The REAL overlooked sin in RPGs: disconnect between narrative and mechanics

[Verylittlefishes]

The new Tomb Raiders are also a good example. During gameplay, you shoot more humans than in any of the earlier TR games, but in cutscenes Lara almost starts crying when she has to shoot and slaughter a deer for food

Wait, really?

 

[AshenNedra]

Trash mobs are bad, trashtext is bad, but here's what you people are REALLY overlooking: disconnection between in-game narrative/setting/"lore" and actual gameplay mechanics.

Fully agreed on everything here, my lad. The biggest issue of modern games is that they don't integrate narrative and mechanics with each other well enough (or even at all) and the end result is always mediocrity.

Take Dragon Age, for instance. Very early in DA:O you're told that mages need their mana potions and some get addicted to the stuff, become druggies and shit. You also uncover that even some Templars get hooked and become dirty cops, helping mages smuggle magical cocaine. Sure, great premise, I like it! Except...you can have as many mages in your party and mana management will never lead to addiction, legal troubles or anything of the sort. The narrative and the gameplay exist in different realities. That's the hallmark of a mediocre game. Same goes for blood magic: you can cast all BM buffs in front of templars, nothing is gonna happen, lol.

Thanks to the OP for this thread and the quality answers.


Re the Dragon Age series, I remember that back when I was angry at the train wreck that was DAI, I did some research: turns out that segregation of gameplay and narrative, i.e. the origin of the said ludo-cognitive dissonance, is a high-end principle of game design imposed by EA to all of their subsidiaries.


Sadly, the Bioware forums went the way of the dodo, and I can't be bothered to look for the source/quote.


Symbolic coherence between gameplay and narrative is a marvel when done right.


The virtual equivalent of the Baudelairian “Correspondances” in nature and art.

 

[JarlFrank]

I have to admit I was disappointed in Thief TDP after you lose your eye half the screen doesn't go black to reflect that.

It... doesn't work that way

But when you are blinded in Ishar, the screen does go black.

And then there are funny mushrooms in Ultima...

Deus, the sequel to Robinson's Requiem, makes half your screen go black when you lose an eye. The entire screen goes black when you lose both.

The game also has you encounter aggressive pterodactyls which attack you by stabbing their beak in your face, which often results in losing an eye.

I'm one of those guys who love realism, simulationism, I even think losing limbs can be cool... but if the game throws a group of enemies at you that can irreversibly take your sight within the first 5 minutes of the game, when you're ill-equipped to deal with them and aren't familiar with the combat system yet, the game is more of a masochism simulator than anything else.

 

[Roguey]

In the dreamland, I thought of a better example of why this is something that doesn't matter at all.

In Planescape Torment, after a certain point you discover that your immortality has a limit; now that you're no longer forgetting everything upon dying, you're slowly progressing to a stage where eventually you'll die and become a complete mindless vegetable and nothing will be able to bring your mind back. However, it's impossible to actually reach this point in the game itself. This is because Avellone needed a reason to get the player to care (after all, why not just retire to a life of hedonistic luxury when it's become obvious that learning your past will give you nothing but trouble?) but he also wanted to preserve his goal of making sure players never felt like they ever had to reload (it would be a game-stopper and a player punch to have a hidden death limit). There's a similar deal with the shadows who chase you in cutscenes but who can never actually catch up to you until Ravel's maze and then never again.

Despite this ~ludonarrative dissonance~ Torment is the #1 RPG of the Codex and no one even cares to bring this up. Complaining about this stuff is just some convenient scapegoat when there are other more important reasons why you dislike something.

 

[Trashos]

When you lose an eye, you do not stop seeing the whole picture (although you will lose the very edge on the gone eye's side, true). What you really lose is that you cannot calculate depth (and therefore distances) any more. The reason why we have 2 eyes is because our brain compares the 2 pictures taken from the 2 eyes, and does some pretty advanced math to calculate depth, based on the differences in the 2 pics.

There are some cameras with 2 lenses (both active at the same time) that operate on this very principle.

 

[BING XI LAO]

You also can't see past your nose, so you do lose maybe 45 degrees from your field of view.

 

[Trashos]

You also can't see past your nose, so you do lose maybe 45 degrees from your field of view.

Nowhere near that much. But closer you lose a bigger part of the pic, true.

 

[mondblut]

Deus, the sequel to Robinson's Requiem, makes half your screen go black when you lose an eye.

It should have been called Rabinovich's Requiem then. The (((nose))) blocks peripheral eyesight.

 

[Viata]

disconnection between in-game narrative/setting/"lore" and actual gameplay mechanics

Reminds me when I tried the first nuTomb Raider. You killed a fuckton of enemies left and right, then you have Lara killing someone on a cutscene and how bad she felt for killing that person. It's like the people that makes the gameplay mechanics and the people that makethose cutscenes/plot are from different devs and have no fucking idea of what the other team is doing.

