Motivations?

Can't you just make one up? I thought that was the point. You make a character and decide what he/she is going to be.

In Morrowind, I pretended my character was curious about the prophecy and went to great lengths to investigate it.

In Oblivion, I pretended that my character used to live in Kvatch, so when she saw it destroyed like that, she did not hesitate to follow Martin's orders.

Well, I do want to ruin it , so


No! You do NOT get more X options, and matter of fact, you'll get FEWER X options in every game as time goes by! Heck, you are not even going to get X options, you get W options!

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH!!!

Holy wall of text Batman!

Also, I agree. I think you put it really well, too. Much, much better than I ever could've. :thumbsup:

What the OP desires will never be available in a video game. Play D&D or go live your actual life. I play TES knowing that, even though it is an open world where my character can do tons of things, it will never be as in depth of an experience as real life.

Recent games by Bethesda paint an encouraging picture (to me at least). In The Pitt DLC for example when you first meet Werner he tells you about the situation, you can reply by saying "Whats the reward?" to which he'd reply "Well look at you moneybags!" or you could stress your sedire to save the people in the Pitt and he'd say "Wow aren't you a big hero?". Even though in both dialogue options you have expressed a desire to save the citizens of the Pitt you give different motives for your actions. Its these little details that help you stay in character and I think Bethesda is working towards this sort of thing on a wider scale.
Also I don't like making up motivations because often you are forced to say something that totally contradicts what your character would do and whats in your head, I would prefer it if Bethesda just did more to accomodate different motives.

TIP: if you want to make people interested in your post make sure its compact and not long. blocks of texts are not what people are looking for. make your idea in short sentences easy to understand. if you want to work in the videogame industry one day those kind of presentations of an idea will make people loose interest in no time.

Well done indeed I do agree btw. However I have to say for OB it took atleast a year months for the liberty effect slightly fade...(though for FO3 a mere 3 months...I think it's because I was already used to Beth's mechanics) so I hope Skyrim take at least that much time

ok people, enough abstract meaningless talk. Here is a simple, 100% doable way to achieve (at least a little) what the OP (if not all of us) wants:

Dialogue options up until now boiled down to Good-Bad. You had the opportunity to give a bad or good response to every quest NPC. That means that every NPC used a universal (global if you prefer programming terms) good-bad scale. How about having different scales for each NPC depending on his/her character ?
Each NPC will have predetermined spoken lines as usual, depending on his local scale, which along with the position of your character on a universal good-bad scale, determines how much your responses weight. It sounds confusing I know but here are some examples:

1)
NPC A is your standard noble knight so he has a local scale
|-100% bad ------------------ 100% good-|
So he gives choices like:
a ) Praise Akatosh. 100% good reply
b ) kill babies. 100% bad reply

The universal scale is again something similar:
[-1,1] where -1 is absolute scum of the earth and 1 is super pure goodness. Note that it is pure coincidence that local and pure scale are the same here. Let's say that you are positioned at 0.2 on the universal scale.
So if you choose kill babies, it is registered and acted upon as a 0.2 * -1 = -0.2 kind of response . Let that value be newChoice. Your new position on the universal scale is going to be a moving average:
newPos = (1-a) * prevPos + a * newChoice, where a is the rate at which your character changes (0
The whole point of this mechanism is to approximate how good/bad your character is. Moving on to another NPC:

2)
NPC B is an average Joe with a local scale
|-40% bad ------------------ 60% good-|
Again you do what you did before.

Not only does this system offer good approximation of your character's character but it also gives you much more versatile dialogue options in the end. All that with the same amount of dialogue.

So, you may not have an infinite amount of choices for each NPC but you can define your character through multiple NPCs interactions...And before anyone say that we still are restricted to shades of grey with the Good-Bad scale: It is very easy to expand this system to as many colors as you like, to have each NPC with completely different scales too, such as Sane-Insane or even have multiple scales for each NPC (multidimensional behavior space)...Possibilities are limitless. What do you say?

