The best structure for an RPG?

[Shadenuat]

There isn't one, because since it's a roleplaying game, the structure should depend on the role you're playing.

 

[JarlFrank]

4. Now we come to my personal favorite structure. The goal-based structure.

You make 80 hours worth of gameplay, player only sees 40. That's cool and all, but let's be realistic, we got a product to make here, we gotta pay the bills, etc.

In a world of unicorns, you can do that. In the real world, getting to choose between two cities at the beginning of W2 is all you can get. And I personally hated it when they did it, cause 1) I don't want to replay W2, it's not a chef d'oeuvre, and 2) I'll always pick the scientists over the sheeple no matter how many times I replay.

Fallout is somewhat of an example for this.

Disagree.

The player sees as much of the content as he chooses to see. He can finish the game in 5 hours (Fallout speedrunners can be even faster, since all you have to do it: get chip, kill master, destroy base), or he can spend 60 hours exploring everything before making the choice on how to accomplish his goal.

The Wasteland 2 example is actually not a goal-based structure at all, it's a branching structure: you have to help either the town or the agricultural center, you pick the town you can't help AG center, you help AG center you can't help the town. It's two mutually exclusive branches.

Fallout definitely is goal based. What do you have to do to get the water chip? As in, absolutely have to? Just go to Necropolis and get the chip. You can go there ASAP, kill the ghouls and grab their chip, and the quest is done. Or you can make a deal with them to get the chip. And as a first-time player you will first have to track down the location of the chip by visiting several other locations and following the trail of clues, but that's not a mandatory quest step. The only mandatory thing is getting the chip itself: the goal of the main quest. Therefore Fallout is goal-based.

Goal-based main quests are actually easier to develop than linear or branching quests because when you're getting close to release and have to cut content, you can more easily cut out intermediary steps of the questline or alternative ways to achieve the goal, as they are technically not relevant. Meanwhile in a branching line, if you already started developing a branch you better finish it, and in a linear game it's more likely that the plot depends on the planned story beats, so in both these cases it's more difficult to cut out content.

It also means the game is more replayable because it never forces you to repeat the same quests every time you replay the game. If you already did a quest that lets you find out where to go in your first playthrough, you can technically ignore that quest in further playthroughs and just go there.

Goal-based sounds like the developer gets the hell out of the way once the setting and backstory is established, and affords the greatest degree of player agency.

It also echos the adventure hook for Wizardry 7 & 8, so naturally it's the best.

Precisely. The player receives a mission, and then it's up to the player to follow the trail of clues, find the things he needs, and confront the antagonist. The game doesn't force the player into a certain sequence of events and doesn't offer any handholding.

In BG2 there is a moment where you meet a warband accompanied by 'truth-seeing' mages. You have the option of getting irritated by the mages when they pronounce that your words are 'strong truth' (or otherwise), or just letting it slide.

Would you consider that an example of 'false choice'? Whether or not you get irritated at the mages, and even threaten them, nothing different actually happens.

For me is this is an example of old school RPG dialogue, where there are many options in dialogue but they still effectively lead to the same place and there isn't necessarily C&C involved. Yet I don't mind this kind of dialogue at all, because it gives me at least a chance to feel like I'm role-playing.

This kind of dialogue is dying out because it's prohibitively expensive to voice-over all these branching dialogue trees, even if they don't actually constitute C&C.

Slight tangent to the original point, but it's what always springs to mind when I see these kind of discussions. I miss old school RPG dialogue.

(Of course if dialogue is built with ACTUAL C&C then that's even better, but that's even more expensive)

That's just a nice little mini-encounter in the game, not part of its overall structure. Side quests and small encounters have structures of their own, sure, and the more variety there is in them, the better. This is all about the overall structure of the game, how it treats its main quest and general approach to quest design.

Well, it's also often a question of scale. Sometimes you get to do 3 or 4 to fix a spaceship, but it turns out later that no matter what the spaceship gets shot down by space hookers. So was that just 2 (fake choice)?

Often it depends on how long & involved the 3/4 section is before it has to converge again. I often don't mind story-heavy games where you have to go through certain set outcomes (you faff around for a while, but your side loses the war, you faff around for a while, but space hookers kidnap your sex friend), if there's a lot of actual gameplay inbetween that has sufficient branching. I fapped to ending slides just like everybody else, but I'm also OK with games with clearly set endings & major story points if the actual moment to moment gameplay has variation.

