Larian Studios Forums General Chat RPG Chat Are story focused RPGs dying out?

I also like Jolee... Heck, I like all of the characters in the game! Even Bastila has her uses.
Yesterday got to the uncharted planet for the first time and before, heard about the 'original meatbag' from HK-47. That was unexpected <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" /> <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/up.gif" alt="" />.
Well, I suppose there long before I finish the game (and restart as a new char) so I can probably judge the story so far.

Although there certainly are some familiar elements which are often misused in a cliche RPG, KotOR's story is masterfully crafted. It all seems logical, with nothing out of place. Not only that, but sometimes you do have the feel that your actions change the gameworld.
Example: *micro-spoiler*
It is unbelievable you can be banned from Manaan! I've never seen it in any other RPG! Or that you can actually be executed there! Usually the game 'forgives' the dialogue errors you make so whatever you say, the conclusion is the same. I was surprised to see it is not true in KotOR.
I also applaud the cinematics crew, both FMV and cutscenes. They are made from several small scenes yet this is what makes it special.

banned from manaan? err.... remember stormfist castle? got kicked out with huge drop in reputation? that's quite a biggie for me as well. i was miffed! <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/rolleyes.gif" alt="" />

anyway, before KOTOR is deemed overrated (thanks to winterfox <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/tongue.gif" alt="" /> ), the game has all the usual elements right for a tightly woven RPG. it's quite a feat considering that the game was released for 3 platforms & that makes thrice the nightmare for developers.

i just hope KOTOR 2 will be a lot better, if not on par with the first. & as for the rest of RPGs, it's entirely up to developers to delve into whatever subject matter they're interested in. if almost all of them still want to beat up that old horse we call medieval fantasy, we can't stop them.

ah heck, premise is one thing. story is another. i feel larians did it right by having their games singleplayer only so the story-driven elements can be enforced. multi-player requires conformity & that will threaten any story-driven elements if gamers in a session may not 'role-play' to make it more immersive. but then, what do i know as i have almost no experience in multiplayer at all.

heck, u know what? this topic mirrors Alrik's writing thread in that story elements are very important with believable characters & plausible plots ... etc.

come to think of it; KOTOR manages to make the game & story work together by limiting players to only certain types of playable characters. u have the melee & range in the beginning. later on characters will evolve to jedis. nevermind consular or superfly or salesperson. u're a jedi & that's that. & i don't hear major complaints on why players can't be bounty hunters like bobba fett, or fishy like akbar or idiotic jar jar binks.

less is more. quite true in this.

Every so often this issue comes up, is the genre dead, I think it's because those games either take longer or need more people, or both. Development cycles are longer so subjectively, to us that love them, the genre seems to die between bouts of games.

But I think there is too much demand for them, even specialized, and even when some ideas get a bit tired or oddly done.

The question is not whether the games will die, for that to happen role playing would have to die, but rather where is it going?


Sadly, from my perspective, RPG's are most likely to save on development costs by going exclusively online, multiplayer. The reason for this is that very soon we will see all of these games come with editing options that allow individuals to carve out a piece of that online world and generate their own adventures. Imagine hopping into something like the World of Warcraft 2 someday and being able to create your own quests, even monsters via a point and click interface, for people, with some supervision, and run mini games within the online game. You could create your own NPC's, and even feed them dialog via your cell phone in response to triggers...

This is available technology right now and allows for a kind of replayability and cheap development that other rpg's would always lack.

The dialog and options will fall to massive numbers of players to flesh out naturally. Hopefully we can train them to stay on topic and in character <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/winkwink.gif" alt="" />


I do suspect that computer RPG's as we have known them will be dead in 1-2 game generations, or fall to a single publisher and perhaps series. Online games will be an interesting substitute, until....

AI software is able to generate stories and dialog "at random" but appropriate to quest and theme. That is not as far away as you might imagine. Within our lifetimes, one would suspect.

Loki-Lowkey (American Gods?):
We'll see: after KotOR, the interest in console RPGs jumped up, the release of KotOR2 and Fable confirmed and games like Jade Empires on the horizon, maybe not everything is lost.
Yet I can't deny you are right: Final Fantasy doesn't have dialog choices and everyone plays it. Your idea of an AI gamemaster is most possible. Small steps in random generation and AI Dungeon Master were made and I am sure they will soon evolve.

Well, I just finished KotOR on the Dark Side (and tried the easter-egg ending). Without spoilers, I'll say that I loved Bastila by the end.
Janggut: First, being banned from Manaan happens only if you are lying like a Hutt in the jury. It means that it is a part of the world's reaction to the player. Now being executed on Manaan was even more unexpected. Especially that I had to move four areas later (forgot to save).

