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[Duke 2.0]

have you ever seen a fully trained mage in RPGs? 
I agree that learing how to throw thunderbolts should be harder for a maceman, but only because of his lower intelligence and heavier armor, not because he was born to be maceman.

 I guess I forgot to post this, seeing as how late it was for me.

 The way I see experience gain, everything is hard to learn. I mean, your adverage joe would need to go through quite a bit to be mildly skilled at anything. However, Guilds/schools/jobs/military would help you learn whatever stats they use the most. Of course, what if a character joins a bunch of these things and gets better at learning everything? Thats when the world fleshes out. Make it so the guild of fighters won't like a weak member of the mages guild in their ranks. Make the some military professions require full-time work. The way I see it, these are jobs. The more you work for them, the more time you must spend there and the more you learn about the field of work.

 Actually, that would be rather kickass. The jobs/guilds/positions you can fill is based on how much (Abstracted) time you take at it. Say you have a virtual 12 hours you can devote to work. The local government has a job that takes up a good six hours of this allocated time. It helps you learn the basics of Town Guard skills, so any skill that can be related to being a guard is easier to learn(Preferably by a large factor). You take another job as a fighter in the arena. It takes four hours and increases many of the same skills.
 Now you don't need to be at these jobs yourself. You can take "Quests" from these jobs, but you are not required to be at them for those hours. It's more of a gameplay mechanic. They are just ways of getting skills/experience more easily from specific fields, but you can't just be part of every job and get the best stat gains possible.

 

[nerdpride]

Hooray for classless video games!

I liked Morrowind as much as the next guy, but a "perfect" game (or as close as possible to one) wouldn't be the same.

First of all, I don't think multiplayer games are out by necessity.  It's just the 99% case because you get stuck with annoying people.  If there were something to separate players, like some game worlds to be created by players with cheating options (maybe not blatant cheating, but a lower difficulty world) on, that would separate out the little n00bies pretty good and cater to mature players IMHO.

Power levels would also have to be limited.  The highest level player in a game should, in theory, be vulnerable to strategic lower-levels if they get careless.  Not showing any "level" would be helpful here.  People can't just become invulnerable to other people, maybe some rats couldn't kill an experienced warrior, but a somewhat green mercenary should be able to.

I'd hate to make multiplayer games though.  I'd rather avoid network communications, dinky single player games are hard enough to make.


I also don't think first person is immersing at all.  You notice all kinds of bugs, strange animations, or other computer trouble.  But I prefer DF-style ASCII, regardless of computation limits just because it allows for imagination.  Plus 2d/3rd person views allow strategic views of situations, so you don't have to spend precious time trying to figure out what's going on instead of playing in big situations.  IRL, you would probably notice eventually if someone sneaks behind you, assuming you don't die outright.  With first person view, even the most unstealthy types could sneak up on you and kill you before you notice.


Finally, randomness is important.  Dungeons should be randomly generated, if not overworld areas, monsters, and magic loot.  Doing the same exact thing twice means breaking any immersion gained.  I find it extremely difficult to find any roleplaying reason for going back and doing the same things with every new character, knowing what to expect, what certain monster's weaknesses are.

In a Google Group, I saw one Roguelike developer suggest that plot can be cyclical instead of randomly generated, to an extent.  Say you meet a Blacksmith, and he wants some iron ore, so you fetch it.  Next he's lacking coal.  Next, he's been captured by orcs, so you go save him.  You don't escort him home, so by the time you make another character, he's having trouble on the road.  Anywhere in a sequence like that, the blacksmith could forgo quests entirely, allowing other NPCs to give the player things to do.  It could be based on a time sequence, or it could just be random.  For an interesting challenge, you can create a world where you actually have to "save" the NPCs you want to use.


My, that was a lot.  I keep trying to write short posts, but fail.

