Preview Dragon Age sightings at 1UP

[Naked Ninja]

No, if characters who got knocked down in the middle of combat get back up after its just to short circuit the damn stupid "crap one of my guys died time to reload" syndrome. Honestly, the number of people who would just let a character in their party die because of a bad attack roll and be permanently dead in these games is so small a percentage of gamers as to be completely inconsequential. And no author of any story ever kills a main character off unless it has some sort of point for the storyline.

Imagine if, in the middle of The lord of the rings, Gandalf choked on a turnip while eating supper and died. That would have made that story SO much better. Dramatic impact and pacing +100!!!

Its got nothing to do with cut-scenes. It adds nothing to the storyline, and Bio and a lot of other companies have realised that players are just going to reload anyway, so they've been helpful and saved us a few button clicks.

The first one to post some pretentious shit about how their role-playing cock is bigger than mine and if a member of their party died they wouldn't reload just gets The Glare.

 

[Zomg]

I agree. However, the cutscene question can be easily modified to ask whether you can ditch the NPCs permanently, a la BG or Arcanum as opposed to KoTOR or NWN2.

Anti-tedium arguments take a hit when you look at NWN2, where you get idiot design. For example, you can defeat one of the hundreds of haphazardly place traps by by running your character over it, watching him die and then autoraise, and then instantly rest him back to full. If the designers are going to be that stupid they might as well hew to the tedium of older designs.

 

[Twinfalls]

No, if characters who got knocked down in the middle of combat get back up after its just to short circuit the damn stupid "crap one of my guys died time to reload" syndrome.

Obsidian admitted, on their own boards, that the reason they use the unconscious-yet-invulnerable substitute for death was because the party members are needed for the cutscenes. We can assume the reasoning is the same for Bioware. My feelings on the "What's the use of death? Do away with it!!" trope are here.

You also appear to be forgetting that these are RPGs we are talking about, not movies or books (or have these things now become essentially indistinguishable to people?)

Anyway, Zomg has re-cast the question in a better way.

 

[Naked Ninja]

Yes, as with any other design element you add to a game, you need to consider whether it "breaks" any of the existing systems, such as making traps easy to deal with.

But really, it was just completely unnecessary to get all rabid on the Bioware guy. It was just being an ass for the sake of it.

That argument was ludicrous. I can see it now. Deep in Bio HQ, the Dragon Age design document. Flip open the first page and read...

"What is this game about?

Answer : Cut-scenes

How can we maximise the number of cutscenes in game (What is the shortest distance between two cut-scenes, in design space)?

Answer : A straight line, ie lets make this game linear!

How can we support the cut-scene idea?

Answer : NPCs who never die!!!"


It was a fucking stupid argument, and did nothing but antagonise someone who could actually have listened to your input and maybe even taken your ideas back to people who actually develop pc RPGs.

 

[Twinfalls]

Yes, as with any other design element you add to a game, you need to consider whether it "breaks" any of the existing systems, such as making traps easy to deal with.

Um, so we agree about the death thing then? Nevmind.

But really, it was just completely unnecessary to get all rabid on the Bioware guy.

You think that's going rabid on someone? I'm not pulling post-count here, it just has to be said - you really haven't been here long, have you?

That argument was ludicrous. I can see it now. Deep in Bio HQ, <bleh>

Someone used the bullshit euphemism 'story-driven', was called out on it, and got all evasive and pouty. What's your fucking problem?

It was a fucking stupid argument, and did nothing but antagonise someone who could actually have listened to your input and maybe even taken your ideas back to people who actually develop pc RPGs.

*slaps forehead* omigosh! I coulda changed DA like totally around into a real choice and story-consequence game!!

I don't know what you expect of this site, but check the url - it's not www.rpgDEVcumgargling.com

 

[Ladonna]

Yeah Ninja, get that cock out of your mouth FFS....



Asking the wrong question now 'chases' someone away....Ok...

 

[Naked Ninja]

Story-driven is a bullshit euphemism? Enlighten me. My favorite RPGs have all had amazing stories. In fact when playing I felt....driven...to uncover them.


Ahaha, a joke involving bodily fluids, my inner 12 year old is laughing hysterically, I'm sure.

