Interview Chris Avellone on What Makes a Great RPG at IGN

[Serious_Business]

‘I don't think I'm growing. I don't think I'm developing’ … The box was always in place. If it had moved just a little bit, that would have been nice, but it just didn't.

Getting older eh Chris. It's time for you sit back, sit on a rock and discuss philosophy ; a time grand ideas and leaving the execution of said ideas to the more robust, younger people. A time to fully join RPG Codex as a full-time posting member

 

[NJClaw]

Avellone says, referring to the classic combination of combat, exploration, and role-playing/decision-making that form the backbone of most RPGs.

ah, that vaunted combat pillar which disco elysium lacks...

The three combat encounters in Disco Elysium are amazing though. It's a shame you can't solve one of them without fighting.

I love story games a lot, but when it comes to RPGs I want that combat, which is why Mask of the Betrayer and Planescape will always be better than Disco Elysium to me.

(Not to mention that stories about souls and morality are infinitely more interesting to me than stories about failed communist revolutions)

(I really like Harry DuBois but I never fell in love with DE's world, like I did Planescape's)

I found Disco Elysium to be much more about souls than about failed communist revolutions, but I guess that depends on which themes you care more about. To me, in DE the failed revolution was nothing more than a background detail in a very intimate story about a troubled person who couldn't face loss and abandonment.

When someone asks me to describe DE, the first thing that comes to my mind is not the political theme, but the dialogue during the final dream sequence.

 

[luj1]

Eventually, Avellone says, he got to a point where he decided, “‘I'm going to go find more boxes and I'm going to build towers out of these boxes. I want to see what an FPS is like, I want to see what an RTS is like. I want to see what VR is like. And I want to know how all these different genres tell stories, because I'm guessing there's plenty of stuff that these other genres have learned quite well that would apply to making a great RPG.’”

Sounds a little lost imo

 

[gurugeorge]

I think the story is integrated into the gameplay in PFK better than in any of the other big RPGs of the moment.

 

[Lilliput McHammersmith]

Avellone says, referring to the classic combination of combat, exploration, and role-playing/decision-making that form the backbone of most RPGs.

ah, that vaunted combat pillar which disco elysium lacks...

The three combat encounters in Disco Elysium are amazing though. It's a shame you can't solve one of them without fighting.

I love story games a lot, but when it comes to RPGs I want that combat, which is why Mask of the Betrayer and Planescape will always be better than Disco Elysium to me.

(Not to mention that stories about souls and morality are infinitely more interesting to me than stories about failed communist revolutions)

(I really like Harry DuBois but I never fell in love with DE's world, like I did Planescape's)

I found Disco Elysium to be much more about souls than about failed communist revolutions, but I guess that depends on which themes you care more about. To me, in DE the failed revolution was nothing more than a background detail in a very intimate story about a troubled person who couldn't face loss and abandonment.

When someone asks me to describe DE, the first thing that comes to my mind is not the political theme, but the dialogue during the final dream sequence.

Yes, but there was something lacking about it, that I just can’t place my finger on. The greatest moments were with the Ancient Reptilian Brain, and the dream sequence at the airport. So good, and so moving, but there was just something missing. And whatever it’s lacking, MOTB and PST have it in spades. Perhaps it’s sympathetic characters. PST has Morte, and Grace, and Annah, and Ignus, and Dak’kon which are all very memorable to me. And then there is Ravel and The Transcendant One who make for excellent antagonists.

I think that MOTB and PST set out with a very clear and defined purpose, with the questions they asked. And everyone gets something different out of them. But for me, the question posed by MOTB is “can you be good, despite your weaknesses, despite your appetites” or “how can you overcome your darkest self” and it’s also a tragic love story. And PST’s is “what can change the nature of a man?” obviously and there is so much tragedy woven in, so much soul to it.

I struggle to think what the main question is of DE. There are so many great elements. The tragic love story, the mystery, the dream sequences. It’s like someone grabbed my favorite story elements, but they didn’t coherently weave them together. I really love the woman smoking on the roof and I think she is one of the greatest parts of the game, but I think overall the game lacks focus.

Which isn’t to say it’s bad, by any means. It’s a very accomplished effort by an unknown studio, and it’s impressive how close it gets to the quality of the hard hitters, but it needs more refinement, more polish.

 

[Thac0]

People here seem to struggle with reading comprehension. He talks about how back than those infinity engine games restricted his ability to tell the stories he wanted to tell.
The infinity engine struggles with environmental changes and having different versions of a map. As an example https://baldursgate.fandom.com/wiki/The_de'Arnise_Keep_has_been_Invaded the fighter stronghold quest just spawns in a completely new map for the repaired fortress, making it possible to bug the game by leaving stuff on the old inacessible map. Also item based puzzles are harder in it and you can obviously not make any physics based puzzles.
Bethesdards creation engine (or whatever they call that behemoth they are dragging around since the morrowind days nowadays) has the possibilites for physics and handles tons of different physical objects littered all over the world reasonably well. But you cant rely on the Infinity Engines huge spell arsenal for your quests.

