Lessons of Torment...

Hahaha...

Once again, I read someone's review and think to myself they mst have played some other game I have never even heard of.

 

Ok, first off, your art criticism is bizarre to me. Just look how generic crap like the BG series is, or morrowind or oblivion, and tell me the art sucks. Pharod's area seemed squalid and depressing, and the hive somewhat squalid, very busy and boisterous. Every area had a feel to it and yet it all fit together, and that can't be said of 99% of the games out there, so right away I have to wonder what you have been smoking. They don't have thermal bloom? Is that the complaint? You sound like you should be playing an fps, not an rpg.

As for the user interface, it's fine. Nothing horrible, nothing great. How anyone could get excited about it either way, I have no idea. Better than but similar to the bg stuff but not really much different.

The combat sort of sucked simply because it is realtime with pause, and because the party members act like nitwits. Thankfully, there are ways to get around this, it just takes time.

As for crashes and slowdowns, did you do a full install? If so you should have no problems worth noting at all, but you must do so manually. An annoyance, I suppose, but nothing compared to the old dos games where you had crazy config scripts for each game.

'the game is still clearly written to be "saved often." At least that's what I started doing after being bitten a few times.' What game were you even playing? This has to be your most puzzling comment.

As for character development, it hardly matters combatwise. Some people got frustrated by the combat for some reason, but it's really all painfully easy if you, you know, have a brain and all. Especially as a mage. Maybe you should memorize something besides fireball???

"There's absolutely nothing of the fun of battle you can find in Fallout, for example, in this game." The combat is not the best in torment, but it is really not any worse than fallout. Fallout just has little text messages and people's guts exploding in its favor.

"Lesson learned: why the hell do great stories and great gameplay have to be mutually exclusive? *Is* there a game other than the Fallouts that manage to combine the two? 'Cuz I can't think of one, not off-hand anyway." Betrayal at krondor, ultima 6, wizardry 6.

 

I think his "re-loading" comment has more to do with the large amount of dialogue options at times and his desire to try them all?

UI wasn't bad, wasn't great. Beats the hell out of the more recent crap I've seen. (KotOR, Fable, and Oblivion all committed serious UI crimes)

 

First, Blackguard is a PtC and so subjected to DM aproval.

Second, the basis of a party is coperation and evil parties tend to go out of hand ... in fact the rulebooks tended to disaprove of running such groups in the first place.

Third, if evil parties are bad then mixed aligment parties are worst since when you have a cleric and a paladin of the game god and the paladin goes blackguard it becames a "it me or him" situation were one of the characters have to go.

PnP is limited, its not a "la la land of mytical non lineraity" since DMs had a story arch and plot prepared as well encounter tables, dungeon maps and a crate load of stuff that does not come out of tin air when a DM says "boo".

If the party decides to not undertake a quest string leading to a story arch then the entire campain session materials are useless and the DM have to come up with new things.

In the end its a "carrot-in-a-stick" as PnP allows the DM to offer more of then and in diferent variaty they are still a "carrot-in-a-stick" and the players have to take it.

 

That depends on the players and a party.

For example, think of a party united behind a common but unequivocally evil purpose. Suppose they're fanatical followers of a cult whose purpose is to kill or convert everyone who believes otherwise, stamp out heretics within through inquisitorial methods, and enslave all inferior races.

Or consider the role-playing possibilities in a crime family. Or a party doing black operations for an evil overlord (whom they might eventually supplant in a palace coup). Or a party that works towards a common purpose out of tactical reasons. Or any of a number of other possibilities.

All it takes is seeing past the clichéd view of evil as just "doing nasty stuff for its own sake" or "being selfish in a completely short-sighted way."

And that's just where it gets interesting, isn't it?

My current PnP campaign actually involves a mixed party, with one player (secretly) the analogue of a blackguard, and (secretly) recruiting other members of the party to her cause, with another player a paragon of virtue, becoming increasingly isolated. The trick is that they're united behind a common purpose -- fighting against an enemy that threatens them both, that the good ones want to destroy and the evil ones want to supplant.

Of course, things will get interesting once they actually get to the point where they have to choose which way to go. I as the gamemaster will set up a situation where there is a third option -- but I'll leave it up to the party to decide what to do; even think of some completely different way of solving it. (In fact the third option is already built into a plot twist that I haven't yet revealed, although I have dropped some hints so perhaps some of them have an inkling that something's wrong.)

