Chimpy Chompy on 25/4/2012 at 22:19

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Papy I'm struggling to see what sort of game you're arguing for. What sort of RPGs do you play? I'm wondering if you're just looking for something totally different from them.

You make a big deal of the player making their own decisions. But without goals and interaction with NPCs that furthers some story, you're just left with building up your character, and random roaming. Which as I said can be enjoyable, it's just not a whole game in its own right. I can decide my next sequence of actions but it's never going to be anything more than "find another random ruin to plunder for loot" or "kill cliff racers for the sin of existing". Nothing that tells a story or develops characters or anything.

If I'm killing wolves I'd sometimes rather it be to aid some character I've gotten to know, who is aiding me towards a wider goal. And maybe I need wolf pelts to make a disguise to infiltrate an enemy base to help rescue his brother. Or something, that's a random hypothetical. But to me that's a sort of small dose of fulfillment (objective reached, narrative slightly furtherer) from my evening's gaming time that will not come from open roaming and fighting.

Of course sometimes the writing is lazy - "kill wolves.. just because" - and it just becomes errand running or fedex questing. But then i'd say the answer is to write the quests better. Think up a good reason to have us doing these missions, write characters we give a damn about, throw in some unexpected events along the way maybe. And so on. Not ditch the idea altogether.

Papy on 26/4/2012 at 02:51

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How do you come to the conclusion that I don't like character interactions and goals? My most important criticism about CRPG is precisely the lack of character interaction and too much random roaming. That's why I didn't like at all Morrowind and Oblivion. With those two games, characters were mostly walking signpost with exact instructions about what to do next written on them. Characters were almost completely empty and my actions were limited to obey this or that, without any kind of thinking involved. That's certainly not what I call character interaction. As for goals, they were mostly without reasons and, in the end, me going here or there was not really different than random roaming.

I'll give you two examples of what I call good character interaction. The first one was with Gothic 3. While traveling, I met a paladin. He just explain who he was and what he was doing. He talked to me about another paladin who was once his friend, but who become a bad guy. He told me he was now on a mission to kill him. A few moments later, I met this other paladin and, guess what, since the situation was quite clear, I decide to kill him. I wasn't asked to do it, I chose to do it. After that I went back to the first paladin, he thanked me and gave me a reward to express his gratitude.

Another example is with Deus Ex. I first talked to Gilbert Renton who told me he was worried about his daughter. Then a few moments later, I met Sandra who was threatened by a pimp. And you know what I chose to do? I chose to defend Sandra and ended up killing the pimp. Gilbert didn't offer me a "quest" to kill Sandra's pimp, I just chose my own actions based on character interaction.

Sulphur on 26/4/2012 at 06:49

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That's pretty much what I was thinking.

Truth be told, I'd prefer regressing back to the ol' tabbed journal system of 'this interesting thing happened here', instead of automatic quest markers and the like. It really does feel like busywork when you've got a set of yellow circles glowing urgently on a map, drawing attention to the fact that you have to hit each of 'em to progress. Kinda kills the exploratory buzz in games where exploring is its own sort of joy.

Chimpy Chompy on 26/4/2012 at 09:27

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It does sound like the problem is more in the writing.

I suppose they could sometimes be implemented more in a "making a note in my journal, saw something interesting, investigate further" sort of way, as you seem to have some sort of "don't tell me what to do, man!" objection.

re: gothic 3, I've not played it but I did finish 2. That had a fair bit of formal questing - as in someone asks you to do something, it appears in your little journal, you get a reward when it's done.

Or yeah you can goof around and kill people who piss your off or whatever, but that's never really going to result in the same kind of opportunities for story-driven activity. Probably just some slightly different character reactions. I don't see how removing the quests would be an improvement.

I think these RPGs get it right when they offer something of both.

Yakoob on 26/4/2012 at 16:00

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Ugh, let's not, please; I always hated having to scroll through PAGES UPON PAGES of unorganized, overly verbose journal entries to find a name/location of one guy. And I don't want to sit at the PC with a notepad and pencil in hand; this isn't my goddamn homework I should be taking notes on.

Honestly the best I think is a quest list with toggable arrows. Usually if I am in-the-quest I wont bother checking it since I am figuring out what to do as I go, but if it's an old quest I want to get back to, I can quickly look it up / toggle it and get back on track. This is essential as many RPGs tend to have those "do x once you get into the city on the OTHER END OF THE WORLD" quests that you cant really complete until you're like 30hrs in and by then, kudos to you if you remember wtf the quest was actually about.



I think i get what you mean now, Papy, and I do agree it does lead to more engaging gameplay. It's like Skyrim walking-sign-post syndrome where people will offer you precise quests within 2 seconds of meeting you and have literally no other role in the world.