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« Reply #20 on: July 24, 2012, 06:21:28 PM »

(Still reading most of your input toast_trip & the thread)

I believe this has more has deeply to do with how the NPCs re-reacts not what the player does, thats the whole problem with "sandbox-alignment" games. Sometimes I think "if the NPC wasn't coded to ask the player for anything, would they really give a shit about what the player does?" Sometimes this is where MMOGs fall into this pitfall where it becomes apparent that the designer lazily created this conflict for them & then tacked on this long ass text for what reason when people skim thru it.

The problem is NPCs don't care about one another enough, the entire game is built around the problems of the player-char as if everyone was waiting for the player to reach them. Who were they before the player even got into contact with them? More importantly, who are the others NPCs to one another - you stated some awesome games; in FF7 Barret broke down when his crew died in vein for his anger here he felt guilt & loss, in Journey you are alone in this world that no one knows so when you encounter another player online, progress is strengthen by the mutual fear of the unknown yet the beauty of the world.

Guess what I'm trying to say is, systems need to span where NPCs are more than just dolls to one another, its that cool little thing in Skyrim where you see NPCs talk to one another but to take to another level could create a deeper purpose where the conflict has nothing to do with beating the game but seeing how NPCs deal with one another & the world itself.

One thing I loved in GTA 1 & 2 was you had to side with a gangster to unlock their half of the missions. This would piss of their rivals, they will attack you & you cannot even receive missions from the opposing sides until you start killing their rivals yet you needed to complete every side missions to move on to the next level. Imagining putting context under this where you expose the nature of their problems with one another, imagine spanning interactive systems like Karma where for killing another sides men would come back to bite you in the ass in later levels & then some. Procedurally generated stories have to start with the NPCs purpose, their re-reactions to the player reactions could be like a long ass game of ping pong. Along with Pacing + Timing, everything can hit just right.
« Last Edit: July 24, 2012, 08:19:02 PM by 16Bit_Daye » Logged



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« Reply #21 on: July 24, 2012, 07:19:54 PM »

No, NPCs would definitely not care. One of the worst feelings is when you exist in a world that has not life of its own. A world like that clings to you like saran-wrap. Not cool.

It creates melodrama. The goals given to you seem hollow, and patronizing. It makes many interactions boring. It pushes you out of the experience. It makes you not care about who is who, and what they do. You may as well not be a character at all.

Those are lifeless worlds.

Character construction is non-trivial. Movie makers fuck it up, authors fuck it up, and game-makers, for whatever reason, really fuck it up. I still don't know why that is. I think there's this divide between writers and the rest of dev, so the writers are more constrained than otherwise, get treated poorly as a result. Their work isn't prioritized.... On top of that, the writer can't control what the character does, so they're left creating story in this independent arc from everything else. Hence the text walls.

It's a result of everyone trying to do their job simultaneously, without a lot of cohesive direction.

The issue: mechanics get designed first, then characters are put in the world. By that point designers are struggling just to give the play experience they want, so NPCs become vehicles for enforcing "level design." By level design I mean the segmented construction of challenge segments. So in Skyrim it would be individual quests, "exploring" a particular area etc.

Writers shove everything else into the empty spaces. Obviously this doesn't work. NPC creation needs to happen in tandem with everything else. The obvious difficulty here is that the NPCs need to evolve with the mechanics. If you change core gameplay, all the NPCs might have to be reconsidered. This reality is daunting. But it's not a time-waster, as so many devs believe. It is actually an opportunity. Evolving NPCs, iterating on them, produces a much healthier design, and firmer integration between all the pieces of the game.

In Journey - maybe you know this - the devs started with the idea of player interaction. That was more important than the sand and the plot. They said, how can we make player-on-player gaming be more meaningful? So they developed the rest of the game around this idea. That's one of the critical reasons why it worked out so well.

I'll build up my AI while I prototype. So the NPCs will be learning to play as I do. They will have the same powers and options as the player, though obviously with different restrictions and goals. They'll also have their own personalities. That way I'll be able to prototype how all the characters interact from a very early stage.

One of the biggest mistakes less experienced AI designers make, is to design a system, then design the AI afterward. This is not a good idea. That is like writing a software package then implementing threading afterward. I mean figuring out how to implement threading afterward (then implementing it).

