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Noyb
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« Reply #20 on: December 28, 2010, 06:51:55 PM »

@Kramlack, Super Paper Mario did a horrible, player-unfriendly version of that. After a long introduction, some dude approaches Mario and asks if he'll help him. The player can say no. Say no enough times and you get a non-standard game over, are thrown back to the main menu, and must watch the unskippable introduction again.

(Man, that game loved wasting my time.)
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Yabab
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« Reply #21 on: December 28, 2010, 07:36:30 PM »

I may add that perhaps another way to create meaningful narratives would be not to divulge to the player there are other ways to playing the game than the one he chose.

There's nothing worst than completing a game and then reading in the achievement panel = ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED - Get True Ending;

I mean, what's up with that? I played the game, that was my experience, that ending was the truth to me!

A game should not break the player's own experience by trying to match him with its standards. And not only in terms of things showing that different options are avaiable, but not showing the option to the player at all. Take for example those books in which it points you which page you can go depending on what you want the story to happen. That totally ruins the feeling of destiny or fate. Because the player sees the option.
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Craig Stern
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« Reply #22 on: January 07, 2011, 05:07:01 PM »

Bad Game Design:
King: Will you help our kingdom?
Player: YES   >NO
King: You'd let all these people die?
King: Will you help our kingdom?
> Repeat infinity

Good Game Design:
King: Will you help our kingdom?
Player: YES   >NO
King: You'd let all these people die?
King: Will you help our kingdom?
> Repeat three times
King: Will you help our kingdom?
Player: YES  >NO
King: Fine, then I have no choice. Guards, seize him.
> Branches off into different storyline.

I'm guilty of doing this on occasion, though I agree that it's not ideal. I excuse myself for this solely on the basis that writing branching narrative is extremely difficult and time-consuming (especially when you're a one-man team), and it's especially tricky to let the player believe he's just rejected the entire premise of the game while simultaneously finding a way to make the player go on the quest regardless.
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Brother Android
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« Reply #23 on: January 07, 2011, 05:30:49 PM »

I definitely agree with the original post, but I also agree that it'd be really hard to make a game like that oneself. I feel more and more like making a story-based RPG these days, but every time I think about how hard it would be to implement one satisfyingly, I get all depressed.
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mcc
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« Reply #24 on: January 07, 2011, 05:36:26 PM »

(to blatantly railroad without them feeling pressured into it, post NES Zelda games are often a good example of this - even when it's simply a YES/NO dialogue option where NO holds no value at all... I wouldn't call that shitty game design, but an attempt at creating illusions for the player to improve upon their willing suspension of disbelief.)
Maybe one problem is though, you'd better make darn sure when you try this trick that the user actually finds themselves hitting the option you expected them to, otherwise you've just kind of taken that suspension of disbelief you were trying to build and smashed it to bits with a hammer...

The example I think of is toward the end of Golden Sun, the first one, you are given a YES/NO box where picking YES would be insane, genocidal even-- the choice is, the villains tell you to hand over the keys of ultimate, universal power, which you have spent the entire game trying to prevent them from acquiring, which you know they will use to destroy and enslave the earth; or they will kill a hostage they've taken. Now, a choice like this has happened more than once in the game at this point, and each time, the villains break their promise and kill the hostages anyway. You cannot possibly believe that even if you chose the ridiculous path of doing what they say, they will hold up their end of the bargain. So of course you pick NO. And then it turns out you're being railroaded into YES and the game overrides you. When I reached that point, not only did it just feel insulting, the little YES/NO dialogue box basically just totally shattered any suspension of disbelief I had. Now, the funny thing is, if the game had just had the villains order to hand over the artifacts and a member of my party had done it, I probably would have accepted it because I was watching a cinematic and this was just something the characters in the story I'm being told did. But because I was given that YES/NO choice, told "this is a decision you're making!" before having the game flip and go "wait, no it isn't", the forced acceptance just brought the artifice of the whole thing to my attention in a very unavoidable way. It was like that old proverbial thing of the game choosing to blink "YOU ARE PLAYING A VIDEO GAME" on the screen.

I guess where I'm going with this is: Yeah, the illusion of choice is good. But if you're going to spin illusions, you'd better make sure they're convincing illusions, because a disguise you can see through is worse than no disguise at all.
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Captain_404
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« Reply #25 on: January 07, 2011, 06:32:02 PM »

Does anyone else feel that YES/NO branches* break suspension of disbelief just by existing?

When I see one, I don't truly believe I am making a choice. I know that the game will go on if I pick Y or go on if I pick N. A lot of times, these are presented in cases where they are extremely game-breaking. For example, answering yes/no to the acceptance of the game's main quest. The game has built up narrative machines pointing toward a specific resolution of the question such that you know that one of the two options is just the other in disguise. Should I ever press that unlikely opposite option, I'm not really intending to do that, I just want to see what the developers came up with in an attempt to cover up their plot hole.

At that point, I'm taken out of the game dialog's flow to weigh the consequences of the inconsequential. This forces me to the realization that the choice I'm making doesn't matter, instead of obscuring that fact.

I don't know if I can name any of recent games that do this now anyway. It seems like the trope has been mostly put to death.


*I'm referring here to YES/NO's in the dichotomal sense, and not more complex dialog trees seen in games such as Air Pressure and others.
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TheSpaceMan
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« Reply #26 on: January 08, 2011, 12:11:42 AM »

Was playing mass effect 2 yesterday, I mention this a lot in posts about dialog and story now.