 

[Trashos]

In the dreamland, I thought of a better example of why this is something that doesn't matter at all.

In Planescape Torment, after a certain point you discover that your immortality has a limit; now that you're no longer forgetting everything upon dying, you're slowly progressing to a stage where eventually you'll die and become a complete mindless vegetable and nothing will be able to bring your mind back. However, it's impossible to actually reach this point in the game itself. This is because Avellone needed a reason to get the player to care (after all, why not just retire to a life of hedonistic luxury when it's become obvious that learning your past will give you nothing but trouble?) but he also wanted to preserve his goal of making sure players never felt like they ever had to reload (it would be a game-stopper and a player punch to have a hidden death limit). There's a similar deal with the shadows who chase you in cutscenes but who can never actually catch up to you until Ravel's maze and then never again.

Despite this ~ludonarrative dissonance~ Torment is the #1 RPG of the Codex and no one even cares to bring this up. Complaining about this stuff is just some convenient scapegoat when there are other more important reasons why you dislike something.

Do you not see the difference between this example and the DAO example? Here, there is a part of the narrative that is not included in the gameplay, but it does not contradict anything. In the DAO example, the narrative and the gameplay are in direct contradiction.

I see no reason why we should necessarily reach the point of actual death within the game. The fact that there is actual death at some point does have an impact on the narrative that we experience within the game. Unless I am forgetting something, it looks perfectly all right to me.

I am not commenting on the shadows, because I do not remember the details of that situation. At any rate, noone has ever said that PST is perfect.

 

[JarlFrank]

In the dreamland, I thought of a better example of why this is something that doesn't matter at all.

In Planescape Torment, after a certain point you discover that your immortality has a limit; now that you're no longer forgetting everything upon dying, you're slowly progressing to a stage where eventually you'll die and become a complete mindless vegetable and nothing will be able to bring your mind back. However, it's impossible to actually reach this point in the game itself. This is because Avellone needed a reason to get the player to care (after all, why not just retire to a life of hedonistic luxury when it's become obvious that learning your past will give you nothing but trouble?) but he also wanted to preserve his goal of making sure players never felt like they ever had to reload (it would be a game-stopper and a player punch to have a hidden death limit). There's a similar deal with the shadows who chase you in cutscenes but who can never actually catch up to you until Ravel's maze and then never again.

Despite this ~ludonarrative dissonance~ Torment is the #1 RPG of the Codex and no one even cares to bring this up. Complaining about this stuff is just some convenient scapegoat when there are other more important reasons why you dislike something.

Afaik the amount of shadows you encounter in the fortress at the end is greater if you died more often because every death of yours takes the life of a rando somewhere in the multiverse, and those shadows are the souls of those who died in your stead.

That's a great example of lore bit actually influencing gameplay mechanics.

 

[Roguey]

Do you not see the difference between this example and the DAO example? Here, there is a part of the narrative that is not included in the gameplay, but it does not contradict anything. In the DAO example, the narrative and the gameplay are in direct contradiction.

It is contradictory. Die a million times, it makes no difference. Rest forever, the shadows will never catch up to you.

Afaik the amount of shadows you encounter in the fortress at the end is greater if you died more often because every death of yours takes the life of a rando somewhere in the multiverse, and those shadows are the souls of those who died in your stead.

That's a great example of lore bit actually influencing gameplay mechanics.

While that is true, it's abstracted. Dying 1000 times doesn't create 1000 shadows obviously.

 

[Trashos]

It is contradictory. Die a million times, it makes no difference.

Did it specify in how many deaths the ultimate death would come? If it did specify and did not live up to it, then there is contradiction. If it did not specify (which I think is the case, but do not remember 100%), then there is no contradiction.

 

[Roguey]

Did it specify in how many deaths the ultimate death would come? If it did specify and did not live up to it, then there is contradiction. If it did not specify (which I think is the case, but do not remember 100%), then there is no contradiction.

The only direct quote I could find about this in minutes of research was

He told me that my mind is weakening with every death. I asked him how this could be, but he could not answer. He was of no use. I butchered him so that no other incarnation would ever benefit from his uselessness.

Of course your mind does not get weaker with every death and you can happily bring up your int and wis scores to 25.

 

[Sreggin Etah I]

Funny how codexians here agree with everything you said,then in the next thread they're complaining about the lack of combat in Disco Elysium(a game about a fucking detective).

https://rpgcodex.net/forums/index.p...e-admit-that-disco-elysium-is-decline.131120/

 

[JarlFrank]

Afaik the amount of shadows you encounter in the fortress at the end is greater if you died more often because every death of yours takes the life of a rando somewhere in the multiverse, and those shadows are the souls of those who died in your stead.

That's a great example of lore bit actually influencing gameplay mechanics.