Now about the ending:
*NO spoilers, for those who haven't played the game*
That was probably the longest ending ever in an RPG! A great ending to conclude an equally great game. Excellent conversations, FMVs and, unlike most endings, it doesn't look rushed! Now when I look back at the game, I can see why it impressed me so much. The game's story had usual elements, but used in ways I never seen before. There were some GOOD twists. Sure I could guess many of the elements, but it was because of the great foreshadowing. It's more like guessing the end of a mystery novel than guessing the end of an american action flick. As I said before, I find Star Wars flat like a brick. KotOR was not.
Still I laugh at the idea of dense energy of defined lenght in lightsabers but now there is a new dimention to the Star Wars elements:
Understanding the Sand People, discovering the rotten sides of both the Jedi and the Sith, seeing memorable characters (Luke was paper-thin [character-wize]).



This is the whole idea behind a story-driven RPG. Nobody complained you can't play a Mystra-offspring in Baldur's Gate. Nobody asked to play Lord of Chaos in Divinity.
I would disagree when you say "you are a jedi and that's it" unless you meant that all what makes a jedi is waving a lightsaber and being able to force-persuade. It's like saying that the only difference between a religious person and a non-religious is a wooden cross. The comparison is vague but I think you understand: in KotOR, you do not have to accept Jedi's philosophy. Nor you have to settle for the Sith view. You can be neutral. Jolee is.
KotOR's number of side-quests surpassed Divinity and Baldur's Gate 1.
To conclude, KotOR has two (three, if you consider the easter egg) endings. That alone is worth considering. I said a long time ago that Vampire: The Masquerade has three endings. Nevertheless, the three VTM endings together are half as long as a KotOR ending. They also have a rushed feel.

Now I'll take a breath, watch Futurama and make a new character for a new KotOR game (this time on the light side) tomorrow.

DATD: a question -- are you opposed to the idea of <span class='standouttext'>Spoiler : </span><span class='spoiler'>a female Revan</span>? Many male players seem to think it's preposterous and put there only because Bioware wants to be politically correct. (Which is a WTFish interpretation, to say the least. There are many, many dialogue choices -- apart from the romance -- that a female PC gets and a male one does not.)

Sorry for the late jump in on this topic, but a key phrase caught my eye. May I ask where you got info that the Van Buren (Fallout 3) project was revived by Bethesda instead of Obsidian? I know, it's a bit off topic, but I'm trying to gather any info I can on the revival rumors. I've been "out of the loop" as of late, focusing on modding my PC more <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/rolleyes.gif" alt="" />

EDIT: Just saw the official news. Sorry I jumped on the post, it's just I've wanted another "traditional" Fallout to come out since I finished Fallout Tactics, and since the horrible F:BoS came out and BiS was scraped I've become very worried Fallout 3 would never see release... kinda like Duke Nukem Forever...

Interesting stuff...although I'd like to point out (again) that I'm not *the* writer of Beyond Divinity. If anything that honour should go to Bronthion who wrote the story and original dialogues - I just came along did some editing, added a bit of me to it and some original content here and there. I'm sure I would have done things differently if I'd been involved in the early stages of story/character/narrative design.

PC RPGs are already dying out and pretty fast, that's not to say they're not flourishing on consoles, but these days for most publishers sticking to one platform for any genre is risky, especially with an almost niche genre like RPGs. I think that dialogue length will decrease in RPGs but there will be more emphasise on refining emotional character development and storytelling rather than bombarding the player with a load of text that you could of conveyed to them a hundred other ways that would have been 1) more powerful 2)less time consuming and 3) less likely to get skipped over.

*Probable spoilers ahead*

Nonsense.
Notice that in most of the new Star Wars games/movies/books there are female jedi. Thus said, I see no reason why a Dark Lord can't be a female. Honestly, in a way females are more likely to become an overlord: even in Star Wars, women are often mistreated and underestimated on many worlds, hence revenge (which, according to the jedi teaching, leads to the dark side) from those is very likely. I do believe there is a psychological difference between men and women but not in such case.
I loved how the first Dantooine dream sequence was done: Darth Raven never spoken, which added to the gloomy athmosphere and contrasted to the young Malak's over-eager ramble. Damn, it is great how Bioware showed Revan's apprentice: the opposite of Darth Malak. I trully enjoyed Malak as the game's main opponent. He was a... round character. The only evolving arch-enemy I've seen in any game (maybe Crimson Skies 2 too). One thing I don't quite understand: what happened to Malak's jaw? Why was it removed and some robotic parts added? Was it he himself who integrated a part of the Star Forge in his body or was it replaced after a battle? Or was it just a way for Bioware to make him look more malevolent and imposing?