Funny, that -- I haven't actually been drawing dungeon maps or setting up encounter tables in over a decade. I do think of major plot points, set up environments, and set up conflicts and other situations where the players have to make hard choices wherever I can. IMO it's far more important to create (or read yourself into) a believable world than to draw up dungeons.

If you're interested in how I set up adventures, there was a time I kept some of my materials on the Net. Here's an adventure I wrote in 2000 or thereabouts:

[ http://www.seittipaja.fi/isfastan/html_ ... dates.html ]

(There's a lot of other stuff on that site about a long-running but now suspended/defunct campaign.)

Quite often I'm outsmarted by my players and have to ad-lib -- and very often that's when things really get interesting. If I know my world well enough, I can pull out stuff as I go, sometimes coming up with absurd situations that I need to work into the story afterwards. I'm a bit short on imagination, you see, and working with what the players throw me helps a great deal in that department.

Which is one reason I stopped making elaborate prepared areas and encounters. Instead, I know what my story hooks are, have some ideas about how to hand them to the party, but if the party decides to do something completely different, I'll just have to ad-lib some other way of handing them the story hook. If it goes well, they'll feel just as if it was *them* who stumbled upon the story. It's sort of like sleight of hand in a way.

Example: in a campaign situated in a semi-mythical version of Egypt during the Roman Empire, I had planned for a certain encounter, involving a temple and a tomb, in the city of Meroë, in Nubia. Turns out the party made some choices I hadn't anticipated and were effectively run out of the city before they got there, and were forced to hike back towards Egypt along the edges of the desert (couldn't go through the cultivated areas because people were after them). After some hard marching they looked for a hidden and defensible spot to set up camp to rest. When searching for firewood they came across a door hidden in the cliffside. All I had to do was rearrange my back story a bit to explain how come the tomb was there rather than in Meroë, and in fact it ended up enriching it (the explanation was that the individual buried there, a Nubian high priest, was defrocked and exiled because of some horrible crimes, and his followers dug his tomb in that hidden spot to prevent it being desecrated; my back story already had the horrible crimes, and I only had to change the individual committing them).

The trick is to make like the magician who asks you to pick a card, any card. It's not that hard. After all, in a PnP session you can't save-and-reload to figure out how the trick was done. ;-)

 

This isn't meant as a personal attack although it's probably going to sound that way.

Anyway after reading your comments here and in your Save-itis thread I can't help but think the problem is with you and not the game. You seem to be fixated on experiencing every single little thing and doing everything 100% "right" in one play through. As others have pointed out you don't need to do everything and can botch quite a bit and still make through the game. Just relax and enjoy the game and not worry about not doing everything and making mistakes. Make some mental notes of things you could have done differently and try them on another playthrough. Just my 2 cents.

 

I'm sure it's *partly* me -- that is, I'm more susceptible than I should be to the mechanism that reinforces save-and-reload behaviour. However:

(1) I know for a fact that I'm not alone -- many people, even some here on the Codex, say that they fall easily into the same trap, if the game design reinforces that behaviour, and

(2) I have played and enjoyed games *without* falling into this trap, in particular the Fallouts: they did not reinforce save-and-reload anywhere near as much as PS:T and most others for that matter. Not coincidentally, these are the games I've enjoyed most.

(Incidentally, I don't save-reload anywhere near as much in shooters or strategy games.)

As a software designer, I feel quite strongly that "the user is never wrong" -- that is, it's the user interface's job to explain itself and reinforce productive behaviours, rather than expecting the user to be productive *despite* the system and the user interface. This applies to games exactly as well as productivity applications.

(And before someone accuses me of wanting to play Oblivion again, no, I don't mean that the game should hold your hand, walk you through every quest, and have little blinking !'s on quest-givers. I mean that it should make routine tasks (such as opening locked/trapped containers, basic inventory management, other chores) easy, and it should reinforce desired behaviour through in-game rather than metagame features. For example, failures should have believable and interesting consequences rather than simply "bruup, no cookie for you.")

(Also, this particular issue has gotten blown somewhat out of proportion here due to the discussions that took off.)

 

So basically the only game that makes you happy is one with no replayability? Great.

 

(sigh)

No, dear. If that were the case, I would not be constantly singing the praises of Gothic 2 and its multiple paths through the game.

What I want is simply this:

Interesting. Consequences. For. Failure.

How difficult a concept is this to grasp?

I'll try drawing a picture.