[Asehujiko]

4,5,6,7,8,11,12 and 15 are cosmetics are subject to taste. For example i don't mind not having "historic" music. Seriously, what was the last time you saw an entire latin choir present at a major battle?
9) is a needless chore. Having to cancel monster hunting because my stomach meter is dangerously low is not immersive. Neither is having to eat every x minutes to keep my stats topped up.
13) is very bad idea to me. Running the same path several times gets boring quickly and having to fighting your way across said path does nothing but slow the game down alot and not make it much more interesting. Spending MONTHS on a boat with a 1/24 time scale is plain retarded, no other way to put it. I don't feel like babysitting my character for 60 hours in case a 5 minute event like a pirate raid occurs.
17) i asume you mean bolt to the head=instagib? They only reason we tolerate that in df is because it's alpha and ranged weapons will get nerfed before 1.0 Having to reload a story based game because of a lucky hit will get annoying after the second time.

Your idea of an rpg is far from perfect nor is it feasable for a game anybody exept you would apreciate.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

First off, realism is out. You cannot have realism in a fantasy game - what you're after is verisimilitude, or the illusion of reality. You want a game that tells its fantastic story in a way that makes it seem real, without actually being anything close to reality. People want an escape, they don't want to get home from a job just to play a character who has a job.

So, long travel times and realistic skill gain are out. If you tell someone they'll have to train at swordfighting for a few years of real time before being able to handle themselves in a swordfight without dying, that would suck.

As a good example of travel, I give Morrowind and Wind Waker. Morrowind just crammed a bunch of cool scenery and random monsters between towns, and peppered the countryside with side quests and small side dungeons.
Wind Waker made traveling from island to island kind of a meditative thing. Sure there were occasional random encounters, but it generally didn't take long to get from place to place.

I think skill training should be somewhat close to how it works in real life: the first three months you learn a WHOLE LOT and are head and shoulders above someone who doesn't know anything. But later training gives you less and less of a return for time spent on it. Of course, someone who is 4 years into it will be much better than someone 3 years into it. But it'll still be kind of a close thing, and other circumstances can throw the contest one way or the other.

And your unused skills should slowly get rusty, though not below a point based on your original skill. A 5-year swordfighter who hasn't picked up a sword in a decade should still wipe the floor with someone just out of the 3-month shakedown period. But it's possible for someone with just 3 months to lose almost all of that value if he never uses it.

And regaining skill to the point you were at your peak is easier than learning it in the first place.

Also you should be able to set a task when you log out, and your character would sit around in the world doing that task automatically. Like AFK macroing. He'd gain skill in it, etc. You'd come back with an empty wood bin but a bunch of finished lanterns or whatever. This would be the primary way to gain skills, since sitting there watching it happen or doing it manually is just plain boring. You could AFK swordfighting practice, but the benefit gained from that is quite a lot less than fighting actual opponents.

I think your character should age according to the timetable in the game. It makes sense to have perhaps 4:1 time ratio, so every 3 months of real time you get through a year of game time. This way a night lasts about two hours, long enough for a thief character to pull off a heist. And players who play during realtime night will get to experience gametime night and day, which they wouldn't if the game were in a 1:1 time ratio.

So if your character started as an adolescent just entering adulthood, you would learn more easily but your physical statistics would be a bit lower. As you enter your prime, your stats are all normal. As you age, you lose out in pretty much every statistic, but because you've been gaining skills all this time you can still stick it to the young'uns.

After about 5 years of real time, your character would be about 35, still able to adventure. If the game stuck around for 10 years (like EQ and UO have), people could see characters age to the point that fighting becomes quite difficult and only their high skills make them still able to compete. I imagine a grey-haired, wiry old swordsman of 50-60 at this point still trying to prove he can slay dragons with the best of them. Eventually your character's statistics would simply become too low to be active anymore, and your options would be limited to hobbling around town telling stories. If that's not entertaining, maybe you should have gotten married when you were younger and rolled up a son.

I think it would be really entertaining to fart with their age limits, making people adolescents at 15, adults at 22, middle-aged at 28, old at 35, and elderly at 45. Max age would be 50. This seems appropriate in a medieval setting.

