Editorial RPG Codex Editorial: Without Map, Compass, or Destination - MRY on RPG Writing

[Mr. Hiver]

How so?

Genuine question for instance, What makes the process of writing a branching dialogue harder than a linear form?

Is it the process of envisioning responses that the audience can relate with or is it the fact that it is more work in general.

When you have a big tree with branches growing all over the place with additional sub-branches, it's difficult to maintain the proper flow between individual nodes. By the time you finish one branch and get to the other, you can forget what the first node contained and put ugly repetitions into the subsequent ones without even realising it.

 

[DeepOcean]

I understand MRY's points and somewhat agree with him, the profession of videogame writing isn't a sexy one, even videogame companies and developers seem to not give a shit to their own history and preserve it, let alone if a game has good or bad writing. Right now, the video game world is full of rentists wanting to make big bucks that don't give a shit for art, of developers that are more worried to pay their bills and not get fired so they don't give much of a shit for art too and of players that don't give shit for art either. If no one gives a shit for writing, that isn't exactly a good place for a writer to be.

I just wanted to mention another thing people aren't mentioning, I read quite a few of interviews from Avellone and other writers, John Gonzalez for example, I watched recently a documentary on the making of Horizon Zero Dawn, on that game, the main character and its abilities and the world were already set when John got to the game, the whole beginning of the game was set. The developers, Guerilla, hired John because they were afraid and running out of ideas of how to make their vague world building ideas to work.

John immediately had a fight with the whole team because they designed the game with the main character having access to a robot horse and being a fully grown adult right on the start of the game, he felt that was wrong because that would completely alienate the players so he came up with the idea of the game starting with the main character as a child and the story being a story of discovery of identity on a strange world, the developers had a whacky idea of robot dinosaurs roaming the world and John made that incoherent shit into actually something understandable, interesting and acceptable for the players.

The work of John and a few other New Vegas writers were really fucking good because they got the abstract world building all the way down to the character and quest level, Dead Money was just fucking brillant in terms of world building and character but this skill of building a world from the top to the bottom for some reason isn't understood by many RPG writers.

What I'm talking is something like what Matt Colville does on his world building series on his channel, it is a fucking basic thing, any good GM will tell you he needs to have some clue about how his world works so when the players act, he knows how to respond to them and any good GM knows that on RPG storytelling, player experience and focusing on the frame of view of the player is key. You build a world starting from the heavens then refine things down to get characters then refine things down to get quests and then refine it down to get good dialog and finally get to the player frame of view, this is something that sounds obvious but it surprisingly isn't especially when you have a lead writer that doesn't understand this or don't know how to apply it.

Avellone is pratically a broken record at this on pretty much most of his interviews. I played most of the kickstarter RPG games and what I noticed was a deeply disconnect from the people that were writing for those games from this basic knowledge of storytelling that any experienced GM would use every day. The impression I have is that those people were obsessed with language while world building and character building were a second thought, they were sort o building things from bellow to up and getting terribly confused about it.

It could be all those ad hoc writers and it was a real problem to integrate their works or that many of those writers are English majors and not hired from the position of having experience on actual storytelling so those english majors focus too much on the language and its forms without understanding those words need a context.

What I think is that we had a pool of PnP geeks that actually tried to build a professional life out of their experiences at the PnP and had the dream of recreating that experience on the videogame format, like the true Elder Scrolls creator (not that manlet farce that is Todd Howard), Julian LeFay, that just wanted to create a videogame that was a simulation of a PnP session on Daggerfall, of course, not everything was flowers because it turns out RPG videogames are very different from PnP games but we had really great successes too because those guys had that basic knowledge of PnP storytelling. That was completely lost after the XBOX launch as the experiment of trying to make RPG games that had some roots on PnP was dead along with the PC platform.

When the kickstarter era came, it was like we started from zero, there was an effort of bringing people of the PnP scene to write for those games but the PnP scene was pretty much dead too for quite some time on 2012 with only DnD, Pathfinder and a few other relevant Ips more surviving than being truly successful. The biggest source for good new RPG writers was dry for quite some time on 2012 so we have the drought we have today.