Suppose you had a storyline that required solving quests Q1, Q2, Q3, and Q4. These quests would have to be "rigged" to succeed -- that is, there would be multiple paths through them, but the end result would be that the player moves to the next phase in the story.

Now, normally story quest structures are linear: Q1->Q2->Q3->Q4. You may or may not take side quests on the side, but they won't affect the main story. In some games, the main quests could have variable outcomes that affected some parameters in the later ones. We'll ignore that for the moment.

Some games -- often the ones I've most liked -- have some sort of branching structure:

<table>
<tr>
<td>Q1</td>
<td> ->b1</td>
<td>->Q2</td>
<td>->a1</td>
<td>->Q3-></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td></td>
<td>->b2</td>
<td>-></td>
<td>->a2</td>
<td>-></td>
</tr>
</table>

So you could take either path b1 or b2 from Q1 to Q2, and path a1 or a2 from Q2 to Q3, and so on. Picking one precludes picking the other. This is already miles better than linear play-through with side quests (the typical pattern).

What I'm looking for is this:

<table>
<tr>
<td>Q1</td>
<td> ->b1(success)</td>
<td>->s1</td>
<td>->Q2-></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td></td>
<td>->b1(fail)</td>
<td>->f1</td>
<td>-></td>
</tr>
</table>

That is succeeding in quest b1 would lead to path s1 to get to Q2, but failing in it would lead to path f1 to get to Q2. If f1 followed logically from failing b1, and was as interesting/rewarding as (but different than) a1, there would be a strong incentive for the player to keep playing rather than try, try, try again until they succeed. This wouldn't even have to be the structure with *every* quest -- just enough of them to nudge the player into staying in character. This structure would greatly *enhance* replayability, since the branch structure of the quests would be less obvious and would have more variety.

Anyhoo, I'm sorry I insulted your baby. Should've known better. Perhaps it's better to call a halt to this particular thread.

(Why does the system add all that whitespace above my tables, I wonder?)

 

Reminds me of WC III were if you failed some missions then the next campain area would be diferent and if you screwed up the main line enough you get dump into the defend Earth final missions that were pretty much impossible to beat.

WC IV had that to some extent, the very first dialogue option on the game dictated how you would play one of the missions later on.

 

Freespace 1 had some of such stuff. At some missions, failure in achieving certain primary or secondary objectives would result in changing/altering the next mission and they would eventually branch into diferent directions (allthough coming back to the main line after 1 or 2 missions)

Also, in Freespace 2 in the end even dieing was an option. ( but first after you had passed some point of the mission of course)
If you didnt make it in time to the jumpgate you would get a alternative cutscene describing you as a hero who sacrificed himself.

Pretty neat stuff

 

I don't care if you insult it, I just find your 'logic' to be bizarre. I did not read this whole thing, because you have a tendency to be rambling and kind of incoherent, but the real conflict I see is simply that 'save and reload' and real consequences are somewhat conflicting in nature.

If you have real consequences, that is the only thing I could see that might make me want to reload. In torment, most of the game is just sort of background story. If you fail to expose it, you fail to expose it. It is a game more about exploring a world than completing some sort of quest, and you seem unable to enjoy that for whatever reason, but I have to say that it is not a failing of the game but just your taste (which is rather bizarre compared to, well, everyone ever, pretty much).

 

The only time you ever really need to re-load in Torment is when you stumble apon one of those insta-failure, gameover triggers -- I.E. Requesting the Gorgon prostitute to remove her veil (what can possibly go wrong?), striking that angel fuck with his own sword instead of the chains that bind him (lol), dying on the Negative Material plane (you suck), etc... Any other case and it's your own damn stupid fault. Seriously, if you did something that induced a "bad" consequence that you did not "enjoy" - grin and bear it! The game goes on...

 

The only game I can think of off the top of my head with the initials "WC" is Warcraft, but there haven't been four (I don't think fanboys will let them get away with that without Starcraft 2).

 

Wingcommander? All these acronyms get pretty fucking ridiculous. Is it so hard to type a whole word out, at least the first time it's discussed in a thread?

 

@ Junta
Your longwinded explanation doesn't apply to your examples. Failing to find the Ignus chick (which is silly, because they told you where she is) isn't failure of the quest. It is necessary to distinguish between a failure of the character (quest actually made impossible because character killed person X) and a failure of the player (has all the information, can complete the quest, but for reasons of incompetence, doesn't). In your case with the Ignus chick (and in fact pretty much all your examples), it's quite clearly the latter.