Do not do that! If you're a programmer you'll understand why.

I want my characters to feel so real that the player never sees the man behind the curtain. I'll raise my NPCs like babies, inside the growing environment that is my game.

Yes, generated stories start with robust characters. They are like the tools you use to build things, or the building blocks for a house. Faulting foundations will always crumble, no matter how genius your building is on top. But good foundations can take you somewhere.

Yes, everything can hit just right. You must control it like a conductor, but like a ninja. No one sees.
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« Reply #22 on: July 26, 2012, 01:48:23 PM »

It's like you want more a social simulation than a storytelling generation engine
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« Reply #23 on: July 26, 2012, 02:29:42 PM »

gimmy's posts are procedurally generated
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« Reply #24 on: July 26, 2012, 02:34:50 PM »

It's like you want more a social simulation than a storytelling generation engine

Stories are built on characters.

Story telling engines are built on social simulations.

If I said to you, "let's focus on making our heroine more relatable," would you say to me, "no, let's make her journey more interesting first!"

Can't build the roof without the walls. etc.

Create an NPC that reacts believably and you are in a much better position to manipulate the story. So many dynamic story lines in modern games feel contrived because the devs try to manipulate weak constructs that weren't designed with dynamism in mind. etc.

moi has a good point.

edit:

Still going through those articles.

I liked that GDC vid with the Wooga guy talking about core gameplay loop. Best social/casual games talk I've seen.

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« Reply #25 on: July 26, 2012, 03:18:40 PM »

If I said to you, "let's focus on making our heroine more relatable," would you say to me, "no, let's make her journey more interesting first!"

Can't build the roof without the walls. etc.
I'd have to disagree on these first sentiments, create an interesting journey and then make the heroine react believably to the events that unfold during it, whether the player/reader relates or not is largely out of your hands. The goal creates the journey, the journey incites the reactions, the reactions define the character.

Quote
Create an NPC that reacts believably and you are in a much better position to manipulate the story. So many dynamic story lines in modern games feel contrived because the devs try to manipulate weak constructs that weren't designed with dynamism in mind. etc.
Or they try to manufacture "relatable" personalities only to make them seem contrived and flat.
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« Reply #26 on: July 26, 2012, 04:23:35 PM »

I'd have to disagree on these first sentiments, create an interesting journey and then make the heroine react believably to the events that unfold during it, whether the player/reader relates or not is largely out of your hands. The goal creates the journey, the journey incites the reactions, the reactions define the character.

It depends which character you are talking about.

Start with the player character, Skyrim's for example. This is a game where the events are chosen independently of what the character might want to do. Its approach is to flatten barriers between the player and his desires so that he(/she) can roam wherever he pleases. The issue with this is that none of the player's actions connect together in a meaningful way. Every decision exists in an independent silo and has little to no affect on how other events play out. ... I'm talking about in-game connections. The character's "story" exists in the player's mind.

The core engagement of Skyrim is to do whatever you want. Since there are so many things to do, and each thing is given a lot of character and detail, its flaws are a worthy trade-off. However, if it tried to be Final Fantasy and retain a comparable degree of player choice, the plot would feel contrived... or the player would feel forced along a path i.e. there would be very little freedom.

Characters have to be built out of details. Humans are built out of details. We experience one thing then the next. Our personalities are a reflection of all the things that have happened to us. Each event we experience produces a reaction in our minds that stitches itself into our selves. When we act, spectators see pieces of that fabric reveal itself in varying ways. The fact that everything within us is intricately connected, using some twist of reality as the thread, is what makes us relatable and interesting. Other people watching us see pieces of our experiences through our behaviour.

Flat characters are products of non-relatable details. They are built out of experiences that the writer didn't think hard enough about, didn't feel very strongly in the first place, or didn't translate to the page effectively. They are also, often, inconsistent. Each part of them doesn't seem to connect to the other parts in a way that seems believable to the audience. This is often because the writer didn't spend enough time understanding why each character makes the decisions that they do, how each decision connected to the owner's past, and how that past is a plausible reality in the manufactured universe.