You assume that type 4 has to converge, but it really doesn't - or already does, depending on how you see it. The player has a goal - get a spaceship (any spaceship), get a water chip (any water chip), stop the bad guy (any... no wait, just that one bad guy), etc. Fallout would work just as well if there were multiple water chips around that the player could get. It wouldn't matter which water chip he brings back to the Vault, as long as it works. When you have a game where the goal is to stop the bad guy, any method of stopping the bad guy would work. Kill him, use diplomacy to convince him to stop, call the police to imprison him, whatever. The point of convergence would be "Player brings water chip to Vault, Vault is saved, yay" or "Bad guy has been stopped from doing bad stuff, yay".

The overall ending might usually be the same (but doesn't have to, there can also be alternate endings like "Player helps bad guy instead of stopping him, conquers world"; Fallout is a good example here again, the player can join the Master and be turned into a mutant, which is a legit alternate ending to the game), but the way you get there will differ depending on player approach. It's not like there are mutually exclusive branching paths that have to come together at the same point again. If there were a dozen different water chips in Fallout, all in different locations and with different methods of acquisition, the player could get one of them, or if he wants to spend the time on it even all of them, and then return to the Vault and hand them over. The point of convergence happens when the goal is achieved and the item that had to be procured is delivered. What happens in between the start of the game and the achievement of the goal doesn't matter.[/QUOTE]

 

[Kyl Von Kull]

Feels like a false dichotomy: 1-3 are narrative structure, 4 is quest structure. JarlFrank can you think of a game other than Fallout that has this overall goal oriented structure? I suspect Fallout could get away with this because it’s a pretty short game that doesn’t have a whole lotta content.

Well, it's also often a question of scale. Sometimes you get to do 3 or 4 to fix a spaceship, but it turns out later that no matter what the spaceship gets shot down by space hookers. So was that just 2 (fake choice)?

Often it depends on how long & involved the 3/4 section is before it has to converge again. I often don't mind story-heavy games where you have to go through certain set outcomes (you faff around for a while, but your side loses the war, you faff around for a while, but space hookers kidnap your sex friend), if there's a lot of actual gameplay inbetween that has sufficient branching. I fapped to ending slides just like everybody else, but I'm also OK with games with clearly set endings & major story points if the actual moment to moment gameplay has variation.

Boyarsky has been talking about structuring CRPGs like a football. You have lots of branching, with multiple ways to complete each branch, but then events overtake you and there’s some kind of convergence (space hookers shooting down your spaceship). Then it branches again—maybe you can side with the hookers depending on what you did in the first act—before converging on another unavoidable event. And so on.

Fallout is basically one football.

 

[JarlFrank]

Feels like a false dichotomy: 1-3 are narrative structure, 4 is quest structure. JarlFrank can you think of a game other than Fallout that has this overall goal oriented structure? I suspect Fallout could get away with this because it’s a pretty short game that doesn’t have a whole lotta content.

Other than Fallout, none come to mind right now.

But all four of them are quest structures - you can design a quest to be a long line of quests (You must do A before you can do B, then do B which leads to C, etc), you can design a quest to be branching (You must get A, then you can give item A to char B or C who will give you a different follow-up quest, etc), or you can design it around a goal (You have to get A, doesn't matter how you do it).

 

[Harry Easter]

I think Goal Based does work best in the end. Branchbased may make a stronger plot, but goal-based does make for more fun and interesting player experience. The Fallouts and the Original Sins show how that can work. You have enough room for lots of interacting with the gameworld, which gives you more material for anecdotes ("and then I set the chair on fire and while they looked away I picked everybodies pockets") which I would also count as storytelling, because it was your solution and therefore part of your story. It also doesn't block you, if you killed an important NPC.

 

[conan_edw]

Goal based is structurally superior that I would still enjoy it even if it sucked narratively. That's why I enjoyed D:OS2 even though the writing was mediocre at best. Quests were maybe a mix of 2, 3, 4 but the larger quest of each island was goal based and you are basically able to get out of each island in no time if you had a prior knowledge of the solutions.

That said, I still enjoyed AoD much more for both combat and writing quality despite not having the best structure.
Honestly though, I'd still prefer it if 4 was the norm.

 

[Üstad]

Any other "good examples" of this? Cause AoD is the only one that comes to mind, which tells me it's not a popular scheme, if we can only recall one RPG doing it or pulling it off successfully.

Nah, in AoD you can't really call it a branching structure since you can probably only choose one branch in any given situation depending on your stats

Objectively wrong. Hybrids are always a possibility.

 

[Bester]

Fallout definitely is goal based. What do you have to do to get the water chip? As in, absolutely have to? Just go to Necropolis and get the chip. You can go there ASAP, kill the ghouls and grab their chip, and the quest is done. Or you can make a deal with them to get the chip.

