It was a joke, but I've applied for jobs with Microsoft (before they shitcanned ACES Studio) and Bethesda. They both gave me a lot of good pointers on what to work on.
Mind if I ask what kind of pointers?
If I'm being invasive, don't hesitate to tell me to fuck off; I'm just trying to figure out what I need to do before I start throwing out applications.
Romanian My Escutcheon on
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Viscount Islands[INSERT SoKo HERE]...it was the summer of my lifeRegistered Userregular
edited January 2011
Rom stop being such a pussy.
They aren't going to shit on you because you're asking for advice.
Viscount Islands on
I want to do with you
What spring does with the cherry trees.
UnbrokenEvaHIGH ON THE WIREBUT I WON'T TRIP ITRegistered Userregular
edited January 2011
Oh my god Orik you make the best threads, why did I have to find this while troubleshooting an obnoxious kerberos error? I will have things to say when I get home.
It was a joke, but I've applied for jobs with Microsoft (before they shitcanned ACES Studio) and Bethesda. They both gave me a lot of good pointers on what to work on.
Mind if I ask what kind of pointers?
If I'm being invasive, don't hesitate to tell me to fuck off; I'm just trying to figure out what I need to do before I start throwing out applications.
Well, I was applying at ACES to be a SDET (a glorified tester, but requires programming knowledge to write code to perform tests under certain circumstances). At that point, they said I was close, but I was taking the long way to get to some things - basically pointing me towards writing more efficient code and learning some design patterns.
Bethesda was for a junior game programmer position, and while my references and knowledge were generally good, I didn't have much experience with low-level stuff like efficient memory coding and not a ton of graphics experience, which while not directly required, would still have been helpful.
The crazy part of that was that after the initial short call from HR, the actual phone interview was with Todd Howard. That kind of blew my mind and I think made me much more nervous than I would have been. He was pretty cool though and really wanted me to understand the specific areas that I would need to concentrate on.
I've done voice acting and had to do music composition in college for my degree. And I make weird noises all the time.
But I'm playing Kingdom Hearts Re:Coded now. It's a full-time job
Oooh, I forgot that came out. Is it good?
It's pretty fun. They've found ways to take the exact same places/bosses from the first game and put you through them again without making it feel exactly the same.
I can give you some pointers, Romanian, though I'm not a writer (I'm a Cinematic Designer). Still, originally I was looking at becoming a writer so I can drop some knowledge bombs.
a roguelike game in 3d would be cool, wonder why it doesn't happen too much. probably a ton of work. I remember Nosferatu did something like that, but there would be a problem that the key necessary to open door X was on the other side of door X leaving the game unbeatable.
I think a lot of it is that with tile graphics you let the player imagine most of the stuff that is going on. Modeling every single thing in a randomly generated dungeon and making all the monsters move and interact nicely with all the other models would take a huge amount of time and money. Time and money they could use to make more content in other areas that people play roguelikes for
a roguelike game in 3d would be cool, wonder why it doesn't happen too much. probably a ton of work. I remember Nosferatu did something like that, but there would be a problem that the key necessary to open door X was on the other side of door X leaving the game unbeatable.
I think a lot of it is that with tile graphics you let the player imagine most of the stuff that is going on. Modeling every single thing in a randomly generated dungeon and making all the monsters move and interact nicely with all the other models would take a huge amount of time and money. Time and money they could use to make more content in other areas that people play roguelikes for
A dungeon crawler with randomly generated dungeons wouldn't be tremendously difficult in the sense that you could create rooms as static meshes with "connector" points that make sure that doors line up or whatever. Then you could randomly spawn items and weapons and monsters in different rooms and have people explore.
You couldn't guarantee any sort of natural progression of gameplay or difficulty (unless you scaled the spawning of things to how much of the dungeon you explored - but still, certain set pieces might show up at weird times), but it could have the potential to be sort of like a 3D game of Betrayal at the House on the Hill.
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UnbrokenEvaHIGH ON THE WIREBUT I WON'T TRIP ITRegistered Userregular
edited January 2011
Okay I'm waiting forever for a profile to load on a PC so I have tiiiiime.
I too want to make games, but the skills I want to use/develop are the ones you aren't looking for, presumably because that's what you will be doing (design/programming/writing), but that's okay because I want to make my ideas and not yours.
