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Codex Interview RPG Codex Interview: Chris Avellone at Digital Dragons 2016

Deleted Member 16721

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Here's what I posted over on RPGWatch about a certain point Chris made in this interview:

Less talking in RPGs? Hmm. No, I happen to like dialogue and text exposition in RPGs.
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I understand loving the mechanics in Divinity: Original Sin and wanting to interact with the dungeon environments in different ways. That is cool with me.

That idea is not mutually exclusive with talking to NPCs in an RPG.

In fact, I think talking to NPCs in RPGs has already taken a big downturn.

Think about a game like Morrowind, where talking to NPCs was not only expected, it was a huge part of the game. If you wanted to know where a quest destination was, or where to find a specific person you were looking for, you asked NPCs. It was necessary. Sometimes, they didn't even give you the straight answer, or didn't like you and told you to go away. Most times, they let you know directions to where you could find what you are looking for.

That, to me, is some of the best design in RPGs I've played. I love talking to NPCs, piecing together clues, gathering information, etc., rather than following a magical compass or arrow leading me directly to the destination.

I have to invoke Fallout 4 here again. There is a quest where you search an abandoned house, and you have to look for clues there. Well, instead of maybe talking to the fellow you're exploring it with (at the very least), or exploring it yourself, the quest marker leads you directly to the "secret" button underneath the desk.

This is 21st century gaming. The games play themselves!
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As new RPGs continue to come out, they are taking away more instances for you to figure things out, gather your own information, talk to in-game characters, explore dialogue, etc., and many are just pointing you exactly where you need to go.

Why have NPCs in the game when you don't need them for anything? Just follow the magical arrow.

So, I would not like to see less talking in RPGs. More talking along the lines of Morrowind and Gothic, please.

But yes, interacting with dungeons and the environment is cool and I greatly enjoyed doing just that in Divinity: Original Sin.
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As for "seeing more, talking less", well, I'm just going to go ahead and play a Jeff Vogel/Spiderweb Software game right now.
smiley2.gif
 

Mustawd

Guest
Less talking in RPGs? Hmm. No, I happen to like dialogue and text exposition in RPGs.
smiley2.gif

You are missing the point of what he's saying. It's not "less dialogue" and it's more about letting the player explore and find out about the world on their own instead of getting lore dumps.
 

Fairfax

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I suspect the "good thing overall" is how they got to develop their own tools, but it also sounds like he's glad it was cancelled. Don't know why exactly he said "take that opinion with me to my grave". It suggests to me that it was a controversial opinion or something like that, but I don't know.

Aliens's cancellation freed up the resources for them to take on New Vegas as a project. I agree, things worked out for the best.
That's 20/20 hindsight, and if that was the case, why would he say "I'll take my opinion with me to the grave" afterwards?
"It's all good because we got to make FNV instead" wouldn't need that follow-up. Probably a universal opinion over there at the time.
 

Deleted Member 16721

Guest
You are missing the point of what he's saying. It's not "less dialogue" and it's more about letting the player explore and find out about the world on their own instead of getting lore dumps.

Well, the best crafted RPGs in my opinion are a careful mixture of text exposition about lore as well as seeing the world for yourself.

Morrowind. You talked to NPCs, asked them about things, read books, etc. But you also saw the giant mushrooms for yourself. The Telvanni towers. The forts full of Imperial Guards. The Ghostfence. Together, it told a great story.

Spiderweb Software games. Graphically not the latest/greatest technology, BUT they still visually told a story. Also, plenty of excellent text about lore, conversation, dialogue, etc. Despite not being a 3D world, you still visually saw things in the game that, together with the text exposition, built a beautiful and intriguing world.

I would ask for an example of an RPG that didn't have a careful mixture of "talking and seeing". Pretty much all the RPGs I can remember have balanced this pretty well, with some absolutley stellar examples like the few I just gave.
 

Mustawd

Guest
Spiderweb Software games. Graphically not the latest/greatest technology, BUT they still visually told a story. Also, plenty of excellent text about lore, conversation, dialogue, etc. Despite not being a 3D world, you still visually saw things in the game that, together with the text exposition, built a beautiful and intriguing world.

Avernum did a great job of not giving you lore dumps. Yes, you got narrative descriptions, but it also let you explore and find things. What I'm trying to say is that a combination of NPC telling you stuff and the player finding stuff is much better than a few NPCs explaining everything in a lore dump.
 