EDIT:
Neo,
Van Buuren is not revived. Bethesda is starting from scratch. Also, Beth's Fallout 3 will probably not be as BI studios planned the sequel.

The mystery of Malak's jaw has never been solved. Most people think Revan did it, but none of the Biowarians has stated what exactly happened. I suspect it's there just to make him look more menacing. Hey, it's all fine, anyway. I love the way very little of Revan's background is revealed; it gives us fanficcers fun wriggle room. (In the unlikely case that you're interested, this is my version of what happened.)

The links doesn't work.
Is this what you spoke about?

Drat. Wrong code. I was linking to this specific chapter. (The interludes tie in with the main plot, but can be read pretty much independently.)

Sorry, my fault for using an imprecise phrase. When I said “the game writer Rhianna Pratchett” I meant it in the same sense as “the singer Nora Jones”, or “the plumber Arthur Robinson”, rather than to mean the sole writer of this particular game.



I’m sure you’re right about the reducing role of dialogue, or at least text, in games. It’s probably an inevitable part of a general movement from games’ original roots in books – starting with text only adventures like Zork – towards the more visually dominated style of films. The interesting question though is how games can preserve things like depth, charm and involvement whilst using less words.

How exactly DO games makers get the messages across in “ways that would have been 1) more powerful 2)less time consuming and 3) less likely to get skipped over”?

Certainly, there are some good film directors who can do it. And a lot more mediocre film directors who fail trying. Do games need a ‘director’ figure with an overall creative vision and the skills to convey that vision to all the different team members, and then pull it all together as a coherent whole that’s properly paced and balanced?

In my experience, the factors ‘get you in’ and give a game charm and quality are hard to pin down, and often vary from game to game. It’s certainly not just directly tied to how much text is included. I happen to like text, but I’d rather have a game that does the job well in a mainly visual way than one that just dishes up reams of uninspired words.

Can anybody elaborate a bit on what they think successfully creates atmosphere, drama, emotion and character development in a game?

aural factor.

sound. ambience. speech. voice. music.

well at least that's what i believe. at a market place,one would expect the usual noise from crowd & all. manners of speech of people who frequent market places; uncouth sellers, polite ones, simpletons, haggler, boisterous shoppers, authoritative attitudes of (obviously) police, children running about & among the crowds like skiffs cutting through water, etc. ambient sound does a lot where graphics may fail to convey.

voice cannot be overly emphasised. where especially graphics fail to convey the emotions of characters (how? characters with static facial features, static portraits, even KOTOR fails in graphical representation of emotions), voice can provide so much even in one or two sentences. using KOTOR as example (again!), how we perceive Carth as whiny or full of emotional baggage is already success in sound department as how he is voiced has given Carth a character trait, be it good or bad. so i hope u can see how voice delivers where graphics fail.

music is where larians are successful without a doubt. kirill's styles of music blends well with the game & hence made DD especially such memorable gaming experience. that's more or less the same thing people say about the anime series Cowboy Bebop, the sound especially music defines almost all aspects of the series; from mood to atmosphere to story progression to emotions ... .

anyway, that's my 2 cents. aural experience is very very important for overall experience though people may zero in on graphics for first impressions. which is why i'm a KOSS fan.

note: graphics helps a lot in the sense that if u convey emotions succesfully (via protrait or avatar showing emotions, probably to the point of exagerration to get points across), u will worry less on localisations as u don't localise graphics. do u? <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/confused.gif" alt="" />

Great point janggut. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

Music, for me, is the King of the Arts. I can feel sad or elated, or even unexpectedly have tears trickling down my cheeks, after only a few seconds of the right piece of music. Everything else takes longer to work. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

I remember the first CD player I bought, some years ago. I put on a CD of Winton Marsalis playing a Classical trumpet concerto and sat in a favourite chair to listen. The sound that came out of the speakers was so clear and Marsalis' playing was so unbelievably good (plus it was a great concerto anyway) that within moments I was completely choked up with the brilliance and beauty of it. Instant emotion!

Yes, I'd certainly rate sound very highly. As you say, the music, the ambient sounds and the voice acting all make a big contribution. Having such awful voice acting in BD really jarred - not just the DK but many of the other voices too. There was one guy with an English voice who did a whole bunch of characters in later acts and was terrible at all of them.

Maybe we could name a few games we thought did work and try and figure out why they worked?