*how game mechanics can be used to present a character - niko saying that he wants to live a peaceful life and yet all these crazy players keep making him massacre cops, vito scaletta wanting to get respect and managing to kill everyone ever because that's the only way he or the player can interact with the world
*designing games so that the player still has agency to influence the narrative but it doesn't end up being a shallow mishmash of boring things to do and cutscenes a la just cause 2
*playing halo competitively
While I very much enjoy games that tell a story and do it well, but my interests from a design perspective are currently leaning towards making the story as emergent and user-defined as possible. Fishman's LP is a big inspiration for this, and I feel a big part of X-Com's long term success is the fact that the story changes every time you play it, and it's different for everyone who plays it. I considered doing a LP for Betrayal at Krondor back in the day, but felt wierd as the story I was playing was the same one as everyone else, and BaK was a fairly sandboxy game for it's day.
I also just finished Alpha Protocol last night, and I want to play through it again to see how much my choices actually affect how things play out - it feels like it has a fairly major impact, but I'm not sure if how much that's actually the case, and how much it's clever writing making it appear that way.'
Oh, cool thread. I'd love to contribute to something like this, but I really doubt I'll have the time this year, and I'm not sure what I'd be contributing unless your detective game is going to have a lot of explosions.
*how game mechanics can be used to present a character - niko saying that he wants to live a peaceful life and yet all these crazy players keep making him massacre cops, vito scaletta wanting to get respect and managing to kill everyone ever because that's the only way he or the player can interact with the world
I've been thinking about this a lot, in particular if it's even possible to centre a storied game around a pacifistic character, without it being an adventure or puzzle game. The action-adventure genre pretty much relies on violence as its bread and butter. It becomes an issue of finding a suitably taxing skill-based mechanic to replace combat, and which'll still work realistically as as the primary gameplay mechanic. Combat works because it's narratively easy to work in; just add bad guys.
The only game that comes to mind that plays with the idea of the pacifist character is something like Deus Ex, where (to an extent) it's possible to progress without attacking (or at least, without killing) a lot of the NPCs, without necessitating venturing too far into puzzle/adventure territory - the pacifist game is still unquestionably a FPS/RPG, but one that presents a different version of the protagonist which is somewhat acknowledged occasionally by other character NPCs.
*designing games so that the player still has agency to influence the narrative but it doesn't end up being a shallow mishmash of boring things to do and cutscenes a la just cause 2
I know you're a big fan of Heavy Rain, and I think that's the only real way to satisfy that objective. Sadly, it's very taxing from a development perspective (extraneous art, writing, etc.) - it makes sense in Heavy Rain because that's billed as the main feature, but I don't know how far you can push branching narratives without making a lot of excess work. Also, while there's appeal in allowing players to own their own version of the story, there's a similar appeal in having players all experience the same story.
Personally, while I adore what Heavy Rain did, I don't see narrative trees as something that's ultimately going to affect my enjoyment of a game - most players are only going to play the game once, so really, one story is as good as one branch of a multi-branch story. I think an approach closer to what Bioware do with their RPGs (particularly Mass Effect, and I suspect, Dragon Age) where the bulk of the main story is consistent, but there are multiple (and possibly) extensive threads woven around the central narrative.
While I very much enjoy games that tell a story and do it well, but my interests from a design perspective are currently leaning towards making the story as emergent and user-defined as possible. Fishman's LP is a big inspiration for this, and I feel a big part of X-Com's long term success is the fact that the story changes every time you play it, and it's different for everyone who plays it. I considered doing a LP for Betrayal at Krondor back in the day, but felt wierd as the story I was playing was the same one as everyone else, and BaK was a fairly sandboxy game for it's day.
Since I've been discussing this very point a lot recently, there's some other games that have a similar effect - the Silent Hunter series has had crew management that personalizes the experience somewhat in the fact that you are on this boat with these guys and when you go up to the deck, your watch commander, who has a face and a name and stats in your crew management section) is standing up there looking through binoculars, searching for convoys. Still, other than something of a mechanism to illustrate your progression through experience, there's not much else there, which is why it failed as an LP target for me.
Blood Bowl really gets it right in the same way that X-COM does, because you are directly playing characters that you can customize and who have a direct role in the execution of the game. When you are passing downfield or trying to break a block, it is one of your guys (and you have a limited number of them on a team), so your success or failure in the game is tied to those characters. This makes the story of what they do and who they are emergent from your actions in the game.