Your diagrams are passable but the last one should only apply to main quests in that "failure" can still lead you to the next quest in the main quest series. Otherwise if all side quests are like this too, choices become inconsequential. In other words, your last diagram should ideally be an exception rather than the common case.

 

Of course its Wing Commander ... is there a WarCraft 4 out yet?

And I am not going to type the whole name because you know what the name of WC III and WC IV are?

Wing Commander III: The Heart of the Tiger
Wing Commander IV: The Price of Freedom

 

Hello?

Er, how about just Wing Commander 3 and Wing Commander 4?

 

Ah, that explains it.

Personally, I find discussion gets more coherent if I try to make a small effort to understand what the other guy is saying instead of just making knee-jerk responses. But suit yourself...

 

A self-ironic statement if there ever was one.

 

Edit: You're right, Slylandro -- I was being unnecessarily rude in my response to you, and I apologize. I did read it through, though, and I believe I understood it. I'll go back and re-read it to make sure.

Edit: Here are a few responses and clarifications to your arguments, point by point, as you requested.

The CRPG reference UI I primarily had in mind was the one in Neverwinter Nights: that one is very fluid to use; routine tasks are never more than a click or a keypress away, and there's very little pixel-hunting involved. (Disclaimer before you accuse me of liking yet more sucky games, yes NWN as a game sucked, but that was because of the utter lack of imagination in the plot and setting, not because of the engine.) To pick a game that's more contemporary to PS:T, the Fallouts also had excellent, fluid UI's.

The "consol-itis" UI's I had in mind were the KOTOR and the Oblivion ones: nope, they're not as fluid as the ones in NWN or Fallout, yep, they have obvious console-derived warts and it's a cryin' shame that the devs didn't put the extra couple of weeks work in to get rid of the warts (or, rather, it would be if Oblivion was a good game to start with), but yep, I maintain that they're way less annoying than the one in PS:T.

Finally, since you asked for it, and since I'm in a good mood today given that we won the Eurovision song contest, with style too, here's a long-winded ramble in response to your long-winded ramble. I'm afraid that even after re-reading it, I feel that your perceptions of PS:T are clouded by the fact that you liked it so much: I get the strong feeling that you're rationalizing away poor design decisions rather than admitting they're there. But anyhoo:

I believe I have addressed this in other posts. However, to recap:

(1) Games are based on reinforcing some ultimately pointless behaviour (like hitting a ball across a net, turning over cards with little pictures on them, moving little statues on a board, or clicking buttons on a computer).

(2) If a game reinforces behaviour that's enjoyable, we experience it as "good gameplay." If it reinforces behaviour that's not enjoyable, we experience it as "poor gameplay."

(3) If a game has a quest structure that is simply based on succeed => get reward, fail => get nothing, it will reinforce save/reload behaviour, which is not enjoyable. On the other hand, if a game has a quest structure that has different but equally interesting consequences (from a gameplay point of view) for success and failure, it will tend to reinforce staying in character and continuing play rather than save/reload. This is more enjoyable, and therefore better gameplay.

(I've detailed elsewhere in this thread how a game could be structured to reinforce this type of behaviour, e.g. by having a quest path fork through success/failure in a quest in addition to or rather than player choice such as joining a faction. Others have pointed out games that do, in fact, do this -- e.g. the Wing Commander series.)

My experience on this point differs from you considerably. My first character was a rogue-type: high DEX, high CHA, low WIS, rest average. As a result, I had severely restricted dialogue options (due to low WIS and average INT, the CHA did get me some), I was next to useless in combat (because there were no missile weapons available, because stealth/backstab was so poorly implemented, and because there were no feats available to make use of high DEX in combat), and I derived virtually no benefits from my thief skills (since there were so few traps and locked containers that could not be dealt with without thief skills, and since I didn't actually come across a single situation where I would have had to use pickpocket, other than stealing from shops.)

Since you stated unequivocally that "There weren't any character development choices that easily resulted in a squib," I concluded that you weren't thinking very critically, and interpreted this behaviour as consistent with what's known as "fanboy-ism" here.

I believe I already addressed this above. Once more, you use an unequivocal, unqualified statement ("it's in fact one of the best I've ever seen as CRPG's go"), which once again is strongly inconsistent with my experience (incidentally, I design and test UI's as a part of my job). This reinforced my perception that your judgment is clouded by the fact that you liked the game so much.

