This Fall is going to be the greatest fall in the history of RPGs

[VerSacrum]

Avowed will be the least pozzed but most bland = Codex GOTY 2024 incoming.

Nah, that's Kingdom Come 2. It's basically locked down at this point unless some weird shit happens.

Vavra did say it will be a "diverse" game, but I think he meant to say that there will be characters of different nationalities and backgrounds - French, German, Ottoman, not just Bohemians.

In real history at the time burghership and council of Kuttenberg was pretty much entirely German (which is why it was burnt to ashes and nearly everyone in it killed or expelled in the Hussite Wars), sure hope the game will reflect that.

 

[NecroLord]

Yeah.
Let's see just how historically accurate are they going to make KCD 2.

 

[Lord_Potato]

A second, interesting question, would be which one of those games will receive the 75% discount kiss of death first...

Which of these games become an Epic freebie, you wanted to say

 

[KeighnMcDeath]

Hmmm... Burger Ship... tasty.

 

[BrainMuncher]

It's probably more correct to talk about agency/constraint rather than agency/narrative, since you can have constraints on agency that aren't related to narrative. But a pre-determined narrative is by it's nature a constraint.

I/we were talking about games like Dwarf Fortress, Kenshi and Crusader Kings. People call these games "story generators" because, despite not having a pre-defined narrative they generate stories through their simulation engine. All I'm saying is that for me personally these "machine generated stories" despite how much you as a player affected their creation, can't come close to even badly written drivel by a human. But that's just me (and many others )

Right if you're talking about quality there are certain things that you aren't likely to encounter when a player is essentially writing the narrative by accident and in real time in a sandbox game. Like an unexpected twist, or a murder mystery or something. On the other hand Kenshi stories won't have any unexplained plot holes, deus ex machina, plot armor etc. So in terms of quality the human touch gives with one hand and takes away with the other.

A game by definition has rules so you need some sort of narrative or you don't have a game.

That's quite the leap in logic, are you saying there are no games without a story? Because that's not the case.

I was referring to rules and narrative as loosely the same thing. You could think about a point of narrative as a game rule. For instance you always start Diablo in the town of Tristram. Is that a rule or part of the narrative? In that sense they are essentially the same thing. Any pre-determined narrative is essentially a rule since it contrains the player in the same way as a rule. Likewise, you could consider rules as constraints on the narrative. If the player in Diablo can't fly then in a certain sense that is effectively part of the narrative even if not explicitly stated.

Narrative and player agency in games exist on a continuum. The more of one you have, the less of the other. At one extreme you have table top games, where the only real limit on player agency is imagination, even the rules of the game can be broken. Games like minecraft and civilization are near this end of the spectrum, with only minimal narrative constraints. The story is just an account of what the player chose to do, it's not LARPing it's just facts about what happened.

No, tabletop and Minecraft aren't the same thing at all. If you play minecraft for a few hours and then that's your story, the shit that you did in the game, by all means go ahead and call that "story" but that's not what I was talking about.

Every story is just a recounting of events that may or may not have happened. Minecraft stories are technically non-fiction since they actually happened so you might call them history. You might not think they are worth recording or telling but it's still a story.