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[platypus]

Is it just me, or are the vast majority of today's commercial games flashy, linear, non-interactive shlock?

Yesterday, I downloaded Dragon Age: Origins, a game touted as the one of the games of the decade, a purportedly fantastic role-playing experience that has been receiving the grandest praises (it has one of the highest scores on Gamespot, for any game, ever).

Within one hour, I am COMPLETELY disillusioned.

Behind the polished presentation, there is absolutely nothing interesting. There is almost no interaction with the world you're trying desperately to immerse yourself in, and the few things you can interact with - a chest here, a door there - sparkle jauntily as soon as they're in sight, screaming "Click me!"

The combat is similarly unconvincing. The game throws mobs at you, seemingly arrayed in splendid armor, bashing away at you with oversized weapons, only to leave you bemused when you kill one, clicking its (now sparkling) body only to discover A PIECE OF ELFROOT is the only item you can remove from the stiff, battle-clad corpse.

The game is intensely linear and holds your hand throughout. By dint of little flashing icons, it tells you where to go and whom to interact with to unlock the next segment of the story. There is no free exploration, and even if there were, the world is so lifeless I'm not sure I'd want to slog through more of it.

It feels like it's one of those ghastly novelty books from the 80s, where you read a few pages, get to a critical juncture upon which you're faced with a series of "choices", where, depending on your predilection, you're told to thumb to page 32, or 54, or 98, to discover what will befall your protagonist. It's a movie with pause screens and a branching story - a horribly written one at that.

Is this what games have come to? Is today's average game consumer really this dumb? The experience was so stultifyingly tedious, it was all I could do to keep myself from screaming. And the storytelling - ostensibly a high point - makes me wonder whether anyone who likes this game has ever read a single page of serious literature.

So! In short: Thank you, Tarn, for creating an intelligent, deeply satisfying sandbox game that is everything modern games are not. Your work goes a long way toward restoring my faith in the future of gaming.

- Mr. Platypus

[G-Flex]

You really hit the nail on the head, though.

The little, stupid details are nice, too. Like the quirky animal behaviors. Bears will drink your booze on you, raccoons and monkeys steal stuff, cats kill pests and try to bring their remains to their owners in between periods of lounging around in random spots, etc.

I was mentioning to a friend of mine how Dwarf Fortress is on its way towards modeling personality and such better than The Sims games do. It's funny how much stuff like that I notice about DF.


Oh, and don't forget: 14 different kinds of shark and 9 (near?) identical gibbons!

[Shades]

things you can interact with - a chest here, a door there - sparkle jauntily as soon as they're in sight, screaming "Click me!"

Most of what you said I agree with however with regards to the above statement I think they did the right thing (abet to cover up for bad design).

In a game where there are lots of potentially searchable things most of which are just models that have no interaction at all then it makes sense to highlight the items you can do something with otherwise you'd clicking forever on the large number of non-interactive ones.

Now I'll agree with the fact it's stupid design that lead to this problem in the first place, an off shoot from rpg's ever present 'bash the crate' problem, but because of the situation they ended up with then highlighting makes sense.

[Nintenlord]

Is today's average game consumer really this dumb?

Nope, there is a reason why modern games flood the second-hand market mere days after the release and 'hardcore' market has been shrinking for a while. Modern game-developers think people are dumb and that they are business geniuses, but all the screwing of gamers is coming back to haunt them.

[Draco18s]

Is it just me, or are the vast majority of today's commercial games flashy, linear, non-interactive shlock?

Yes.  It's a shame.

Speaking of which, I got Left 4 Dead 2 which is (supposed to) have large randomized elements of the level layout, e.g. two different paths, only one of which is available in a given game (the other has walls).

I have yet to actually notice any such feature.

Considering that I trivially implemented it in the first game in a matter of days (ok, so the bots have a bit of a pathing issue), I don't see what the problem is.

[platypus]

Well, here's the thing: It plays and feels like an MMO, which is a gross misdesign, since the primary draw of an MMO is the player-player interaction, of which there naturally is none in DA:O, being a single-player game.

