I have no patience for RPGs anymore

[Ashenai]

And anyone who's looking for an RPG with no trash mobs, no backtracking, and no bits without meaningful decisions... is going to be looking for a long time.

Is there a reason why this isn't achievable? A purely design one?

Yes. All of these issues are a consequence of choices given to the player. If the designer can perfectly predict a character's abilities and power level (because there are few or no meaningful choices to make in developing them), then he can sculpt every encounter to provide a good, interesting challenge. But since most RPGs give you significant freedom in your character development, it's impossible to calibrate all or even most encounters to properly challenge every character. And understandably, most games err on the side of allowing most characters/parties (even non combat focused ones) to deal with the majority of combat encounters, so they can beat the few legitimately difficult ones by using their carefully hoarded supply of consumables, for instance. This means, however, that for a combat focused party, the majority of encounters will not be challenging.

Backtracking is a similarly a consequence of choice. If the designer knows exactly what path a character is going to take through the game, he can sculpt the game world around them, making backtracking unnecessary. Adventure games, for instance, often do not have much backtracking, because you progress through the game in an entirely linear fashion, and the designer can predict that and design the stages around your critical path. Most RPGs do not have this luxury. Good level/world design can help minimize backtracking, but can never eliminate it, not without taking choice and meaningful exploration away from the player.

Finally, a lack of meaningful decisions. Somewhat paradoxically, this is also a consequence of providing the player with choices. If the game designer cannot predict what choices a player has made before reaching a certain encounter, he cannot guarantee that the choices to make in the encounter will be meaningful for that player. As a simple example: if your character is equipped with a Long Sword +2, then finding a Long Sword +1, +3 Against Undead gives you a meaningful decision about which one to equip. However, if your character has found a Long Sword +3 before finding that sword (because he chose to explore a different dungeon first), then there is no decision to be made, the new sword is simply vendor trash. This sort of issue (where one character's meaningful decision is another character's no-brainer) is, again, a function of giving the player the freedom to play with complex systems as he sees fit.


Re: Age of Decadence: I haven't played that game! If it doesn't have any of these issues, then it has certainly paid a price for that. Maybe power levels are flat, meaning that your character can't get much more powerful as the game progresses. Maybe encounters are balanced towards specialists, so a combat-focused character will be challenged by every combat... and a non-combat-focused character will not be able to meaningfully take part in combat. I don't know! And I definitely want to play it and find out. But I am positive that it had to slaughter a lot of traditional RPG sacred cows to achieve this, because the "timewasting" issues I talked about are a direct consequence of what we expect from RPGs (nonlinear, meaningful character progression, etc.)

 

[Trip]

All of these issues are a consequence of choices given to the player. If the designer can perfectly predict a character's abilities and power level (because there are few or no meaningful choices to make in developing them), then he can sculpt every encounter to provide a good, interesting challenge.

This is exactly what modern RPG designers do. (When they do their job well.) And no, they don't make their predictions easier by railroading character development; they simply create a system that caters to a wider variety of builds. (A better simulated game world - where it matters - helps a lot with that.) It makes for a complex system of interdependencies, but it comes with the job. Either that, or they handcraft encounters with scripts and exceptions. A more writerly way to do it, but also works if the designer's good. At any rate, a number of RPG designers have stated that this exact thing is an important part of their job. So yeah, they're dealing with it, it's not a sacred cow or an intrinsic feature, and hasn't been in a while.

If the designer knows exactly what path a character is going to take through the game, he can sculpt the game world around them, making backtracking unnecessary.

Or the designer could just abstract exploration and lengthy movement at some level. Higher levels of abstraction don't preclude freedom of exploration and player-choice, as any 4X game ever testifies.

Imagine the Fallout overland movement system with some "strategic" options thrown in. What do you do while you travel the wasteland from Klamath to New Reno? Maybe you shoot the bull with Sulik, which finds some expression in his stats/attitude/companion-quest options (which he was supposed to have in the original version; thumbs up for RP). Maybe Myron is finally sick of Marcus making fun of him and slips something in his drink; and now you have to deal with it. Or maybe you're that autistic guy that spends the entire time reading guns'n'bullets, so much so that Cassidy pulls you aside one night, telling you to lighten up a bit and go have some sex with Davin or something, 'cause he misses you.

All of this could be narrated through a dialogue/CYOA-like interface. The complexity of such a system could be whatever the designer wants it to be. It could focus on narrative or reflect directly on stats and perks. And it's all expanding player-choice, not taking it away. And all of that is apart from various encounters and uncharted spots on the map you can discover, while wasting no time at all click-spamming Starcraft-style across an empty, boring wilderness map. (Maybe at some point you'll critically fail a Wilderness Lore check, eat some berries and get the shits. Then a magical tribe of leprechauns will come and help your shivering, crumpled carcass get better; see, you've had a new and interesting encounter.)

