Playing a Role
In first person games the feedback seems to want headphones with no fancy music but rather environmental sounds that gives the maximum amount of information to the player. This is because the field of view is limited to quarter of a sphere or even less. This also demands an exceptional interaction response time for turning around and facing a sound triggered event. Consequently, zooming in should be forbidden to give accurate visual feedback for relative position.
In that analysis the player plays the role of the character less the gravitation effect feelings and pain inflicted on the character.
The bird’s-eye concept of viewing, however, is totally different and in which the player plays the role of the all-knowing God that can see ahead of what mortals may be able to see. In that technical implementation of playing a role, the extents of the field of view are critical to the value of the design, and that is because there is a minimum extent of the field of view that makes playing the role of a God, puppeteering the avatar, efficient rather than truncated and worthless. It is seeing ahead the possible events and NPCs that makes the player decide what to command the avatar to do to advance and win a game in a multitude of successful steps. Here zooming in and rotating the world is optional and required for different levels of detail and handling different situations.
In first person style there is no avatar to be identified with at all because the player is the person.
In bird’s-eye, which we may also call the Divine Puppeteer style, a God is certainly identified with his chosen person whom gets God’s full attention as the player puppeteer his/ her character.
Deciding on what your puppeteered character should do next is absolutely strategy of short term.
Therefore, playing a role in RPG as a DP is a subset of strategy games.
The difference between the two styles up to this moment is as simple as single and plural.
In RPG we are making strategic decisions for one person or one major character (a hero).
In Strategy games we make decisions for a faction, a nation, a species, a city, a planet or even for the whole universe.
There is no contradiction in mixing both styles, where the Divine Puppeteer (the human player) decides generally for the environment in which the hero dwells.
The trick here is to make the hero command the divine decisions rather than bypassing the hero to the environment directly and that makes the hero a ruler of sorts.
The game may set objectives to achieve an optimal environment for the hero’s needs and the welfare of his/ her people.
However, it is much more interesting to develop the character first before rising to the ruling status.
It is in that phase of game play that adventures and discovery as well as gaining lore comes in.
This means that RPG, Strategy and AD&D are all co-affine and can be mixed to produce the ultimate game.
For developers to take a decision on developing such a holistic category might not be recommended as many people have different tastes and abilities, that is why it is favourable to give that choice in the upper most menu of the game hierarchy to select to play an RPG, a Strategy, an AD&D or all combined.
My verdict is that Reality Pump is on its way to that level and that Larian Studios can do it and share the market.
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