The focus shifted, developers don't want to make wannabe PnP games on videogame format anymore, they want to make a good enough marketable product and those things are very different. If you want to make a good enough marketable product, you wont be ambitious, you won't have your eyes on the heavens, so your characters wont be fully integrated on your setting, so the conflicts of your characters will be disconnected from their reality and you won't know what your character really needs to say so his dialog will be dry and lead nowhere, but that is good enough.

 

[Nalenth]

Actually, one of the problems is that whereas older writers had jobs, education and hobbies that provided them with a wide variety of quality inspirations (see: the non-gaming background of the Ultima VII writer in the Antiquarian retrospective, or even someone like Chris Avellone hugely valuing real history as a source of inspiration), a lot of newer writers grow up doing nothing but playing video games (and not necessarily incline ones at that). So when you grow up on a range of Baldur's Gate to Oblivion, and perhaps some fantasy novels, then what you create is going to be pretty derivative.

It's common in other fields too. Fantasy writers tend to be avid fantasy readers. There's nothing wrong with that.
I mean, i grew up on Infinity Engine games, including Baldur's Gate. I don't think writers, who are fans of these games, would copy their narrative shamelessly.

Video game writers shouldn't read 8 million feminist books then try to hamfistedly shove it into a CRPG (same goes for Nazis or hardcore communists or whatever, I don't care), but it's also a problem that they go omg I played games 16 hours a day now I get to create one of my own squee! The industry would benefit if it was able to attract a wider variety of talented people from a wide range of backgrounds (both political/cultural and literary/artistic), but as MRY pointed out, one of the problems is that the video game writing job is not prestigious or rewarding enough to do so.

That's true, but i don't think an average nerd with low literacy would be writing for videogames. Even if the standards are low, there are still standards.
Other than that, people who are working in the videogame industry tend to love videogames.

 

[IHaveHugeNick]

They tend to love videogames that are fucking crap.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

I understand MRY's points and somewhat agree with him, the profession of videogame writing isn't a sexy one, even videogame companies and developers seem to not give a shit to their own history and preserve it, let alone if a game has good or bad writing.

The hurdles of game writing are due in part to the taylorist model of cRPG studios nowadays. They hire a bunch of different people to create characters and dialogues while other people design the game. It’s a flawed model that results in an unfulfilling and ungrateful job. I will repeat this again: cRPGs should have only one writer that is also the lead designer. That way you can have a creator of worlds in the real sense of the term, a real writer, that not only will feel creatively rewarded for his job, but that manage to make something good.

Right now, the video game world is full of rentists wanting to make big bucks that don't give a shit for art, of developers that are more worried to pay their bills and not get fired so they don't give much of a shit for art too and of players that don't give shit for art either. If no one gives a shit for writing, that isn't exactly a good place for a writer to be.

That’s one way of looking at it. Another way is that the problem is precisely because cRPG writers want to fulfil their failed artistic ambitions at the expense of cRPGs. The result is turgid long-winded pretentious prose dissociated from game design. In other words, the problem it’s not that they don’t care about art, instead is that they care too much about art and too little about games, which are depreciatively perceived as escapist entertainment for teenagers. The cRPG writers despise the genre and its players, and don’t like videogames in general, never mind cRPGs. It’s not surprisingly that their games will suck.

But then again this bring us back to what is a cRPG writer question. If being a cRPG writer requires both being a line writer and a designer, very few people today are genuine cRPG writers.

The work of John and a few other New Vegas writers were really fucking good because they got the abstract world building all the way down to the character and quest level, Dead Money was just fucking brillant in terms of world building and character but this skill of building a world from the top to the bottom for some reason isn't understood by many RPG writers.

It isn’t understood because they don’t get any say in the general structure of the game world. They are subcontractors that provide dialogues and quest lines. They are alienated from the design part. If their writing gets in the way of what the lead designer is trying to do, it will be entirely reworked to fit in or dropped altogether. It’s the way these studios are doing things: they compartmentalise the role of writing in the text part at the same time the lead designer needs to create a world, a story, etc. It’s a failed model. That’s why you see so much imaginative things in the lore of the game world and the backgrounds of the characters that are not implemented. Remember Obsidian didn't accept any of Avellone's ideas related to quests? Their creativity is stifled by this failed model, they are unable to develop their potential because they are always the writer that provides the text part.