 

[Twinfalls]

Story-driven is a bullshit euphemism? Enlighten me. My favorite RPGs have all had amazing stories. In fact when playing I felt....driven...to uncover them.

Context. It's a bullshit euphemism when used to excuse plot linearity, before dodging a simple question about party members being allowed to die or not.

Ahaha, a joke involving bodily fluids, my inner 12 year old is laughing hysterically, I'm sure.

You are so mature! Can you tell me all about the early nineties one day?

 

[galsiah]

My feelings on the "What's the use of death? Do away with it!!" trope are here.

And my response to that is here

You know David - the above actually was an interesting discussion (until it turned into Inventory Wars). If you leave in the middle without considering all the issues, that's no-one's fault but your own.

Personally I'd be interested to know why you equate punishing the party with punishing the player [by killing a party member]. These needn't be the same thing. If character death were made an interesting, supported "choice", then it wouldn't be a punishment for the player. It's only a punishment when your "support" for the option extends as far as:
NPC 1: "Aaarggh."
NPC 2: "Oh how terrible! NPC 1 is dead."
NPC 3: "Shame."
NPC 2: "Shall we carry on as if nothing happened and expect to see no consequences of this for the rest of the game?"
NPC 3: "Sounds good to me."

Clearly no "branch" is interesting when you don't support it as a possibility.
It's your job to support branches by making them interesting and rewarding for the player, regardless of the impact on their party. If you don't want to put in the resources, then fine, but don't say "Punishing the player isn't a real choice", since it's not the character death which punishes the player - it's your lack of support for it as an interesting option. Player reward is entertainment - not just loot and character powerups. You can (I hope) provide entertainment even when bad things happen to the party.


Naked Ninja:
If the reader knew from the start of TLOTR that Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, the hobbits... couldn't die, it would not be a good book. That's the issue here - not that it's a better book if they die, but that it's a dull book if the reader knows from the start that they can't.

 

[Ladonna]

What are your favourite RPG's Ninja?

 

[Naked Ninja]

Really? Oh. Well thats dissapointing. You know, I thought he could actually be meaning they want to build their game around a rich and engaging storyline. Shit, now I'm sad. Truly, bioware is a hive of wretched villainy.

I shall have to study harder, to understand this "context" thing you speak of.

The nineties? I barely remember yesterday.

 

[galsiah]

sutff

You do know that Dgaider is about 100 times more likely not to bother continuing with this discussion after you talk nonsense for a few pages, rather than after some innocuous "insult" right?
Do shut up.
Please don't reply to this without some interesting thoughts on the topic. I'll extend you the same courtesy.
[and if you're "cool" enough not to care about the discussion, that's just lovely - though it makes your original point quite idiotic - don't feel the need to share this delightful information with the group]

 

[Naked Ninja]

@Galsiah : I could tell from the very beginning that Gandalf would not die from choking on the turnip. Like I said, no writer ever kills a main character for an arbitrary reason. Doing so would really hurt the story/theme. Its always done to develop the story in some manner.

In fact, making such a huge impact on a storyline (like a main chars death), not because of a character decision (like you choose to betray someone or whatever, you know dialogue and stuff), but because a goblin rolled a 20 on his dice, simply steals a lot of the emotional momentum and investment you might have built up to that point. Anti-climax.

 

[Naked Ninja]

Favorite RPGs : BG2, Ultima8, Kotor, Planescape:Torment, Dues Ex.

 

[Twinfalls]

You need to actually read Galsiah's comment, the one four posts above - which is addressed to David - and understand what he is saying.

In short, Ninjanude, RPGS ARE NOT BOOKS OR MOVIES

edit: and get into using the edit button

 

[Naked Ninja]

The principles of good storytelling are still the same. Even if your storyline branches/has player interaction.

 

[Ladonna]

Hmm, I wonder if Richard the 3rd thought that when he was killed by a peasant armed with a Crossbow.....

But your right of course, the only time anyone is allowed to die in a game is when they are 'supposed' to. Other than that, they should be invincible because thats the movie, er, game that everyone wants to play.

