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Interview Chris Avellone Interview Roundup

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Nothing about storytelling. Nothing about reactivity.
How the hell "NARRATIVE system" has nothing to do with storytelling?

The key word being "system". Ie, what Lancehead said.

Anyway, this is a pointless argument. Send MCA an email and ask him what he meant. He'll probably reply to you.
 

Scruffy

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if you are wearing a hat during an interview, you are a douche.


edit
that interview was boring, someone should come up with actually interesting questions, but i guess everything one could ask to MCA has been asked...
 
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tuluse

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That's more of a game balance than a realism thing. AP is terribly balanced (except for the CQC skill which was designed by ~Josh Sawyer~ so is pretty good given its limitations). Also its shooting is pretty bad, as demonstrated by Sawyer:
It wasn't just balance. There was no resource in the game other than time, so as long you could find a spot to hide every 7 seconds (or however long it was), you could just wait for the cooldowns and then go along your merry way. Which means that stealth was also "pretty bad". I would say no human being likes running between conveniently placed hiding spots and waiting for a cool down either.

I think every system except conversations was terrible, and then Deus Ex: Human Revolution comes along and does the conversation ideas in AP even better.
 

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It bombed, no sense throwing good money after bad.

Yet Sega cancelled the Aliens RPG rather than Alpha Protocol.
Because AP was closest to completion.

Aliens woulda blown it away though, again, thanks to Josh. :cool: Too bad Sega didn't have the money to spare, but it gave us a Josh-led New Vegas so things worked out for the best.

It wasn't just balance. There was no resource in the game other than time, so as long you could find a spot to hide every 7 seconds (or however long it was), you could just wait for the cooldowns and then go along your merry way. Which means that stealth was also "pretty bad". I would say no human being likes running between conveniently placed hiding spots and waiting for a cool down either.
I guess some people play degenerately like that, but I never would.

I think every system except conversations was terrible, and then Deus Ex: Human Revolution comes along and does the conversation ideas in AP even better.
AP handled conversations better because they weren't win/loss and used reputation as an indirect reaction system. The only thing HR had going for it in its favor were the highly detailed facial animations and that's superficial.
 

tuluse

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AP handled conversations better because they weren't win/loss and used reputation as an indirect reaction system. The only thing HR had going for it in its favor were the highly detailed facial animations and that's superficial.
What about the lovely feedback and information on the underlying systems?

But yes, not having win/loss and indirect reaction is better. The win/loss thing isn't systemic though, that's hand crafted for each encounter.
 

Roguey

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What about the lovely feedback and information on the underlying systems?
I don't understand what you mean, unless you're referring to how highlighting the option gives the full sentence in most cases.
 

tuluse

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I don't understand what you mean, unless you're referring to how highlighting the option gives the full sentence in most cases.
HR has the thing that scans the person and as you talk to them gives you more accurate information to what personality type they are.
 

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I don't understand what you mean, unless you're referring to how highlighting the option gives the full sentence in most cases.
HR has the thing that scans the person and as you talk to them gives you more accurate information to what personality type they are.
And AP has dossiers you can buy/find that tell you what a character is like.
 

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I may be wrong but I think the conversations in DE:HR were randomised, i.e. the npc personality changes on a second attempt, so selecting the same options would likely lead to different responses from the npc. The developers probably did that in order to give the speech augmentation more value.
 
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I may be wrong but I think the conversations in DE:HR were randomised, i.e. the npc personality changes on a second attempt, so selecting the same options would likely lead to different responses from the npc. The developers probably did that in order to give the speech augmentation more value.
The personality doesn't change, but yes, npcs sometimes react differently to the same questions/arguments, but all ways they can react in are beliavable. Having said that, dividing all possible npcs into three personality types is overly simplistic and arcady. As Roguey said, AP handled it better, because there was no 'wrong' outcome - if you failed to convince an NPC, you were put in a different situation, that usually wasn't better or worse than if you had succeeded.
 