What I'm talking is something like what Matt Colville does on his world building series on his channel, it is a fucking basic thing, any good GM will tell you he needs to have some clue about how his world works so when the players act, he knows how to respond to them and any good GM knows that on RPG storytelling, player experience and focusing on the frame of view of the player is key. You build a world starting from the heavens then refine things down to get characters then refine things down to get quests and then refine it down to get good dialog and finally get to the player frame of view, this is something that sounds obvious but it surprisingly isn't especially when you have a lead writer that doesn't understand this or don't know how to apply it.

That’s true, but then again, if you hire a bunch of failed artists who despise cRPGs, they won’t have a clue of what is what. In fact, I have the suspicion that even veterans of the industry lost the interest in cRPGs, which would explain what they are so eager to dumb down their games to make more money. What would they want to make complicated systems if cRPGs are just a means of living? That’s the main problem with Mark’s account in my opinion. He wants to explain why something is failing, but at the same thing he wants everyone to be blameless. It’s almost as if all the involved were saints and their failures result from structural reasons and the realities of the genre, or whatever is the euphemism used to deflect the responsibility.

Avellone is pratically a broken record at this on pretty much most of his interviews. I played most of the kickstarter RPG games and what I noticed was a deeply disconnect from the people that were writing for those games from this basic knowledge of storytelling that any experienced GM would use every day. The impression I have is that those people were obsessed with language while world building and character building were a second thought, they were sort o building things from bellow to up and getting terribly confused about it.

That’s why they need to stop hiring random people to flesh their games with text. You either have a writer that is also a designer, or you don’t. Hiring people to make text, but don’t have any meaningful input on quest design and the game world doesn’t make any sense.

The biggest source for good new RPG writers was dry for quite some time on 2012 so we have the drought we have today.

The source is dry because developers are taking for granted that every cRPG should have the same word count of PS:T. The weight of expectations is self-imposed. Nobody asked for this.

The focus shifted, developers don't want to make wannabe PnP games on videogame format anymore, they want to make a good enough marketable product and those things are very different.

I couldn’t disagree more. They want to make cRPGs that check certain boxes that reflects their misguided beliefs about the genre. The more you focus on the cRPG writer as a profession and the attempts to turn cRPGs into an art form, the less emphasis is placed on the PnP systems, the combat part, the integration between writing and design, etc. That’s why a cRPg developer thinks he can avoid cRPGs in his past time and get away with it. If cRPGs are just C&C with writing, who cares what you play or don’t play in your spare time? You don’t need to study cRPGs, they think, because there is nothing to study. cRPG in their heads is just dialogue choices with some fights to please the traditionalist outdate gamers that still insist on PnP roots. It’s a decline in design that reflects a decline in attitudes towards the genre. It’s not amoral and technical, as Mark tried to portrait.

That's true, but i don't think an average nerd with low literacy would be writing for videogames. Even if the standards are low, there are still standards.

But the standards involve design and writing together. The discussion about writing in isolation accomplishes nothing.

Other than that, people who are working in the videogame industry tend to love videogames.

That’s projection from your part because you play games on your spare time. Maybe some of them are still dedicated, but most of them are either burnout, disillusioned or developed other interests. That’s especially true in the case of veterans, which should be the examples to other developers. They are the examples alright, the examples of decadence and decline.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

Actually, one of the problems is that whereas older writers had jobs, education and hobbies that provided them with a wide variety of quality inspirations (see: the non-gaming background of the Ultima VII writer in the Antiquarian retrospective, or even someone like Chris Avellone hugely valuing real history as a source of inspiration), a lot of newer writers grow up doing nothing but playing video games (and not necessarily incline ones at that). So when you grow up on a range of Baldur's Gate to Oblivion, and perhaps some fantasy novels, then what you create is going to be pretty derivative.

I understand that writers being superficial is a problem, but it is too optimistic to expect that the recent batch had any formative experience at all with cRPGs, popamole or not.

Video game writers shouldn't read 8 million feminist books then try to hamfistedly shove it into a CRPG (same goes for Nazis or hardcore communists or whatever, I don't care), but it's also a problem that they go omg I played games 16 hours a day now I get to create one of my own squee! The industry would benefit if it was able to attract a wider variety of talented people from a wide range of backgrounds (both political/cultural and literary/artistic), but as MRY pointed out, one of the problems is that the video game writing job is not prestigious or rewarding enough to do so.

