Timed Events

[Sustenus Paul]

A fairly common CRPG situation:

On your way into town, you defeat a handful of bandits who manage to rough you and any companions you might have a fair bit. You limp in to town and a distraught peasant woman runs up to you, begging you to save her child who just fell into a nest of giant scorpions who are about to kill him. Assuming you are of a heroic bent, do you:

A) Rush into the fray and hope for the best, knowing you aren't in optimal condition.
B) Down some of your limited stock of healing items, then rush into the fray.
C) Find a room at the Inn (or, better yet, the forest floor outside of town remains free) and rest a couple days until your wounds are healed up, then rush into the fray, knowing the giant scorpions will remain "about to" kill the boy until you finally get off your lazy duff and stop them.
D) Reload to just outside of town and rest up before encountering the woman and triggering the event.

There seems to be a certain anethema to timed events in CRPGs, both in the short term (complete this quest in two days or no reward) or long term (if you don't defeat the mutant army in 100 days, they'll overrun the wasteland and end the game). This understandable to some extent, since RPGs are largely about the freedom to explore and it's a bummer knowing you have to be in Tamathriel by Solstice when you really wanted to take some time to find the underground Dwarven cities in the nearby mountains or whatever.

On the other hand, I was thinking about what I just wrote in another thread about "static situation" plots (as found in Fallout or a lot of "old-school" CRPGs), where things are indefinitely hanging on the razor's edge of a crisis until you finish wandering around exploring/beefing up your character(s) and resolve it.

Even plotted games tend to use this model, only more often. You have a series of gradually worsening "static situations" that you must resolve one at a time in a certain order.

The problem in the former situation is there can be no plot, because only one real plot point occurs in the entire game, that being the point where you step in and resolve the crisis. Up until that moment, nothing of signifigance to the main storyline can happen, and after that point you can only have denoument.

The problem in the latter situation is, of course, linearity. You have to deal with the barbarian raids in Northbrook before you can learn about they were instigated by the evil sorcerer who you must now hunt down before you can access the plane where his demonic master resides, preparing to enslave the planet.

In the latter situation, you can solve linearity a bit with branches. If you wipe out the raiders, you then have to fight your way through the sorcerer's fortress, but the Baron of Northbrook will reward you with some heavy duty equipment. If you simply sneak into their camp and read the Orcish Warlord's journal, you'll get no such aid, but can take a similarly stealthy approach to dealing with the sorcerer himself. If you give Northbrook's tactical maps to the Orcish Warlord, he'll take you to meet the sorcerer personally, and you can then slip poison into his wine and take his place as the demon's prime servitor. Or whatever. But, in the end, you're dealing with a series of linear paths, each of which have to be hand-coded, and none of which are truly "fluid" in the optimal sense.

Alternatively, what if the raiders started harrassing Northbrook on day 30, and remained in place until day 50, after which Northbrook would be wiped out if you hadn't yet come in to stop them. Then, of course, the location of the sorcerer's fortress would have to be learnable somewhere else, or else maybe on day 60, he would begin a powerful summoning ritual which would allow you to divine his location, but would only give you maybe 5 days before the demon was brought into the world, effectively ending the game. You could do whatever you wanted during all this time, with the only caveat that you only had 65 days to do it in before it became imperitive that you find and stop the sorcerer.

Of course, the reality is that a lot of people are going to choose option D to my original question if option C isn't available, but I don't think that it's the responsibility of the designer to code for the player's lack of self-discipline.

 

[Deathy]

Avernum 3 does this kind of thing. You'd have the threat from monsters worsen as time went on, if you didn't solve the problem. Eventually, towns would be overrun by the threat.

It was a neat way of doing things. It made it seem that the world didn't revolve around your schedule. As I understand it, Fallout was originally intended to do the same thing, that is, actually have towns overrun by mutants if you waited too long, but that didn't make it in.

 

[Sustenus Paul]

I know the original (unpatched) version of Fallout had two time limits. The "find the waterchip" time limit that you would pretty much have to try not to make, and an overall time limit before the mutants wiped out everyone. People complained, and so the latter limit was taken out, although the Boneyard ending changes depending on how fast you beat the game.