If the game designer cannot predict what choices a player has made before reaching a certain encounter, he cannot guarantee that the choices to make in the encounter will be meaningful for that player. As a simple example: if your character is equipped with a Long Sword +2, then finding a Long Sword +1, +3 Against Undead gives you a meaningful decision about which one to equip. However, if your character has found a Long Sword +3 before finding that sword (because he chose to explore a different dungeon first), then there is no decision to be made, the new sword is simply vendor trash.

Or maybe the designers don't allow for outright meaningless options to crop up at all? Random +X items are hardly the best way to approach loot design anyway.

To wrap up: I'm definitely not against free play with complex systems. (It's what I prefer, a generalized system that allows freedom of expression, not scripting and special-casing everything, though I like that too, when it's well done.) But I like my complex systems elegant, as well. A complex system that allows for useless choices is simply a bloated system. Also, a designer can predict what choices the player's made, at least in the general sense of "Okay, so by now these villagers are either very angry with you, or they worship the fungus between your toes". It's the same thing as predicting the PC's power-level, a complex task, but doable. And being done by RPG designers as part of their day job.

 

[worldsmith]

Instant travel is a game killing for me.
It is clearly an awfull lazy move from dev considering the billions of more believable options to speed up travel.
It isn't like the only two options are walk slowly like a turtle with crippled legs vs teleport everywhere anytime.

Instant for whom?
I agree that unless the PC has some teleportation skills or is stepping into a teleporter or something like that, travel should not be instant for the PC. However, travel being instant for the player is often desirable. (Or at least really fast for the player - i.e., a "proper RPG" is going to be simulating the game world for all of that travel time, so it's not going to be instant for the player but only as fast as their computer can go. The travel can be accomplished by having an AI temporarily take control of the PC with the simple goal of "get to destination", and the AI does so merely with the normal means available to the PC, and should return control of the PC back to the player early if something unexpected should happen during that travel.)
I am a firm believer that time should matter in the game world, so the fact that the PC is spending time traveling should also matter, and if the player makes the PC engage in a bunch of unnecessary traveling thereby wasting a bunch of game-world time, that may very well have significant consequences in the game world.

Creating an AI for this type of thing is several orders of magnitude easier than for DF.

No, it's not really that different.

1. Techniques such as hierarchical decomposition can, when actually needed, be used to bring larger game worlds under control. It trades off some solution optimization for that massive reduction in complexity, but not only is it very much worth it, humans do the same thing (though generally not in as mechanically a fashion as simpler AIs).
2. Most NPCs have zero need to analyze the whole world when making decisions. Do you consider the traffic patterns on the Po Nga road in the Tai Po market district of Hong Kong when you are trying to decide what to eat for breakfast? Of course not. That would be stupid. Think about what information you actually need to get through your day, and you will find it is some vanishingly small fraction of what exists in the world (much less what exists in the universe). Even if you are just considering your home town, 99.99% of what happens there is likely none of your concern.
3. NPCs should not even have any way to analyze the whole world, because they should not have access to all of that knowledge. Information should not just teleport into every AI's brain anymore than IBM's unreleased quarterly numbers teleport into mine. Knowledge should exist only in the minds of the player and the AIs, and in explicit manifestations (books, the sound of two people talking, the actual item some knowledge is about, footprints, etc.). Transfer of such knowledge should only happen by means of in-game-world mechanics. So not only should AIs not consider the whole world when deciding what to do, they can't because they don't have such vast information - they only have the information they have acquired via their senses (whether mundane or magical) and via their own mental skills (e.g., deduction and synthesis). (And even most sensory information gets discarded fairly rapidly. There's some truth to the expression "in one ear and out the other".)
   
4. There is no need for you to consider every possible action. Do you, even for the smallest of moments in your subconscious mind, consider dropping crushed sunflower seeds into the postal box each morning while considering what to do next? Again the answer is "of course not". If your AI is written such that you are going down a giant case statement of possible actions and considering "yes or no" for each action, then your AI is total crap. That's just about the worst possible state-space search strategy in the entire universe. Instead the possible actions considered should be guided/directed/limited such that they lead to a much more efficient state-space search strategy, which is why some concepts in our mind are related to others, and even when they don't pull those related concepts into our conscious minds (which they sometimes do), they still tend to "activate" them as "things to consider in current context". What this means is that having more and more possible actions does not in fact increase one's mental load to the same degree. It requires a bit more memory to store those possible actions and their mappings to other concepts, but it doesn't require a lot more CPU. (And it's not like DF is even using all available CPU right now - the game is still single-threaded.)

