Chade on 6/1/2009 at 21:39
Clearly I suck at words. This seems to be a recurring theme ... :p
Actually, I am making a bit of a fool of myself, because I have been getting Oblivion's character building system slightly wrong.
Ok, Oblivion's character building system can be approximated as: you have your skills at various things you can do in the world (picking locks, wearing nice armour, bashing things up, casting red spells of doom, casting blue spells of peace and love, etc ...). Because these skills basically map one to one with the actions you can take in the world, I have been assuming that the player assigning points to a skill indicates that they are going to use that skill in the world. So our intelligent fighter will have skills in bashing things up and wearing nice armour, but not in casting spells.
Then you have your attributes, such as strength, intelligence, and so forth ... these attributes do not generally map one to one with the things you can do in the world. Under the assumption that the player's choice of skills is the best predictor of the actions he will be taking in the world, then the player's choice of attributes only affects how good the character will be at the skills he has chosen. Therefore they are there to be gamed ... to provide "good" and "bad" character paths, as you suggest. Under these assumptions, our intelligent fighter will not actually be doing anything intelligent in the game world ... he will be a poor character because his intelligence is going to waste.
Hopefully this makes it clearer? :o
What I am saying is that: by using a multiple tier character creation system, Oblivion clearly (to me) intends for some character choices to be worse then others. So I agree with you in that sense. On the other hand, I believe that every combination of skills should be plausible*, if the player chooses the rest of his attributes to compliment these skills.
~~~
* I agree that "equally difficult" is too hard a challenge. My preferred way of thinking about it is that each path should be plausibly playable by a "regular" player ... what exactly "regular" means could vary from game to game, of course.
SeriousCallersOnly on 7/1/2009 at 02:23
Interactive fiction has put up more than a few interactive narratives that i would consider artistic.
I like to compare hidden things in this kind of games as a more challenging version of the layers of meaning a good writter can put into a work - different interpretations - character opinion - unreliable narrator - puns - metaphor fests - etc, where the offordance is less. Things are not in front of you to interpretation, you must also find them.
Edit: Fer ex: (
http://jerz.setonhill.edu/if/gallery/galatea/index.html)
Silkworm on 20/1/2009 at 21:16
Quote Posted by heywood
The goal of traditional RPGs is to solve problems, win battles, gather treasure and experience, and upgrade. Character development not only matters, building a powerful character is the whole fricking point!
So what? That has nothing to do with the argument that some character builds should be inherently more difficult than others for no reason. I agree with you that RPGs should reward synergies and long term planning with regard to character builds, but that's not what you and Papy were arguing.
Quote Posted by heywood
And based on your criteria, Deus Ex would have to be considered a bad game, because certain combinations of skills and augs can definitely make the game easier or harder, and for every level there are probably 2 or 3 different character builds best suited for it. In fact, I would argue that certain augs and skills were intentionally designed to complement each other.
Not really no. Unless your particularly inept, if you get an augmentation upgrade canister in Deus Ex, you'd be hard pressed to put it towards a "wrong" choice. Every augmentation has its uses in certain situations, for the most part you can say that same about the skill points.
Quote Posted by heywood
I think if you want to ensure that character choices never affect the level of challenge during the game, you either have to make the game very easy or make the choices shallow and insignificant. And then it becomes a sandbox game and not an RPG. The difference is that sandbox games are all about giving the player the freedom to do whatever they want without negative consequences, or as 2K Boston puts it, saying "yes" to the player. Whereas an RPG is about making character choices that have significance and involve real tradeoffs, consequences, and limitations.
Once again, total straw man argument. Good games are about
meaningful choices, where players have to make
difficult decisions about investment of resources. If there are right and wrong answers to these choices, they cease to be meaningful or difficult.
If the "hacker" build is 100% easier to play than the "Marine" build, everyone will just take the hacker build all the time. The choice to make a "hacker" build will no longer be meaningful or difficult choice, it will simply be the "right choice." And that's poor game design.
Quote Posted by Matthew
Silkworm is correct in that analysis, I believe.
:~)
Papy on 29/1/2009 at 07:06
Chade: I finally understand what you mean. The first thing I did with Oblivion was to make a mod to remove the dreaded +5 bonus. I hate this kind of "playing with the mechanics of the game". I love when a game reward me for being careful to what's around me, but I hate games which reward me for abusing a completely artificial system.
Silkworm: I think we don't understand each other. We certainly don't talk about the same thing. I do agree that if a choice is known (before playing) to be better than another, than this is a pointless choice and this is bad game design (although wasteful design is probably a better term). I do agree that if a blind choice is arbitrarily good or bad, than the game is unfair and this is a bad game design. But those two cases were never what I had in mind.
You said that, with Deus Ex, "every augmentation has its uses in certain situations". That's true, but the fact is we also faced some particular situations far more often than others. Some choices were clearly useful a lot more often than others. Simply put, some choices were clearly superior to others. Of course, the value of our choices were not only dependent upon level design, our natural ability as a player and our previous choices would change the overall value of a choice, but level design and general gameplay mechanics still had a big influence. You had to be aware of your surrounding and make appropriate choices or the game would become a lot more difficult. Basically, some choices were inherently better than others.
Having said that, to me the biggest quality of Deus Ex was there was little blind choices. The first augmentation canister we got is Combat Strentgh / Microfibral muscle... and for me there was a visible better choice. My experience with the beginning of the game showed me that close combat was extremely dangerous. I did die from a single bullet so I concluded that close combat had to be avoided as much as possible (particularly because I don't save in the middle of a level). My early contact with Deus Ex certainly showed me that Thief style of gameplay was easier.
A bit latter, I found an upgrade canisters. I certainly could have spent it to upgrade Microfibral muscle. But the thing is, I didn't see a real need for upgrading yet, I didn't face a situation where it might be really useful, and I knew I would find other augmentation canisters that seemed to be interesting. So again, it seemed to me that holding on to this upgrade canister until I found a more useful augmentation canister was a better choice, even if it meant wasting a bit of inventory spaces.
To me, that's what choices should be about. That's good game design. You present the player an ongoing situation and, at regular interval, a choice. One choice must be "better" than the other. If the player makes a "good" choice, he must be rewarded my having an easier time playing the game, if he makes a "wrong" choice, he must be punished by making the gameplay a lot more tedious. Making the game easier, because of good choices or successful actions, is the only possible reward of a game like Deus Ex.
Anyway, it seems to me you consider video games like Deus Ex only as a medium for a semi-interactive story where the gameplay should be as transparent as possible. Am I wrong?