Maybe it would've been better for me to say that characters and their journeys should be constructed in-tandem. If you construct the journey first, the characters have a higher probability of being weak because you'll need to invent reasons for them to continue through each leg, meaning you'll probably choose traits for them that you don't relate to, meaning they'll become less believable. If you construct the characters first, you don't have this problem - a character can go anywhere - but you may find him(/her) ill-suited to the journey you'd like to see him in. You may have picked that journey because you happen to find it interesting and want to tell that story.

Forgetting NPCs, if you want a player-controlled character to make meaningful decisions and be reacted to in meaningful ways, you have to restrict what options he has to a certain degree. If he can do anything, then it becomes much harder to build a believable world around him. Every game has invisible tracks. There is this hallway that the player walks down that may be very wide but still gently guides where he can go. Even Skyrim has one. If you want to make connections between the player-character and the world you need to restrict what decisions he has available and how he reacts to events, intricately. NPCs, in-order to be interesting, need defined personalities. That limits the range of interesting interactions they can have. Either you flatten the plot so that it has no structure (Skyrim) or you restrict the PC.

If you want to develop a story you have to develop all the pieces together. You have to iterate. You can write in a linear way, defining the world and characters as you go, but you'd still be deepening each element at each stage. If you developed 1 character's move set in Smash Bros completely, then another, then another, and so on, you would end with a very disjointed game. Doing that would be similar to designing chess by choosing how one piece moves at a time. The depth of chess emerges from the intricate relationship all the mechanics have. The relationship between depth and internal dependencies is just as true for interesting stories.

I'm not planning to develop all my character then construct scenarios. I'll be developing both at the same time. The mechanics, the structure of the narrative, the characters, the artwork, the sound and music, will evolve one step at a time. That's how most games should be made, and I think that's how most people do it here.

What I am saying is that good games are built on good fundamentals. Lemmings were made cute and interesting before the idea of a "level" arrived. Prince of Persia was fluid animation, a couple mechanics, and artistic influences before it become a game. I'm probably preaching to the choir. I think believable interactions with NPCs, that allow you to express yourself, that produce naturally emergent consequences, that suit the world, and that flow out of and back into the mechanics, are just as hard to build as any other mechanic. Most games that try for these things, and fall flat, do so because they shove the development of the character interactions in at the end.

Mario is fun without coins and mushrooms and moving platforms, or death and time limits. All of those things, plus secrets, power-ups, bosses, and funny-moving enemies, build around the solid foundation. You could say that Mario was a "platforming" engine before it became a game. Mario 64 was just Mario running around in a white room, to nail the feeling of motion, before it was anything else. Creating that first was a command from Miyamoto. I'm suggesting building the comparable white room for characters, in which NPCs are interesting all by themselves, and react to the player in compelling ways before anything else is added. I want the act of expressing oneself, seeing the consequences, then acting again to be engaging all by itself.

Naturally everything will continue to develop as pieces are joined.

If you need a journey to make a player's choices interesting then the player's choices probably aren't that interesting to begin with. That's where I was coming from with the walls+roof comment.

Though I think we're just talking about semantics. Game dev is game dev.


Or they try to manufacture "relatable" personalities only to make them seem contrived and flat.

Yeah, that's even worse. Flat characters have no personality and are uninteresting. Manufactured characters are flat and insulting.




« Last Edit: July 26, 2012, 05:02:22 PM by toast_trip » Logged
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« Reply #27 on: July 26, 2012, 05:05:06 PM »

The problem is you're focusing on traits and mannerisms, not driving forces. Traits and mannerisms can help define a character's presence but it is the wants, needs, and virtues (or lack thereof) and what the character is willing to do to achieve or maintain them that make a character compelling. It is internal (and external) conflict, and something we can all relate to in one way or another.

This is actually where Skyrim really suffers, rarely does it ever give you any real reason to care about any of the characters or even your own outside of what is relevant to the gameplay mechanics. They focus so heavily on traits and mannerisms that they completely omit any kind of real internal conflict, and what is there is so contrived it just comes off as lifeless. Don't get me wrong, I love the game but definitely not so much its story.