The story will push you in a fixed storyline, but I do feel that the choices actually work. The paragon/renegade options are fun, interesting, you can be a total bastard. It's just kinda hard to know what choice counts as paragon and what counts as renegade at some point.

It's also a game filled with optional quests even if the main story is not really optional.

ALSO It's nice to have choices that are not based around light/dark, good/evil.

I don't belive in good and evil.
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BlueSweatshirt
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« Reply #27 on: January 08, 2011, 01:26:45 AM »

I think Fallout did a great job of giving the finger to the traditional yes/no dialog setup.
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ஒழுக்கின்மை (Paul Eres)
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« Reply #28 on: January 08, 2011, 05:11:07 AM »

i think both gameplay and story should be optional. the player should be able to skip the story for the game if they wish, but they should also be able to skip the levels to see more of the story if they wish. there are certain games where the game itself is quite boring, or impossible to beat without ages of grinding, but i want to see how the story ends -- kartia is a prime example. the gameplay was substandard strategy-rpg fare, but the story was one of the best i've ever come across in a game. it'd have made the game much better if it had a 'skip mission' option. towards that end both the story and the gameplay were skippable in immortal defense (the former with an official 'cheat key' to skip a level which can be found in the game's documentation, the latter just by clicking to pass the text).
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Craig Stern
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« Reply #29 on: January 08, 2011, 11:17:11 AM »

Does anyone else feel that YES/NO branches* break suspension of disbelief just by existing?

No: not if the developer feels like doing their due diligence, and makes the storyline actually branch. I'm working on a mission in Telepath RPG: Servants of God right now where the enemy you've been fighting against the whole game makes an offer to you to join them. You can actually do it, and it changes the storyline. Granted, it's just going to lead to one of the game's alternative endings--I'm not making two whole, separate games here. But it's not just an illusion. You get to see where the story goes when you make that decision.
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mirosurabu
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« Reply #30 on: January 08, 2011, 01:34:04 PM »

I think that optionality is more meaningful if options aren't explicitly stated. I want to be thrown in the game and be allowed to "discover" options.

This is done well in games which focus on spatial navigation (Demon's Souls comes to mind), but it's poorly done in games that focus on conversations. Visual novels, CYOA's and RPG's are all having explicit options.

Games with text input, such as IF's and the very first Leisure Suit Larry, are close to achieving this but are unfortunately suffering from the consequences of subpar Natural Language Understanding algorithms. Players should not fight with poor NLU and they should not bang their head against the wall in order to make the slightest progress in the game.

I think that very few options should be explicit and that majority should be implicit. Now, I'm making difference between implicit and secret options and I'll use Demon's Souls to illustrate that difference:

Secret option: Executioner Miralda
Implicit option: Lord Rydell, a prisoner in Tower of Latria, who is heard yelling "Please help me" while you play the game, hinting on his presence

The difference lies in that there is no hint for the secret option, whereas there is one or few very subtle or even subliminal hints for the implicit option. In Demon's Souls, If you decided to look for side-quests, you'd recall Lord Rydell immediately, because he was seeded to your subconscious mind through constant yelling.

The same concept, I believe, can be applied to dialogs, where text subtly hints on or even subliminally seeds options to your mind which later feel like your own discoveries (but it's really only exploiting your biases).

This could work with rich combinational style of interaction without making players try random combinations because they don't have idea what to do next. A combinational style of interaction is the one where you combine information with context, such as that one found in Ace Attorney styles. Doodle God too is an example of combinational interaction where you combine information with information to get new information.




Derren Brown, thus, should start making games.
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Noyb
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« Reply #31 on: January 08, 2011, 03:01:31 PM »

Silent Hill 2 did this pretty masterfully. It assigns you a different ending based on the cumulative effect of a bunch of choices you make throughout the game that don't feel like choices at all (Healing yourself as soon as you're hurt, acting protective towards Maria, looking at your wife's photo or the knife constantly, etc.).

Metro 2033 did this too, to a lesser extent. There was a completely hidden morality meter that opened up the possibility for a second ending with an opaque semi-hidden choice at the end. If you were a violent, brutish action hero throughout the game, you had no such option, but the ending completely and satisfyingly fit the tone that you set. The narration paints the story in a retrospectively tragic light and hints towards playing the game more humanely.
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RobHaines
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« Reply #32 on: February 13, 2011, 05:08:44 AM »

[Mass Effect 2] is also a game filled with optional quests even if the main story is not really optional.

I was thinking about ME2 when reading this thread; it's a superb game, and does an excellent job of making the optional story missions feel genuinely rewarding (not to mention having a direct effect on the progression of the endgame). However, I think it trips over a minor issue with the concept of optional content in the non-story sidequests: I find an anomaly on some backwater planet, but because it's optional and the devs don't expect players to play it, they can't actually put anything meaningful in there. (Also, for obvious reasons they aren't putting much of a budget into each sidequest, so they feel flimsy and unimportant.)

It's the same problem I have with a lot of DLC content. You can't guarantee a player will play it, so either you resort to the tricks of episodic tv (restore the exact status quo at the end of the DLC as existed at the beginning, just in case) or do the Assassin's Creed 2 method of mysteriously giving the player a macguffin they 'acquired' during the missed period. While the DLC itself is optional, unfortunately it loses all meaning as a direct result.
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