Deleted Member 16721

Guest
Avernum did a great job of not giving you lore dumps. Yes, you got narrative descriptions, but it also let you explore and find things. What I'm trying to say is that a combination of NPC telling you stuff and the player finding stuff is much better than a few NPCs explaining everything in a lore dump.

That's pretty much exactly what I just said. :)

Do you have any examples of RPGs over the years that just gave you these "lore dumps" and didn't show you anything? I must be missing something, because most RPGs have narrative/lore/dialogue text as well as visual elements that show you stuff as well. It's a balance.
 

Mustawd

Guest
Do you have any examples of RPGs over the years that just gave you these "lore dumps" and didn't show you anything? I must be missing something, because most RPGs have narrative/lore/dialogue text as well as visual elements that show you stuff as well. It's a balance.

PoE tends to give you huge lore dumps
 

Deleted Member 16721

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Really? I greatly enjoyed Pillars of Eternity. I will have to inspect it more upon replay.

Even if this is true about PoE, many people consider it a modern classic, myself included. So even if this is true, it didn't make too much of an impact on the overall quality or experience the game offered.
 

Mustawd

Guest
Even the lead writer has admitted the lore dumps were a problem. Just because you or a few of the RPGwatchers were ok with it doesn't mean it could not have been improved.
 

Deleted Member 16721

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Even the lead writer has admitted the lore dumps were a problem. Just because you or a few of the RPGwatchers were ok with it doesn't mean it could not have been improved.

I could easily say the same to you. Just because a few RPGCodexers say the "lore dumps" were a problem, doesn't mean it really hurt the game. :)

Could PoE be improved? Of course it can. Any game or RPG can.

How do most isometric RPGs show you the world? Did Baldur's Gate do much of this "less talking, more seeing"? Probably about as much as PoE. Many areas in Baldur's Gate are wilderness, small towns, etc. Yet that is an all-time, dearly beloved game.

And the first town you encounter in PoE, well, it has oodles of atmosphere and greatly goes a LONG way to showing you what this world is about.

Maybe all RPGs are different and there are numerous ways to make a great and memorable RPG? That's likely the conclusion I would come to. :)
 

Deleted Member 16721

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Elminage Gothic. Lovely, awesome modern Wizardy-style dungeon crawler RPG. Yet, doesn't show much in terms of world-building or lore at all. That's not the focus of the game, really. Although there are scattered lore bits around the world, the focus is more on the gameplay and surviving the various rugged encounters in the game.

Just a simple example.
 

Space Insect

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Geneforge definitely did a wonderful job of letting you discover things on your own. It also helped that the setting was pretty strange and original, so you never really knew what to expect. I loved how people wouldn't tell you about places they would have no idea existed. No one told me about certain agricultural conditions in certain cities that they had never been to. You would not hear about the actual quality of life and quality of the city in general until you had been there. Before that, it was just a great unknown except for the philosophy that the city shared.

A lot of the ruins you could find also did a magnificent job of fleshing out the setting without telling you anything directly. You might find the ruins of a school when previously you had not known there were any schools. You might find ruins of a power plant, further fleshing out the background of rhe group that built it. Even simple tropes like exploring the tombs of a long dead and forgotten species would give you information about them that literally no one else could have told you.

However, I still hope writing and conversation can stay in the game. It just needs a perfect balance of the two.
 

Deleted Member 16721

Guest
Geneforge definitely did a wonderful job of letting you discover things on your own. It also helped that the setting was pretty strange and original, so you never really knew what to expect. I loved how people wouldn't tell you about places they would have no idea existed. No one told me about certain agricultural conditions in certain cities that they had never been to. You would not hear about the actual quality of life and quality of the city in general until you had been there. Before that, it was just a great unknown except for the philosophy that the city shared.

A lot of the ruins you could find also did a magnificent job of fleshing out the setting without telling you anything directly. You might find the ruins of a school when previously you had not known there were any schools. You might find ruins of a power plant, further fleshing out the background of rhe group that built it. Even simple tropes like exploring the tombs of a long dead and forgotten species would give you information about them that literally no one else could have told you.

However, I still hope writing and conversation can stay in the game. It just needs a perfect balance of the two.