Flat characters aren't the product of unrelatable details, they're the product of driving forces the player could care less about (and often it seems the NPC could care less about them as well). "Please good sir, find my lost magic sword! I'll just wait right here and do nothing proactive about my situation because it doesn't really matter to me, so take all the time you want. I'll probably just give you some useless potions for your troubles and then we'll never mention the ordeal ever again."

I mean really, if some guy randomly came up to you and said "Hey dude, I lost my sunglasses across town a while ago. I don't really want to go look for them so can you go find them? I got like 50 cents I can give you if you find them." How enthusiastic do you feel about that? This is essentially what we are given in games time and time again. Of course the characters are flat, they're wasting our time and their conflicts are anything but dramatic. The characters can have all the quirks in the world but if we don't care about their conflict or what they are doing in reaction to it then in the end the character is pretty much worthless.

The details complement the reactions to the conflicts created by the journey to reach the goal.



Edit: To give a good example, Monkey and Trip from Enslaved. That game really does an amazing job at pulling at the heart strings and showing the characters twist and turn under the pressure of the conflicts their journey throws at them. Ninja Theory did an amazing job at touching upon the humanity of the characters and you feel it all throughout the journey.
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« Reply #28 on: July 26, 2012, 05:23:50 PM »

Semantics.

Traits are driving forces. The two are different sides of the same coin. We behave according to our goals. A goal is an abstract thing. It is the idea that we relate to that allows us to act towards what we want. A behaviour is a real thing that serves our goals. One is the other. You can take a character's goals and derive their behaviour. You can take their behaviour and derive their goals.

What you're talking about are characters with inconsistent mannerisms that either point to a goal that can't possibly exist, or one that isn't rooted in detail i.e. it is isn't interesting. Skyrim's NPCs have mannerism based on goals that have 0 detail. For example, "character who wants to be loved and is wary of strangers" could be a possible Skyrim NPC description. "Loved" is the goal and "wary of strangers" is a behaviour the implies a goal such as "strangers are normally implicitly condescending to him because he can't relate to them because he grew up under a rock (and is socially isolated), so he rejects them to protect his self image as someone who is worth talking to". Actually, that implied goal is probably flattery to Skyrim NPCs. (The goal is: to protect social self-image).

Anyway. Both goals can be summarized very quickly. To make the character interesting he would have to be injected with a lot of relatable details. A goal such as, "to be loved," is generic. "To be loved by a maternal figure who expects a lot, is rough around the edges, and forgives frequent blunders... because he is hyper-active, unstructured from a lack of belonging to a formal institution such as work or school - due to rejection for a slight oddity to blink too much - and in constant conflict with his passive mother," is a little more detailed. You can keep going and going. The more detailed you become the more naturally behaviours will emerge, and the more likely that they will appear consistent and trigger the player's imagination.

"Details" was a dangerous word. I meant critical details. The details you're implying are just poor ones. Good details and bad ones are totally different things.

Maybe I should describe the engine this way.
  1. Detail a character's goals and input it into the system.
  2. The system translates these goals into behaviour for the character.
  3. Interact with said character, as the player, to see if it is interesting.
  4. Repeat.


edit:
Enslaved is on my todo list. Monkey is played by "Golem" from LOTR.


« Last Edit: July 26, 2012, 05:31:18 PM by toast_trip » Logged
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« Reply #29 on: July 26, 2012, 05:47:41 PM »

"Wanting to be loved" is not a goal, it is loneliness. It is an internal conflict.

"Wanting to be loved by a maternal figure who expects a lot, is rough around the edges, and forgives frequent blunders... because he is hyper-active, unstructured from a lack of belonging to a formal institution such as work or school - due to rejection for a slight oddity to blink too much - and in constant conflict with his passive mother."

Unless within the story he is put in a formal institution (to conflict and challenge his lack thereof) which emphasizes his hyperactivity and blinking problem as being a significant problem and his conflicts with his passive mother has some real impact on the story they are just mostly wasted details. Wanting to be loved by a maternal figure who expects a lot and is rough around the edges is also just wasted detail unless he is in some way (even if indirectly) proactive about it and the person is specific (or winds up leading him on a crash course with specific people that do not fit the bill). The journey determines the worth of the details. Accomplishing a worthy goal takes a worthy person.