That's why you typically see a corresponding curve between game complexity and AI problems.

I get the distinct impression that your knowledge of AI is derived pretty much entirely from what you see in the games you play rather than a direct examination of what those in the AI field have shown to be possible. When game AI is regularly short-changed in terms of development effort (even while PR types regularly give a bunch of lip-service about how "advanced" the AI is going to be), of course it's not going to be very good. Since (at least per my own personal "theory of fun", which doesn't apply to everyone) good AI is the source of the bulk of the entertainment games provide, it should be where much of a game's development resources are focused (rather than getting somewhere around 1/20th or 1/30th of the art budget). When you squeeze the AI development effort to such a degree, you end up spending a large percentage of that development time on simple nuts-and-bolts issues rather than making the AI actually good, and subsequently the result is even worse than a linear extrapolation would suggest. (Some of the issues that you see may be due to AI dev time being cut so short that even some of the nuts-and-bolts are missing.)

Are you kidding me? If someone develops a generic AI that can run DF, that will be the Singularity, won't it?

No, I'm not kidding. Generic AIs have already been created, in all sorts of flavors. Breadth-first state-space-search is a very simple example of a generic non-learning AI "engine". Some of them would likely be capable of playing DF so long as they were provided an accurate encoding of the game mechanics and a means to represent game state (and some sort of evaluation function), though the inefficiency of many of them would be completely unacceptable (and not practical in terms of memory usage). The most challenging parts of working on AI have nothing to do with making something that could work in theory, but optimizing representation, search and evaluation efficiency enough to make it work in practice (thus things like alpha-beta pruning are invented which, while being a relatively crude way of optimizing search and reducing the need for evaluation, is still effective in simpler cases). More advanced AIs, the kind of AI needed to make the type of RPG I would like to see made, require more advanced techniques - being able to work with concepts, hierarchies, abstractions, etc. But none of these are new to the AI field - they've been done. Even the best strategy game AIs do not appear to be anywhere near state-of-the-art, and saying that RPGs (NPC non-combat AIs) are far behind those strategy game AIs is a giant understatement. Whether or not you believe a certain level of AI can be achieved in the near future (something which I'm not really interested in debating here), even you should be able to see that there is a crapload of improvement that could be made.
And no, it won't be singularity. Programming an effective AI is a massively harder problem than playing DF. (For more than ample evidence of this, see the large numbers of DF players who are entirely incapable of writing any sort of decent AI.) An AI being able to play DF does not imply that said AI could create something as capable as itself, much less an even smarter AI, so no singularity. (BTW, here's a video of an AI that plays Dwarf Fortress, in fortress mode no less. GIT is here. Now where's my promised singularity?)

You do realize that DF is in the middle of its development right now, right?

Irrelevant. The question is not whether it might be worth playing 20 years from now, but is it worth playing now. I can't play the future version right now, only the one that exists now. That the future version might be worth playing in no way makes the current version so.

Have you considered the possibility that maybe you are just too intelligent and edgy to enjoy video games?

Have you considered the possibility that you have reading problems? I pointed out multiple videogames that I explicitly stated are fun for me, in this very thread, in posts that you responded to.

snip

Everything you say is wrong.

You don't have to prevent the player characters from having to fight easy stuff. It may be that's just the way the game world is. What you can prevent is forcing the player to sit through boring combat - just let it go to auto-combat. And it doesn't matter if the game dev had no idea whether the player party would be weak or strong - just make the determination at runtime by comparing the player party with the mobs in question. Many games past and present have made such determinations (e.g., Warlords 3), so it's not like it's anything new. (And if the RNG gods are feeling mean and things go unexpectedly bad during an auto-combat, the game can then drop out of auto-combat and let the player take over so it doesn't get worse.)

You don't have to do weird level design to try to avoid backtracking. Just have fast-travel (fast for player, not fast for PC) so backtracking is relatively painless for the player.

You don't have to eliminate all "vendor trash" in order to avoid presenting the player with such tedious decisions. Let the player set filters and/or let the player define vendor trash by selecting items and saying "anything like this or worse goes in the vendor trash bag". Then for all future loot collected just automatically take care of throwing such trash in the trash bag for the player.

And absolute perfection is not the goal here. If we can get boring%:interesting% to go from 90:10 to 70:30, that's a win. If we can go to 30:70 that's even better. Just because 0:100 may in fact be impossible does not mean we should just be happy with something like 90:10 for the rest of our lives, especially when we know RPGs can be made better now and games in other genres are achieving better ratios.

Is there a reason why this isn't achievable?