Here you're actually arguing past me: I'm no big fan of console UI's, especially console UI's ported over to PC's. However, some ports with clear "consol-itis" still manage to be much more fluid in use than the UI in PS:T. As I mentioned, the "reference UI" I had in mind was the one in NWN -- nope, it's not perfect, but it does manage to handle a huge amount of complex gameplay in a simple, intuitive, and fluid way.

(snip rest of discussion of console UI's, with which I by and large agree, but which goes off at a tangent that I don't feel needs to be discussed further here)

 

Ok, this is going to make me look like VD but...

Thanks although I'm not too sure I requested a point by point analysis. I was simply pointing out that your reaction to my first post was a bit of a knee jerk as well. I'm hardly a fanboy of PS: T. Storywise it's excellent but as a game it's terrible, but I have different reasons for my opinion.

I remember NWN being little better except for the bottom row of keys that you could popup. I wouldn't say that NWN's UI was that much better. Remember, as Mantiis pointed out, you can bind things like lockpicking and spells and such to hotkeys in PS: T. Requires a bit of customization but nothing hard. The reason NWN's UI seems so much simpler again requires a firm grasp of the context. In NWN (I don't know if this is still true for the expansions as NWN was too boring for me to continue), you have very little control over your allies, eg when they drink potions and other important details. In PS: T, all of this is under your direct control. There is some automated stuff, eg Fall-from-grace can be told to auto-heal, but most of the time you have to control all 5 party members, not just yourself. This is why the UI seems that much more annoying in contrast, because every difficulty is multiplied. In NWN, you have very few allies and they're almost totally autonomous. So less interface issues, but unfortunately more AI issues. Either way, a number of grievances for the player. In other words, another tradeoff. This is well documented on the Bioware forums and in reviews just in case you didn't run into these problems. In short, NWN isn't a good comparison I'd say. I would say it'd be more appropriate to compare NWN's UI with Fallout's actually or Arcanum's since in all three, you are mainly controlling a single character, everyone else is just a tag along. PS: T's user interface is better compared/contrasted with Baldur's Gate's. And it beats it fairly handily. Is PS: T the first Infinity Engine game you played? Also, how often do you play strategy games? You'll notice that games that fall into those two categories had some of the interface issues you mention.

Agreed. It had the right ingredients for a good game but no cigar in the end.

I think this is an indication you missed my point. My point is that UIs should be compared/contrasted with reference to what they were designed to help the human interact with. KOTOR, Oblivion, much of the Final Fantasy series, and console RPGs in general have radically different (read: usually simpler) gameplay, and therefore their UIs was simpler. Could you aim a Force Whirlwind at a specific location (not a character), hoping that the moment a guard opens the door, the Whirlwind would have already been on its way? Nope. You can do something very similar to this in PS: T with fireball. Can you direct a companion to move to a specific place without being actively in control of said companion in KOTOR? Nope. You can in PS: T. I'm not arguing that the PS: T UI can't be improved. I just think that your context (console RPGs and simpler gameplay) exaggerates the UI weaknesses. PS: T's UI was designed with respect to the type of gameplay being offered- direct control over 6 characters in "real time." Heck, even NWN's UI was almost certainly based off of PS: T's, which shows you how good it was.

I've never rationalized away poor design decisions. No offense, but basic reading comprehension indicates (several times over) that I agree there are problems with PS: T. Do I have to quote myself? I've made this point over and over again but you can't seem to understand it. I'm not sure if you just missed them or what. There are indeed problematic design issues in PS: T. I just disagreed with a few of the ones you proposed. I'm not going to say it again, I'm not a machine.

Yes, and I addressed those new posts, with no reply, eg the one regarding the modron cube. A quick recap: you argued that PS: T contained many badly designed quests which severely punished the player for failure. I asked for examples. You replied, and I quote:

Problems:
(1) Most of these aren't even quests
(2) Most of them involve problems with the player (not searching the curiosity shop with enough enthusiasm) as opposed to the game
(3) Most of these don't represent actual failures of a quest-- as I pointed out earlier,

Regarding the modron cube, you countered that, and again I quote,

but I pointed out that this was unnecessary since going to the curiosity shop was a requirement for completing the game and therefore the player had to have encountered the Modron Cube at some point. The player's failure to assess the significance of the cube is fine, since it's a side quest and it rewards the more adventurous players who buy the cube out of curiosity. Part of the thing about RPGs and adventure games that make them so fun is that they reward self-driven exploration.