The Total War series straddles sort of a middle ground. While in many of the games, you have "characters" on the board that represent certain people, and they can go into battle, on a grander scale the story of your nation is the story of its rulers. The family tree and the rise and fall of monarchs and even full lineages are a huge part of what makes that game spectacular to me. When your king's eldest son leads the charge into a battle to save a city in your empire, it has repercussions on the entire future of the nation you are playing. Plus, the portraits and stats give the characters personality even though they hardly interact in the game except to provide some boosts or modifiers in some gameplay mechanics and maybe provide a unit of heavy cav to an army. The inclusion of that part of the game is minor in terms of value in the execution of play, but absolutely essential in the building of a compelling narrative by the player.
There's been plenty of games that I feel could have greatly benefited from the addition of something like this, but just didn't have it. That doesn't make the game fail in most cases, but in others, it restricts that self-created narrative from adding that much more depth to the playing of the game.
See, I wonder if a tactical squad-based kind of dealie could pull that off; maintaining massive character/equipment customisation while still having scripted and possibly voiced personalities and dialogue trees.
Would Minsc have still worked if he was an X with a space hamster, rather than a sword (or mace) wielding ranger? Would he have worked if he was stuck in a Mass Effect universe and potentially inserted into any one of the existing class archetypes? Then again, Shepard's class didn't have any bearing on his (player-controlled) personality.
It's like... when my X-Com guys died, I reloaded. Having "any time" deaths that tie into and are recognised by a game's overarching plot would be spectacularly difficult to pull off, not to mention that so many people would do similar and simply never continue playing on after their big favourite died on them, but I think there'd be interesting ways of combining sweeping character-driven narratives with tactical squad games.
UnbrokenEvaHIGH ON THE WIREBUT I WON'T TRIP ITRegistered Userregular
edited January 2011
Posting from my phone now, so I won't be as verbose,but one of the gaming moments that really stuck wit me was in the first Medieval: TW. I noticed one of my armies had an incredible commander, and upon inspection found he was a beast with Dread even higher than his Command. I looked up the name and found that Roger Mortimer was a real historical badass, and immediately started trying to find ways to manipulate succession/rebellion to try and make him King.
My second favorite M:TW moment was having a massive Venetian army in place to meet the mongol horde the moment it arrived and turned it back.
*how game mechanics can be used to present a character - niko saying that he wants to live a peaceful life and yet all these crazy players keep making him massacre cops, vito scaletta wanting to get respect and managing to kill everyone ever because that's the only way he or the player can interact with the world
I've been thinking about this a lot, in particular if it's even possible to centre a storied game around a pacifistic character, without it being an adventure or puzzle game. The action-adventure genre pretty much relies on violence as its bread and butter. It becomes an issue of finding a suitably taxing skill-based mechanic to replace combat, and which'll still work realistically as as the primary gameplay mechanic. Combat works because it's narratively easy to work in; just add bad guys.
The only game that comes to mind that plays with the idea of the pacifist character is something like Deus Ex, where (to an extent) it's possible to progress without attacking (or at least, without killing) a lot of the NPCs, without necessitating venturing too far into puzzle/adventure territory - the pacifist game is still unquestionably a FPS/RPG, but one that presents a different version of the protagonist which is somewhat acknowledged occasionally by other character NPCs.
You can actually play through Deus Ex with only killing one character, and that character can be taken out with a killphrase instead of shooting. It's absolutely revolutionary to build the game that way, and I think is a standard to prove that it works. We'll get to Heavy Rain, but it's important to note that the value you place on the lives of NPCs is important in how players will react to them. Death is a huge thing in that game, so when it comes time to kill someone, they make it really difficult, and a difficult decision at that. Pulling the trigger once is a major part of that game, and it shows that if you don't condition the player to solve every problem with the trigger button, the game doesn't have to rely on it.
*designing games so that the player still has agency to influence the narrative but it doesn't end up being a shallow mishmash of boring things to do and cutscenes a la just cause 2
I know you're a big fan of Heavy Rain, and I think that's the only real way to satisfy that objective. Sadly, it's very taxing from a development perspective (extraneous art, writing, etc.) - it makes sense in Heavy Rain because that's billed as the main feature, but I don't know how far you can push branching narratives without making a lot of excess work. Also, while there's appeal in allowing players to own their own version of the story, there's a similar appeal in having players all experience the same story.