Kinda like in NWN2, when a main character gets killed, and theres me, with my fucking raise dead spell on hand the second the character dies....guess the invincibility spell wore off eh? After all, I couldn't run the character through, I couldn't burn them up with a fireball cos they would leap back up after the battle!

See, thats the game playing itself for you. Linearity leads down a lovely path of not bothering to replay a game because every character is in your team and none of them can get killed at all.

Edit: just saw your answer.

Can you tell me what the principles of good storytelling are? and then tell me how one allows someone else to put their own choices into this story without forcing the player to do as he/she is told.

What if I killed Gandalf in an RPG. A good developer would take this into account and allow another way of dealing with the Balrog for example, or Saruman. Shit, this was the case even in the Lord of the Rings RPG's that were out way back when! There were other ways to deal with problems (even though the third edition was never published, though it was rumoured to be finished....).

 

[Naked Ninja]

I found Neverwinter 2 quite boring and arb, so lets not use it as an example. I find the fact that my one character will run through a trap, then the rest of them will all run after him and die one at a time, lemming like, far more annoying than the getting back up thing.

Whats your point Ladonna? So your character dies for real, and you get to experience the awesomeness of knowing that this would be permanent, if you weren't about to reload your save game? I hope those few fleeting seconds of watching the load screen are worth it.

 

[Naked Ninja]

Alright, let me give you a hard question in return Ladonna :

Could you explain to me how to build an engaging storyline without any characters? Because if any of them can die at any time, in any order, it is hard for a writer to actually write any kind of story whatsoever. How do you create a dramatic climax of some sort when you can rely on no character actually being alive?

Its a trade off. The player trades unlimitted choices for a smaller subset of those choices, but more engaging plot and dialogue. Maybe thats not your cup of tea. But me, if I just wanted to imagine a whole bunch of shit in my head, I could do that without a PC. I like my game to have a good storyline. Which I can affect, to a certain degree. That is the best we can do with current tech.

 

[sheek]

Ninja: the answer is (obviously), something in between the extremes. I don't particularly like Daggerfall like Twinfalls but Dragon Age seems to have gone to the other extreme. If everything important (character death! ) is pre-determined, how can you call it a game?

How is it not just an over-long and expensive movie played on your computer screen?

@Galsiah: just re-read your post on character deaths and must say it's a good one, you really convinced me with it.

 

[galsiah]

I like my game to have a good storyline. Which I can affect, to a certain degree. That is the best we can do with current tech.

Nonsense - it has nothing to do with "tech". You can create a great branching story if you're a halfway decent writer. The problem is in creating all the extra content.

For a character death to be really interesting over the long term, it needs to be treated as a genuine branch in the story. Not everything needs to change, but there must be significant consequences which are relevant until the end of the game. This takes a lot of development time.

A way to do this well would be to develop a relatively short, but branching game - with the same amount of content, it's possible to cope with a few really interesting branches, so long as the final game is shorter. So long as replay value is hyped to the max from the start, this needn't be a big downside. The outlook shouldn't be "But most players don't replay games!", but rather "Why don't most players replay games?" - because hardly anything changes the second time through.

Even with a somewhat shorter game, you aren't going to be able to branch the plot in interesting ways for the death of each of 10 characters. You could do it for two or three though - and have the rest be relatively unimportant.

You do get a problem here though: if character death is a really interesting plot divide, then it needs to happen without the player needing to play less well. The odds of getting through the game without at least one such character dying need to be pretty small. [note that "but the player will reload" isn't a reasonable argument against this without considering why he reloads: because he knows that there is no upside to the death from his perspective as a player. If there is such an upside (a truly interesting branch), then no sane player will keep reloading on their second playthrough - even if they did on the first]

Also, do read this thread if you haven't already.

 

[Vault Dweller]

Could you explain to me how to build an engaging storyline without any characters? Because if any of them can die at any time, in any order, it is hard for a writer to actually write any kind of story whatsoever. How do you create a dramatic climax of some sort when you can rely on no character actually being alive?

A story doesn't have to rely on characters [being alive]. Take the LotR, for example. Boromir died. Did the story stop? No. If it was a game Boromir could have died at any moment and the story would have still carried on. Gandalf could have died on that bridge and the story would still be ok. The fucking hobbits could have died and Faramir would have had to continue the quest. And so on, and so on.