A goal is something specific, something the reader should understand and possibly identify with, and the character may not immediately enter the story with it but happen upon it. He may want to be loved and then happens upon a girl he is head over heels for and winning her affection become his goal and in the course of this journey all sorts of conflicts arise (maybe she currently has a boyfriend or a crazy ex) that he must contend with to win her affection (or not).

Once the journey has been defined then you should create details that suit it, details that add more drama to the conflicts and are relevant to the story. It is like working on a painting, the journey is your base sketch before you start filling it in with the details that ultimately bring out the work as a whole.





Also, "traits" are recurring mannerisms or behaviors, or physical or mental features, not driving forces (as far as a plot is concerned).

Noun: trait
A distinguishing feature of your personal nature

Noun: goal
The state of affairs that a plan is intended to achieve and that (when achieved) terminates behavior intended to achieve it

« Last Edit: July 26, 2012, 05:54:14 PM by JWK5 » Logged
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« Reply #30 on: July 26, 2012, 05:56:02 PM »

By the way, you do know Prom Week, ye? You might also be interested in the presentation they held at last years Paris Game/AI Conference and in the papers listed here.
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« Reply #31 on: July 26, 2012, 06:15:33 PM »

Regarding your game, Toast_Trip, maybe something along these lines:

Goal (Specific)
       |
    Values
       |
   Conflicts
       |
     Traits

A character's goal is what they are specifically striving for, a character's values are a measure of what lengths they are comfortable with going to to reach their goal (violation of these values, either by the character or others, is often a source of conflict), the conflicts are the obstacles the character contends with along the path to achieve the goal (how the character does so is what really defines him), the traits make the character more dynamic and add drama to the conflicts.
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« Reply #32 on: July 26, 2012, 06:18:03 PM »

mmmM.

It's all the same to me. Interesting stories are goal-based characters meeting conflict.

So, following with what I had, I could say that he's worked his way into a University department with a lot of female professors. His most important relationships are with 3 teachers in particular. We can say that maybe his social awkwardness gets him relegated to a limited role in interactions. He blinks, is generally strange, and is unpracticed at even relating to people around him. Maybe he's over-sensitive to the approval of those teachers, and often has to recoup from the damage of their off-handed manner in his other social engagements (with people his own age).

He needs the approval to be confident. He needs to be confident to be respected by his peers. He needs the respect of his peers to have the insight necessary to show his better side to the female authority figures. He has to balance a loop.

If he shows his passion too easily to the teachers they'll pull away. So he has to develop closeness gradually. The situation for him is like keeping a beast on a lead, moving at a steady pace. His hyper-activity and absent mindedness do not make this any easier.

Maybe his mother had low expectations because she was drugged up all the time, so largely oblivious. Ok. Now he wants tough love. He wants an opportunity to be given to him, then challenged to improve. But he has difficulty showing his passion for a more meaningful project without dipping into his desire for a mother figure - and making someone awkward. So he tries to do his menial tasks to an incredible degree, to get recognized for it, then be given something more substantial.

Maybe he's trying to hang with a tougher crowd to put the "I'm already a little tough" attitude into himself, so that the profs he works for will treat him more aggressively, apply more demanding tasks to his workload. But he has trouble doing this without sacrificing some of his moral standings, often staying silent about critical issues when they arise when trying to fit in, consistently applying pressure that tries to marginalize his role within that group. The cycle repeats.

Past creates goals, goals inspire action. Personal weakness finds natural conflict. Journey is produced.

The problem you're referring to is like when the guys who built the Jack character model for Mass Effect 2 - she's the one with a zillion tatoos, is angry, is destructive, can have sex with - said, "we have a story for every one of those tats!" This made the tats more meaningful, and I'm sure made the game a little more interesting if you paid attention to her markings, but it does not fill out her character. A lot of writers misunderstand the point of having a past. The only relevant past is the one that drives a goal the character pursues in the story you are telling.

There's no point creating goals that aren't worked towards. Details have to be relevant. If there's a detail then there better be a conflict in which the owner makes a decision that serves his goals that is based on it. Keep everything in proportion. The more central the goal in the story-line, the more detailed the reasons for pursuing that goal need to be.

