So you want to be able to click and roam around, like it's an action game, with NPC behaving like they have a life. I mean, that's a very big ask from this type of game, with what I assume wasn't overabundant budget. Even original Fallouts didn't have that level of environmental fluidity, every major mission checkpoint was heavily scripted in comparison to open world with static NPCs.
Do I, though? All I thought up in this post was an alternate way of designing a quest from the game, with the only change being more player involvement in the exploration and discovery part. Where the fuck did I make any comparisons to action games? Why would you claim I want to do it "like it's an action game"? You could click and roam around in Fallout, Arcanum, Baldur's Gate, Planescape Torment, Dark Sun, Wasteland 2, Torment: Numenera, Knights of the Old Republic, Underrail, Divinity... uhhh yeah great list of action games right there guess I have to update my genre definitions.
Also my specific example doesn't require NPCs behaving like they have a life, just some simple scripting to simulate a living city to a decent degree. The example quest I cited above, where during the night the noblewoman's mansion would have more guards but during the day there'd be passersby on the street that can see you attack the guards, would only require a simple script that adds or removes generic commoner and guard NPCs during certain times of day. It doesn't even require any NPC schedules. You can just place three additional guards in the mansion and give them a script tag that makes them only appear when the time of day is after dark. Easy. As for the passersby on the street during daytime, just make a patrol route from one end of the map to the other so commoners walk along the road. Make a simple script that spawns one commoner NPC at one edge of the map, then makes him walk to the other edge and despawn once he reaches it. Make the script have a total amount of between 10 and 13 commoners on the map, so that a constant stream of commoners walk along the road. Poof, you got yourself passersby who can see you attack the noblewoman's guards if you go for a frontal assault during the day.
You don't need a full "open world" style of game to create a quest approach like the one I suggested above. You just need to think of creative solutions.
To script and put in motion how you've described it every single scenario in AoD would take the budget of EA to support it. There is just too many variations, I don't know if you're aware of just how many there are. Like, it trumps most classics in that regard.
Would it though? Let's see how much it would take to create the scenario I described above:
- place a bunch of guards and civilians and make their spawning on the map dependent on the time of day
- add unique dialogue options to the guards if the player is female and wearing a harem girl outfit as a disguise
- add an interaction to the balcony based on the player having a grappling hook and rope in his inventory
And uuuuh yeah that's it. I'd argue it even takes less time than scripting every interaction as a node in a CYOA segment because you can let some things be governed by the systems. Give guards patrol routes (very simple to set up, just put patrol points on the map and have guards walk from A->B->C->D->A etc), make them initiate dialogue if they spot the player, make the stealth skill reduce chance of detection. Granted, for that they'd have to implement a decently workable stealth system, but guess what - Fallout and Arcanum also had such a system so can't claim that "even the original Fallouts didn't have that" for this feature. Other than that, everything else is actually easier to script and implement. Instead of writing 3 different CYOA nodes where the player gets captured by guards, you just have "player gets captured by guards" happen as a natural thing when a guard detects the player. Because you can let the systems deal with a lot of scenarios dynamically, it's actually
less work than having to write each scenario variation manually.
I personally prefer shortcuts to and from quest locations, because why would I want to spend time walking and traveling through load screens.
Yeah I can't disagree with that. The town map shortcuts are one of the best things in AoD: just click on "Market" and you are at the market, no walking required. Cool shit. It does get a bit excessive during quests though, where giving the player more direct agency and a chance at exploration might improve the experience.
Choosing approach by action instead dialogue option would be nice, but it seems a silly reason to get stuck on in a game that's clearly not AAA. Also, this is only present sometimes, plenty of times you can do it by action.
Yes, sometimes you can do things by action and those are my favorite parts of the game.
Also, a game doesn't need to be AAA to pull off a more interactive playstyle. You're exaggerating the effort required for it - in fact, it might even cost less effort than the meticulously crafted CYOA approach of AoD.
Another point I wanted to address, unlike Skyrim, the world, major players and events unfold and what player does carries consequences. This is why there are restrictions of travel in early game and mini endings. I was pissed off at first, but then I accepted that's just the way game meta works, and once you learn meta, game becomes beautiful and easy to appreciate.
If you have issues it's not fully open world, go play Witcher 3.
Fallout 1,2, PST etc all required players to learn meta, AoD is just more annoying than most. Toughen up son.
Uh yeah. Just play Witcher 3. Ok
I don't know where you've picked up the idea that I want a fully open world game from AoD. I never claimed anything like that. The quest example I described above still is a self-contained quest that would fit well into the overall chapter structure of AoD.
Also, you seem to consider me to be one of the AoD haters. I'm not. In my first post in this thread I even said "I like the game, but..."
I got over 30 hours and 60 achievements on AoD in Steam, so yeah, I obviously enjoyed my time with it and I occasionally replay it to try different paths. But I still recognize the issues people have with it, understand why people have these issues (such as the feeling of being railroaded), and personally would have approached quest design in an entirely different way than VD did. It's not bashing the game or "not being tough enough" to enjoy it, it's a valid criticism of AoD's approach and a suggestion of a different approach that might have been more enjoyable to those who don't like AoD.
