Game News The Two Most Important Factors For Organic Virtual Worlds...

[DraQ]

scatophile

I'm glad scat is now associated with scat. It truly was one of the worst musical stylings ever conceived, and was probably the first "decline" in music. It is fitting that its legacy lives on in such a putrid word.

I did, however, find it scary when I saw that one of the Neverhood tracks is named "Skat Radio".

 

[Clockwork Knight]

Or why a continous simple casual game can be more immersive than a high end shooter.

Wait what?

High speed Tetris vs. Generic 3d Shooter

you pay a lot more attention to the first one

 

[GarfunkeL]

For 15 minutes. If you 'immerse' yourself into Tetris for much longer, you need professional help. From Lithuanian hitmen.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

You're associating immersion with LARPing. I was thinking more along the lines of "shit, look at the time" immersion. Immersion =! immershun

 

[John Yossarian]

Re: No.

Theme-park designers start with a list of game elements that they think would be cool and/or fun, and then they craft the world around those elements.

Sorry for the selective quoting, but I gotta say, if they really did this, that would be a hell of a game.
What they actually do is come up with fun elements (which sometimes aren't), pick a generic fantasy setting and mash them together without regards as to how they complement each other, or how one could have given rise to the other.
The only reason results are not worse is that settings always resemble real life to a large degree, and a lot of mechanics are copied from real life, so in those cases a lot of the coherence carries over. Case in point RT Combat, grand strategy games, and 4x games.
But this is also a mixed blessing, since when designers are forced to integrate a mechanic or element that doesn't exist in RL, or when the tech doesn't enable them to copy RL, they won't know how to approach the problem, and end up shoehorning it in without any thoughts as to the repercussions. That's why magic sucks, and large scale conflicts in RPGs suck, and diplomacy sucks, and NPCs are billboards, etc.

 

[Rhalle]

'Radiant AI' wasn't perfect (but it was the direction everyone needed to go in), and it was one hell of a lot better than just making the NPC stand in one place forever, like they do in WoW-- a strategy everyone in the fantasy genre seems to be adopting.

 

[Drakron]

"making the NPC stand in one place forever, like they do in WoW"

They do that for a reason.

They are quest dispensers, offer services or act as guards and are going to punish players for not playing at the "right" time? I used to play WoW at graveyard shift.

How about you THINK for a second and realize why the idea of giving NPCs a activity script would is VERY FUCKING STUPID on a MMORPG.

Besides, Gothic 2 already done what Retarded AI did without so much LIES AND PROPAGANDA.

 

[DraQ]

Immersion is closely tied to the suspension of disbelief. Abstract games have null immersion (doesn't mean that they are inherently not entertaining/stimulating/worthwhile). If you can get immersed into Tetris, Go or Rock-Paper-Scissors, you need some fucking help or are an outsider to this universe.

For 15 minutes. If you 'immerse' yourself into Tetris for much longer, you need professional help. From southernmost Baltic state persons available for contract hire.

[intelligence] That's professional help indeed.

 

[Rhalle]

"making the NPC stand in one place forever, like they do in WoW"

They do that for a reason.

They are quest dispensers, offer services or act as guards and are going to punish players for not playing at the "right" time? I used to play WoW at graveyard shift.

How about you THINK for a second and realize why the idea of giving NPCs a activity script would is VERY FUCKING STUPID on a MMORPG.

No shit?

We're talking about singleplayer RPGs. And yet the NPCs in all recent RPGs stand in attention in one place, like they do in an MMO.

It seems that recently developers have gotten lazy; they appear to have given up on realistic AI for NPCs in creating a living world.

This guy, however, Daniel Orgengrinder or whatever his name is, gets how important it is for NPCs to have a schedule and not stand in one spot like cigar-store Indians.