0:100 probably is impossible because neither the game nor the player can with perfect accuracy predict in advance what the player will or will not find interesting in retrospect. In fact the player's opinion of what was and was not interesting may change later in the game - especially if the game is giving the player clues now that won't even make sense to the player until later in the story, clues that in some cases the player might not even figure out until years after they have finished playing the game. There might also be problems trying to present a coherent story while not saying anything about any events uninteresting to the player - some of those events may be key to understanding what's going on even if the player doesn't find them especially interesting, so in some sense the player is interested in them because they want the story to make sense yet at the same time the player may never consciously realize that and so think they were uninteresting. (Also consider the movie genre - movies have total control over everything that happens in them. Yet what % of movies manage to be interesting to you all the way through - every last moment? I know for me that %, if not zero, is pretty close to zero. But that doesn't mean there aren't movies that I like, because I don't expect movies to be 0:100 any more than I expect games to be.)

 

[Trip]

Well, 0:100 was never what I meant I just meant, "Couldn't this be (significantly) mitigated?" And I may be overoptimistic, but I think it can.
For the record, I also think that AI is the foremost factor in making an enjoyable, reactive RPG. It's the GM that makes a PnP experience either great or terrible, so AI, which simulates a GM, should theoretically mean the same to a cRPG

 

[naossano]

Instant travel is a game killing for me.
It is clearly an awfull lazy move from dev considering the billions of more believable options to speed up travel.
It isn't like the only two options are walk slowly like a turtle with crippled legs vs teleport everywhere anytime.
There is no excuse for such a failure when you can copy paste much much much much much better concepts.

As a side note, i think watching Naruto all the way require more patience than playing RPG. I doubt i would have such patience.

You'll like it when you're older. Like vegetables.

Also, you'll stop liking RPGs without fast travel, cuz Aint Nobody Got Time For That.

It isn't like the only two options are walk slowly like a turtle with crippled legs vs teleport everywhere anytime.

 

[Mustawd]

Instant travel is a game killing for me.
It is clearly an awfull lazy move from dev considering the billions of more believable options to speed up travel.
It isn't like the only two options are walk slowly like a turtle with crippled legs vs teleport everywhere anytime.
There is no excuse for such a failure when you can copy paste much much much much much better concepts.

As a side note, i think watching Naruto all the way require more patience than playing RPG. I doubt i would have such patience.

You'll like it when you're older. Like vegetables.

Also, you'll stop liking RPGs without fast travel, cuz Aint Nobody Got Time For That.

It isn't like the only two options are walk slowly like a turtle with crippled legs vs teleport everywhere anytime.

I don't even know who's trolling who anymore.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

The "industry" game developers are cowards who have allowed themselves to be pushed around by studio execs, who are only interested in profit margins, for so long that it has become standard. No one wants to take any chances and there are enough stupid people out there who will keep buying the same old shit. Only hope is that some of these bright, talented new independent developers can make enough off their smaller games to be able to invest in creating something on a larger scale - without sacrificing their creative freedom.

I can't blame them. Unless you're doing it as a "side project" like VD and Age of Decadence, you're gambling with your livelihood when you take risks. It's just saner to make blander games that are more likely to sell enough to keep the company alive. Jeff Vogel appears to have found a bizarre middleground, popping very niche games out of an assembly line on a regular schedule like Assassin's Creed.

 

[Melcar]

Don't forget the faster porn streaming.

"What's streaming"

"Basically, better online porn"

"What...in the future you can play any game and watch any porn...and you're BORED?"

"It's more of an ennui thing. I feel nostalgic for the time I was you and had to endure an entire weekend with a rented game that turned out to be shit...it builds character, you see."

"Are you fucking high?"

Past you would probably kill present you and that your place.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Run button

I know what you mean. In some of the real early games you moved around as fast as your finger could type or keep your finger on a button (or joystick). I remember playing Morrowind and one of the first things I used to do was increase my speed. Being able to run everywhere is everywhere although I recognise it is not realistic. I think developers make the wrong choice when they introduce 'real time slow paced walking'. I want to be able to move around the world as I did in the Bards Tale or Ultima, heck even Pools of Radiance. I don't want to pay for and play a game in 2015 that has slower movement. That is MY expectations.

It reminds me of some ways the old 80s style is superior to the new games.

The Kickstarters were never going to innovate on anything. They were caching in on nostalgia. And the trouble is: caching in on nostalgia and innovation are kind of anathema. By the very nature of the quest for nostalgia, things can never be too different from what they were. It's kind of the definition of nostalgia. Nostalgia offerings can only be apings of what came before, or else they won't make the nostalgic feeling happen. And if nostalgia-seekers are the bankroll, then inevitably nostalgic apings are what you're going to get.