This means your character, if he's healthy and doesn't receive a lot of diseases and injuries, would last 5 years of realtime before really starting to go downhill. You'd play the game for about a year, have a couple kids and play them, maybe manage to buy a family manor house and set everyone up in there. Get into politics with your older character and get government perks for his children. But understand that you're playing a family, so you might log in for a while on one character and then with a different one.

I'd imagine you could have one son be a leatherworker, and you log in with him to call for a porter job (which an NPC or a player could fulfill) to go buy you leather. Restock your shelves with goods that were bought since you logged out last, call for a cleaning job for the workshop, grab some food, and do whatever. The log him out with the leatherworking job going, and fire up your magic-user character who lives in the attic. You walk downstairs, pass your leatherworker character as he waits for the porter to come by with leather, and head out into the city.

I think the main thing to think about with an RPG is that no part of it can afford to be tedious and boring. It doesn't need to be! Of course, people will create tedium on their own - for example, low-crawling backward from one town to the next, or swimming across the ocean. But you don't have to put it in for everyone to see when they just try to play the game.

[Kagus]

I saw a comment about music, and thought I should mention Knights of the Temple.  That game had some nice music in general, but that "low-health requiem" was absolutely stunning.  Really set the mood.

Music can make or break an atmosphere, and I at least think that realism can take a hit if you're listening to some nice, immersive music.


And Leo, that's a lot of realism you're suggesting after saying that realism is out.  You even talk about one of the biggest issues of realism, aging.  Sure, it will provide a big incentive for players to go out and search for that elusive potion of immortality or fountain of youth, but you'll likely get a lot of complaints.  Even if it does take five real years for you character to croak.  It's just one of those things.

[Asehujiko]

It is possible to create a decent story that doesn't take years. Half life 2 for example starts in the morning, before noon lamarr botches the teleport and you make it to black mesa east just before sunset, spending the entire night in ravelholm. Shortly after dawn you get your car and you get your rocket launcher  roughly at the time you would have lunch. As night falls, you infiltrate nova prospekt. The story skips a few weeks here as plot device for the rebellion and puts you back in kleiners lab at arround the sime time you left it a few days before. The final battle ontop of the citadel takes place during the sunset.

ep1 starts the same evening and you remain underground for most of the night, getting out in time to see the first light of dawn and ends with a big explosion arround noon.

ep2 begins mere seconds after ep1 and ends with the missile being launched into the sunset.

The entire story so far took about 5 ingame days and i doubt ep3 will extend that beyond a week.

In contrast, i took atleast 2-3 months playing though acts 1 and 2 of the witcher simply because i had to keep meditating 23 hours daily just so the shopkeepers would refresh their goods. That and all my trips through the swamp took 36 hours+ because fighting drowners, drowned dead, leeches* and echinopsae takes retarded ammounts of time.

The story advances for about a week during this entire period.

*they are called bloedzuigers ingame which is dutch for leech yet i'm playing the english version.

Which of the KOTT songs is the low health one? None of the ones i can find on http://gamemusichall.net/music/Knights_of_the_Temple/kott.php seem to be particulary linked to being wounded.

[Sergius]

1)First of all, I think that immersion is one of the most important elements of a good RPG. Otherwise you feel like you're playing a game and it's easy to start acting that way rather than truly role-playing.
2)To that end, I think that a first-person perspective is rather important. Elder Scrolls, Ultima Underworld anyone?

Mirrors. You can't have 1st person Immersion (TM) without Mirrors. That's the worst failing of most of those RPGs. Morrowind and Oblivion should have Mirrors (and some reason to wear anything other than the same armour everyone else wears). Ultima UW, well, for obvious reasons, couldn't have Mirrors. Even DooM 3 has Mirrors, and it's a better game for it (even if it sucks anyway).

3)Also important is a text-based speech system: while voices certainly add to the immersion factor, the inevitable bad acting and repetitiveness incurred by it isn't worth it.