True.

But the problem again is, what exactly do you mean in terms of "but equally interesting consequences" for success and failure? Your examples given earlier don't work. You did not "fail" any quest by not finding the Ignus chick. So there could not have been anything to do as a consequence for "failing" the quest, because you didn't fail it. Failing it would be killing the Ignus chick. Or killing Ignus. Or breaking the decanter. Not completing a quest yet != failing the quest.

This I can agree with in part. Thieves aren't as good as they are in most other games, and in PS: T they just didn't have good equipment designed for them. The squib part is exaggeration though because (in case you didn't realize this) you can switch from the thief class to the fighter class or to the mage class or vice versa at any point after you acquire Dak'kon and Annah. This part of PS: T is actually very innovative and part of the reason why I argue that PS: T is extremely forgiving when it comes to character design. In fact there's a lot of debate whether it's an adventure game or an RPG because of this. P.S. That character probably would've made a good fighter.

Well you jumped to conclusions. You don't see me jumping to the conclusion that you're an RPG n00b just because you only recently played PS: T (and gasp, after Morrowind!)

It's only an unqualified statement when you remove the next sentences after that one sentence you quoted. That's nice that you design UI. I don't design UI for my job but I had to take it in undergraduate so I know the same principles. And the UI still doesn't look bad to me. In fact it was good enough apparently to inspire Bioware to take some hints to change their UI in BG II -> NWN. Does that circular menu look familiar? Bioware added a couple extra things but overall a lot of it is the same. If your contention is that game UIs have generally improved over the years, I won't argue, but let's not exaggerate the problems of PS: T's UI. In its proper context and when you consider how many later games used a similar UI (eg NWN and to a lesser extent ToEE) its UI was fine. Certainly the amount of control it gave you made up for some of the shortcomings, AI still being weak even today. I don't know if you've played Arcanum but if you have you almost definitely encountered cases where your AI friends decide to pick up random garbage and rocks on the way home and end up encumbering themselves like idiots. Or casting the wrong spells at the wrong time. There is some of this in Fallout too, unfortunately. If you haven't played Arcanum yet (my guess is that you haven't since you make no reference to it), play it. If you loved Fallout it's near impossible for you to not like Arcanum.

 

Correct, the allies are basically autonomous, and you only have control over some of their AI behaviour (melee/missile, distance to follow, attack on sight or attack on signal, some spell preferences and so on). That, however, is a design decision rather than a UI decision. I also prefer direct control over allies since it greatly adds to the tactical aspect of combat.

I would frame this a little differently: the UI fails to address the increased complexity required by full control over party members. This is far from an insoluble problem: RTS games like Myth solve the proble excellently. IOW, I definitely see this as a UI design failure.

I believe it is. I did try out Baldur's Gate 2, but didn't get very far; real life intruded and I never got back to it. It's still waiting in my shelf for me to get back to it.

Quite a lot, actually. IMO they're precisely the UI paradigm to follow for a game that gives you full control over more than one character ("unit").

Isn't that the fundamental purpose of a UI?

Again, I would separate the design decisions (what kind of gameplay to implement) from the UI decisions (how to control the gameplay). The problem with console ports is primarily the dumbing down of gameplay, and only secondarily inheriting UI's that are designed to work with a gamepad.

The most egregious example of UI consolitis I can think of is from Deus Ex 2 -- which, incidentally, is also the most egregious example of gameplay consolitis I can think of. In that game, the UI was unbelievably annoying because it made no use of the strengths of the keyboard and mouse (the ability to point precisely, and the ability to key in a huge variety of single-action commands, as in keypresses and key combinations).

OTOH, in Oblivion for example the UI actually works perfectly well with a mouse and keyboard; the consolitis warts in the UI are cosmetic rather than crippling. Even the Oblivion game engine hasn't been too badly crippled by consolitis. The death-stroke to that particular game has fallen in the dumbing down of the content and the challenge -- which has everything to do with the console *market* and nothing to do with the console *platform.* (And, incidentally, the Elder Scrolls engine would make a perfectly good platform to create a really engaging game, if someone just set their mind to it.)

(snip)

Hm. I really don't see too many commonalities between the two, other than at a very fundamental level that's pretty much shared by all games that involve pointing and clicking.