Couple that with soft funding, and the Codex Kickstarter Malaise was inevitable. It simply is as VD warned: Kickstarters ask for the amount of money they can get, not the amount of money they actually need to fulfil their ideas. Want Fallout? In a strict inflation ratio, dollar for dollar, you need 5 million. Factor in the current weak dollar and the fact that big studios these days vacuum up a lot of the talent you would want, and you're probably looking at realistically 6-6.5 million. And that's just to make Fallout as is, warts and all, with some minor tech upgrades. If you want to innovate, you'll need to pump up the monies some more. And if you want a full upgrade to modern times? Mid-size studio budgets start at 10 million.

Magic can still happen with budget tier titles, true. Magic can happen anywhere, as things just magically coalesce into something special. But combine budget-level money with the bankroll coming from nostalgia backers, and good-for-what-it-is becomes the highest probability of what you're going to get.

Everything is shit.

 

[Doctor Sbaitso]

On the kickstarter front, it was major disappointment after disappointment, even most people that like them (exception of the retarded fanboys) say they are just good for what it is, bad/mediocre clones of games made 20 years ago. Funny that games made by "professional" game designers, people who live by making money from games and are supposed to be very knowledgeable about game design are inferior products when compared with enthusiast projects.

Counting on Kickstarter is a fool's errant. That system doesn't lead to different results than the publically traded publisher model. The games are made to sell. After the developer has collected all the money from the grognards, that money is used to design a game, that's bought by people, who haven't backed the project yet.
There is no incentive to do it differently.

For some, doing it differently - right, is exactly the point and incentive enough. Many haven't been poisoned by big business models and Kickstarter is a way for them to realize a dream. Inspired work makes for amazing games. Look at Underrail for example. I have refrained from playing (although I backed it) it but I am willing to bet that Serpents in the Staglands will be great as well.

I look at Underworld Ascendant - the sequel that Paul and Tim have said they have been dreamed of making for over 20 years. It would not be possible without KS and I am very stoked to see what they can come up with.

 

[PorkyThePaladin]

... wall of text of technical jargon regarding AI ...

You are starting to sound like all those AI researchers in the 80s and 90s that promised human level intelligence ages ago. And yet, to date, the most advanced AI we seem to have are used for data mining and stuff like IBM's Watson, which may appear intelligent, but is actually just a bunch of clever statistical analysis of mountains of text. Good luck trying to use those kinds of pattern recognition approaches with a complex video game. But hey man, I am certainly no expert in AI, and talk is cheap, so go forth and make this game/AI of yours, and then we'll see how it goes.

Irrelevant. The question is not whether it might be worth playing 20 years from now, but is it worth playing now. I can't play the future version right now, only the one that exists now. That the future version might be worth playing in no way makes the current version so.

Oh ok, well, let's go find a version of Age of Wonders that was 10 months into development (roughly the equivalent of where DF's is right now with its far longer development cycle) and shit on that as well.

 

[lemon-lime]

For some, doing it differently - right, is exactly the point and incentive enough.

That's true. And I have deep respect for such people, and Kickstarter can enable them and their fans. Yet the cards are kind of stacked against them. You can design a game for the backers instead of future buyers, but that also means you'll probably need a higher initial goal, which reduces the chances that the project is successfully backed in the first place. And such benevolent projects will feel the backlash too, if people get burned too often by the business suits' projects.

I see Kickstarter more and more being used simply as a tool to minimize financial risk to traditional investors. And often the projects are not open about their budgeting and additional sources of investments.
"Everything is shit" and if it isn't yet, the business suits will find a way to turn it into shit. (See payed Skyrim modding as a typical example, which has been averted ... for now.)

 

[DawnrazorDCLXVI]

To be here for 10 years and only now reveal yourself as a ADD addled popamole faggot is really impressive.


At least there is still this:

DawnrazorDCLXVI

Educated

Joined: Jan 11, 2015

So at least some things stay the same...

Weird....his profile shows he joined Jan 10, 2015

Rarely do I hear a Looking Glass game mentioned, much less a new Deus Ex, or System Shock 2, and even then, only in passing. Elder Scrolls series seems to put everybody off. Dark Souls got brief waves, and even Witcher undergoes heavy waves of criticism despite fanboys. Yet nobody would dispute Fallout 1-2, and given the choice, I think most players here would prefer a new Jagged Alliance, or Wasteland, or Original Sin sequel, than a new Underworld, even if it was done properly gauging by the number of comments.

Give them first person, or real time, and it's OH GAWD NO! Especially if there's no dialogue, or minimalistic dialogue with few choices.

What crap are you talking about? There's a constant stream of LGS threads, Thief threads etc here. The thing is that these games aren't specifically RPG's and so talk of them is mostly relegated to the GG section.