AoD has plenty of choices, yes, but they all lead you down relatively narrow paths - it's why people tend to call it a "CYOA RPG". You pick a choice, then you're railroaded down into the next choice, and so on.
Well technically paths are narrow but you have so many paths and crossroads that it doesn't matter. It's not a sandbox but at the same time if offers way more choices than any sandbox game I know.
And yet the narrowness of the paths is why the game feels somewhat railroading to some people. You can disagree with that assessment but it's an understandable position, isn't it? It definitely feels more constraining than, say, Fallout 1 and 2, which are AoD's most direct inspirations.
if you joined them, you don't get the option to betray them and work for a different faction instead
lol
That's just a straight out lie. You have the option to betray your faction and work for another, whatever it is you're smoking I suggest you stop because you're getting holes in your brain.
People talking out of their ass now. Game constantly offers opportunities to switch sides and loyalties. Most of complaints here derrive from butthurt because game didn't scale to your level.
These opportunities are game-driven though, not player-driven.
You can't just decide spontaneously "You know what, I hate my current faction. I'll march over to their rivals and sell them out for a decent reward.", you can only decide such a thing when the current quest you're in offers you the opportunity.
Oh, so now you're changing your tune and saying that "you can betray your faction pretty often BUT it's not at times when you want it". Are you serious? Grow a pair and admit that you're talking out of your ass.
I'm not changing my tune. That's what I meant with my first post already. You don't get options to do things on your own initiative - you only get
reactions to situations you find yourself into. It's not the player saying "I will decide to do X now", but the game telling the player "You must decide X now". Maybe you should put some more points into your reading comprehension, then you'd understand what I actually mean here.
These opportunities are game-driven though, not player-driven.
You can't just decide spontaneously "You know what, I hate my current faction. I'll march over to their rivals and sell them out for a decent reward.", you can only decide such a thing when the current quest you're in offers you the opportunity.
Almost as if game waits for an opportunity for your character to be in a position of power / value to the opposing faction for them to consider you worthy of conspiring with. Crazy.
What
ScrotumBroth said. Plus you can do it only when it's beneficial to you and you want to play as an opportunist, not being able to play as a retard or a crazy man is a quality not a flaw. Going against a faction on their territory or at a moment when you will be able to hugely profit from them (by being paid by them and getting more influence and power) would be just retarded. Same goes for going into the enemy territory undisturbed (usually they shoot first, ask questions later) and presenting them some interesting information. How do you imagine would they react to it if it came from an enemy? Firstly they would be sceptical, secondly, you wouldn't be able to leave until it was confirmed, thirdly, even if it had been confirmed why would anyone want to have a traitor among their ranks? It would be easier to kill you in case you would decide to switch sides again.
That's the thing with traitors, unless they have a damn good reason to betray instead of your spontaneous idea they become the lowest of the low. And these are problems only from the top of my head, in reality it's much more complicated and creating a storyline that would make sense in such case would require some amazing writing skills.
Then kill off the player if he makes such a stupid decision. Oops. You betrayed your faction to the assassins, and the assassins killed you because you're untrustworthy. Choices and consequences, bitch. You now get an ending slide that mentions your lack of judgment. Only a naive idiot would betray his faction to the assassins and think he gets out of it scot-free.
Instead, what AoD does is that once you've joined one faction,
you cannot even talk to representatives of the other factions even if they were approachable before. The NPCs just get hard locked, no talking to them unless a quest specifically requires it. This is another reason why AoD sometimes feels railroaded. There is little interaction between the different paths - as you yourself said at the start of your post, the paths are rather narrow.
Or the problem in "you need the lockpick skill in order to succeed because it's the only way forward".
There wasn't one moment like this in the game, don't understand why you're lying like this JF.
The game pits you in several situations where if you have not specced a minimum of points in "XY" skill you're dead, and have to start over, and does this for purely the sake "being hardcore". ... You're not playing the way you want to in this game; you are playing the way you must do to succeed. That is, you're not role-playing your character, rather you're manipulating your character's stats once you've found out through trial and error what stats your character needs to have to progress.
This is the only legitimate complaint and it's a weakness of hard gated design - ie "you need 18 skill in lock picks and anything less is a fail" instead of "the higher your lock pick skill is, the less resources you need to succeed."
Or the problem in "you need the lockpick skill in order to succeed because it's the only way forward".
For example?
Nah, this one was just a response to Tavernking's general criticism of hard gating rather than to anything specific in AoD.
Personally I don't mind hard gating, and thing hard skillchecks are a decent choice and better than dice rolls which encourage savescumming and re-trying the same check over and over until it works, rather than encouraging clever character builds.
As long as there's always an alternative way out of a situation, or the possibility of progress despite failure (that is, fail states beyond "game over").
AoD does a well enough job at providing different approaches for different character builds even within each of the narrow faction paths. I even remember some quests where you can fuck up and still progress, which is really cool.
Hard skill checks > dice roll skill checks. That's a good part of AoD and one I hope you'll keep for Colony Ship RPG.