Wonderful post, my friend. :)

A good balance is indeed key to me as well. :)
 

Roguey

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That's 20/20 hindsight, and if that was the case, why would he say "I'll take my opinion with me to the grave" afterwards?
"It's all good because we got to make FNV instead" wouldn't need that follow-up. Probably a universal opinion over there at the time.

New Vegas hadn't been released yet, it was a few months away from release. I imagine the people who were laid off weren't particularly thrilled about Obsidian getting a once-in-a-lifetime chance to work on Fallout again given the sacrifice was theirs. :P
 
Self-Ejected

Lurker King

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Good writers don't end up writing for games. For that to change would require a sea change in the industry. I could see it happening some if more powerful + easy to use tools were created, making it more viable for a game to be written according to one writer's vision. And some other changes as well. But big games are too costly to take too many risks or be dictated by a creative, too big for one person to write a large enough portion of it for it to be written in his "voice" - unless you want a lot of trash filler dialogue/lore/etc. And smaller studios might have trouble being able to afford letting a decent writer run free. The thing about starving artists is... they starve. If you want to attract seasoned, genuinely good writers they're going to have to be able to practice their craft with some creative freedom and get paid doing it. A book is a lot cheaper to make than a game, less risk for the publisher, meaning failure isn't catastophic - just unfortunate. Also you only need a handful of people to be competent: Author, editor + a few others. The smaller the chain, the easier to avoid weak links. Honestly, games development is a pretty bad environment for this stuff. There may be a unicorn genius dude out there who's willing to work for peanuts with little creative control over the product with a mastery of narrative and a strong understanding of writing in an interactive context. But I doubt it. The people writing for games now are second rate, frequently manchildren as well.

If good writers didn’t end up writing for games, we wouldn’t have Avellone or VD, would we? If game development is a bad environment for good writing, we should discuss more about this subject and demand better conditions. The question of what is the right amount of writing in a cRPG, and the way it should be introduced, it is complex. Someone could wrongly assume that any cRPG with serious writing would be another PoE with lore dumps, and that any cRPG with more humorous writing would have the interaction of a D:OS. Of course, that is a mistake. We have great heavy text cRPGs, and D:OS would be a much better game with better writing, humorous or not.

I accept that cRPGs are not books, but games to role-play and interact. They represent a specific medium, with specific needs. I also accept that verbose and pretentious writing should be avoided like the plague and that even PS:T is too verbose in some cases. However, the solution to verbose pretentious writing is not childish minimalist writing and focus on actiony gameplay. Focus on gameplay in any game is a given, but what gameplay should we expect in cRPG? Certainly, not the same gameplay you should expect in an adventure or action game. Using the environment to kill your enemies in three different ways is nice, but even nicer is providing the choice to avoid killing at all. Genuine role-play demands more choices, and more choices demand better writing. In fact, even being an action game is not an excuse to poor writing. The only difference is that you will have less writing in an action game. See "Battle Brothers", for instance, it's a strategy game, but it is not idiotic.

And you know, I'd rather just skip the whole thing. When I was a teenager I could read all that shit and exhaust those dialogue trees and read those loredumps, but I really don't have the patience anymore. I've got better things to do. Like whine on the Codex.

That would be a more honest answer. I think the reason why some players are not interested in more writing is that they are too tired to dwell in big dialogue trees and such. That is probably the same reason why some players don’t want to play hardcore cRPGs anymore. It is too time consuming. I think this is pointless, to be honest. If you are too tired to read proper writing or to master a decent combat system you should be play something else in your spare time or choose another hobby.

You are missing the point of what he's saying. It's not "less dialogue" and it's more about letting the player explore and find out about the world on their own instead of getting lore dumps.

I didn’t get the impression that he just want to avoid lore dumps. In fact, he is talking about the problems of the traditional dialogue system for many years now and I don’t understand what is his alternative if not less writing and more actiony stuff. It seems he, like all other veterans, are tired of doing what they did best in the past.

Well, the best crafted RPGs in my opinion are a careful mixture of text exposition about lore as well as seeing the world for yourself.

Morrowind. You talked to NPCs, asked them about things, read books, etc. But you also saw the giant mushrooms for yourself. The Telvanni towers. The forts full of Imperial Guards. The Ghostfence. Together, it told a great story.

Spiderweb Software games. Graphically not the latest/greatest technology, BUT they still visually told a story. Also, plenty of excellent text about lore, conversation, dialogue, etc. Despite not being a 3D world, you still visually saw things in the game that, together with the text exposition, built a beautiful and intriguing world.

