Starker on 18/6/2018 at 09:46
Yeah, people have done small-sized RPGs before, that's not really new. The intriguing part is the idea of making a tiny slice of a world as alive and rich and deep as possible. Maybe if SS3 is a hit, Otherside will finance it.
Sulphur on 18/6/2018 at 10:01
This conversation reminds me I never really played The Last Express properly. Time to dig that one out of the GOG library, I think.
Malf on 18/6/2018 at 10:31
Witcher 3 certainly simulated some NPC's lives. They had daily routines they'd follow, that's for sure, and they'd chat about events.
I'm not sure how reactive the simulation was, as while I put hundreds of hours in to the game, I never thought of trying to disrupt the sim to that extent. Hmm, good excuse to revisit the game again!
But then, if simulation of every-day lives of characters is what you want, it's really hard to beat Dwarf Fortress. And that game's problem is the sheer over-generous wealth of information it supplies.
Here's a typical Dwarf's personality:
Inline Image:
http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/imgs/pers4.pngThose thoughts and personality traits change depending on what the dwarf encounters as it goes about its daily perambulations. And every sodding object in the game, be it alive or inanimate, tracks its own history in similar ways.
There's a reason why amongst a certain strata of gamers, a more important question than "Will it run Crysis?" is "What's the time to framerate-death in Dwarf Fortress?"
Huh, and I've just realised that since upgrading my CPU, I haven't ran DF.
icemann on 18/6/2018 at 11:14
Quote Posted by Starker
Mankind Divided did very little of the in-depth simulation that Warren's idea is about. It's basically that you have this one city block and people live their lives like they would in reality -- closing up shops, etc. And they would have complex relationships and histories with each other. And everything would be simulated down to the smallest detail. The way he proposed it, it's framed as the antithesis of the open world game -- instead of miles wide and an inch deep, you aim for the opposite.
We just need Westworld the RPG already. Minus the killing of players/humans and AI glitches. That or an actual holodeck.
demagogue on 18/6/2018 at 13:42
Right, I was going to mention Mirror's Edge 2 & then forgot about it. Ok, and Mankind Divided. Both were let downs.
Thirth already explained the same feeling I had with MD more or less. The levels felt to gamey and constructed for the player to be living spaces. (The set pieces themselves were lush though. I dream of having assets like that to make my own levels.)
GTA5 is the gold standard for a living world, with trash and weeds and broken down rusty jalopies placed with such devoted care. MD was a far cry from that.
ME2 was the one that really disappointed me though. It was even a good game. (MD was too, as a shooter.) But something was just off about the world. Maybe it was the tone. The city had the feeling of an organized play-space out back of a youth hostel or share-house. It didn't feel particularly cyberpunk. I guess I was disappointed because the first Mirror's Edge is one of my top-five games of all time, and the second didn't really capture the magic. But that gameplay doesn't really lend itself to open world but to set levels, because then you gamify the world too much as some kind of neverending obstacle course.
I guess we can mention Stalker. Even with discrete levels, it felt like an open world. The catch there is that it isn't particularly cyberpunk, although there are a few scifi tropes thrown in there, and it's not urban.
Anyway, all of this is the context in which I'm guardedly looking forward to this game as potentially meeting those expectations, or it's a rare contender I have hopes for.
PigLick on 18/6/2018 at 13:46
The witcher 3 was actually quite shallow, follow a few peasants around for a bit and you will see. It didnt matter though, the sheer scope of the world made up for it and it seemed a lot deeper than it was. And by shallow I dont mean the quests and such.
Jason Moyer on 18/6/2018 at 13:56
Dema, I thought Mirror's Edge 2 was disappointing too and I think it's because DICE has no idea why the first one was so great. It was maybe the most cynical, fan-driven game I've ever played as well. Actually, not so much fan-driven, but anti-fan-driven. Making a game for the people who didn't like the first one, and guess what, they didn't like the second one and now the people who liked the first one don't either.
Edit: Er, other than Fallout 4 I guess. And whatever 76 is trying to be. And I guess TDS/DXIW fell into that trap a bit too.
Sulphur on 19/6/2018 at 06:38
Quote Posted by demagogue
ME2 was the one that really disappointed me though. It was even a good game. (MD was too, as a shooter.) But something was just off about the world. Maybe it was the tone. The city had the feeling of an organized play-space out back of a youth hostel or share-house. It didn't feel particularly cyberpunk. I guess I was disappointed because the first Mirror's Edge is one of my top-five games of all time, and the second didn't really capture the magic. But that gameplay doesn't really lend itself to open world but to set levels, because then you gamify the world too much as some kind of neverending obstacle course.