His point with the boxes is that switching engines, genres and subgenres helped him see new angles and new techniques for his storytelling. Its not just that he wants to blow up towns since he runs out of ideas.

 

[luj1]

I think the story is integrated into the gameplay in PFK better than in any of the other big RPGs of the moment.

Not at all hugely ironic

You have a shitty and totally uneccessary buggy minigame in the center of it, which contaminates traditional RPG gameplay and shits on the whole experience (which was fine until Chapter II)

So yeah it "integrated" it pretty well

 

[Zed Duke of Banville]

“You can take all the typical RPG pillars,” Avellone says, referring to the classic combination of combat, exploration, and role-playing/decision-making that form the backbone of most RPGs.

Even writer Chris Avellone agrees that combat and exploration are two of the three fundamental components of RPGs.

 

[Van-d-all]

Eventually, Avellone says, he got to a point where he decided, “‘I'm going to go find more boxes and I'm going to build towers out of these boxes. I want to see what an FPS is like, I want to see what an RTS is like. I want to see what VR is like. And I want to know how all these different genres tell stories, because I'm guessing there's plenty of stuff that these other genres have learned quite well that would apply to making a great RPG.’”

Sounds a little lost imo

Geez. He's way past his prime, and yet...

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

Getting Killed by wolves at the start.

 

[gurugeorge]

I think the story is integrated into the gameplay in PFK better than in any of the other big RPGs of the moment.

Not at all hugely ironic

You have a shitty and totally uneccessary buggy minigame in the center of it, which contaminates traditional RPG gameplay and shits on the whole experience (which was fine until Chapter II)

So yeah it "integrated" it pretty well

What I mean is that most of the choices you make do have quite impactful results much later in the game, sometimes in surprising ways. There aren't that many loose ends, a lot of things you do mean something by the end of the story. With the DLC too (Varnhold).

To that extent I think it's very successful as an RPG proper, and successful in exactly the way Avellone talks about. It has the requisite intricacy.

If you're talking about the kingdom building, isn't that part of the original pathfinder story? It's a bit buggy and a bit sketchy sure, and it could have been integrated better, but I wouldn't say its inclusion offends me.

 

[luj1]

It offends me because I want to be fighting monsters in a dungeon somewhere instead of wasting time on a stupid kingdom card game. PFK would have been better with traditional quest structure. It would "integrate" story and gameplay all the same, if not better.

 

[Chaotic_Heretic]

It offends me because I want to be fighting monsters in a dungeon somewhere instead of wasting time on a stupid kingdom card game. PFK would have been better with traditional quest structure. It would "integrate" story and gameplay all the same, if not better.

Yeah, just want to be d20 murderhoboing across the stolen lands in Turn Based mode. and not play a WE WUZ KANGZ sim

 

[Sentinel]

I really don't understand the point of these interviews. Clearly the people Avellone works with do not care for his advice, if he ever bothers providing it.

"[There] are more interactive and game-ey ways to communicate the horribly long, long exposition.”

Yet every game he has worked on is filled to the brim with walls of text full of drab shit straight out of a fucking realism-era novel.
He is never going to work on his own project again. He's doomed to forever be used as a marketing tool because of the freelance meme.

It's time to drop the "M" from MCA.

 

[CRD]

branching paths are not used for the complexity of developing those systems, not because engines can't manage it.

It's simply a cost reduction formula.

 

[Nano]

Yet every game he has worked on is filled to the brim with walls of text full of drab shit straight out of a fucking realism-era novel.

Alpha Protocol. Though to be fair it's set in the real world, there's not a ton of lore that requires exposition.

 

[Absinthe]

In the old days, we would hesitate before saying things like "Oh we can't burn down that town" or like "We can't erect a new town here" "We can't have a new settlement form up from all the people you help because, you know, that's gonna, you know, cause too much disruptions in the, in the terrain and we can't switch out huge swathes of territory like that and you can't y'know mix and match" but now suddenly that question is a little bit more of a question where we're like "oh we could do that and here's how we could do it but the hardware's allowing us to do it" so I think it's going to allow for some more dramatic visual changes in the environment which I think are great because that's one of the easiest ways to show the impact of your actions as long as it feels scripted like we go like "oh I know that that happened only because I did this and there was another way to do it that wouldn't have caused this but I'm-I'm seeing the effects in the world and I think the the new generation of hardware world will allow us more opportunities like that and I'm kind of excited about that.