While that is true, it's abstracted. Dying 1000 times doesn't create 1000 shadows obviously.

Well obviously, at some point it no longer becomes reasonably manageable. 1000 shadows would probably crash the engine.

But the game nevertheless attempted to create a systemic correlation between the story (every time you die, someone else loses his life and you can go on) and the gameplay (the amount of shadows you faces increases if you die more often, simulating the amount of people that died because of you).

The devs didn't just completely ignore that aspect.

 

[Prime Junta]

In my view we're splitting hairs a bit here. The objective isn't perfect ludo-narrative consonance. It's to avoid ludo-narrative dissonance, and to create ludo-narrative consonance (both on the ludic and the narrative side) wherever it is feasible.

And yes I think DAO would have felt richer and more real if the lyrium addiction had had gameplay effects. It would even have benefitted the gameplay, since mages are so outrageously OP compared to most other classes -- some negative consequences for overindulging in lyrium consumption could have put a small damper on that.

 

[Lutte]

While that is true, it's abstracted. Dying 1000 times doesn't create 1000 shadows obviously.

You know, for someone who throws the autism word around, you sure show a lot of it ie talking in absolutes "it's either perfect or I consider it not done at all". Yes, the game doesn't simulate it entirely. It still takes it into account and the devs did try to make an effort and care.

 

[Roguey]

While that is true, it's abstracted. Dying 1000 times doesn't create 1000 shadows obviously.

You know, for someone who throws the autism word around, you sure show a lot of it ie talking in absolutes "it's either perfect or I consider it not done at all". Yes, the game doesn't simulate it entirely. It still takes it into account and the devs did try to make an effort and care.

This describes just about every game. Seems to me like people are picking and choosing what's acceptable based on other factors.

 

[Lutte]

tunnel vision 101

 

[Darth Canoli]

And it's funny, because that's a lost battle at this point in time. Everyone just accepts that the thing you PLAY and the stuff you read/hear can be in direct contradiction and it's all fine.

On a side note about things you read, modern games throw at you quantity of books to read (like DOS) and none of them matters.

WTF, if i want to read novels, i'll just do that, don't throw your useless crap at me.

Some games make some of these books matter, telling stories leading to secrets or giving you useful answers for conversations/puzzles but even then, only10% of the books are useful.

I enjoy reading but certainly not second rate short stories by talentless writers inserted in random cRPG with no gameplay support.

 

[DraQ]

Thus spake DraQ:

Replace "realism" with "consistency" and you might be onto something. The thing is - consistency is, was and will be the king.
No matter whether you want to be realistic or not (and realism is just a specific kind of consistency), if you show me a shit design in a game, I will show you inconsistency that lead to it.

And lo behold! Inconsistency makes games shittier.

Some games make some of these books matter, telling stories leading to secrets or giving you useful answers for conversations/puzzles but even then, only10% of the books are useful.

A headcrab in every vent is boring.

 

[Kleptocratic debt serf]

Just out of curiosity, which modern/recent (post 2009) cRPGs would the Codex rate highly - as far as ludonarrative consonance/harmony is concerned?

 

[DeepOcean]

The biggest "Whoa" moment I had on gaming was the nameless one facing stuff about his past and then the suffering he had become a spell you can use. There is always the meme that doesn't die, doesn't matter how false it is, that "Torment is just a graphic novel." or worse, a JRPG but one of the reasons it is so awesome is how gameplay and story relate with each other. On fucking MotB, you can create a necklace with the souls of all people you betrayed using the crafting system of the game.

Doing that sort of stuff, isn't even that hard, the only thing that can justify why developers don't give a shit is that most plebs don't even notice what they are missing so why having extra work to implement stuff that most plebs won't care about anyway? A sinergy of story and gameplay on a game that is really trying to explore ideas, themes and concepts of value is why I fucking love RPGs. I like to smash globins and getting loot but when shit like that happen... I tried play BG 2 after Torment and man, what a bad idea it was, while it had a better combat, it was like the game was written by children in comparison.

I won't even mention the irredeemable trash that pass for writing on modern RPGs, I don't even expect those clowns that work at gaming companies to be able to implement a basic hero's journey plot successfully, let alone for they to know what ludo-narrative dissonance is.

 

[DeepOcean]

Despite this ~ludonarrative dissonance~ Torment is the #1 RPG of the Codex and no one even cares to bring this up. Complaining about this stuff is just some convenient scapegoat when there are other more important reasons why you dislike something.

If you assume a position that a game must have 0 ludo-narrative dissonance, then yes, all games will have it but sacrifices to keep the flow of the game don't justify developer total lack of care on that regard like it is the absolute norm these days. If you go on a quest to autistically be consistent with everything on your game, you will just get insane and your project cancelled but there are very clever ways to do it, you don't need to be consistent all the time, you just need to be consistent enough.