Personally, while I adore what Heavy Rain did, I don't see narrative trees as something that's ultimately going to affect my enjoyment of a game - most players are only going to play the game once, so really, one story is as good as one branch of a multi-branch story. I think an approach closer to what Bioware do with their RPGs (particularly Mass Effect, and I suspect, Dragon Age) where the bulk of the main story is consistent, but there are multiple (and possibly) extensive threads woven around the central narrative.
Heavy Rain, if there was one thing that spoiled the entire experience for me, it was that my decisions didn't actually have the largest impacts on the ending of the game. Sure, there were some things that I did that changed the course of the narrative, but in the end, most of the bad things that happened in my playthrough were because I am shit at quick time events and didn't make it through some of the action scenes at the end. It failed in terms of narrative agency because I didn't feel like I had the power to really change what was happening in the story. It was a good experiment in what is a genre in its infancy, but I don't think it reached the levels it was aiming for.
Your point against that sort of game represents what's holding it back. The brute force method of branching narratives, where you just create 30 separate storylines worth of content, is never going to be an effective way of going about it. The cliche of work smarter, not harder is called for in this case, because what we need to find are paths to smarter design and programming that will allow for the game world to be altered in terms of events and character interactions in such a way that the emergent narrative is built from those choices. Create a world, populate it with interesting characters and information, supply a mystery or some sort of impetus to resolve the plot, and give the player the ability to determine how he or she will explore that narrative and go about reaching the end. This doesn't mean that events and interactions can't be scripted or set in stone, but the pathways to reach those points can be divergent and with some crafty design and programming, can lead to interesting places for each player.
Two moments in video games that really affected me recently:
Getting the "didn't save everyone" ending in fable 3. I was honestly depressed by what the end world looked like. It was sort of lonely when my entire crew died in mass effect 2, but this was on such a larger scale I actually impacted me emotionally to the point were i was doing things to bring them back. I know this was mostly intended and I have to say in this way the game really impressed me.
The other was last night, managed to get the second X-com game off a buddy, got it installed, running it through dosbox and it was running insanely fast making it nearly unplayable at the time. Got to the battle scape screen, i moved my units around carefully hit the end turn button. cuts to the aliens and then i just see flashes on my guys, hear screams and some explosion. Then i get the mission summary screen informing all of my agents died. It's not something intentional from the game makers, but man that blew me away.
cuts to the aliens and then i just see flashes on my guys, hear screams and some explosion. Then i get the mission summary screen informing all of my agents died. It's not something intentional from the game makers, but man that blew me away.
Nope, that's pretty much how Terror from the Deep goes.
Yeah, but doing it again at normal speeds the everyone dying was slightly less traumatic.
When i say flashes i mean literally a flash. less then a second on screen, i didn't have time to register a dying animation it was just flash of ground, scream, flash more screams. EVERYONE IS DEAD. And i was all "well, fuck."
It's funny, I hadn't even thought about Heavy Rain when I was writing the paragraph on pacifist gameplay, but it really is an incredible example of how powerful that sort of character decision can be when its given the appropriate gravitas by not making violence/combat a gratuitous portion of gameplay. The few moments where you're given the chance to kill or injure someone in the game seem weighty because of it. Building a game around that as a mechanic suddenly becomes very appealing.
I definitely agree regarding Heavy Rain's (lack of success) as an experiment in narrative trees. A lot of the decision nodes aren't really decisions at all, so much as arbitrary tests of luck/skill - as emphasised by watching my brother (usually very adept at most games) managing to get just about everyone unintentionally killed. While in my playthrough I was very satisfied with my narrative, his experience was ... different.
The problem is that what you're proposing (designing smarter means of emergent narrative, rather than brute coding multiple options) is a very open ended problem, and one for which I don't think there's really an adequate solution yet. Allowing for emergent content that isn't tightly scripted and accounted for in every eventuality, while still maintaining the quality of a handmade narrative experience encroaches on AI territory - or at least, heavy proceduralism, which in some cases is no less difficult.
