Interview Chris Avellone on What Makes a Great RPG at IGN

[Kalin]

Yes

 

[RNGsus]

If you write about Baldurs Gate (sorry Baulders Gate) then you are promoting BG III. You get respect points with Larian and Wizards of Coast. If you talk a about KotOR, Disney is pleased. If you write about D:OS2 then again Larian is pleased. I think journalists also take into account a perceived number of fans of the franchise.

wtf nobody does business like this except in gangster movies. You don't get kudos, you don't get respect. You only think you do. You want to believe all that work, saying the right things and the grovelling paid off, but it never does. These devs know there is no such thing as a magnum opus, they are not "artists" they are toy-makers at best. The industry has moved on from PS:T, everyone has. And a looooong time ago it was. Cold but true. It was all dumb luck.

 

[Hirato]

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.

It was less a problem in the 2D era, since depending on engine, a chunk of assets could be fairly easily swapped out or even rearranged, and no one would be at all the wiser.

With the 3D era, things are much more complex with the added freedom.
if you want to swap some things out, there's a lot more that has to be considered compared to the 2D era.
And the issues with it scale exponentially based on the needs; a big reason it's very limited, and usually just takes you to a different map if anything changes at all

For example, let's say there's a town and we just plop down a new house on the outskirts.
Problems we'll be facing include:
1. Lighting and Shadows; some years ago, most of it was still baked into maps using what was simply called "lightmaps" - it's not that simple to just swap them out or recalculate them on the fly; it's too costly and expensive.
2. Pathfinding: It's trivial to do for 2D by comparison, but with 3D, you need to cleanup the waypoints, or if you're using newer fancier stuff, swap out the navmeshes being used.
3. You cannot edit the map itself; with 3D, you're usually very limited and restricted to what changes you can make to the geometry of the world; usually no flattening of fields, or tweaking any nearby mountains; you can only add or remove models (this is why a lot of games block of areas with objects)
4. The physics engine needs to be aware of the changes. Generally speaking, anything that wasn't baked into the map itself typically got treated as a giant box, or if you're lucky, a cylinder.
And if you want to scale it up, to say a whole player built city, the number of assets grows exponentially, as you'll need to consider all the possible combinations and cater for them.


As for their contemporary states:
1. All the decent major engines implement full real-time lighting models, so that's no longer an issue
2. Most engines can generate nav-mesh dat on the fly, or are able to combine subsets that were stored in asset prefabs, which either solves or alleviates it
3. Modern open-world engines, can allow you to swap out chunks based on game state (comes with the same scale issues), but making it realtime will at best get you something akin to minecraft
4. Physics engines have gotten a lot more advanced, stability can be an issue, but it's more than enough for adding proper buildings and other trinkets.

So if anything, MCA is right, and making a reactive world (at least one that doesn't look like shit) is easier than ever.

 

[Metro]

Nice guy. Solid dev. But vastly overrated here.

 

[FranticDistortion]

Nice guy. Solid dev. But vastly overrated here.

Yeah, dude just wrote couple of the best RPG stories. Overrated as hell.

 

[Crescent Hawk]

Shit infinitron still salty he fucking exposed your ass?

 

[hivemind]

who cares what an adulterer thinks about rpgs

his soul is suspect from sin and any art he makes is thus naturally harmful to experience

 

[Farewell into the night]

it is a work of the devil

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

I keep thinking that mage (early pic in the video not the later) is a bearded woman. If you're gonna make a woman mage don't make them bearded. Let them be proud of their tits like Mika

Seems like a lot of lazy devs go with just random generation Rouge-likes now. I like rouge-games but I do enjoy fully developed games that aren't random.

 

[PrettyDeadman]

One of the greatest men alive.

 

[Twizman]

“What's painful,” Avellone says, “is when you spend five minutes looking at a character, and you haven't been given any options. They're just talking at you; your choices don't seem to matter.

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

two excellent pieces of advice imo; are you just going through a mundane chat that is there to waste your time or is there something in that dialog that will matter depending on what you say? why create a branching dialogue that is ultimately pointless when you can just give them a quick sentence of text to communicate whatever? MCA also once said that game-writing and screenwriting are the most interconnected forms of writing, you can see that when a quest is designed to communicate story through actual events rather than just a long branching dialogue.

Persona 4 opening

 

[commie]

MCA

Master Chris Avellone

I always thought it was Motherfuckin' Chris Avellone.

 

[LeStryfe79]

It's Marmaduke Chris Avallone.

 

[Boomer_007]

Hold on, Chris.

 

[Grauken]

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.

How fast things can change

 

[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.

How fast things can change

Very true. Now he's just doomed.

 

[baud]

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.

How fast things can change

Very true. Now he's just doomed.

He could find remote work, perhaps under a nom de plume. Though that's on him to try.