There's also a lot of talk of Underworld III(Arx Fatalis) and pining for more of the same.

Evey game gets criticised here yet once you look past the crap KKK harvesters, you'll see that games like Witcher are supported by many and often a majority. Hell, take a look at the earlier threads about the 'maligned' Witcher 2 combat and you'll find that a lot of those that later would come out with phrases like "rolling simulator LOL" actually were praising the combat difficulty and even complaining that the game was too hard! That the Witcher 2 ended up having a pretty exploitable combat system is a separate criticism that wasn't originally apparent and so it's only in retrospect that it looks like the Codex 'hated' it always when orginally there was praise for the game from most quarters.

ES puts people off because apart from a couple of entries, the games are staggeringly deficient as RPG's with idiotic mechanics and cut pasta exploration. Redemption only comes with mods and only then partway. When Obsidian made F:NV it garnered a lot of acclaim here precisely because it didn't for the most part fall in the same traps. So how does that fit with your 'theory' that Codexers like only spreadsheets?

To be here for 10 years and only now reveal yourself as a ADD addled popamole faggot is really impressive.


At least there is still this:

DawnrazorDCLXVI

Educated

Joined: Jan 11, 2015

So at least some things stay the same...

Weird....his profile shows he joined Jan 10, 2015

I no longer have access to my old profile. Which was dated 2002ish.

As far as my point, Codex bias leans toward turn-based and isometric. Deus Ex and SS2 may turn up, but they rarely get any replies, and eventually everything turns back to Fallout, and turn-based isometric. Just read the number of replies to the Shadowrun threads versus the new Underworld. And the comments against Warren Spector, though warranted after DX1, already reveal a distinct bias. Nobody bothers to criticize Tim Cain, despite the number of buggy and glitchy games Obsidian releases.

Aside from the length of my reply, I'd also like to mention character assassinations are not an argument.

Better pray to the Elder Gods for a few ad hominems to supplement your poor debate "skillz."

I'm sure there's a "For Idiots" guide out there for people like you, as I've mentioned my old account numerous times.

It just proves how egotistical this forum is.

Not to mention all the idiots flinging mud, which means they're covered in it themselves. If you can't come up with an intelligent idea, please forfeit posting debates. Colored pictures prove nothing. Your argument is dead. And your stupid is beginning to taint my Armani Digi-suit. You might as well resort to threatening me with "Your Mom" jokes to begin a debate.

If you really want to fling mud, remember my tongue is sharper than yours, and its probably up your mom's pussy. Delivering death by a thousand cuts while you curl in fetal position, wishing you could find your way out of her transgendered mangina.

Something is bound to offend everyone. Welcome to the Codex. Cheers. :D

Not my circus. Not my monkeys.

I'm just here to enjoy the sideshow.

 

[Catfish]

OP, have you considered switching genres for awhile? Play some Arkham Oranges. Go through Ascreed. Or better yet, spend a few weeks in the latest Call of Battle Duty.

Either the pacing'n'stuff will be refreshed naturally, or you will find a new and entertaining outlet to sink your time in.

Spoiler

You'll come crawling back...

 

[theSavant]

If the RPG is promising there is plenty of motivation to play the RPG. Even if it has 50+ hours gameplay. The problem arises when you play the game a 2nd or 3rd time. Suddenly you remember all the things which were cumbersome and annoying in the game. But at the first playthrough they didn't annoy you that much, because everything was a fresh, new, exploration. You don't have this bonus next time. I tried that with Wiz8: 1st walkthrough... was enjoyable. 2nd walkthrough... stopped in the middle. 3rd walkthrough... stopped after a quarter. It just doesn't give you that much enjoyment anymore. Even different party & race combinations don't make up for it.

I caught myself in thinking that "short RPGs" (i.e. with a duration of 4 hours) would be kinda cool - if they offered multiple ways to finish the game, act differently, with actual different consequences. Such games might be more combat oriented, but it would be a different experience each time.

The only solution I find to this problem (especially relating to RPGs), and maybe get more patience for it, is to play like an "evil" guy one playthrough and like a "good" guy the next. However most game designs do not offer that much changes in gameplay (or pseudo choices), so it doesn't work. In that case, I'd rather prefer the "short RPGs" mentioned above. Actually it could be a market niche.

 

[Mustawd]

snip

Not sure why my quote was included in that response, as I was just wondering why that screenshot was off by one day: Jan 11 vs Jan 10. Sorry, it's the auditor in me.