Your point against that sort of game represents what's holding it back. The brute force method of branching narratives, where you just create 30 separate storylines worth of content, is never going to be an effective way of going about it.
sadly the only method to genuinely engaging narratives is to script them. there is no procedural recipe for meaning, no design for an emergent world that can insert its own figurative imagery and cohesive denoument. art just doesn't work like that - it's like expecting to be able to program an add-on for photoshop that takes a few cues and turns it into a subtle, interesting and noteworthy impressionist painting
and stories are art.
it's a big question. this thought is what's led me to decide that in an open or procedural videogame environment it's going to be much, much more satisfying, as a developer, to not play the role of storyteller but the facilitator of stories: to focus on narrative only by giving your users toolsets to create their own. a huge part of this is sharing. stories are about communicating, but there are so many games - especially now that sandbox is very do-able and very trendy - where stories do arise emergently, yet there's no way to share them
To comment on the other topic, it's funny that X-COM is coming up a lot as an example of player-made stories. In this context I imagine it's mostly because of the LP, but it's always been my de facto example (for instance, here) of the power of player made stories - even 15 years later, my own entirely internalized stories from Terror from the Deep have stuck with me, long after the actual stories of every other game of that time have since been forgotten.
I always wondered what it'd be like to do a semi-procedural RPG, where the characters conformed to a Sims-esque number of personality traits, allowing for slight variations in character that would allow each player a completely different party for each playthrough. Coupled with the tragedy of unavoidable deaths, I think it could be a powerful mechanic to build a game around, in the same way it still works for XCOM.
I have filled a notebook with my thoughts on how to do that, Darric, so it would be less-than-adequate to try to summarize here. Needless to say, I think that deconstructing what goes into a good narrative and plucking out the parts that are imperative is part of the process.
I certainly plan on exploring it with actual gameplay in the future.
Your point against that sort of game represents what's holding it back. The brute force method of branching narratives, where you just create 30 separate storylines worth of content, is never going to be an effective way of going about it.
sadly the only method to genuinely engaging narratives is to script them. there is no procedural recipe for meaning, no design for an emergent world that can insert its own figurative imagery and cohesive denoument. art just doesn't work like that - it's like expecting to be able to program an add-on for photoshop that takes a few cues and turns it into a subtle, interesting and noteworthy impressionist painting
and stories are art.
it's a big question. this thought is what's led me to decide that in an open or procedural videogame environment it's going to be much, much more satisfying, as a developer, to not play the role of storyteller but the facilitator of stories: to focus on narrative only by giving your users toolsets to create their own. a huge part of this is sharing. stories are about communicating, but there are so many games - especially now that sandbox is very do-able and very trendy - where stories do arise emergently, yet there's no way to share them
At this point, I guess all I can say is that I sort of disagree. I think there is room to tell your own story (as a developer-storyteller) and also let the player's story emerge.
Very, very interesting. Well, if you ever want someone to discuss it with, or bounce ideas off of, it's definitely a topic I've wanted to think a lot about, if not actually done so.
I did at some point consider the possibility of proceduralizing side stories (weirdly enough, in the context of a XCOM-ish squad game - it's all converging) ages ago, but filed it away in my head with all the other things I'd love to do, but could never have time for.
Your point against that sort of game represents what's holding it back. The brute force method of branching narratives, where you just create 30 separate storylines worth of content, is never going to be an effective way of going about it.
sadly the only method to genuinely engaging narratives is to script them. there is no procedural recipe for meaning, no design for an emergent world that can insert its own figurative imagery and cohesive denoument. art just doesn't work like that - it's like expecting to be able to program an add-on for photoshop that takes a few cues and turns it into a subtle, interesting and noteworthy impressionist painting
and stories are art.
it's a big question. this thought is what's led me to decide that in an open or procedural videogame environment it's going to be much, much more satisfying, as a developer, to not play the role of storyteller but the facilitator of stories: to focus on narrative only by giving your users toolsets to create their own. a huge part of this is sharing. stories are about communicating, but there are so many games - especially now that sandbox is very do-able and very trendy - where stories do arise emergently, yet there's no way to share them
At this point, I guess all I can say is that I sort of disagree. I think there is room to tell your own story (as a developer-storyteller) and also let the player's story emerge.
sure, it's possible, but the thing is that neither can gain anything from the merge. stories are as much about being given their own space as anything else: a story can actually vanish pretty easily if it's not given the right frame, mainly because the best stories are subtle ones.
This actually has very little with what we were talking about, but Crashmo got me thinking about something else, and I know this is probably a unpopular opinion (but somewhat relevant, talking about procedural, um, stories) but fuck me, I loved Yoda Stories.
Posts
Mind if I ask what kind of pointers?
If I'm being invasive, don't hesitate to tell me to fuck off; I'm just trying to figure out what I need to do before I start throwing out applications.
They aren't going to shit on you because you're asking for advice.