We're both talking about the same thing. All of the elements of a good story need to be considered at the same time. A procedurally generated story will come out of good characters doing things. A character "with goals" that isn't pursuing them doesn't actually have those goals. In that case the writer is just saying that some goals exist, but the story says otherwise. A character who actually has goals acts on them and meets conflict.

If there's no conflict then there is no goal because it has already been reached. If there's only a small conflict then the goal is reached quickly and the game is short, and that's fair. If the conflict prevents the character from progressing at all, then the goal doesn't make any sense because a character can't desire something that is impossible. (That last sentence may take some explaining).

If the character's progress is uninteresting then they aren't goal-oriented. That's a common occurrence in real life. To make a passive character interesting on their own you need cut out parts of their story where progress wanes. You can also make them interesting by presenting other truths about life through their passivity, creating an implied conflict within the viewer about what will be revealed.

This is all just terms I think. Maybe mine are unclear.

« Last Edit: July 26, 2012, 06:36:34 PM by toast_trip » Logged
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« Reply #33 on: July 26, 2012, 06:33:45 PM »

Ok. I caught your definitions. I'll clarify some differences.

A human's behaviour is directly proportional to their goals. Values are just me looking at goals from a new angle. You can say values and goals are different, but I also think its fair to say that a value refers to less practical goals, "spiritual" (ethical) goals.

In a story we only see a piece of a character's theoretical behaviour. I could hypothetically take any human and generate an infinite set of circumstance to put him through. I put him through one and write down how he reacts. I hit the reset button, so that he forgets, then do it again, for every circumstance. What I end up with is a list of behaviours. These behaviours form a 1-to-1 relationship with that persons conscious and subconscious goals.

When I say behaviour I mean those theoretical behaviours. You're talking about the behaviours that only show up in a story. Here comes a good example of having an engine. You want to define a character in such a way so that you can shift their goals dynamically and watch their behaviour shift with it, or adjust circumstance slightly - leaving the goals - and see their behaviour shift with it also. With a system like that it becomes very easy to test the robustness of both a character's goals - i.e. how interesting they are and how well they suit the environment - and your system's ability to translate those goals into behaviour.

Since all goals should be achievable in game, and all character should have weaknesses, conflicts will arise naturally. If goals are reached too quickly that just means the character wasn't dreaming big enough. You can define them accordingly. (A plausible human-life character always dreams, at least implicitly, big. No one doesn't want the things in a big dream, whatever that may be (according to what satisfies them), even if we don't consciously acknowledge it.)

You can also control conflict by biasing goals and the environments characters are in.
« Last Edit: July 26, 2012, 06:39:30 PM by toast_trip » Logged
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« Reply #34 on: July 26, 2012, 06:37:36 PM »

A lot of games do what ME2 does. They attach meanings to things that aren't meaningful hoping to inject life into the world, but the problem is that if they aren't meaningful to the story at hand they are largely just excess information that most players will look past. In other words, wasted writing and wasted time.

If the player cares about the story they inherently care about anything important to the story (which allows them to continue to follow along and see what happens next). I always felt Skyrim could have been much better if they made each of the quests like an episode of Batman: The Animated Series.

Each episode of BM:TAS plays out like a self-contained movie. Everything you need to know about the story is contained in the story and the events that unfold and scene locations are always relevant to Batman's ultimate goal in the episode. Even if you know nothing about the Batman lore or anything about Gotham City you can still follow along comfortably.

Skyrim, like most western RPGs, always tries to tell you the story outside the quest from a bunch of NPCs that don't matter through a bunch of dungeons that are mostly "just there". This not only brutalizes the story pacing, but often because of the gaps it creates between one event and another you get side-tracked and forget about the quest altogether only to come back later when half the quest story has already faded into the background.

In comics they try to emphasize ending every page with a cliffhanger so that the reader is always tempted to turn the page and see what happens next, and in this way plot momentum is maintained. I think that is what games really need to try for, ending every block of events on a cliffhanger and ensuring that the next block is never too far away, leading the player to the resolution like a trail of bread crumbs.



