helps making non-time dependent exploration more fun, or at least I think so.

 

Um.. Narrative time?

[AwesomeOcelot]

The good thing about the way Fallout did it was that it went really slowly at locations, you don't want to feel you're on a timer in an RPG like this, but because it did progress quickly on the world map it did feel like time was passing, which is a problem in a lot of RPGs. So I would say that it's a good idea for RPGs with world maps like Fallout's to have timed quests, but for other RPGs it's probably a bad idea.

[Erez]

Thank you all for your input, I would like to throw a few more thing in favor of timed events, it has becoming more prevailing in time based games with to give npcs schedules. They eat, work, sleep and even hang around the bar at night.

A year ago, I played D&D as a dungeon master with my friends in a time based adventure, I have placed several timed events in motion:

1) Village Carnival and Lord son wedding.

2) The arrival of a knight to the village who is investigating into a mining town near the border going quite.

3) A large enemy force moving toward the village, scheduled to arrive thirty days in game time.

 

Their actions could have shaped the future. Will they aid the knight, or scout ahead on their own, gaining knowledge of possible enemy activities. Will they stick around and help the village when time come. Maybe they will decide they want to go a completely different way and only hear about the devastating fate of their families some time after.  

 

The player must have some clue in regard to possible future events, and a have a decent amount of time to do something about it. But having the entire world static, sort of break immersion for me since it encourage me to meta game.

 

Take Fallout 3 new Vegas for example. (Spoiler alert)

You could easily tell that finding benny would change the game story state. Not surprisingly, just as you exited the tops casino you were informed the legion has made and advance and everyone now wants to be your best buddy. (even if you made your way straight to benny). There is also the ending when you get to decide when the legion will invade to hoover dam, basically giving you time to thin out the legion or Ncr until there was no one left alive.

  In Neverwinter 2 , you got to decided when the final invasion will occur.

Baldurs gate 2 Imoen - It doesn't matter if you took your sweet time or sold one of your kidneys to get aboard a ship, the result would still be the same leading to a very linear gameplay exprience.

 

I think that beyond the feeling of urgency or lack off, having no time affected events, fails to reward players who are invested in the story and make the right decisions and fails to reward players who just want to fool around, creating a much more linear and predictable experience. In a way we fear missing content and the price is losing ability to truly influence the world we are immersed in.

 

Waiting around for something to happen, Can be solved by giving the character more fun things to do while he waits: exploring, meeting people, enjoying the local bar, sleep, read books, train, craft.  Before you know it, enough time has passed a fella with very interesting new reach the local meeting place or local news channel.  And since some actions take time to occur like the legion crossing for example, you can simply intercept them as they make their way towards hoover dam, leading a group of rangers in guerrilla warfare.

 

The Nightkin who arrived every night to kill mutated cows in new Vegas, instead of lurking around pressing the wait button, you should have been able to locate him in black mountain. The Ncr spy, you should have had more means to discover who he was that wouldn't require your arrival at an exact time.

 

It will require extra scripting, but not more than any alternate quests paths. The result will be a shorter game due to more content missed.

[nipsen]

Novac was.. well.. it seemed to have gotten more attention than any other location in the game. But I don't think it was the actual time mechanics that made it successful. Instead it was that it made sense for the people to be there at the time. The time-advance mechanics still weren't all that great - even if they were saved in this specific case by the fact that you could sleep in a bed and advance to the right time-slots. Since you don't know when the switch is thrown, right? But it made sense this time because the guy waits until dark, and he is bound to be in the dinosaur when the sun rises. .. even if the engine didn't actually allow that, you imagine it did.

 

But I think you're right that it doesn't necessarily need extra paths. More than careful scripting... and a link between the scripting and the writing. The difficulty is having someone as gamemaster, or writer, and so on, who can quickly come up with alternative rationalizations for what happens. Like I said, narrative time doesn't mind about technical things, it only cares if it sounds plausible. And since you're not really demonstrating every single event, people will extrapolate what happened from just a few extra cues. So the trick is to allow for events in the timeline that seemingly alter the paths, and then account for those indirectly.

 

Then again.. I know a guy who did this purely mechanically, listed events in the quest and just chose one randomly. Had a traditional arch, opening, crisis, resolution - put in one, noted the conditions, and that led to a specific resolution he had prepared. And still pulled it off pretty often.

 

But what you want to "see" is that the world around you is actually moving when you're not looking, no? That's the goal, not to create incredibly difficult and complicated guided paths. And that doesn't necessarily mean you have to make everything the player does reactive. ..lots of people who write stories like: "you pick up an apple, cut it, and it causes the apocalypse!". That doesn't make the world more dynamic, it just makes your choices more important, as well as always being that annoying trigger everyone stands around waiting for.

[Erez]

But what you want to "see" is that the world around you is actually moving when you're not looking, no? That's the goal, not to create incredibly difficult and complicated guided paths. And that doesn't necessarily mean you have to make everything the player does reactive. ..lots of people who write stories like: "you pick up an apple, cut it, and it causes the apocalypse!". That doesn't make the world more dynamic, it just makes your choices more important, as well as always being that annoying trigger everyone stands around waiting for.

 

This is what made the road appealing, it strayed away from the heroic path and told a more personal story in an apocalyptic time. You can still make time triggered events to be heavily influenced by the player actions, its the ability to calmly eat an apple which I find so appealing. (Bard Tale spoiler)  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eAPowdfHGSA

Edited July 3, 2014 by Erez