What spring does with the cherry trees.
Feauturing: A game where you are an octopus posing as a human father (with a sweet theme song).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVoSYDWX2Ig&feature=player_embedded
A game that is like Myst but looks like it is in Tron world.
http://vimeo.com/18548118
A 3d platformer where everything is destructible or something and giant comic book onomatopoeia spam the screen.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gau64RmevJs&feature=player_embedded
What can I do?
Dear satan I wish for this or maybe some of this....oh and I'm a medium or a large.
pm nudes, he'll need some models for the shower scene
...
do I have to?
Dear satan I wish for this or maybe some of this....oh and I'm a medium or a large.
But I'm playing Kingdom Hearts Re:Coded now. It's a full-time job
Oooh, I forgot that came out. Is it good?
Well, I was applying at ACES to be a SDET (a glorified tester, but requires programming knowledge to write code to perform tests under certain circumstances). At that point, they said I was close, but I was taking the long way to get to some things - basically pointing me towards writing more efficient code and learning some design patterns.
Bethesda was for a junior game programmer position, and while my references and knowledge were generally good, I didn't have much experience with low-level stuff like efficient memory coding and not a ton of graphics experience, which while not directly required, would still have been helpful.
The crazy part of that was that after the initial short call from HR, the actual phone interview was with Todd Howard. That kind of blew my mind and I think made me much more nervous than I would have been. He was pretty cool though and really wanted me to understand the specific areas that I would need to concentrate on.
send them to him asap
and don't bother explaining why he is receiving nudes of you, he is already expecting them
It's pretty fun. They've found ways to take the exact same places/bosses from the first game and put you through them again without making it feel exactly the same.
I think a lot of it is that with tile graphics you let the player imagine most of the stuff that is going on. Modeling every single thing in a randomly generated dungeon and making all the monsters move and interact nicely with all the other models would take a huge amount of time and money. Time and money they could use to make more content in other areas that people play roguelikes for
A dungeon crawler with randomly generated dungeons wouldn't be tremendously difficult in the sense that you could create rooms as static meshes with "connector" points that make sure that doors line up or whatever. Then you could randomly spawn items and weapons and monsters in different rooms and have people explore.
You couldn't guarantee any sort of natural progression of gameplay or difficulty (unless you scaled the spawning of things to how much of the dungeon you explored - but still, certain set pieces might show up at weird times), but it could have the potential to be sort of like a 3D game of Betrayal at the House on the Hill.
I too want to make games, but the skills I want to use/develop are the ones you aren't looking for, presumably because that's what you will be doing (design/programming/writing), but that's okay because I want to make my ideas and not yours.
While I very much enjoy games that tell a story and do it well, but my interests from a design perspective are currently leaning towards making the story as emergent and user-defined as possible. Fishman's LP is a big inspiration for this, and I feel a big part of X-Com's long term success is the fact that the story changes every time you play it, and it's different for everyone who plays it. I considered doing a LP for Betrayal at Krondor back in the day, but felt wierd as the story I was playing was the same one as everyone else, and BaK was a fairly sandboxy game for it's day.
I also just finished Alpha Protocol last night, and I want to play through it again to see how much my choices actually affect how things play out - it feels like it has a fairly major impact, but I'm not sure if how much that's actually the case, and how much it's clever writing making it appear that way.'
and now, back to work.
Still, I'm always keen to talk about design.
I've been thinking about this a lot, in particular if it's even possible to centre a storied game around a pacifistic character, without it being an adventure or puzzle game. The action-adventure genre pretty much relies on violence as its bread and butter. It becomes an issue of finding a suitably taxing skill-based mechanic to replace combat, and which'll still work realistically as as the primary gameplay mechanic. Combat works because it's narratively easy to work in; just add bad guys.
The only game that comes to mind that plays with the idea of the pacifist character is something like Deus Ex, where (to an extent) it's possible to progress without attacking (or at least, without killing) a lot of the NPCs, without necessitating venturing too far into puzzle/adventure territory - the pacifist game is still unquestionably a FPS/RPG, but one that presents a different version of the protagonist which is somewhat acknowledged occasionally by other character NPCs.
I know you're a big fan of Heavy Rain, and I think that's the only real way to satisfy that objective. Sadly, it's very taxing from a development perspective (extraneous art, writing, etc.) - it makes sense in Heavy Rain because that's billed as the main feature, but I don't know how far you can push branching narratives without making a lot of excess work. Also, while there's appeal in allowing players to own their own version of the story, there's a similar appeal in having players all experience the same story.