It's a quest with optional side quests, but the location of the chip is not given to you, so you have to brute force it by visiting every city. However, once you do know where it is, the quest becomes extremely straight forward, and doesn't involve you "running around collecting clues", which was the best part of it. And the magic is gone.

So the "goal-based" category, it's just branching with hidden solutions, according to your description. Some of these hidden solutions may basically involve a secret door that lets you skip optional side-quests. When you know the door's location, the quest is as good as ruined for the player. So much for "replayability".
And I certainly don't agree that fallout is a "goal-based" game. Most of its quests are not from this category. Not sure it's even a category apart, really. Maybe a subcategory at best.

It also means the game is more replayable because

Just make a game that's playable and enjoyable at least once (because this is where 99% fail), then think about replayability for future titles.

The Wasteland 2 example is actually not a goal-based structure at all, it's a branching structure: you have to help either the town or the agricultural center, you pick the town you can't help AG center, you help AG center you can't help the town.

But it amounts to the same thing, given your example.
In your example, the player either sees left side branch or right side branch, and then flies off on his newly acquired ship, and has no incentive to see if there are other options to acquire ships once he has one. Therefore losing a significant portion of content that he'll never see.
You made an entire area ("Wilderness") that the player will not see, if he talks to the locals and sees that there is a solution to his quest right here in the city. That's disturbing.

 

[Reinhardt]

I'm fine with 1.
Thinking is hard so if i have to do it after all i prefer to think in party creation screen.

 

[Falksi]

Witcher 2 nailed it for me. Linear enough to be tight & focussed, but enough choices to add a ton of replayability.

 

[JarlFrank]

The Wasteland 2 example is actually not a goal-based structure at all, it's a branching structure: you have to help either the town or the agricultural center, you pick the town you can't help AG center, you help AG center you can't help the town.

But it amounts to the same thing, given your example.
In your example, the player either sees left side branch or right side branch, and then flies off on his newly acquired ship, and has no incentive to see if there are other options to acquire ships once he has one. Therefore losing a significant portion of content that he'll never see.

Yes, once he has the ship he's won the game. And when he plays it again he can take a different path this time.

Fallout definitely is goal based. What do you have to do to get the water chip? As in, absolutely have to? Just go to Necropolis and get the chip. You can go there ASAP, kill the ghouls and grab their chip, and the quest is done. Or you can make a deal with them to get the chip.

It's a quest with optional side quests, but the location of the chip is not given to you, so you have to brute force it by visiting every city. However, once you do know where it is, the quest becomes extremely straight forward, and doesn't involve you "running around collecting clues", which was the best part of it. And the magic is gone.

So the "goal-based" category, it's just branching with hidden solutions, according to your description. Some of these hidden solutions may basically involve a secret door that lets you skip optional side-quests. When you know the door's location, the quest is as good as ruined for the player. So much for "replayability".
And I certainly don't agree that fallout is a "goal-based" game. Most of its quests are not from this category. Not sure it's even a category apart, really. Maybe a subcategory at best.

This is about main quest structure and not individual side quests, so Fallout, as a whole, is a goal-based game, even though not every single quest in the game is like that.

The idea of a goal-based quest design is that there's a goal the player wants to achieve. There are multiple ways to achieve it, some more and some less obvious. The player can use any of these ways to achieve it, which one he chooses is up to him.

It differs from branching because there isn't a fixed progression in between point A = get the quest, and point Z = finish the quest.
Branching would look like A -> B or C -> D or E, etc.
Goal-based structure has you start at A and arrive at Z with any number of stops in-between, depening on how you choose to tackle the issue. You can march straight from A to Z, you can gather information at B that leads you to C, you can go to C right away but without B's information which makes it more difficult to deal with C, you can go to D or E from C or skip straight ahead to Z, whatever.

Optional quests or activities that allow you to deal with the final goal better are a good example of this. In the fight against Tchort in the climax of Underrail, you can figure out a certain mutagen solution that can be injected into Tchort to weaken it, but it's completely optional and you can attempt the fight without it, it's just harder that way.

Basically:
do X
there are various things you can do to make X easier
none of those things are absolutley necessary to do X, but they help

 

[Bester]

You're just repeating the same things over and over again, refusing to deal with the fact that all your "goal" quests involve are branching (optional side-quests) and hidden doors.

 

[JarlFrank]

But that's their point. You can do optional side quests to help you get to X, or you can go to X straight away and tackle it in 5 different ways.

That's not branching in its strictest sense, that's more free-form than branching.