It is a game of dress-me-up dummies shackled in a prison of gaudily tinted cardboard sets, where the greatest degree of personal freedom is found, paradoxically, in the physical attribute section at character creation.

If I see something, I want to be able to interact with it, otherwise it's a flag of disbelief. A lofty ideal, for sure, but this is one of the dangers of replacing personal imagination with the statically rendered snapshot reality of most games. If I don't feel like I'm in an organic, dynamic world - it doesn't have to be realistic, it doesn't have to be complete, but it DOES have to be internally consistent - I'd rather read a book.

And, again, whoever wrote the dialogue options needs to be strung, drawn and quartered.

[Shades]

There is a problem doing non-linear story^* based games, in that you have to have built content for whichever path the hero chooses. I don't mean random level layouts here, because not only is that easy but it doesn't make a game any less linear, but truly non-linear stories where you actually have an effect on the world and when you go back and do it differently it's different.

The problem with building this extra content is that you only have so much time to make a game (in most cases) and so the more content you do the less good that content is and the more is wasted as people often won't ever see it. The 'ideal' story driven game would be one that felt like the player was driving the whole thing but in reality they always happen to pick the only option any work was done on. This is of course silly and improbable.

Another option is to generate content. Now with games like Sim City or Dungeon Keeper this would be easy as the game world can be build quite simply, there isn't much story, but there doesn't need to be. Modern RPGs have complicated stories often with audio dialogue, which would be very hard to generate. To be honest it's hard to generate anything more complex than fetch/kill/find style quests.

Dwarf Fortress is impressive for many reasons, not least of these is the depth of detail in the background. However I'm not convinced this is enough, as it is, to match the level of detail in a constructed story line. Still Tarn has surprised and impressed me so far so we'll just have to wait and see what the new versions hold.

^* They claim to have stories at least, but I use the term here in it's looses possible sense. I guess asking for interesting or involving stories is too much.

If I see something, I want to be able to interact with it.

Yes, this is the design flaw they covered, I agree with the ideal but I also think they solved the fact they failed to achieve this in a sensible way.

[platypus]

How is it that a company with a million-dollar budget, staffed with professional artists, game-designers and programmers, can't turn out a product that can hold a candle to Dwarf Fortress - an obscure and largely uncompensated effort by one man, his brother and a cat?

I think you're right in that this has everything to do with market research and revenue generation. For some perverse reason, the target demographic is willing to pay hundreds, sometimes thousands, of dollars per capita per year for these hopelessly shallow click-fests.

[zwei]

You had silly expectations that game simply can not meet:

 * Fully intractable world is, well, hard to do. Nor it is advisable. It breaks immersion even.

RPG players have these kleptomaniac tendencies to take everything get get their hands on and to sell them for profit.

They are also incredibly nosy and want to talk to everyone about everything.

Just imagine how this would work in real world: Madman enters village, tries to have hour long conversations about everyones childhood and to simultaneously strip their homes of everything.

He would end up beaten badly, or ignored/met with locked 'noone is at home' door.

Not mention that it would be serious hell for OCD player, and most rpg players are OCD types. That is not immersive, that is just ... overdone for no reason.

BTW: you can turn 'sparkles of interactivity' off.

World is not supposed to be your sandbox. There is no reason it should be. Seriously, ability to take platters off table or to have long conversations with beggars has no point.

* Loot ... look, mobs have to look impressive, so of course they will have neat weapons/armor. No, you can not get it. There is this thing: Balance. Loot has to match challenge, not what mobs would really carry.

Besides, typical rpg-player instinct would be to strip everything naked and to regurarly return to npc merchant to sell it as their inventory fills. That is hardly positive thing, it breaks immersion, hard.

Goblin clothing is hated/loved for this one reason, and people commonly mod it out.

* Story & co. I do not know what is supposed to be dumb about it, but it is matter or taste. You play *bioware* RPG, they are defined by not being sandbox and by having strong story which you have to follow or uninstall. If you expected 'world simulator' here, you simply got wrong game.