 

[Catfish]

If the RPG is promising there is plenty of motivation to play the RPG. Even if it has 50+ hours gameplay. The problem arises when you play the game a 2nd or 3rd time. Suddenly you remember all the things which were cumbersome and annoying in the game. But at the first playthrough they didn't annoy you that much, because everything was a fresh, new, exploration

But isn't this equally true for old titles just as much as the new ones? Hence the original question of "have I lost patience"

I caught myself in thinking that "short RPGs" (i.e. with a duration of 4 hours) would be kinda cool - if they offered multiple ways to finish the game, act differently, with actual different consequences

Man, so true. But go even further, imagine serialized games, with smaller scopes. Imagine Obsidian would adopt a model in which they would produce four short episodes of a game, each about four hours long at a time, instead of a full enormous experience. Or even non-rpg stuff, like Hitman (blood money in particular) - imagine a company producing two awesome levels in the timeframe it would normally take them to produce a full game. This would be a better world I would even buy a season pass

 

[PeachPlumage]

Interesting topic. I found with Baldur's Gate 1 what with the emphasis on exploring the wilderness and those being split up into their own maps lead itself more to me breaking the game up into smaller chunks. Probably the only way that I could enjoy it in short bursts when I felt the itch to fire the game up and play a bit.

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

Playing UnderRail for the first time.

1. What an atmosphere! what cool little graphics! What moody sounds!
2. Damn the guy is too slow.. where is the run button ... fuck there is no run button
3. fuck, why dont the screens transition directly ? I have to wait this slow fade out.
4. Hey! Beardy dude by the crossroads is cool. Seems like someone avatar on the codex
5. what a moody exploration! Im excited! all those derelict stations and all
6. OH COME ON, no fast travel ?? I must traverse all these maps back in turtle steps !?
7. Ok, first mission is over. Now I must capture some little dogs.
8. FUUUUCK! MAPS TOO BIG! TURTLE STEPS AGAAAAAIN!!!!
9 quit

 

[shihonage]

Man, so true. But go even further, imagine serialized games, with smaller scopes. Imagine Obsidian would adopt a model in which they would produce four short episodes of a game, each about four hours long at a time, instead of a full enormous experience.

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. How exactly do you see a non-linear world-roaming RPG with actual choice&consequence being split into "episodes"?

 

[Raghar]

Man, so true. But go even further, imagine serialized games, with smaller scopes. Imagine Obsidian would adopt a model in which they would produce four short episodes of a game, each about four hours long at a time, instead of a full enormous experience.

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. How exactly do you see a non-linear world-roaming RPG with actual choice&consequence being split into "episodes"?

That's easy. Play FF X-2 and you'd see. You actually does have choice and consequences. (You can have completed, or concluded result.)

 

[Catfish]

Man, so true. But go even further, imagine serialized games, with smaller scopes. Imagine Obsidian would adopt a model in which they would produce four short episodes of a game, each about four hours long at a time, instead of a full enormous experience.

Uh-huh. Uh-huh. How exactly do you see a non-linear world-roaming RPG with actual choice&consequence being split into "episodes"?

Ahem, well... this could sound programmy, but:

1) Every decision you make in an RPG is stored in a number of variables that project the eventual ending
2) Take those variables, insert them in start of next chapter
3) Continue story like a boss

Granted, this may seem unmanageable on a decision-to-decision basis, but this is a new artform, and I believe this kind of approach is exactly what the videogame medium really needs to shine. Personally, I feel that this is the kind of step gaming needs to make to be esteemed the same way a Laurence Olivier scene is perceived, as in "this shook me to a totally different level..."

 

[shihonage]

Ahem, well... this could sound programmy, but:

1) Every decision you make in an RPG is stored in a number of variables that project the eventual ending
2) Take those variables, insert them in start of next chapter
3) Continue story like a boss

Granted, this may seem unmanageable on a decision-to-decision basis, but this is a new artform, and I believe this kind of approach is exactly what the videogame medium really needs to shine. Personally, I feel that this is the kind of step gaming needs to make to be esteemed the same way a Laurence Olivier scene is perceived, as in "this shook me to a totally different level..."

I figured you'd say something like that. However,

• It already requires that you pre-planned, in minute and verified, tested, detail, everything that happens in ALL chapters, while you're only making the FIRST chapter. Abstraction does not cut it here. "Variables" are concrete. All the minute choices you will ever make, have to be accounted for, and many of these things WILL INEVITABLY change in IMPLEMENTATION, in the game, being actually RAN and TESTED. This simply requires precognition ability which nobody has. "Planning" does not work here.
  
  
• You will end up boxing the player into some small area in the first chapter, or creating a wide, empty world which magically gets more populated in the next chapters. Neither is an acceptable design for an free-roaming, allegedly non-linear RPG.