But all the talent in the world will not help if the industry doesn’t get its shit together. The area is marked by bizarre expectations about the role and nature of writing in cRPGs.

And yeah, I know what you're saying - that they should actually learn more about the classic incline CRPGs and appreciate what goes into an actually great game. We saw with felipepepe's enterprise how blind even developers can be to the great works in their own line of work. I do agree on that.

I don’t think I made myself clear, or maybe I did but people ignored what I said or disagree with me, but let me insist on this point one more time. The writing in cRPGs is the creation of the fictional world, which also involves the design. Therefore, it makes no sense to talk about cRPG writing as if it was a thing divorced from game design. This way of looking at things explain why the examples of good writing in cRPGs always involve a bigger role of writing and (area, quest, etc.) design. Do you think it’s a coincidence that the areas written/developed by Colin McComb in PS:T are bad, while the ones written/developed by Avellone are good? Good writing is good design, and good design involves an understanding of cRPGs’ gameplay, systems, etc. Imagine how much PS:T would improve if Avellone had a better understanding of combat systems. The problem of cRPG writing is that people talk about this topic as if was a different from cRPG design. It’s not. Inversely, the more one thinks of the two as separate, the more he will be dismissive towards the genre, the design aspect, and the more he will try to vomit artistic walls of text dissociated from gameplay. The complaints against C&C and storyfags may be simplistic but they have some truth in them.

 

[Mr. Hiver]

You know, all that, all the issues MRY listed, all the problems you two just mentioned - all of that comes from people not seeing video games as a multifaceted united whole first - then as separate parts making that whole second.

Its not that the great games are made from top down - but with understanding them as a whole in which all the parts are connected and influence eachother.
You may think that the overall setting and big story is "top" but it can also be seen as the groundwork, foundations from which the rest of the game grows. But its also true that all the parts that grow from the main idea also influence and change and shift the main idea. Its really best to understand this not as top or down - but as a whole.

In the same way a character and his personality influences and changes dialogue options, options inside the quests and ultimately can change how the whole story unfolds.
Just as character skills influence how you solve specific tasks, quests and combat scenarios.

In cRPGs this situation is more complex because this genre of games is defined by gameplay options being limited by character abilities (that the player can strategically develop and evolve but cannot directly override) - which provides different distinct options in almost every aspect of the game.
While in other games a "writer" can write a single linear story and be more or less separate from the actual programmers and designers in cRPGs thats just the start.

For cRPGs you need a ... a creator, rather then just a writer. Someone who not only can write and create a narrative, idea, character and the dialogue options but also understand the whole structure of the game AND also plays and understands the gameplay in its every form. That not only creates some part of the game but plays and has direct experience on how his design - feels.

Most devs dont actually play the games.
They design and create content based on their internal vision and have some limited experience of how that actually plays as a whole. But thats not good enough. Because the experience of playing is an integral part of the game - whole.
An idea may seem great in someones mind but when put into the game it can clash with other specific features in wild ways - and then it needs to be changed and adjusted or even removed.
This can be experienced only by playing the game.

In the situation where the business side works as it does and we have these hierarchical structures of owners of the companies employing the devs... all of this unavoidably has to be understood and supported from that very top - down in the company.

 

[Kasparov]

Over-the-top self deprecating heads-ups aside, I think the original article is a great conversation starter. I hope Marat Sar or another writer from ZA/UM will type up a candid post-mortem after we ship the fucker, because the ways we´ve been attacking this writing-a-cRPG-topic while working on Disco Elysium have been many.

Personally I think that the main issue with any project as complex as a video game is communication - how much and how well the different specialists communicate with each other. Communication takes time. Time = billable hours = expenses = iterations are expensive as a MOTHERFUCKER. To find the best balance between writing and everything else you need iterations. Through iterations you learn.

The overall design (or vision?) has to be cohesive: writing, art, various game mechanics, sound etc are all tools to tell a story with. If, say, artists don´t communicate well with writers - you get shit. If writers work in isolation from designers who are elbow deep in mechanics - you get shit. Miscommunication during design phases and during the day-to-day development grind can lead to animators animating verbatim what writers have already described. Now add redundant voice-over to that.