Personally, while I adore what Heavy Rain did, I don't see narrative trees as something that's ultimately going to affect my enjoyment of a game - most players are only going to play the game once, so really, one story is as good as one branch of a multi-branch story. I think an approach closer to what Bioware do with their RPGs (particularly Mass Effect, and I suspect, Dragon Age) where the bulk of the main story is consistent, but there are multiple (and possibly) extensive threads woven around the central narrative.
Nope.
Since I've been discussing this very point a lot recently, there's some other games that have a similar effect - the Silent Hunter series has had crew management that personalizes the experience somewhat in the fact that you are on this boat with these guys and when you go up to the deck, your watch commander, who has a face and a name and stats in your crew management section) is standing up there looking through binoculars, searching for convoys. Still, other than something of a mechanism to illustrate your progression through experience, there's not much else there, which is why it failed as an LP target for me.
Blood Bowl really gets it right in the same way that X-COM does, because you are directly playing characters that you can customize and who have a direct role in the execution of the game. When you are passing downfield or trying to break a block, it is one of your guys (and you have a limited number of them on a team), so your success or failure in the game is tied to those characters. This makes the story of what they do and who they are emergent from your actions in the game.
The Total War series straddles sort of a middle ground. While in many of the games, you have "characters" on the board that represent certain people, and they can go into battle, on a grander scale the story of your nation is the story of its rulers. The family tree and the rise and fall of monarchs and even full lineages are a huge part of what makes that game spectacular to me. When your king's eldest son leads the charge into a battle to save a city in your empire, it has repercussions on the entire future of the nation you are playing. Plus, the portraits and stats give the characters personality even though they hardly interact in the game except to provide some boosts or modifiers in some gameplay mechanics and maybe provide a unit of heavy cav to an army. The inclusion of that part of the game is minor in terms of value in the execution of play, but absolutely essential in the building of a compelling narrative by the player.
There's been plenty of games that I feel could have greatly benefited from the addition of something like this, but just didn't have it. That doesn't make the game fail in most cases, but in others, it restricts that self-created narrative from adding that much more depth to the playing of the game.
Would Minsc have still worked if he was an X with a space hamster, rather than a sword (or mace) wielding ranger? Would he have worked if he was stuck in a Mass Effect universe and potentially inserted into any one of the existing class archetypes? Then again, Shepard's class didn't have any bearing on his (player-controlled) personality.
It's like... when my X-Com guys died, I reloaded. Having "any time" deaths that tie into and are recognised by a game's overarching plot would be spectacularly difficult to pull off, not to mention that so many people would do similar and simply never continue playing on after their big favourite died on them, but I think there'd be interesting ways of combining sweeping character-driven narratives with tactical squad games.
i was real sad when my assassin died
My second favorite M:TW moment was having a massive Venetian army in place to meet the mongol horde the moment it arrived and turned it back.
You can actually play through Deus Ex with only killing one character, and that character can be taken out with a killphrase instead of shooting. It's absolutely revolutionary to build the game that way, and I think is a standard to prove that it works. We'll get to Heavy Rain, but it's important to note that the value you place on the lives of NPCs is important in how players will react to them. Death is a huge thing in that game, so when it comes time to kill someone, they make it really difficult, and a difficult decision at that. Pulling the trigger once is a major part of that game, and it shows that if you don't condition the player to solve every problem with the trigger button, the game doesn't have to rely on it.
Heavy Rain, if there was one thing that spoiled the entire experience for me, it was that my decisions didn't actually have the largest impacts on the ending of the game. Sure, there were some things that I did that changed the course of the narrative, but in the end, most of the bad things that happened in my playthrough were because I am shit at quick time events and didn't make it through some of the action scenes at the end. It failed in terms of narrative agency because I didn't feel like I had the power to really change what was happening in the story. It was a good experiment in what is a genre in its infancy, but I don't think it reached the levels it was aiming for.
Your point against that sort of game represents what's holding it back. The brute force method of branching narratives, where you just create 30 separate storylines worth of content, is never going to be an effective way of going about it. The cliche of work smarter, not harder is called for in this case, because what we need to find are paths to smarter design and programming that will allow for the game world to be altered in terms of events and character interactions in such a way that the emergent narrative is built from those choices. Create a world, populate it with interesting characters and information, supply a mystery or some sort of impetus to resolve the plot, and give the player the ability to determine how he or she will explore that narrative and go about reaching the end. This doesn't mean that events and interactions can't be scripted or set in stone, but the pathways to reach those points can be divergent and with some crafty design and programming, can lead to interesting places for each player.