 

[Deathy]

I always thought that the time limits added a nice amount of urgency into the game. They also added some degree of replay value, as there was only so much that a character could do while staying within them. Removing the second time limit was probably bad, as it allowed people to do all of the monty haul style quests.
With the time limit, it was difficult get the power armor, so, often the game was completed without it.

The main problem with the time limitwas the fact that you could not evade it, and it was essentially a plot device that made you play the game in a certain way, like the iron shortage in Baldur's Gate restricting access to the city, although making a lot more sense.

 

[Saint_Proverbius]

I'd prefer if the game didn't end to that, though. Maybe the mutants started destroying cities one by one, and the game wouldn't end until they had eventually killed the Vault 13 citizens, as your mission was to save them in the first place. All this would naturally affect the ending.

That's the way Fallout used to be. I remember when I first beat Fallout, I had version 1.1 on CD when I bought it, I told a friend of mine about it. He asked, "How many towns did you save?" I said, "Huh? All of them, I guess." because I had no idea what he was talking about.

It is rather silly to not have things like that in a CRPG, I think. If you're going to have some wise, old sage guy call you up and say, "Look, hero, you've got to save the world from this threat, otherwise we're all doomed. DOOMED!", well, then you should see evidence of that! If you start the player out with the "Evil is destroying the world" idea, and you can putter around to your heart's content, then how much danger is the world really in?

Jagged Alliance 2 did a decent job of this as well. You had to garrison towns from the bad guys to keep them out. You'd liberate and garrison. If you didn't garrison, the bad guys eventually retook that town.

 

[Greenskin13]

Jagged Alliance 2 did a decent job of this as well. You had to garrison towns from the bad guys to keep them out. You'd liberate and garrison. If you didn't garrison, the bad guys eventually retook that town.

Not just that, but after you unleash the bugs, the attacks become increasingly more common and difficult until you killed the queen. Sci Fi mode only.

 

[Spazmo]

I don't know that that's such a good idea. It doesn't help for the non-linearity of a game. If the game essentially tells you that you can do anything you want, anything at all, but if you don't do exactly what the devs planned, you lose, that's pretty much linearity. It does create a more interesting world, but it also sort of puts you on a rail.

 

[Ausir]

Even in the patched version, they forgot to change the lines of Patrick the Celt, who tells you which towns were destroyed, even if they weren't because of the patch.

 

[Sustenus Paul]

I don't know that that's such a good idea. It doesn't help for the non-linearity of a game. If the game essentially tells you that you can do anything you want, anything at all, but if you don't do exactly what the devs planned, you lose, that's pretty much linearity. It does create a more interesting world, but it also sort of puts you on a rail.

Er... no, not at all, or at least not any more than is already in place. Unless you expect a completely plotless, open-ended world to roleplay in without end (which is another discussion entirely), you're always going to eventually tackle whatever obstacle the devs placed in your path in any CRPG.

The difference is between going to your job and having someone say do this, this, this and this, then you can do this and this and then you're done or going to your job and being told you have to do this by Friday, and this and this by next Wednesday, and the rest you can do or not do as the mood strikes you and time allows, depending on if you feel it helps you accomplish the assigned tasks.

Again, in my aforemention example, you just have to deal with the issue of the evil sorcerer by day sixty-five. Dealing with the barbarians by day fifty will certainly make it easiser to do so, but you aren't obligated. Certainly it tends to suggest an order to things (for instance if the barbarian raiders are present from day 30-50 and the rebellion at the docks is going on from day 20-40, it would make more sense to deal with the latter first), but power levels already do the same thing more obtrusively (the random street thugs in the city where the end game takes place are better trained, armed, and armored than the sorcerer's elite minions you defeated several levels back). And again, if things are structured so you could theoretically let the majority of crises pass with no more loss than a loss of opportunity for rewards and experience, you are still free to do what you want, but not completely directionless unless you willfully decide to be.