I would ask for an example of an RPG that didn't have a careful mixture of "talking and seeing". Pretty much all the RPGs I can remember have balanced this pretty well, with some absolutley stellar examples like the few I just gave.

Exactly. It is almost as if every heavy text game who is interesting must be considered boring now, because PoE is boring. There is a bunch of great cRPGs with tons of writing and there is nothing wrong with it. In fact, lots of text should be expected in any cRPGs that are whorty. I would only disagree with you in the memory part. Pretty much most of the RPGs I can remember fail in this aspect miserably.
 
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Mustawd

Guest
How do most isometric RPGs show you the world? Did Baldur's Gate do much of this "less talking, more seeing"? Probably about as much as PoE. Many areas in Baldur's Gate are wilderness, small towns, etc. Yet that is an all-time, dearly beloved game.

Baldur's Gate is RTwP trash. Don't try and make it seem like it's actually a good game. It is not. fallout 1 did a better job of this IMO. All the IE games, with the exception of PS:T are not that good. You just think they are because of nostalgia. But the games are hardly better than the goldbox series. If anything, they are more like the original Bard's Tale series. Just considered good due to good graphics. Both series are shit.

Could PoE be improved? Of course it can. Any game or RPG can.

Yes, that is what we are discussing. How can RPGs improved? PoE is an example of how it can be improved with better exploration and a lack of lore dumps.
 

Mustawd

Guest
Fair enough. They are not horrible. I just hate the fact that they are the starting point of "good cRPGs". They have a ton of flaws and are not as good as some of their fan boys say they are. "They are a pretty good D&D fantasy romp" is about right.
 

Deleted Member 16721

Guest
Baldur's Gate is RTwP trash. Don't try and make it seem like it's actually a good game. It is not. fallout 1 did a better job of this IMO. All the IE games, with the exception of PS:T are not that good. You just think they are because of nostalgia. But the games are hardly better than the goldbox series. If anything, they are more like the original Bard's Tale series. Just considered good due to good graphics. Both series are shit.

Yes, that is what we are discussing. How can RPGs improved? PoE is an example of how it can be improved with better exploration and a lack of lore dumps.

What I'm saying is, I don't agree with the "less talking" bit in this sense. As or your specific PoE example, I will have to re-play it to get a better idea of this criticism and how it affects the game.

Large amounts of lore text is not inherently bad, by the way. At least, not in my opinion. I also love reading lore books in all RPGs when given the opportunity, including once reading damn near every book in Morrowind some years back. :)

I have no nostaligia for Baldur's Gate, by the way. I was a console gamer until around 2013, when I started playing catch-up for all the computer RPGs I missed over the years. Baldur's Gate was one of them that I played an completed, and I thought it was one of the best RPGs I have ever played, period.

RTwP is also my favorite style of combat.
 

Deleted Member 16721

Guest
There is also not one "correct" way to build an RPG, or an "end all, be all" design for an RPG. Different ideas for different games.

I love Gothic just as much as Baldur's Gate, which I love just as much as Temple of Elemental Evil, and so on. :)
 

Mustawd

Guest
Fair enough. Yuo have good tastes...sometimes..RTwP is still horribad though.:M
 

Deleted Member 16721

Guest
Fair enough. Yuo have good tastes...sometimes..RTwP is still horribad though.:M

I really like RTwP. I also like turn-based, but RTwP is my favorite.

Real-time, eh, not too crazy about, unless it's implemented more in a tactical way, with menu options for attacks, skill usage, etc. Or it's just flat out fun like Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. :)

I like RTwP because it's got the excitement of a faster-paced battle, yet you can pause at any moment you like to deliver intricate orders.

Then, of course, un-pause and watch it play out for a few more seconds and BAM! Something happens that you have to quickly take care of! Pause again, re-strategize, figure out what you're going to do, take a breath, etc.

It's a constant game of play, issuing orders and having to adapt on the fly, with a bit more overall pace than a purely turn-based system.

Still, I'm not saying turn-based is bad by any means. I love ToEE, for example, or Divinity: Original Sin. But I would probably say my favorite combat style ever was in the Baldur's Gate/Icewind Dale series, as well as PoE, which I also greatly enjoyed.
 

RK47

collides like two planets pulled by gravity
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