Hello.I'm.The.Voice.Of.Your.Commodore.64.
Oh, you mean just text dialogue, I thought you meant text-to-speech.
I think Baldur's Gate voice was nice, every (non-party) NPC had a one-liner, which may or may not have been the first line of his dialogue depending on whether his dialogue was generic commoner banter. Everything else was written.

4)On that note, music should only be used if it is both appropriate to the time period and the situation you find yourself in. No rap in the 14th century while you mourn your dead grandmother for me, thanks.

A lot of people associate heavy metal and strong rock-type music with medieval movies. I don't know why. Even old classic movies like Excalibur had that kind of soundtrack (also everyone wore armor made of Mirrors. guess that made their armor Immersive (TM)).

But honestly, if I hear Greenleaves once in your game I'm tossing it down the toilet. Same goes for all that crappy renn-faire Bard-wannabe style music that everyone seems to love.

5)Graphics don't have to be very good at all, but they must stay the same quality level throughout.

Consistency is a no-brainer. Ever played that Urban-something mod for Jagged Alliance 2? It added new NPCs. Some used the same old portraits with a MS Paint moustache tacked on with horrible fan voice acting, others where "CGI" portraits made with some 80's version of AutoCAD, with synth voice that made GlaDOS sound like a master orator.

6)Physics and such are always immersive, but not if they're glitchy or laggy.

Physics in a rpg are nice eye candy, but little more. Sometimes it's cool to be able to stack objects and stuff tho.

7)Weather, and especially the sound that accompanies it, are always a plus.
8)Ambient noise is also good, so long as it has a visible source that makes sense. I don't like dripping noises in caves when there isn't water anywhere, and I hate bird noises when I've never seen a bird.

Agreed. I'm playing Baldur's Gate I and the ambience sound is just right.

9)Things that tie the game to real life, IE the progression of time, hunger, sleepiness, etc. are all quite keen, so long as they are realistically handled. No instant death from sleeplessness or hunger, no two-minute days, and for cheesecake's sakes don't make a grape and a loaf of bread have the same nutritional value.

This is possible as long as it doesn't become a source of un-fun. Ultima VII for example, had you unable to heal naturally while camping if you were malnourished (AFAIK), and that was the only drawback. Going without sleep for long could result in a few minor penalties, like the BG series of games.

10)All levels and such should be handled 'behind the scenes' so to speak. I don't like quantifying how skilled my adventurer is with a sword. Instead, a meditative interface could be used. When settling down to camp or rest you could meditate on your skills and such, entering a dreamlike trance wherein you examine your character from the inside out, perhaps in an environment determined by your character's nature. Your most basic information (name, date of birth, etc.) could be gleaned from a government issued ID ala Morrowind's tutorial scene. Also, perhaps leveling up and one's experiences could be examined from within a dream sequence while your character sleeps.

This is in my opinion a matter of taste, period. Some people happen to like crunch. The whole trance thing seems rather setting-specific too.

11)For once, an inventory should not be invisible and intangible. If you have a bag of holding, fine, but it should be displayed on your character's belt or something. If you just have a sash around your waist and some pockets in your vest, the inventory menu should take the form of a physics enabled set of pockets and pouches. Either that or you have a pack mule that follows you endlessly. Way to go Alone in the Dark!

This is IMO one of these times where realism gets in the way of fun. Whenever I compared RPGs with unlimited inventory space (character-agnostic too! I don't really care *who* is carrying the dead cat, only that it's there for whatever quest needs it... that's moot for a First Person, maybe, unless you have followers).

And pocket/pouch-browsing, yuck!

12)Spells are almost always imbalanced in some way or another in RPGs. I think one decent solution is to make spells require either timed gestures, spell components, reading from spellbooks, runes, or any other combination of these and other ideas, so that they aren't just super-powerful insta-nukes.

There are many times as many Spell rebalancing solutions as there are Spell systems, this is again rather setting-specific and up to whatever flavor the author is trying to convey with his magic. Magic can be totally nerfed or uber-powerful, and anything in between, it depends on to the Game World. Very easy to do, also.