Anyhow, what is wrong at story? I guess you did not go that far to interact with main characters meaningfully, but even before that, most of origins are quite compelling. Especially both dwarf ones are exceptional by both creativity and execution.

If you expect more, well, Tolstoy grade stuff would make increadibly sucky backstory for game. Unplayable and dumb&dull. You need conflict that easily becomes physical to allow for good exploration/battle mix, you need space for character personality and wiggling space for choices. You want to compress everything to ~ 5-6 dialogue lines. That is hard to do and yes, it makes some stuff sound dumb.

Good story is incompatible with sandbox game you also want it to be btw. Oblivion is huge more sandboxey world, and you can see how it ends up ... dull. Do not kid yourself with DF. If you play Adventurer mode, you will get fraction of DA style interaction (empty houses and silent people) and none of story unless you make it for yourself.

---

I will obviously flame you here, but: 10$ you found game too hard and now make excuses for not enjoying it :-).

[zwei]

(Besides, it is HIGHLY entertaining to track who betrayed whom, almost worth of drinking game. I liked how I would betray certain blood mage and he would betray me again and again, always with false pretense for friendship and remorse.)

[platypus]

There is a problem doing non-linear story^* based games, in that you have to have built content for whichever path the hero chooses.

Yes, this is true. And the degree to which a game adheres to a story is inversely proportional to the degree of freedom available to the player. I'm not against story-driven games, I just very rarely come across a story worth playing through for the story itself, it's always what's between the pivotal, scripted moments that's interesting - the side quests, the free exploration, the character building - which usually has very little to do with the main story arc.

I think there's a lot to be said for emergent behavior. Given sufficient complexity, you can generate loose, dynamic stories within which to frame the gameplay. I'd often take suggestion and innuendo over a bombastic this-is-how-it-happened narrative, leaving the details to my imagination. The mind will always try to connect the dots.

[platypus]

I appreciate your comments. You obviously enjoy the game, which is fine. I don't think we'll see eye to eye on this, so let me just address a couple of your points.

You had silly expectations that game simply can not meet.

My expectations were generally low, despite the gushing hype found on (most, there are exceptions) major review sites. Which is why I downloaded the game, to try it out.

RPG players have these kleptomaniac tendencies to take everything get get their hands on and to sell them for profit.

You probably should not presume to know how an arbitrary RPG-player will play his game. Moreover, it seems to me you're describing a power-gamer.

[platypus]

Besides, it is HIGHLY entertaining to track who betrayed whom.

We likely have different standards of entertainment. Again, if I wanted to passively unravel a mystery, I'd read a book.

EDIT: I don't mean to sound haughty. I mostly respect your point of view.

[KaelGotDwarves]

I can't stomach the insipid tripe that passes for plot in most video games. Call me elitist if you want, but I when I start playing "epic games" everyone tells me is awesome (Final Fantasy I'm looking at you); I play through it feeling as through it's Harry Potter-ized, Twilight love-stories, Bioware "feel -like-you're-making-a-difference-on-the-world-but-your-choices-do-less-than-a-choose-your-own-adventure-book" with anime "chosen young boy" crap i've been watching since I was born.

And that's okay, they are games, and games are for fun when they don't take themselves too seriously.

People take it too seriously They should read good books.

EDIT: Way to derail an appreciation thread you derps. 

I'm just going to post this here.

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Spiral42]

Thanks, Mr. Platypus. I was considering buying Dragon Age, but suspected it would just be Mass Effect with swords, or Jade Empire in Eurocentric fantasyland. Both of which I hated, after being spoiled by a diet of Morrowind (and, to some extent, Oblivion - but let's not start that again). I prefer the sandbox feel of Bethesda games, and I don't think there's anything particularly wrong with their stories... if anything I find them more captivating than anything of Bioware's.

Zwei, everything you've suggested would *break* an RPG are the same reasons that a huge community of people are still playing Morrowind over and over again, and adding mods to build replay value... why? Because they know that modern AAA RPG releases just aren't going to satisfy. They've been streamlined and boxed-in and the RPG fan knows it.

I of course need to also thank Toady for doing such great work. DF is one of the few other games I can keep going back to...