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Improving the Opening Stories

Top Hat

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May 24, 2006
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There are a lot of role-playing games which have rather weak/boring/predictable/crap storyline beginnings. And the sad thing is, it wouldn't have taken much to improve them. I'm not talking about changes which are too big (like scrapping the entire story), but making some small changes. Getting the tone right for the opening generally puts me in a better mood for the rest of the story.

For instance, in Neverwinter Nights a plague breaks out in Chapter One. As far as I'm aware, your character doesn't get infected by it, or is affected by it in any way at all. Neither are any of the major characters.

I think it would have been much better had their been some way for various important characters to get infected - in particular, the player's character. This would have quickened the pace of the story. You'd have to judge the wisdom of trawling for phat lewt and doing side quests with the potential for seriously fucking up the storyline with main characters dying. And having your own character affected by the disease meant that you'd have to haul ass before you became too weak to do anything.

Another obvious candidate is Oblivion. Instead of having the emperor get killed in front of you, why not have him escape and go to that hidden outpost at Bruma. He tells you to go look for his heir, and then you go to Kvatch blah blah blah. Except the person you find there isn't actually Martin, it's some magic hoo-haw trick. You lead him back to the emperor, and zomg EMPEROR GOES DOWN. Now you've got to figure out what happened to the real Martin.

What other/different small changes would make RPGs better?
 
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For instance, in Neverwinter Nights a plague breaks out in Chapter One. As far as I'm aware, your character doesn't get infected by it, or is affected by it in any way at all. Neither are any of the major characters.

Best thing was that those "blessings" that were supposed to spread the plague didn't do anything. I got a couple hundred of them and when I found out what they did I thought it was pretty silly.

I'm probably in the minority here, but I think the original Baldur's Gate did some things pretty well in this aspect. You had bounty hunters coming after you for awhile and it really made things more interesting. Of course Gorion was pretty bland.
 

Baphomet

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What game designers need to realize (and some have) is that plot and interactivity are polar opposites. If your game is plot heavy, then there can not be much in the way of meaningful choices - after all, such choices run the risk of ruining the game's fragile but supposedly awesome plot. The folks who put together Gothic know this, and what's interesting is that they made a game world that is so interactive that people complain about a weak plot. There is no narrator's voice, so to speak. Nothing but internal drive to motivate the player's interaction with the game world. In this case a game features metaplot. I'd say it's the way of the future, but it seems only a minority of gamers appreciate such things. The average gamer is used to being lead around by the nose and has grown to like it.
 

Mayday

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Well, the next step is having a metaplot where you're not the only character to actually be doing something. (In Gothic the world was static without your input).
 

Spazmo

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In a freeform game, the best you can do is create characters with meaningful and interesting motivations and plans, as well as locations and groups for those plans to play out in/on. You can't really control how the player will help/ruin those plans (beyond providing avenues for the player to do so), so you just have to hope the player's actions make an interesting narrative.
 

Baphomet

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Mayday said:
Well, the next step is having a metaplot where you're not the only character to actually be doing something.

That would be a step in the right direction. I hear they're going to try to do this with Resident Evil 5 and I'm interested in the final result. A game world would seem much more alive if the people and factions weren't waiting around for you to make a difference. It's one helluva design problem though.
 

JarlFrank

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Baphomet said:
What game designers need to realize (and some have) is that plot and interactivity are polar opposites. If your game is plot heavy, then there can not be much in the way of meaningful choices - after all, such choices run the risk of ruining the game's fragile but supposedly awesome plot. The folks who put together Gothic know this, and what's interesting is that they made a game world that is so interactive that people complain about a weak plot. There is no narrator's voice, so to speak. Nothing but internal drive to motivate the player's interaction with the game world. In this case a game features metaplot. I'd say it's the way of the future, but it seems only a minority of gamers appreciate such things. The average gamer is used to being lead around by the nose and has grown to like it.

I guess Arcanum and Planescape are both great examples for games with amazing storyline and still quite a lot of choices. PST only has minor choices mostly, of a moralic nature, while Arcanum got lots of choices affecting the ending, even during the mainquest. And both have some great non-cliched stories.
 

Nog Robbin

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By having multiple openings you can potentially increase the number of play throughs. When you always start in the same place, and have to go through almost the same things you are limiting the amount of times a game will be played. Of course, this makes it harder to design in the first place, but even having a few different openings, with a few different character types with differing outlooks could seriously enchance replayability.
 

golgotha

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Oct 3, 2005
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Mayday said:
Well, the next step is having a metaplot where you're not the only character to actually be doing something. (In Gothic the world was static without your input).
Weren't the STALKER developers originally shooting for that?
 

Fez

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It was cut. They had trouble enough getting the AI working as they wanted without that aspect to worry about.
 

MessiahMan

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Codex 2012 Project: Eternity Wasteland 2 Codex USB, 2014 Shadorwun: Hong Kong Divinity: Original Sin 2
Space Rangers had something like that going on. Though, still, you were, ultimately, the person that could make the biggest difference in the game.
 

Zomg

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Oct 21, 2005
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I'm a big fan of player-imagined narrative interpolating a few plot events, at least for a quick background sketch of the PC(s). Darklands is the RPG example - ex. a rural commoner -> nun -> doctor and a noble -> squire -> knight produce different little narrative sketches in the player's mind. Obviously that's pretty light in Darklands, but for the whole hog try the edutainment "game" Real Lives, which lets you generate simulated human lives by creating events based on (I assume) some kind of actuarial tables.

So, you get some messages like:

Year x: You've met a new girl, named <x>, whom you are very taken with."
Year x+1: Rejected by <x>
Year x+2: Afflicted by typhus
Year x+3: Afflicted by leprosy
Year x+4: Your country is at war. You have been drafted.
Year x+5: You have been raped.
Year x+6:...

...and so on, and your mind naturally makes a little story about these things, even if it's as simple as, "That guy is having a rough decade."

I'd love to have that kind of thing in an RPG. Just throw in a few plot hooks where background events come up (ex. dialogue: You have no idea what I've seen, man... I had typhus leprosy of the heart as a kid.)
 

JarlFrank

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golgotha said:
Mayday said:
Well, the next step is having a metaplot where you're not the only character to actually be doing something. (In Gothic the world was static without your input).
Weren't the STALKER developers originally shooting for that?

Wasn't a primitive way of this implemented in Wizardry 7? Like, you're searching for that artifact, but another adventurer party got it because you were too slow, and now you gotta hunt them down instead.
 

DarkSign

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Id like to see something similar done in MMOs. Follow me here.

>Lets say you start with the world in state X.

>The plot will have 20 plot "points" as in world-effecting events.

>The players through quests and taking over objectives, etc can effect change to make a plot point move in one direction or another.

>Although there are more than 20 permutations Im sure, the writers have 20 possible server endings - towards which these plot points can contribute to an ending.

These would invariably be different on different servers.
 

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