Development Info New game: Splintered Kingdoms

Tags: Splintered Kingdoms

There's a new indie CRPG in the works, <A href="http://www.ghostgamers.com/sk/">Splintered Kingdoms</a>. Here's a little bit about the dialogue in the game, which doesn't use dialogue trees:
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<blockquote>This brings up an important point: now that we can send a message to an NPC, what are we supposed to say? Well, this is where the system shows it’s high points. Players use a series of two-word commands, which consist of a command word and a token. The command word can be one of nine different commands: GREET, WHO, WHAT, WHEN, WHERE, WHY, HOW, YES, and NO. The token is simply the rest of the string the user types in, but generally should only be one word. For example, to greet an NPC by the name of “Cardob,” the player should type in the following: “Greet Cardob”. This will be considered in game to be a proper greeting, and Cardob would reply appropriately. If something else was typed in, Cardob might give a sarcastic or less friendly response until the player greets him respectfully.</blockquote>
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So, every time I walk up to an NPC, I need to type, <i>GREET NPCGUY</i> or else I get a negative reply? Yeah, that sounds like a LOT of fun, there.
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Spotted at: <A HREF="http://www.diygames.com">DIY Games</A>

 

Not a good ad for FullSail...

:shock:

At least I hope they have the common sense to use the Infocom Z-machine (or some variant) to power their chat engine...

monkey

 

i guess you never played a game without a mouse before, huh??

i used to LOVE the old Quest series from Sierra... UNTIL they took out the text parser and turned them into "point and click adventures" for 3 year olds

zork was swell too...

>put letter opener in keyhole

 

Retro days are here again...
Greet bob
Who bob?
Where bob?
Why bob?
When bob?
No bob
bob No
Yes, Bob
Yes!

 

space captain: no, I used a joystick when playing all those Infocom games on my C128 back in the mid-80's.

Yes, I've played text-only games and text/graphic-hybrid games, but...

The screenshots for the game make it look like some kind of weird EQ-clone, with a text parser/interface where the chat window should be. And their website doesn't instill any confidence that they've played any of the Infocom/Sierra adventures (hell, even the Legend adventures), which would, to me, seem to be a given if you're going to add that "interactive fiction feel via text parsing" to a game...

(Im not even mentioning the fact that there's a vibrant IF community out there on the web...)

And I'm not sure their ideas about conversations with NPCs are all that revolutionary, either; I seem to remember certain late Infocom graphic adventures utilizing some system by which you could control how you appeared or how you spoke (frex, angry, friendly) to another person...

monkey

 

hello
job
hire
bye

How I hated Ultima for that...

 

And the new winner for worst dialog system ever is...

 

No thanks. Looks like a cheap Morrowind clone as well as high fantasy trash.

 

That's not a bad design decision, that's immersion!

Uhm... yeah.

 

N00b. It was:

hell
name
job
hire
bye

 

Yeah, heaven forbid people actually try something new. Everyone should use the same clicky-dialog formula for teh win.

 

Bioware-lite?

 

see
spot
see
spot
run
run
spot
run

 

Bugger, I knew there was one I missed...!

Take a butchers at http://www.notableultima.com/literal/ for the conversations used in Ultima.