The better examples of games with good writing that´ve been listed in the original article/rant and in this thread have all found a good balance for presenting the player with varied information. There is no fixed formula, but when developers work in isolation you end up with info dumps. Those are rarely a good idea and sadly too often world building and lore get presented as such. Developers/studios who do that see writing as just the final coat of paint over some core mechanic. And should that thin layer hold the whole thing together on its own?

Planescape: Torment found a good balance by having the game mechanics support the story. And vice-versa. You learn about Sigil, the world of Planescape and your previous lives by interacting with the game world, the characters that populate it and with yourself via character progression. There is a lot of text, but the player retains agency though most of it. Mechanics dictate how you interact with the world and through those interactions you discover new ways to interact with the world. The NPCs are not just there either: you had to interact with them, before they reacted. In newer cRPGs often you don´t have to do anything for the characters to tell you their life´s story and then a little something about the whole wide game world that you haven´t even started exploring yet.

I´m a big fan of the original Fallout partly because you learned about the world not only by interacting with the characters, but also by inspecting both the world and the gear you found there. Baldur´s Gate went a tad over the top with that and every +1 shortsword with a sob story description about a mischievous gnome that fell on it started to read very formulaic after a while. It´s all about the balance - and that comes from a strong vision. Design. And iterations. Keeping everything in balance comes down to good communication and deliberately making time for that.

 

[Kasparov]

Its not that the great games are made from top down - but with understanding them as a whole in which all the parts are connected and influence eachother.
You may think that the overall setting and big story is "top" but it can also be seen as the groundwork, foundations from which the rest of the game grows. But its also true that all the parts that grow from the main idea also influence and change and shift the main idea. Its really best to understand this not as top or down - but as a whole.

In the same way a character and his personality influences and changes dialogue options, options inside the quests and ultimately can change how the whole story unfolds.
Just as character skills influence how you solve specific tasks, quests and combat scenarios.

This. And the rest of that post.

 

[Mr. Hiver]

True. Communication between "departments" also falls apart when and because the game is not understood as a whole - including the experience of playing it - by everyone involved.
The starting vision for the game has to have that included and everyone working on the game have to understand it from the start - and then behave in ways that support it. That also means updating eachother on the progress and any design changes from iteration to iteration. Some sudden changes cannot always be completely avoided but if you work from the start in the right way you can minimize those.
And if you dont then such mistakes and their bad consequences only increase over time - which does affect all other parts of the whole and results in a poor game.

Obsidian is a great example of such discordant structure producing constant various problems in their games.
Including the horrible bosses.

Ive already said the same thing about PST and Fallouts.
There the writing wasnt just text you read but an integral part of the gameplay. The game didnt just give you any of it, you had to go and get it yourself. You discovered it by playing and using all the skills and mechanics at your disposal and it in turn changed and improved your skills and mechanics you played with. The story, the setting, the characters, the art style, mechanics and the gameplay were one.
Majority of everything written, every dialogue, every bit of info - had some kind of utility that influenced all the other parts and the whole of the gameplay.

Even though combat gameplay - or execution was barely sufficient, the rest of the overall gestalt was good enough to minimize that effect of one feature which wasnt as good as the rest.

 

[Cadmus]

Sorry MRY, this reads a little bit like a sob story about how we should think about the poor writers cuz their job is shit and hard.
Garbagemen, nurses and soldiers have hard jobs. RPG writing is a 1st world problem.
You are looking to blame the company structure, the game plan, the supposedly non-existent learning structure (which is bs imo, you learn by examining the current works and working) but I don't hear you decrying how shit most of the writers are. Might have missed that part, didn't read the whole article.

This reminds me of the fucking waitresses crying how their feet hurt and people ask them to bring them food all the time and everybody wants something and they don't have the time. It's all mostly stupid shit coming from people who have no experience working somewhere really demanding. I'm a bit surprised to hear the same from you when you seem to have some years behind you and actually having released a game.

Yeah, the communication might suck! Don't tell me the writers still couldn't do it better despite that.