(snip)

(snip quote)

OK, scratch those examples. Let me throw a question back at you.

Can you think of a *single* case in PS:T, where the consequence of failure in a quest or picking the "wrong" option in a dialogue was something other than not getting candy (where "candy" = XP, stat boost, nifty item, or some other immediate, obvious, and tangible reward?)

If there is one there, I didn't run across it. The non-combat gameplay is entirely based around (a) making the "right" character development choices (wrong choice = no candy) and (b) making the "right" choices in dialogues (wrong choice = no candy).

I repeat: IMO the biggest problem with PS:T's structure is that there are no negative consequences in the game beyond "no candy." This dynamic strongly reinforces save-and-reload playing, ergo, it's poor game design.

(snip branch that risks devolving into isn't-is-too, which I really don't want to get into)

I can't pick an example from inside PS:T, because it wasn't written to be played that way (which is precisely my beef).

You're clearly an intelligent and thoughtful kind of guy, Slylandro, so think about it for a moment: I'm sure you can come up with examples of your own. I'll get you started with a hypothetical and trivial one.

Suppose you've found out from a rumor that the Grand Panjandrum of Poobah has the Modron Cube safely stashed in a vault to which he holds the key, which he keeps on his belt.

Now, in a typical well-designed game, you could have a few options to get the key: if you're a thief, you could pickpocket it; if you're a fighter, you could hack your way through his bodyguards and get it; if you're an enchanter, you might be able to hypnotize him and get it, and so on.

Now, suppose you're a thief and tried to pickpocket it, but failed. In most games, that would be that -- no Modron cube, pissed off Grand Panjandrum, probably a quick run away from the guards, or a fine to be paid, or something like that. End of story, and for at least many if not most players, a quick ticket to the last savegame.

However, suppose that failing your pickpocket attempt got you thrown in the clink. Suppose that your cellmate turned out to be a member of the resistance against the Grand Panjandrum, and he let you in on a jailbreak organized by the Resistance, thereby connecting you to the series of quests that get you to join that faction (if you want to).

(To keep the trees manageable, the join-up quests would have to be shared -- that is, there would have to be multiple paths to get into them, if you wanted to join that faction, that is. You wouldn't have to add a huge amount of quest scripting to make this kind of thing work: you'd just have to identify your "meaty" quests, main-story or side, and then have lots of small, different, and mutually exclusive "linking" quests to them. Some of the linking quests could be triggered through conscious player intent, others through unintentional failure, some perhaps even by random elements.)

I repeat: not every quest would have to work this way. Just enough of them to keep the player motivated to keep on playing to see what happens, and break the mold of right choice => candy, wrong choice => no candy.

Oh, and what does this have to do with PS:T in particular, since there are very few if any games that actually do this? Only this: PS:T solved the #1 save-and-reload trigger brilliantly -- death, that is. Yet it failed to address the structures reinforcing this behaviour on deeper levels. In my view, this constitutes a major missed opportunity.

(big snip)

...and I think I've said about all I have to say on this topic.

 

The design impacts the UI. For example, in RTS you have multiple units to control simultaneously and the perspective is overhead, consequently the UI must take these things into account, eg hotkeys for production, "bookmarks" for specific locations of the map, the way things queue, etc.

I suppose this part is more opinion, so there's no point in arguing. I think the complexity was addressed fine.

If you do play it, be sure to take full advantage of the quick slots and hotkeys, otherwise it can become a chore.

I phrased it a bit poorly here-- my point was that what the human was interacting with was different in NWN and PS: T, eg single character control v.s. multiple character control.

But you can't separate gameplay and UI! In some sense, the game IS the UI.

I agree that most of the UI problems were not related to the console platform as much as the market. But that's what I also believe for the KOTOR series, since it is more obvious (since it was released for PC almost exactly the same).

Play BG II and you will realize how much Bioware's interface philosophy changed.

Maybe I'm just tired, but did you actually fail a quest? Was this even possible? I don't think I have ever failed a quest in PS: T, and I'm not a particularly intelligent player. (Not that I'm saying you're stupid, it's just I really don't recall any instance of this). With regards to "tangible candy," PS: T didn't have that much of it, success or failure. There are many quests where succeeding just means you figure out more of the story. Sure maybe you get a bonus if you do XYZ but it was all immaterial in a game with almost no combat. In fact, in PS: T, the story itself was the candy. In some cases, doing a certain action meant knowing less of the story. But while some of this could be addressed, there's a certain point at which it becomes implausible. (eg if you kill Vhailor, you really shouldn't still know his backstory. Maybe he keeps a journal but... that's getting a bit too cheesy). If you want an example of an action in which you could've gotten "candy" either doing what was intended or not, the case with Lothar is an example where PS: T offers alternate choices-- you could've given either Mantuok's (Lothar's servant) or Soego's skull to Lothar and he would have been happy. I think there are several others that worked too.