 

[Ladonna]

Ninja:No no...allow me to explain.

Your first post: (Please learn the edit button as I did before, makes it easier)

NWN2 is the latest in the 'No Dieing' episodes. I actually would agree with you in regards to the no dieing in this game because the controls were so damn weak....The viewpoint made any tactical gameplay non existant, while the playing maps were too small to really gain anything by a BG type viewpoint, which allows much greater combat control. You can turn off the AI in NWN2, so your wrong on that count.

However, as you can see, I used NWN2 as an example of Storytelling forcing the player to do as they are told, even when it is a joke and against the game mechanics (see raise dead spell), not as a combat/adventure example.

Your second post:

It has nothing to do with current tech. All of the little conversations you have in RPG's are scripting, not high tech graphical wizardry. What it takes is commitment and time on the part of developers to code various responses, dialogues, and have them linked to different outcomes (eg: The program checks who is in your party, and comes up with the prewritten responses depending on various factors such as alignment, faction, does the player character have the sword of circumcision +5, etc).

This allows for the fact that, lets say you have Viconia, Anomen, Korgan, and Minsc in your party, the program will check what dialogue choices the devs have programmed for them in the interaction part of the code. It will also allow you to do different things with these characters depending on their skills (see Fallout 2 for more on this type of usage, or even NWN2). Scripting, scripting, scripting. It can be done using ASCII. It can be done using the newest graphical shit on the market. It has nothing to do with tech.

Now, it might be very expensive to voiceover all these dialogues, which is why I and many others here don't care about that kind of cake icing, but give a shit about what the cake itself is like. Say no to full voiceovers in RPG's. Unless you want a nice linear romp, which would be fine except thats all there is these days....

So as you can see, its quite doable, it just depends on where you would like your devs budget spent. Graphics sound and voice should get the lions share? Or would you rather the engine, mechanics, plotlines, dialogue, etc get more of the dosh?

 

[sheek]

I'd also add about death and the meaning of including it in an RPG - look at different genres and how they measure success/failure. RPGs are different from, for example, strategy games in that there is a very thin 'margin' of change possible. Throughout the game you are pretty much constantly, 'linearly' progressing - in skills, equipment and money as well as plot completion - and failure at some task, especially combat, is massive or total failure, and the change occurs in a minute of real time.

In a strategy game for example 'winning' is a much longer process and you can accept many more 'defeats', because they do not close down your options - in many cases they increase them. You have to work harder to avoid more 'defeats' and only after several will the average gamer reload. In a good game you will progress and regress many times before finally winning.

So I think this is the problem and it is linked to the overuse of lethal situations and lethal combat in RPGs.

 

[Naked Ninja]

@ VD : Boromirs death had a lot of meaning to it, the whole him struggling against the rings influence, chasing the hobbits, then throwing it off and defending them against the orcs. Its was meaningful and shit. Seriously. I dislike tolkien, but it was definately not the same as if he'd just died because he he sat on a snake while sitting by the campfire. (Hint, in the movies the feelings and concepts they are trying to portray where enhanced by the music in the background. Lady singing = poignant moment)

Gandalfs return as the white wizard was also meaningful. But it was his death that was the most meaningful aspect, in fact it was the freaking climax of the first book. It had huge emotional investment. Their guide and mentor, lost, gone! Shock, horror, what do we do now, despair! Its actually a perfect example of what I'm talking about. Absolutely not a random death. Not at all.


@ Ladonna : While I do hear you, I am also quite aware of how scripting works, and I am a professional programmer. Unfortunately maths is against you/us/rpg gamers. Every time the story branches, you double the number of options you must script for. If you offer more than one branch, you increase this multiplier. The number of options you must cater for grows at an exponential rate. Its actually not really the sound thats the constraining factor. Its the complexity. You reach a point where it becomes extremely unwieldy.

Now I'm not talking about side quests. Or even Gothic style faction quests. I'm talking about options where you impact the future path of the storyline. Its difficult enough to create a game with 8 different endings. But 16? 32? 64? 128? etc etc. I'm not even going to mention how difficult it becomes to hunt down bugs under that scenario.