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The "agency" to navigate towards a binary win or loss?

DX:HR's conversation system is clever, but in the end it's just as shallow as any Speech skill check. It can't be compared with what Alpha Protocol did.
 

tuluse

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How does it give more player agency?
It responds to what you do in a conversation rather than just pay money -> get info.

They didn't really use it to it's full potential, but you could do a number of interesting thing with a such a tool.
 

tuluse

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The "agency" to navigate towards a binary win or loss?

DX:HR's conversation system is clever, but in the end it's just as shallow as any Speech skill check. It can't be compared with what Alpha Protocol did.
It has really good systems but doesn't take advantage of them with content. I'm only talking about systems here.
 

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The "agency" to navigate towards a binary win or loss?

DX:HR's conversation system is clever, but in the end it's just as shallow as any Speech skill check. It can't be compared with what Alpha Protocol did.
It has really good systems but doesn't take advantage of them with content. I'm only talking about systems here.

But the system is binary too. You enter a conversation and the outcome is dependent on whether you finish it with your target in a good mood or bad mood. There's nothing really profound about it, it's basically the conversational equivalent of a lockpicking minigame. Substituting character skill with player skill.
 

tuluse

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But the system is binary too. You enter a conversation and the outcome is dependent on whether you finish it with your target in a good mood or bad mood. There's nothing really profound about it, it's basically the conversational equivalent of a lockpicking minigame. Substituting character skill with player skill.
They only made content for binary results, but there is no reason they couldn't have done content for a gradient of results (other than time, money, and creativity).
 

Lancehead

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How does it give more player agency?
It responds to what you do in a conversation rather than just pay money -> get info.
That's not different from what happens in AP; you can still choose to go against or for what you learn from the dossiers, and npcs react accordingly. You may want to go against because you want to rile up the npc, for example.

Moreover a lot of the dossiers are acquired through hacking/lockpicking/whatever which are character skills that the player chooses. Granted, one doesn't need to have invested in said skills to access the information, but the skills are there partly to equip the character for information access.
 

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But the system is binary too. You enter a conversation and the outcome is dependent on whether you finish it with your target in a good mood or bad mood. There's nothing really profound about it, it's basically the conversational equivalent of a lockpicking minigame. Substituting character skill with player skill.
They only made content for binary results, but there is no reason they couldn't have done content for a gradient of results (other than time, money, and creativity).

What does it matter if it's binary, trinary, or decimal? That would still be a constraint on the designers. Real persuasion isn't based on manipulating peoples' "happiness level" or whatever.

I don't even understand what you're trying to say. Who cares about the stupid conversation system anyway? The content is what matters.
 

tuluse

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That's not different from what happens in AP; you can still choose to go against or for what you learn from the dossiers, and npcs react accordingly. You may want to go against because you want to rile up the npc, for example.

Moreover a lot of the dossiers are acquired through hacking/lockpicking/whatever which are character skills that the player chooses. Granted, one doesn't need to have invested in said skills to access the information, but the skills are there partly to equip the character for information access.
Learning the information of a dossier basically requires no player agency. Either you read the thing or you don't. The scanner thing means there is *gameplay* in learning what the dossier would say. It's interactive and thus has player agency.

What does it matter if it's binary, trinary, or decimal? That would still be a constraint on the designers. Real persuasion isn't based on manipulating peoples' "happiness level" or whatever.

I don't even understand what you're trying to say. Who cares about the stupid conversation system anyway? The content is what matters.
That's the whole idea of systemizing something. You create an abstraction which can then be manipulated. People don't have HP as depicted in games either, it's an abstraction.
 

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That's the whole idea of systemizing something. You create an abstraction which can then be manipulated. People don't have HP as depicted in games either, it's an abstraction.

Uh, okay? RPG players don't really expect conversations to be systemized in that way, especially when the alternative (Alpha Protocol-style "the dev team thinks of everything" scripted conversations) has proven to be much more impressive.

Should I bring up the Oblivion persuasion system?
 

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