For example, not having Mana recharge every second is one of the reasons we could argue that Morrowind magic was more balanced than Oblivion magic (being able to cast quickly while wielding weapons was IMO an improvement tho)

13)No instant travel between areas. You walk there, you ride there, you spend a month on board a ship. Whatever. But you do it IN REAL TIME, or the time system the game uses, be it 1/24 scale or whatever. If you can't make the ship ride interesting there aren't enough pirates and storms.

Rule #1 of role playing games: skip over the boring stuff and get to the action (action meaning, something to do, not combat. And ok maybe it's rule #721, I dunno). Terry Pratchett once conceived a game about a rocket traveling to Alpha Centauri in real time too.

There are many, and in my opinion, better ways to balance traveling everywhere at any time than making sure that every time a simple merchant ship sets sail it's guaranteed to be involved in a complete adventure full of pirates, mermaids, flying shark bosses and a plot to overthrow the One True King. One month in a ship at 1/30 scale means one FULL DAY watching the computer monitor do NOTHING (even if after the first 10 hours a pirate ship boards us). Maybe we can do real chores during those 24 hours of total boredom? How about talking to the Captain for the third time in an hour to ask how's the weather. Should we have real time pass too when we have our character go to sleep? We could put real snoring sounds and do it in 1/whatever scale, so instead of tapping your fingers on the table for 8 hours you only need to do it for 20 minutes!

Giving the "instant travel" actual resource management, use of time, provisions, and specially "random encounters" (to use D&D jargon) is enough.

To be immersive, a game doesn't need to constantly emulate first person point of view in real time any more than it should prevent you from leaving the computer to go watch a movie or go to bed.

14)Your skills, visible or invisible, should have affects on EVERYTHING you do. Strength shouldn't determine damage alone, but also how well you can intimidate people, carry things, throw, hammer, lift, climb, and so on.

Always a good idea to balance stats. Some games do it right, some do it wrong. Both have been covered in many games I think.

15)If you can't get something to look at least mostly believable, don't do it at all. I'm looking at you, Oblivion's NPC conversation system.

No conversation will ever be believable. Either you have a tree-dialogue system (decent), a keyword based conversation (awful, specially in Morrowind), or just random banter without meaning a-la The Sims. Anything except full AI dynamic conversation is going to fall short.

I agree that Oblivion's conversation MINIGAME was awful. The rest was pretty much standard keyword and a bit of tree dialogue. At least you didn't have 500 keywords on screen for every NPC like in Morrowind. In Daggerfall you at least had general categories that every NPC was supposed to know about. ("What's the closest Wizards Guild/Tavern/Armorer/Temple/Dungeon")

16)Let the player mix and match bits of armor, weapons, toasters, and allow him to strap them to his character in whatever manner seems even remotely possible, using a system kinda like the Spore creature creator, but with a requirement that you have enough binding agent.

I agree with this. Also one thing I think is important is what I call the "Barbie Factor". Sometimes you just want to wear something cool, but if Armor X has defense 100 and Armor Y has defense 200, we're all gonna want to wear Armor Y at all times... at least give us different flavors of Armor Y).

17)In combat, don't use arbitrary numbers to determine whether or not I die. Use precisely location-based hit detection and effects that are also dependent on the type of weapon used. When someone punches me in the solid steel chest plate and I die, I feel veeeeery silly.

That goes more in the Physics Sim department than the RPG department. Random rolls are an abstraction of "where you were hit and how strongly". You may want the game to *show* a realistic swing for a given result, but there aren't many ways to make enemy skill *numbers* make a difference if all that matters is the path his weapon followed in 3D to determine if it was a good hit or not. And with the "realism" that people move and dodge in a game, every swing would  pretty much result in an arm hit.