Perhaps, but what strikes me as the central problem was that there were few choices and consequences in general (which is why negative consequences beyond "no candy" seem few). Of course, I'm saying this all of this relative to Fallout and Arcanum. PS: T is still leaps and bounds better than most other RPGs out there.

Well, to each his own but I think most people (judging from this thread) didn't have any reload-save issues. Did you realize this was a game with little tangible candy and very few battles from the very beginning? I think people who did generally didn't care about the candy because they knew it was just fluff thrown in, hence, no reloading for candy. What good is the Celestial Fire when there's nobody to hit it with, afterall.

Precisely. That's why reloading wasn't a big deal. You can't fail in PS: T. Well, you can, but you have to try really, really hard.

And there's nothing wrong with this line of thought. That would make a great quest, for failure to be not quite failure sometimes, and instead lead to the same result or (even better) new quests. I actually like ideas like this, my argument wasn't so much against this as it was to point out that PS: T, having so few possibilties for "failure" in the first place (lacking choices and consequences relative to Fallout), would rarely actually reach such a stage for this to be possible.

However, it's interesting that you bring this up, because PS: T *did* have something similar to what you describe but more simple. In Curst, if you get jailed by the guards (agree to one of the murder conspiracies), you end up in jail. Underground. In the same exact pit with Vhailor, the angry mob of citizens, guards, etc. Which is where you wanted to be, anyway. So in some sense, the character could "fail" and become jailed, and still actually advance normally. Used in small amounts, it works wonders, too much and it makes players feel bulletproof. (There were 2 other ways to get in, one was to escape through the junkyard and the other was to complete several boring quests first that revealed the location of Trias).

Play Arcanum. It does the whole choices and consequences thing a whole lot better than PS: T. (I assume you didn't play Arcanum since you didn't draw any comparisons to it, maybe I am wrong.) Anyone who likes Fallout will almost definitely like Arcanum. It's the spiritual successor to Fallout. Plus, now that you've played Fallout and PS: T, you'll get all the random inside-jokes in Arcanum.

 

Perhaps my phrasing was inaccurate. By failure I meant "failure to say or do the right thing," as in the examples I listed.

What's more, I think you just made my point for me: if a game's quest design is such that it's not even possible to fail a quest, other than by abandoning it and leaving it unresolved, that in itself counts as a point against it (if you like gameplay with different but interesting consequences for different actions).

Once more, my central thesis about this question: PS:T's non-combat gameplay is based on a simplistic model of right choice => reward, wrong choice => no reward, which reinforces save/reload behaviouir. And again, once more, PS:T is far from unique in this respect, and I only brought it up because doing this thing differently, in combination with the marvelous solution to the mortality problem, would have made it extremely interesting to play through without save/reload, and would have immensely improved its replay value as well.

That was indeed an excellent feature in the game -- the "candy" was far more interesting than in most CRPG's where it's just phat lewt or XP. However, this is immaterial to the flaw in the fundamental dynamic of right choice => candy, wrong choice => no candy.

Now we're on the same page. This is in fact very close to restating my original beef with the non-combat gameplay, albeit on a more general level.

You do know that PS:T flopped commercially, unlike Fallout, for example? Don't you think a part of the reason could be the tedious gameplay? Don't you think that many/most people who even talk about it at this point could belong to a self-selected minority that likes it, no matter what?

I didn't know much about the game at all, other than that it had a reputation for having deep characters, a superbly original story, a cult following, and being listed in various CRPG halls of fame. (What d'you mean "very few battles," btw? My experience was that I was up to the armpits in tedious, repetitive monsters gradually wearing me and my party down.)

(big snip)

...which was, precisely, what I meant when I brought up the "missed opportunity." Once more: the missed opportunity was (1) solving the mortality problem so brilliantly, but (2) failing to solve the rest of the gameplay mechanic that reinforces save/reload.

Nope, I haven't yet played Arcanum -- but it's definitely up next on my list, if I can get hold of a copy.