Branching is if you have certain points in the game where the narrative splits but you always have to go through these points, you can't just skip ahead and tackle the goal in whichever way you want.

 

[Dorateen]

JarlFrank

Out of curiosity, would you say that Realms Beyond is leaning toward the third structure? I don't necessarily have a problem with this approach. I do think sometimes, it can lead to developers trying to show how clever they are by offering all these alternative narratives, but if it gets too complex, risks falling apart and potentially breaking content. In the end, it might revert back to the second structure anyway, by giving lots of choices but the players end up in a relatively same place regardless.

 

[JarlFrank]

JarlFrank

Out of curiosity, would you say that Realms Beyond is leaning toward the third structure? I don't necessarily have a problem with this approach. I do think sometimes, it can lead to developers trying to show how clever they are by offering all these alternative narratives, but if it gets too complex, risks falling apart and potentially breaking content. In the end, it might revert back to the second structure anyway, by giving lots of choices but the players end up in a relatively same place regardless.

It's somewhere between the 3rd and the 4th structure, I would say.

 

[MajorMace]

I don't see the difference between your goal-based structure and your fake choice structure to be honest.

 

[JarlFrank]

I don't see the difference between your goal-based structure and your fake choice structure to be honest.

In the fake choice structure you always go through the same quests no matter what you say.

In the goal based structure the player chooses which quests to follow or which methods to use in order to achieve the goal.

 

[MajorMace]

Oh I see it now.
Fake choice is basically a linear structure but with extra shame for the masquerade.
PS : where would you put bethesda and other sandbox heavy games ? Would you account for the sandbox emergent larping or would you say it's a "linear" and "goal-based (larping)" disgusting hybrid ?

 

[JarlFrank]

Bethesda games are linear because their main quests are linear.

This is about the structure of the mainquest, not about how many sidequests there are to fuck around with.

In Skyrim the main quest is purely linear, and none of the side quests have any influence on how the main quest plays out.

Also, I don't think you understand the goal-based structure at all

 

[MajorMace]

I really don't, thanks for the precisions though !

 

[Quillon]

Branching goal-based structure ofc

ed: on the second thought goal-based structure doesn't sound very good; what the fuck is a fag wizard doing in that glorious sci-fi setting?

 

[Neanderthal]

Goal based like Arcanum, stop Arronax being the goal, whether for or against the Dark Elves being optional, as well as how to reach the void and personal motivation.

 

[TalesfromtheCrypt]

I love the goal based, scavenger hunt type of structure. Throw me into the world and let me figure out stuff for myself, following a trail of bread crumbs. This is actually what got me into RPGs, because it was so different from the linear, mission based structure most games would offer.

Betrayal at Krondor, World of Xeen, Fallout 1+2, Wizardry 7 and 8 and Startrail/Blade of Destiny are probably my favourite examples.

Sadly this approach is a thing of the past.

This is also the best in-character motivation to explore the game world. We know the old problem where a game presents you with a very linear main quest and a large number of mostly unrelated side quests. So exploring the world and doing these quests basically means your character is dicking around while he should be solving the (usually world saving and urgent) main quest.

In the games I listed above, exploring the world is an integral part of the main quest.

 

[DraQ]

Chosen goal based, as branching quickly becomes unmanageable as complexity grows and it rarely allows for interactions between quests' narrative and mechanics, which I think is the main point of goal based - rooting as much quest logic as possibly in games' systems making it seem more organic and authentic.
That said there does not seem to be clear cut distinction between branching and goal based as goal based usually features a number of conventionally branching or linear clusters wherever it needs to resort to scripting.

 

[Serus]

Feels like a false dichotomy: 1-3 are narrative structure, 4 is quest structure. JarlFrank can you think of a game other than Fallout that has this overall goal oriented structure? I suspect Fallout could get away with this because it’s a pretty short game that doesn’t have a whole lotta content.

Other than Fallout, none come to mind right now.

But all four of them are quest structures - you can design a quest to be a long line of quests (You must do A before you can do B, then do B which leads to C, etc), you can design a quest to be branching (You must get A, then you can give item A to char B or C who will give you a different follow-up quest, etc), or you can design it around a goal (You have to get A, doesn't matter how you do it).

Jagged Alliance 2 perhaps. You have one goal - kill the queen but you can approach it in different manners. Normally you would just conquer towns one by one and in the end the capital square by square. You do all quests in the meantime. But you can try to approach it differently - go straight to the queen ignoring most of the fighting/questing. There is only the final goal and how it's done is in the hands of the player.

no structure

like cdda

Spoiler

chaos reigns