Again I haven't finished reading the piece but it annoys me already. Maybe I'll change my mind by the end...?

 

[Kasparov]

Ah, combat in cRPGs. That can of worms. That’s also something that hasn’t progressed very much over the years. Combat encounters push narrative forward, but not individual actions during the “action”. So you get these full stops in the general flow of gameplay that resumes only after you defeat something or are defeated yourself.

It’s not such a big issue for other genres - I’m playing through The Last Of Us and they’ve incorporated story beautifully into the exploration and combat flow.

I’m looking forward to a cRPG that pulls that off with tactical combat.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

Ah, combat in cRPGs. That can of worms. That’s also something that hasn’t progressed very much over the years. Combat encounters push narrative forward, but not individual actions during the “action”. So you get these full stops in the general flow of gameplay that resumes only after you defeat something or are defeated yourself.

It’s not such a big issue for other genres - I’m playing through The Last Of Us and they’ve incorporated story beautifully into the exploration and combat flow.

I’m looking forward to a cRPG that pulls that off with tactical combat.

But trying to blend the combat with the flow of the story doesn’t make any sense, does it? One of the main characteristics of good combat is the fact that is a mini-game in itself. We can’t and shouldn’t expect traditional cRPGs to behave like triple-A action games.

Sorry MRY, this reads a little bit like a sob story about how we should think about the poor writers cuz their job is shit and hard.
Garbagemen, nurses and soldiers have hard jobs. RPG writing is a 1st world problem.
You are looking to blame the company structure, the game plan, the supposedly non-existent learning structure (which is bs imo, you learn by examining the current works and working) but I don't hear you decrying how shit most of the writers are.

Because he is a leftist, and leftists tend to diminish the role of personal responsability and treat the failures of this world as victims.

 

[Nalenth]

Over-the-top self deprecating heads-ups aside, I think the original article is a great conversation starter. I hope Marat Sar or another writer from ZA/UM will type up a candid post-mortem after we ship the fucker, because the ways we´ve been attacking this writing-a-cRPG-topic while working on Disco Elysium have been many.

I'm interested. Good luck with that game.

Baldur´s Gate went a tad over the top with that and every +1 shortsword with a sob story description about a mischievous gnome that fell on it started to read very formulaic after a while.

If i remember correctly, only unique items had a backstory in their description. They were relatively sparse.

 

[felipepepe]

Ah, combat in cRPGs. That can of worms. That’s also something that hasn’t progressed very much over the years. Combat encounters push narrative forward, but not individual actions during the “action”. So you get these full stops in the general flow of gameplay that resumes only after you defeat something or are defeated yourself.

Undertale did this masterfully, but it seems like people overlook the genius of its presentation and focus only on the 16-bit nostalgia and quirky characters...

Still, it was linear. I still want to see something like old CYOA books, such as Lone Wolf of Fighting Fantasy, where combat itself is a matter of choice and consequence - but in tactical form.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

The overall design (or vision?) has to be cohesive: writing, art, various game mechanics, sound etc are all tools to tell a story with. If, say, artists don´t communicate well with writers - you get shit. If writers work in isolation from designers who are elbow deep in mechanics - you get shit. Miscommunication during design phases and during the day-to-day development grind can lead to animators animating verbatim what writers have already described. Now add redundant voice-over to that.

In PS:T they had an asian artist that couldn’t speak a word of English and had to communicate through gestures, yet they managed to obtain better results than T:ToN did. Why? Because they cared and because the artistic vision was better. If you have nothing interesting to say and the main vision is poor, communication is useless.

 

[Kasparov]

Ah, combat in cRPGs. That can of worms. That’s also something that hasn’t progressed very much over the years. Combat encounters push narrative forward, but not individual actions during the “action”. So you get these full stops in the general flow of gameplay that resumes only after you defeat something or are defeated yourself.

It’s not such a big issue for other genres - I’m playing through The Last Of Us and they’ve incorporated story beautifully into the exploration and combat flow.

I’m looking forward to a cRPG that pulls that off with tactical combat.

But trying to blend the combat with the flow of the story doesn’t make any sense, does it? One of the main characteristics of good combat is the fact that is a mini-game in itself. We can’t and shouldn’t expect traditional cRPGs to behave like triple-A action games.