 

[Grauken]

To be honest, he sounded more interested in thinking about game design/game writing for the last couple of years than actually doing it, so maybe now he has the time to go after his passion like a philosopher king

 

[Absinthe]

It was less a problem in the 2D era, since depending on engine, a chunk of assets could be fairly easily swapped out or even rearranged, and no one would be at all the wiser.

With the 3D era, things are much more complex with the added freedom.
if you want to swap some things out, there's a lot more that has to be considered compared to the 2D era.
And the issues with it scale exponentially based on the needs; a big reason it's very limited, and usually just takes you to a different map if anything changes at all

Like I said, tech advances actually made this shit more difficult, rather than less, for the most part.

For example, let's say there's a town and we just plop down a new house on the outskirts.
Problems we'll be facing include:
1. Lighting and Shadows; some years ago, most of it was still baked into maps using what was simply called "lightmaps" - it's not that simple to just swap them out or recalculate them on the fly; it's too costly and expensive.

Just spawn custom light sources. I've seen the games that Obsidian made. They're not visual masterpieces. Lighting was basically shit in KotOR 2 and Fallout: NV anyway, for example.

2. Pathfinding: It's trivial to do for 2D by comparison, but with 3D, you need to cleanup the waypoints, or if you're using newer fancier stuff, swap out the navmeshes being used.

Still quite doable. Although if that's such a pain you can take out the palisade and gate, using somewhat orderly rows of huts or patrols & watch towers, and add extra signs to mark that this is now a settlement.

3. You cannot edit the map itself; with 3D, you're usually very limited and restricted to what changes you can make to the geometry of the world; usually no flattening of fields, or tweaking any nearby mountains; you can only add or remove models (this is why a lot of games block of areas with objects)

You don't really need to do any world geometry changes though. At most you remove grass and put a road texture here and there.

4. The physics engine needs to be aware of the changes. Generally speaking, anything that wasn't baked into the map itself typically got treated as a giant box, or if you're lucky, a cylinder.

Look, we're talking tech like in Fallout: New Vegas, where the physics are a joke and everyone is more or less expecting wooden animations. You could easily make some idle animations for trees that look like physics and it could easily look better than the regular physics stuff. Or we're talking tech like KotOR 2, or Pillars of Eternity, or Torment. MCA was overwhelmingly dealing with people who pushed back against creative ambitions rather than genuine engine limitations and unmanageable complexity.

And if you want to scale it up, to say a whole player built city, the number of assets grows exponentially, as you'll need to consider all the possible combinations and cater for them.

I think you're trying to make this sound more complex than it has to be. Yes, if you implement an entire city, you have to consider a city's worth of content and scripting, but the idea that it becomes an exponentially more difficult task simply because you're spawning assets into a location is overblown. Unless you are dealing with some weird shit, that really doesn't have to hold true. And if we're talking small settlements, then it's definitely feasible.

As for their contemporary states:
1. All the decent major engines implement full real-time lighting models, so that's no longer an issue
2. Most engines can generate nav-mesh dat on the fly, or are able to combine subsets that were stored in asset prefabs, which either solves or alleviates it
3. Modern open-world engines, can allow you to swap out chunks based on game state (comes with the same scale issues), but making it realtime will at best get you something akin to minecraft
4. Physics engines have gotten a lot more advanced, stability can be an issue, but it's more than enough for adding proper buildings and other trinkets.

So if anything, MCA is right, and making a reactive world (at least one that doesn't look like shit) is easier than ever.

Honestly old engines could also handle a lot of this shit. If you decided to make a 3D RPG using the Unreal Engine for instance, a lot of the problems you mentioned were avoidable. Pretty sure the Dungeon Siege engine could handle this kind of stuff too. Yes, newer tech allows you to do more shit on the fly, but a lot of it has more to do with engine work than tech advances and it was typically quite doable regardless.

 

[SerratedBiz]

Should we really offer front page coverage to an alleged child molester, rapist, alcoholic and genocidal African warlord such as MCA?

 

[Sentinel]

Should we really offer front page coverage to an alleged child molester, rapist, alcoholic and genocidal African warlord such as MCA?

Usually I'd say no, but since it's MCA I say go for it.

 

[Fenix]

Like I said, tech advances actually made this shit more difficult, rather than less, for the most part.

Yeah, it' nto the first time when "tacj advanes" turned out to be contrary thing - same with reflection in mirrors.
We had them back then in Deus Ex in 20 century, but today it's a HUGE issue.

 

[mondblut]

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.

You meant Fallout 3?

 

[mondblut]

He's doomed to forever be used as a marketing tool

Oh, the irony.

 

[AwesomeButton]

No bad feelings towards Chris, but why do we assume he knows what makes a "great" RPG?

I mean we all know there is only one developer in existance who does...

Spoiler

Just kidding, it's really:

Spoiler