For a preview of what your proposal looks like in reality, look at FO:NV DLCs. While the core gameworld was created "as one", the DLCs are these "growths on the edge", the claustrophobic C&C bubbles, which will BREAK if you even attempt to visit them in the wrong order. The earlier DLC cannot be aware of the later DLC... unless they later start to retcon that into earlier DLCs... creating a clusterfuck.

 

[worldsmith]

the most advanced AI we seem to have are used for data mining and stuff like IBM's Watson

LOL. Watson isn't "advanced AI". It was a marketing gimmick to showcase IBM and their hardware. Trivia pursuit type games are knowledge games, not intelligence games. (And even in such a non-intelligence situation, Watson's winning was entirely dependent on it being able to mechanically press the button in fewer milliseconds than human reaction time allows.)
Note that what I have actually "revealed" in this thread about AI, while being fully pertinent to answering your prior post (even if you understandably don't feel like taking the MIT open course on AI so you can grok it), is in some sense no revelation at all - it's stuff that anyone in AI knows about. (Note that I have a huge incentive to keep my mouth shut about the actual details of my AI-in-progress and what academic sources I am using - getting "scooped" could be a bit of a financial disaster.) While I am certainly adding in some of my own ideas (some general improvements, some more specific to the challenges an AI faces in an RPG world), I am also borrowing heavily from the ideas certain AI researchers (ones that aren't bat-shit crazy - and yes there are a good many of those crazy ones and they tend to get most of the publicity), and those ideas do not exist just as a bunch of "cheap talk" but in the form of actual working programs that, even to me, were very impressive in what they could do - they were doing things that at the time I didn't even realize was in the domain of things AI could approach. I guess what I'm trying to say here, is that the AI field is not as devoid of meaningful advances as you seem to think.

But hey man, I am certainly no expert in AI, and talk is cheap, so go forth and make this game/AI of yours, and then we'll see how it goes.

In case it wasn't obvious from what I've already said (e.g., "and in fact I am betting on that in my own development work"), I've already been "going forth". So yes, we will eventually see whether I can make these ideas work, at least well enough to make a game people might like to play because of its AI rather than despite it's total or near-total absence in anything other than tactical combat. (I am being careful to not be "all or nothing" in my development - if I can only get some lesser version of the AI working in a reasonable time - say within the next year or two, then that's what I'll do. As long as it can provide a living world that is noticeably better than what we have now, I think there will be an audience for it.)

Ironically enough, the answer to your problems lies with a (sort of) roguelike: Dwarf Fortress.

Oh ok, well, let's go find a version of Age of Wonders that was 10 months into development (roughly the equivalent of where DF's is right now with its far longer development cycle) and shit on that as well.

Don't be daft. You're the one that suggested Dwarf Fortress in the first place. You didn't suggest Dwarf Fortress at some future date, or after some specified feature is completed (which would have been admitting that your suggestion is really just vaporware for now - Dwarf Fortress may exist but the "answer" you are talking about does not). If you had been forthright in the fact that such "answer" is about "Vaporware Dwarf Fortress" rather than being about "Dwarf Fortress", I obviously would not have bothered pointing out the limitations of "Dwarf Fortress" (just as I have not bothered to point out the limitations of "Ultima Ratio Regum" as suggested by pakoito, because pakoito had the common sense and courtesy to suggest "the 1.0 of Ultima Ratio Regum in 2020" and not just "Ultima Ratio Regum").
I mean, if you were going to suggest a game based merely on promises made...

Spoiler

Why would anyone suggest anything other than Grimoire?

 

[theSavant]

Man, so true. But go even further, imagine serialized games, with smaller scopes. Imagine Obsidian would adopt a model in which they would produce four short episodes of a game, each about four hours long at a time, instead of a full enormous experience.

It already requires that you pre-planned, in minute and verified, tested, detail, everything that happens in ALL chapters, while you're only making the FIRST chapter.

Yeah these are the problems. It gets complicated pretty soon. That's why I originally only thought of a small scope, rather linear game. Basically the same environment for each but choices that matter. An abstract way to visualize this, is for example a 2-way-gameplay: one time you are the good character and must save the world, on another playthrough you choose to be the bad character and must invade the lands with dark armies, burn and kill everyone. So the same location but played from different persepctives. Of course also with different scripted events, so it is enjoyable.

Game developers already approached this via "factions", but the problem with these are, that the choices and factions hardly change anything in the gameplay. You still need to finish off each quest of the main storyline. You still need to work off all the tedious bits and bytes, no matter what you choose. That's not right. It's like the factions don't really matter at all. They have no influence on gameplay, except maybe a different ending screen. It should be more like the Stanley-Parable, where a different choice really leads to a different outcome. Every path should be a different experience.