Yea and no. They should not behave like triple-A action games. But something could be learned from PnP. We have good tactical combat games. I’m saying that we don’t have anything that simultaneously allows for story progression. Stop thinking about combat as combat - a goblin bashing a kobold over the head with a bone club - but as conflict resolution. It’s a puzzle. Right now the only alternative paths are A) fight! B) talk your way past/through a conflict B’) have someone else fight for you or C) sneak by the conflict. So you choose before a conflict. The progression of any conflict is barely affected. In some cases you can mechanically influence the environment, but it has very little... story consequence.

 

[Crescent Hawk]

This debate actually is really making me sad and depressed. Because we wont ever see something like King of the Dragon Pass. Such glorious tabletop setting, with such respect for fantasy and theology, fucking Indo-European Culture-Hero Socio-Religious Society Simulator 3000.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

Yea and no. They should not behave like triple-A action games. But something could be learned from PnP. We have good tactical combat games. I’m saying that we don’t have anything that simultaneously allows for story progression. Stop thinking about combat as combat - a goblin bashing a kobold over the head with a bone club - but as conflict resolution. It’s a puzzle. Right now the only alternative paths are A) fight! B) talk your way past/through a conflict B’) have someone else fight for you or C) sneak by the conflict. So you choose before a conflict. The progression of any conflict is barely affected. In some cases you can mechanically influence the environment, but it has very little... story consequence.

I don’t see how this changes anything, really. I’m all for more dialogue choices that have narrative impact, and accusing a cRPG of being a CYOA is a compliment. The point is that you still can and should insert a tactical combat system inside a cRPG. There is no good reason not to. The stats and skills fit in the character progression like a glove. It is fun and complex. If you avoid it, you remove one of the cornerstones of agency in PnP since forever. Disco Elysium would be a much better game with a tactical combat system.

 

[Kasparov]

Yea and no. They should not behave like triple-A action games. But something could be learned from PnP. We have good tactical combat games. I’m saying that we don’t have anything that simultaneously allows for story progression. Stop thinking about combat as combat - a goblin bashing a kobold over the head with a bone club - but as conflict resolution. It’s a puzzle. Right now the only alternative paths are A) fight! B) talk your way past/through a conflict B’) have someone else fight for you or C) sneak by the conflict. So you choose before a conflict. The progression of any conflict is barely affected. In some cases you can mechanically influence the environment, but it has very little... story consequence.

I don’t see how this changes anything, really. I’m all for more dialogue choices that have narrative impact, and accusing a cRPG of being a CYOA is a compliment. The point is that you still can and should insert a tactical combat system inside a cRPG. There is no good reason not to. The stats and skills fit in the character progression like a glove. It is fun and complex. If you avoid it, you remove one of the cornerstones of agency in PnP since forever. Disco Elysium would be a much better game with a tactical combat system.

I’ve had my say on the Disco Elysium combat before. In a nutshell: sure Disco Elysium could win from an excellent tactical combat system. But IMO the conflict resolution that is used instead is superior for that game.

But an isolated minigame combat - there are tons of games like that already out there.

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

I’ve had my say on the Disco Elysium combat before. In a nutshell: sure Disco Elysium could win from an excellent tactical combat system. But IMO the conflict resolution that is used instead is superior for that game.

But an isolated minigame combat - there are tons of games like that already out there.

All the more reason to develop tactical combat systems: they can be just as innovative and creative as different paths in a narrative. The possibilities are endless and you can still reach a wider audience. If you end up being successful with Disco Elysium, I hope you guys try this approach in your next game. If you don’t have anyone in the team with a knack for this sort of thing, please hire a player codexer that does.

 

[Kasparov]

If we were going for the wider audience, do you think we’d be making an isometric cRPG, man?

 

[Deleted Member 22431]

If we were going for the wider audience, do you think we’d be making an isometric cRPG, man?

I was obviously talking about a wider audience among isometric cRPG enthusiasts, duh!

 

[Kasparov]

My earlier statement still stands.

EDIT: One of the things that was definitely different in the 90s - most developers were pioneers. They were doing this for the first time and hence had to be inventive. There is little original or memorable content out there, because the templates are already out there. All those Fallout clones and random medieval hacking and slashing romps with shit for dialogues.