I'm not usually a big Adventure game fan but I loved games like Grim Fandango, Sam and Max Hit The Road, and the Monkey Island series. All had great writing and very good voice work. They also all had very appealing graphics. Very basic compared to today's slick 3D stuff, but what they did have was style and charm. Just because something is high tech or modern doesn't mean it's got quality, and I'd still cheerfully play any of those games again.

What other factors does anybody remember from games that they loved?

I can relate to that. Music – not song but music – does amazing things to me. The amount of power and energy that can be fed into music is incomprehensable. Particularly in movies where the visuals accompany the music. The music from Matrix Reloaded got me so involved and pumped when I first so it my legs went numb. In One Perfect Day, I probably spent about half the movie with tears, in happiness, sadness and anger. Even the right song while driving will do it.


Locality and discovery.

I like games where the same characters and localities are reused. I think it's pointles to the story to travel across the entire world. There's only three people outside your party who ever really matter. I like the community I start in and would like to see them prosper.

I loved how games like Myst just give you concepts and ideas and let you work it out from there. They don't need to explain everything to you in great detail. Working out the story is half the fun.

The future of interactive dialogue is an interesting one, and one that I think will be redefined not so much by its underlying structure but by general character development, depth and emotion. Thoughts anyone?

For what it's worth, this brings to mind several games of the great developer Chris Crawford, which avoided those stilted dialog trees and used a mix of symbols for subject, action, and emotion. Thus, you might speak with a character and use the symbols for:

take + crystals + joy

only to have the character respond:

stop + you + worry

By intermixing a form and large numberof emoticons (before there ever were such things on the Web), Crawford allowed for a largely freeform continuity. I have to say I'd regret the loss of the outstanding dialog in BG2 and PS:T, but most games lack that quality. Crawford was onto something, in my opinion. A shame no companies had interest in following it up.

I'm sorry but this is really the lowest degree of "dialogue" or even language...
well it may be really interactive, no doubt, but it is really really far from reality of our world (just we don't speak like that, pointing out(?/ showing?) objects...
a sentence in english is not an intermixing of words (except when I wrote it but that's another problem <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/silly.gif" alt="" />)
but a general meaning... and intermixing of words just served this general meaning... reverse this is not really such a so genious innovation I think...

as usual but not less sincerely: apologies for bad english

I'd very much agree with that too. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/smile.gif" alt="" />

I think that my ideal game would have a home base of some kind where at least some of the people did develop and continue to provide ongoing interactions as the story unfolded. Usually, a few clicks quickly exhaust the possibilities of each NPC. Having a base also allows players to collect their loot and trophies, which always seems a popular thing to do.

I also enjoy exploring and discovering locations that have something genuinely different and interesting to find or experience. Too many games just have miles of repeated scenery and randomly generated junk. I'd rather have a shorter game with some real quality than a repetitive one that just had sheer quantity.

So a combination of a 'home town' with interactions that actually developed and changed as the story progressed, plus a variety of surrounding locations that looked interesting and different and had real stories happening in them, would be just great. Too many games now are full of "Go to X, kill Y or get Z, return and repeat". They might boast 300 quests, but it's often more like one quest repeated 300 times. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/disagree.gif" alt="" />

One example of a game with interactions that developed in a way that I enjoyed was Deus Ex. There was no 'party' as such, but lots of characters like Denton's brother Paul, and a heap of others, kept re-appearing and adding more to the story. Endless twists and turns and a real feeling that there were other people involved in the story from start to finish rather than only a row of generic monsters with a boss to kill at the end.

As someone who has done a small but interesting bit of research into linguistics, I have to disagree with you. Perhaps I didn't explain it well. Symbols, after all, are at the root of all communications. By focusing on flexible symbols instead of 2 or 3 options in a typical dialog (which usually break down to "Yes, I'll help you, because I'm good!" and "No, I'll kill you because I hate puppies and life"!) you'd be able to communicate repeatedly making, and changing on-the-fly arrangements involving the intentions and emotions of both parties to any conversation. You'd know immediately the exact tone of any speaker to you, and be able to communicate a broad range of tones in turn. This wouldn't communicate background, but that wasn't its purpose, not when Crawford's games appeared in the mid-1980s. It was designed as I mentioned above to move dialog into a realtime, flexible, genuine exchange, with an AI that would learn from your dialog behavior as well as from your combat one.

I could see it working -- very, very remotely -- if the gamer is familiar with a language that uses symbols to communicate (Egyptian, modern Chinese because, yes, Chinese alphabets are made up of "pictures").

But uh, for most people, I think the response would be: WTF is this?