Chris Avellone, you poor bastard. That shit was always very doable, and even easier to do when your RPG was like a text adventure. Your problems were never hardware related. You just had bad programmers who were in the habit of saying "oh we can't do that" whenever someone suggests anything that sounds particularly ambitious even if it could be as easy as spawning a few dozen assets (palisade, gate, tents, campfire, cooking utensils, cabin), NPCs, and triggers into terrain coordinates. You had people who lack vision and reflexively assume that if people aren't already doing it, it must be too hard to do. Or that if you do something new, you must reinvent the wheel as part of that process and redo everything from the ground up. If anything newer hardware makes these things a bit more difficult because all the assets are more complicated now.

Tbh, some people have a hard time envisioning anything other than static worldstates and view dynamic changes to the world as a demand to develop and swap between multiple static levels until you cover all event cases rather than... actually changing the worldstate and using scripting logic to add/change/relocate/remove assets based on what the players do. Usually, those people are just bad developers, and mediocre at best.

 

[Sentinel]

Yet every game he has worked on is filled to the brim with walls of text full of drab shit straight out of a fucking realism-era novel.

Alpha Protocol. Though to be fair it's set in the real world, there's not a ton of lore that requires exposition.

I meant every game he's worked on post Obsidian.

 

[Fenix]

Yet every game he has worked on is filled to the brim with walls of text full of drab shit straight out of a fucking realism-era novel.
He is never going to work on his own project again. He's doomed to forever be used as a marketing tool because of the freelance meme.

ANd why are you saying it like it's HIS fault?

 

[Sentinel]

Yet every game he has worked on is filled to the brim with walls of text full of drab shit straight out of a fucking realism-era novel.
He is never going to work on his own project again. He's doomed to forever be used as a marketing tool because of the freelance meme.

ANd why are you saying it like it's HIS fault?

I'm not? I very clearly pointed out that either people don't listen to his advice or he doesn't bother giving it.
It just serves to highlight the fact that the people who hire him mostly don't care about what he has to say, they just use him for real gamer cred (tm) to get attention since he's a fucking legend in the field of RPGs.

 

[MRY]

In the old days, we would hesitate before saying things like "Oh we can't burn down that town" or like "We can't erect a new town here" "We can't have a new settlement form up from all the people you help because, you know, that's gonna, you know, cause too much disruptions in the, in the terrain and we can't switch out huge swathes of territory like that and you can't y'know mix and match" but now suddenly that question is a little bit more of a question where we're like "oh we could do that and here's how we could do it but the hardware's allowing us to do it" so I think it's going to allow for some more dramatic visual changes in the environment which I think are great because that's one of the easiest ways to show the impact of your actions as long as it feels scripted like we go like "oh I know that that happened only because I did this and there was another way to do it that wouldn't have caused this but I'm-I'm seeing the effects in the world and I think the the new generation of hardware world will allow us more opportunities like that and I'm kind of excited about that.

Chris Avellone, you poor bastard. That shit was always very doable, and even easier to do when your RPG was like a text adventure. Your problems were never hardware related. You just had bad programmers who were in the habit of saying "oh we can't do that" whenever someone suggests anything that sounds particularly ambitious even if it could be as easy as spawning a few dozen assets (palisade, gate, tents, campfire, cooking utensils, cabin), NPCs, and triggers into terrain coordinates. You had people who lack vision and reflexively assume that if people aren't already doing it, it must be too hard to do. Or that if you do something new, you must reinvent the wheel as part of that process and redo everything from the ground up. If anything newer hardware makes these things a bit more difficult because all the assets are more complicated now.

Tbh, some people have a hard time envisioning anything other than static worldstates and view dynamic changes to the world as a demand to develop and swap between multiple static levels until you cover all event cases rather than... actually changing the worldstate and using scripting logic to add/change/relocate/remove assets based on what the players do. Usually, those people are just bad developers, and mediocre at best.

Weren't towns not only burnt down, but burnt down in an emergent way in Exile 3 in like 1997, using tech that imitated circa 1990 and designed and coded by just one dude?

 

[vonAchdorf]

He seems to be talking about a narrow subset of (3d?) games while making it sound like a universally truth.

 

[Burning Bridges]

HE RAYP'D ME!

 

[luj1]

Well, at least we know what DOESN'T make a good one, eh?

1. romances
   107 vote(s)
   59.4%
2. player housing
   94 vote(s)
   52.2%
3. mini games
   85 vote(s)
   47.2%
4. cutscenes
   55 vote(s)
   30.6%
5. voice acting
   58 vote(s)
   32.2%
6. eye candy
   38 vote(s)
   21.1%
7. over-the-top cosmetic character customization
   73 vote(s)
   40.6%
8. crafting/itemization
   37 vote(s)
   20.6%

 

[KevinV12000]

"He believes that newer engines now allow more drastic reactivity to be implemented. For example, you can have a quest that results in the creation of a new town in the game world."

In Age of Decadence you can nuke the biggest town in the game and lose all its quests. And that game runs on an old ass engine made in a garage.

Megaton was in Age of Decadence?