Being a designer/writer now is truly a first world profession and you should challenge the establishment. Otherwise we end up with more of the same.

EDIT2: I’m beginning to feel like we’re the last two persons alive on Earth. A terrible proposition...

 

[Mr. Hiver]

Good or excellent tactical system does not in any way preclude narrative flow or trying to make it have more impact on the narrative flow.
These things are not mutually exclusive by themselves.

PSt combat suffered the most from the wrong idea of how "real time" will make it sell better. If anything the game would have benefited from less combat encounters. But making those that remain better.
Same thing with Arcanum and its attempt to fuse the two different combat systems, or similar attempt in van Buren.

Less is more.

Ah, combat in cRPGs. That can of worms. That’s also something that hasn’t progressed very much over the years. Combat encounters push narrative forward, but not individual actions during the “action”. So you get these full stops in the general flow of gameplay that resumes only after you defeat something or are defeated yourself.

It’s not such a big issue for other genres - I’m playing through The Last Of Us and they’ve incorporated story beautifully into the exploration and combat flow.

I’m looking forward to a cRPG that pulls that off with tactical combat.

I think that particular can of worms is fueled most of all by having too much combat. That fits some types of games and some types of RPGs but not all.
Especially when it takes forms of trash mobs - which it usually does.
That was often mentioned during the kickstarter of TtoN as one of the weaknesses of PST which should be corrected but the execution failed as the rest.

I think the problem is two fold. First - the combat became everything and majority of content in every RPG (and most other games) because its a seemingly easy way to emotionally hook the players and increase or pad the overall amount of content.
Second - because all of that combat is lethal. It may seem like a good idea at first as something to increase the emotional investment in players but that quickly wears off. Because of overblown amounts of combat encounters that then must turn into trash mobs and because of the very nature of games which have save/load systems.

Again, all this fits for some types of RPGs. Hack and slash, adventure/action RPGs, especially those with real time combat are a great fit.
But True cRPGs which rely on character abilities (skills, attributes, perks, traits and so on) more then the twitch player skills and aim for increased tactical puzzles in combat design and options and C&C in the quests and the story benefit from less combat encounters that are individually handmade or designed. Would Fallouts played any worse if they didnt have all those trash mobs and endless random encounters? Or would the whole world-setting-story benefited from it?

The problem with lethality of combat is that it robs you of any other options. Because thats the only option. Kill or be killed and reload to do it again.
That also affects the story, quest resolutions and narrative negatively - and the very core of RPG design. No matter with which build class or type of character you are playing with - all you get to do is kill enemies all the same.
Stealth characters kill, mages and wizards kill, druids kill even fucking bards kill.
And every death is practically worthless and cant have any big impact in the world - which also has an additional consequence of you playing a hero who is effectively a genocidal maniac. But still good! err... because!

But if you would start with non lethal combat in mind the things completely change. In that case any single death can have big impact and importance in the story and individual quests or quests chains.
That affects options in choice and consequence department very positively. In gameplay and in the story-narrative. Since they are or at least should be one thing.
If you do that - then each decision (or atleast some of them) inside a combat encounter can have influence on the narrative and its flow which would then have influence on further gameplay and combat encounters and all that will be naturally understandable to every player.
This approach naturally also requires no trash mob encounters and handmade design of encounters in the game - which naturally lends itself into connecting those with the story.

I had, or still have an idea for a game and thats how i would design it from the get go. Combat would be non lethal, you would have a lot of options in that combat (mandatory groin shots galore), enemies would sometimes surrender, sometimes not and how you react to that would count for many things. You would have an option to kill but consequences of that would be drastic in various ways, just like they are in reality. In a few places you would have options to try and hide your trail, turn blame on others or bribe your way out, (doesnt mean you would automatically succeed in any of that), but in most places you would suffer the consequences of being a killer.
And i would add a quest where you are falsely accused of killing too. All of that would be very fitting for the setting i have in mind but thats a long story.

Point is all those options and more become possible when the combat is non lethal and constrained.

Of course you can mix that approach with the current usual design. There was and there is more and more RPGs where here and there you have an option not to kill to solve a quest. Its nice, right?
And thats exactly what cRPGs should provide. Options.