Getting the "didn't save everyone" ending in fable 3. I was honestly depressed by what the end world looked like. It was sort of lonely when my entire crew died in mass effect 2, but this was on such a larger scale I actually impacted me emotionally to the point were i was doing things to bring them back. I know this was mostly intended and I have to say in this way the game really impressed me.
The other was last night, managed to get the second X-com game off a buddy, got it installed, running it through dosbox and it was running insanely fast making it nearly unplayable at the time. Got to the battle scape screen, i moved my units around carefully hit the end turn button. cuts to the aliens and then i just see flashes on my guys, hear screams and some explosion. Then i get the mission summary screen informing all of my agents died. It's not something intentional from the game makers, but man that blew me away.
Nope, that's pretty much how Terror from the Deep goes.
It's for real men who drink rye at lunch.
Welcome to the big leagues.
When i say flashes i mean literally a flash. less then a second on screen, i didn't have time to register a dying animation it was just flash of ground, scream, flash more screams. EVERYONE IS DEAD. And i was all "well, fuck."
Rye at lunch? man, i put that shit in my tea.
It's funny, I hadn't even thought about Heavy Rain when I was writing the paragraph on pacifist gameplay, but it really is an incredible example of how powerful that sort of character decision can be when its given the appropriate gravitas by not making violence/combat a gratuitous portion of gameplay. The few moments where you're given the chance to kill or injure someone in the game seem weighty because of it. Building a game around that as a mechanic suddenly becomes very appealing.
I definitely agree regarding Heavy Rain's (lack of success) as an experiment in narrative trees. A lot of the decision nodes aren't really decisions at all, so much as arbitrary tests of luck/skill - as emphasised by watching my brother (usually very adept at most games) managing to get just about everyone unintentionally killed. While in my playthrough I was very satisfied with my narrative, his experience was ... different.
The problem is that what you're proposing (designing smarter means of emergent narrative, rather than brute coding multiple options) is a very open ended problem, and one for which I don't think there's really an adequate solution yet. Allowing for emergent content that isn't tightly scripted and accounted for in every eventuality, while still maintaining the quality of a handmade narrative experience encroaches on AI territory - or at least, heavy proceduralism, which in some cases is no less difficult.
sadly the only method to genuinely engaging narratives is to script them. there is no procedural recipe for meaning, no design for an emergent world that can insert its own figurative imagery and cohesive denoument. art just doesn't work like that - it's like expecting to be able to program an add-on for photoshop that takes a few cues and turns it into a subtle, interesting and noteworthy impressionist painting
and stories are art.
it's a big question. this thought is what's led me to decide that in an open or procedural videogame environment it's going to be much, much more satisfying, as a developer, to not play the role of storyteller but the facilitator of stories: to focus on narrative only by giving your users toolsets to create their own. a huge part of this is sharing. stories are about communicating, but there are so many games - especially now that sandbox is very do-able and very trendy - where stories do arise emergently, yet there's no way to share them
I always wondered what it'd be like to do a semi-procedural RPG, where the characters conformed to a Sims-esque number of personality traits, allowing for slight variations in character that would allow each player a completely different party for each playthrough. Coupled with the tragedy of unavoidable deaths, I think it could be a powerful mechanic to build a game around, in the same way it still works for XCOM.
I certainly plan on exploring it with actual gameplay in the future.
At this point, I guess all I can say is that I sort of disagree. I think there is room to tell your own story (as a developer-storyteller) and also let the player's story emerge.
I did at some point consider the possibility of proceduralizing side stories (weirdly enough, in the context of a XCOM-ish squad game - it's all converging) ages ago, but filed it away in my head with all the other things I'd love to do, but could never have time for.
It was like a top-down view of a guy in the woods (snes level sprites if I remember)
and all the events in the game were randomized and narrated
it was extremely short and simple, but I thought it worked very well
sure, it's possible, but the thing is that neither can gain anything from the merge. stories are as much about being given their own space as anything else: a story can actually vanish pretty easily if it's not given the right frame, mainly because the best stories are subtle ones.
Dear satan I wish for this or maybe some of this....oh and I'm a medium or a large.