True enough. The aesthetic's beautiful but monotonous, and there's really not anything going on in all that glass that's interesting. It's a playground to bounce around in with very little depth to find either in gameplay or worldbuilding.
Quote Posted by Malf
Witcher 3 certainly simulated some NPC's lives. They had daily routines they'd follow, that's for sure, and they'd chat about events.
I'm not sure how reactive the simulation was, as while I put hundreds of hours in to the game, I never thought of trying to disrupt the sim to that extent. Hmm, good excuse to revisit the game again!
I don't think you
can disrupt the... well, it's not even a simulation. It's conversation routines that (I think) get back to what they were doing after you stop scaring them to death with magic tricks.
Quote:
But then, if simulation of every-day lives of characters is what you want, it's really hard to beat Dwarf Fortress. And that game's problem is the sheer over-generous wealth of information it supplies.
Here's a typical Dwarf's personality:
And this is exactly why I'm both drawn to and repelled by a game like DF. I love the idea of a detailed simulation with personalities, but I can't get over the randomness and abstracted storytelling a set of variables colliding over time provides. I concede that I have little context to this personality dump, but it's fairly transparent that this is an automatically generated type from a palette of attributes, not very well-hidden because a) that much textual detail without concessions for form or story contextualisation is mind-numbing half-way through as any human reading would attest, and b) the vast majority of those sentences (outside of the culture segment) follow a fixed format, obviously variations on the theme of '#gender is #attribute #modifier' with some admittedly careful grammatical detail, like verb variety.
I can see the amount of flavour this detail adds to a simulation, but I'm mostly into gaming for the story-telling opportunities, and if there's no author's hand at work, the overall experience feels chaotic and empty exactly because they tried to imbue robots with personalities but in limited ways, isolated from influencing or telling any over-arching story. A bit of the uncanny valley peeking into personality formation and procedural storytelling, if we want to label that. Of course, I imagine people love DF because of the simulation aspects, with everything else being gravy. I tend to be the reverse with this sort of thing, so... maybe I'm just not the right demographic for it. :)
Thirith on 19/6/2018 at 07:04
I'm in the same boat as Sulphur. I find the potential of procedural storytelling fascinating, but as an audience I've yet to find any of the results all that engaging. I've read about people loving the emerging stories coming out of Shadow of XYZ's Nemesis system, but to me all the orcs felt much like what Sulphur writes above about the Dwarf Fortress text: a list of generated attributes from a list, wrapped up in an orc texture.
Malf on 19/6/2018 at 11:25
Sorry, I should have given a little more context to that block of text. While it may at first look automatically generated, I can guarantee that a substantial amount of that dwarf's personality would have been influenced by its experiences within the world.
When a dwarf is born, its personality page has a lot less content in it, and said personality text then bulks out over time based on experiences. For example, the line about merrymaking and partying probably stems from this dwarf having a lot of downtime; that gels with his profession of "Jeweller". There's a finite amount of jewels available in any fortress at any given time, which gives jewellers a lot of free time. And what do dwarves do in their free time? Gather in designated meeting places and throw parties of course!
And that line about him being a coward isn't just flavour. I know for sure that poor Litast would make a shit soldier. He really would run away at the first sign of danger! Of course, Dwarf Fortress players quickly find that they can condition soldiers by leaving the dead bodies of their friends exposed in public places. They either go mad or become numb to death. And the joy is, his personality page would change to reflect that.
Even the stuff in the first two paragraphs that looks like gibberish actually has a deeper meaning. The religions will actually exist in the wider world, and I believe The Cheerful Floor is the name of the fortress, translated from Taremïteb. Now yes, while these names will have been generated randomly during world generation, they will remain completely consistent throughout the history of that world!
At any time, you can save your game, make a copy of it, then load it into the Legends mode of Dwarf Fortress, and it'll show you the history of the fortress, its occupants and the world it exists in. It'll also show you the history of any migrants who've moved in to your fortress and what they did before moving in. One of the best examples of this is the tale of (
http://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Cacame_Awemedinade) Cacame Awemedinade, Elf King of the Dwarves.
When it comes to simulating a world, there's nothing that quite compares to DF. It's
insane.