18)This kinda goes without saying, but give the player as many choices as possible in every situation. I want the option to choose between a 32" sword and a 34" sword, dammit!<P>You peoples continue from here, I'ma getting tired. Feel free to disagree with any of my points, but please explain why.<P>EDIT: Ooops, misspelled please and the spellchecker didn't get it on account of pleas being the plural form of plea.
MORE EDIT: Formatitization.<p>[ June 13, 2008: Message edited by: Reasonableman ]

I have no comment whatsoever on that last part.

EDIT: Fixed much mangling of quotes, for great justice.

[Sergius]

About the real-time depiction of sleeping, I changed my mind about the snoring sound effects. I can provide those myself.

[Kagus]

Greensleeves, actually. 

I think Baldur's Gate voice was nice, every (non-party) NPC had a one-liner, which may or may not have been the first line of his dialogue depending on whether his dialogue was generic commoner banter. Everything else was written.

"Heya!"


Sorry, just had to say that.  Anyways, as for the KOTT music, I can't get that little player to work.  I don't know what the mp3 is called, I experienced it ingame.  Just download the demo, it's certainly worth playing (especially if you figure out how to hack the divine powers...  Hyuck hyuck hyuck).

Once you've got a feel for the game, let yourself get seriously injured and then kill off everyone nearby so you can listen to the music in peace.  The combination of the thudding heartbeat, ragged breathing, and the absolutely haunting vocals makes for quite an experience.

[Asehujiko]

You need to click the blue file names that end in .mp3 instead of the onscreen player that's been non-functional ever since the website was launched.

[Kagus]

Ah, there we go.  Lemme see here...


"I see the light".  That's the one.  It's not quite the same when you're not in some dire situation, but it's still nice to listen to.

[Asehujiko]

I don't consider that to be good music for when your oppenent just got a few good hits at you in the middle of a fight. This is more for non-combat cinematic injuries.

[Sergius]

Personally, I consider starting to play the theme "Kung Fu Fightin'" or "Smack My Bitch Up" pretty immersive once the first sword is slashed.

So I guess you can't cater to everyone.

[LeoLeonardoIII]

Wasn't there a game out that had situational music? Like the music would be playing, but every time you hit someone or got hit it would change slightly right at that moment as if the soundtrack had been built around your actions. Like a heavier beat or a louder whatever.

As for speech, Freelancer had an interesting system. There were like 4 voices, and they recorded phrases in blocks and reconstructed them in sentences based on the area you were in.

It ended up being like (greeting) (this is who I represent) (do we own this station? if not, what is our relationship with the people who own it?) (how do we feel about you) (do I have a job for you?)

It got repetitive mainly because they had just four voices and not enough variety in recorded phrases. Give it ten times the variety in phrase choices and 20 voices with realtime distortion effects, and you could represent a whole lot of people.

[Sappho]

7 Video Game Commandments

Included on that list is a condemnation of useless side-quests for padding the length of games, forced repetition, and  other such nonsense.  I for one abhor any game where the only way to get good at something is to do it five billion times, at which point I decide to just go the hell OUTSIDE and do something useful with my time.  (Is that what you want, gaming companies?  Do you want me to go OUTSIDE!?)  The same goes for long travel times and other needless realism.  If I want realism, I'll go play in reality.

I also agree with everything nerdpride said about 1st person perspective.  In reality, we have things like peripheral vision, hearing, and other senses that tell us what is next to and behind us.  In a game, all you get is tunnel vision, and you have to turn around a few times to tell what's going on around you.  That is only immersive if your character is wearing one of those cones from the vet.

If you ask me, the perfect RPG is about the perfect story.  I don't give a damn about graphics - in fact, I've found again and again that the more time the developers put into the graphics, the less they put into the story and gameplay.  I don't care how shiny it is if the story sucks!  I've found myself completely immersed in text-only, ASCII, and very low-graphics games because the story was so good.  (I played Sanitarium for the first time starting late one evening and I couldn't stop until I beat it - late at night, I actually started to feel *scared*.  The writing was that good.)  To that end, I wish game companies would hire *writers* to write their games, and then and only then hire designers and developers and whatnot to actually build the thing.  That's how the best games get made.