Edit: Regarding your post just before this one, I won't try and debate that because I think we'd just wind up going in circles (if we're not already), but I think either approach is fine if it actually leads you (the individual) to creating a good story (or a good procedural story system or whatever). So while I still prefer my approach (or terms) I can see the validity in what you're saying.
« Last Edit: July 26, 2012, 06:44:48 PM by JWK5 » Logged
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« Reply #35 on: July 26, 2012, 06:51:31 PM »

I've heard good things about BM:TAS. I'll probably have to view it some time.

Comics leave pages on a cliffhanger. A lot of games don't think about the play experience and the narrative experience as being the same thing. Each follows its own pacing rules. This is not good. There are a lot of ways one can serve the other.

In FF6/7 you get a story blast after a boss. Then you grind and wander. The story hits you when you were at your most vulnerable. You were proud and tired, more so than usual, and itching for a break in both the kind of content you were absorbing and the degree of effort you had to put into the game. This paces your grinding out, so the technical monotony is mentally refreshing. You also get more freedom at this point.

After you've had your fill of open-world you start to get pulled along again by events. A promise of an interesting boss and another story hit beckon you. One blast of energy pushes you into the void and the temptation of the next pulls you from it. The experience breathes in and out. Everything compresses and hammers you, then sighs, releasing all of your restraints.

It's even better when the story line reflects the degree of challenge you personally encountered. Secret of Evermore f-ing nails this. That's an underrated game. (It does have its flaws....)


edit:

Nah. I don't think there is any difference in approach. I don't have an approach. I just want a good result. If a story is bad I try to make it good in the fastest way possible. That's it. No other rules.

The internet always circles.

« Last Edit: July 26, 2012, 06:58:19 PM by toast_trip » Logged
JWK5
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« Reply #36 on: July 26, 2012, 07:00:09 PM »

Another game that does it amazingly well is Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver (even though its literal "To be continued..." ending is the laziest, crappiest ending ever).

There is never enough story to take control out of your hands for more than a minute or two but there is enough of it that you are constantly experiencing the story all throughout the game. Rarely are you engaged in action for longer than 10-15 minutes before you get another taste of the plot's mystery egging you on.

You don't have to know anything about Legacy of Kain: Blood Omen, the setting, or the characters prior to playing the game. Everything you need to know is dished out to you once juicy morsel after another and you're always kept hungry for more.

The

is especially impressive, it pretty much lays the gist of the whole game out to you in just a little over 3 minutes. It is like the entire act 1 of the 3 act structure played out before the game even starts, throwing you right in the middle of the action of act 2.
« Last Edit: July 26, 2012, 07:05:26 PM by JWK5 » Logged
Graham-
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« Reply #37 on: July 26, 2012, 07:05:31 PM »

*adding games to list*
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« Reply #38 on: July 26, 2012, 07:34:06 PM »

By the way, you do know Prom Week, ye? You might also be interested in the presentation they held at last years Paris Game/AI Conference and in the papers listed here.

I'm going through them. Thanks.
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iammonshushu
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« Reply #39 on: July 27, 2012, 02:40:50 AM »

Great thread. Your idea of a game without dialogue that still has the interactions between the player and his environment is really interesting and I think there is a game in there which could be quite unique; let's say your character starts out with next to no means of communicating with others (like a child with Asperger's) and then through the course of the game learns/acquires/masters different emotions/behaviours that allow him/her to communicate with the game characters and environment. Think like Pokemon but with communication instead of fighting. Now you can have entire plot lines that are dependent on a specific behaviour or emotion allowing you to interact with a certain character. Instead of a one-directional story, you have 360 degrees possible depending on what kind of moods/behaviours you learn.

Depending on your own choices (pursuing the angst or optimism or rage and revenge emotions) you can have different AIs having different allegiances to you (something that was done well in TESIII:Morrowind), which in turn alter the story line. But as well as this you can pursue the idea of emotions and behaviours not as experiences but as tools; you aren't expressing your sadness because you are actually sad, but because you are hoping to advance this plot line. Then you can emulate what Braid does really well: the integration of the story line and the gameplay elements, seamlessly linking the actions in the game and the emotions it inspires.

TL;DR - The player acquires emotions, which alter AIs disposition towards them and hence the available plot lines.
Maybe this is completely unrelated to what you meant, but I thought it was an interesting idea.
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