PS: Never underestimate the power of Math.

That seems pretty much the same at what it is already, with the only thing that even slightly changes is the good bad scale which are just numbers behind your dialogue options, and won't actually have any affect on the world nor will they help define your character.

the thing to focus on this system, is the fact that it allows different NPCs to have different kind of responses, so even if your choices don't matter that much, you still get a false sense of freedom. The number of how good/bad you are calculated by the formulas is a simple way for the game to "understand" how to treat you. I set myself the constraint of having the same amount of dialogue options and options in general so that I don't get trapped to the exponential explosion of choices argument.

But if you have the same dialogue options as you would have in a game without this system in place, what's the actual difference?? I'm not meaning to be annoying and nit-picking, but I don't see the benefit of your system.

To be honest I started with the idea of multiple kinds of dialogue for each NPC depending on his/her character and went from the there. The system I describe isn't really necessary, it's just something to go along with that simple idea. It basically quantifies the whole interactions so that if the game had multiple choices with consequences, it would be able to choose what fitted you.

But you'd still need the mutliple choices and consequences, and two dialogue options certainly aren't going to give you a much deeper sense of role playing

Hi Wyatt,

Thanks for the well-thought-out post.

I have a suggestion for you. Next time you're playing through an Elder Scrolls game, start a list and write down what it is that you want to do, where and with whom the interaction is taking place and what you're being pigeon-holed to doing.

I think your initial discussion of the topic is a great start and gets your point across, but now, any concrete examples that you can provide would be great supplements with which the developers could actually work beyond the idea, planning and discussion stages of any games in progress.

First off - Shut up, Yoda. lol, jk

Secondly - That has to be one of the first essays I've ever seen on this forum. Weak in detail, but well written. Only 2 grammar mistakes, too! You get a B+.

Thirdly - Holy *^%#%@#%&*, gpstr replied with something constructive and not like a [censored]!!! It's like a miracle.

Fourthly(?) - Here's something you need to take a look at, OP, it's pretty impressive, and it's a step in the direction you're thinking of. http://youtu.be/FC3IryWr4c8 It will be expensive, but mark my words, it will be applied to a videogame someday.

The OP's idea is possible. Eventually. That about sums it up.

well yeah, but I thought we concluded we couldn't have those, at least for now... so it's better to at least fake it.

I believe the dialog options have been mostly motivation-neutral. You can ask for information, and you can accept a job, and you can refuse a job. There is seldom any motivation implied in your response.

Fake what?? If you've only got 2 dialogue options for each NPC you can only cater to two sides, whether it be good or bad, slightly bad or mostly good, selfish or greedy etc. And you will only ever have those two responses. So no matter what you RP you will end up having to make a choice that isn't what your character would do. So it doesn't really add any depth.

So according to you it is the same thing to have all NPCs with the same standard Good/Bad options than to have NPCs with different kinds of options even if we are talking about 2 options per NPC here. I'm merely saying that multiple types and ranges of choices would eventually get some that you would actually agree with...On the other hand a single Good/Bad scale can never offer you the choice you want. I didn't tell you that you always would get what you want but given sufficient NPCs you would some times... So yes it does (add depth).

Sure state the obvious and tell me how we need more meaningful options and you end up in the same dead end that the whole thread got... You need natural language recognition kind of AI there which we don't have so what's the point of repeating that argument if something' s going to come out of this discussion...

... ah, DeepQA... don't encourage the OP I give it to IBM (I'm a Sun man myself so it is hard for me to acknowledge IBM did anything right ), Watson is very impressive, but I highly doubt you'll ever see anything close to it in a video game, and IF it ever makes it to gaming, I doubt it'll be in our life time, for a few reasons:

Look at the scale of Watson:
The hardware that runs Watson costs around $1,000,000. It is 2 racks (a rack is a standard data center computer cabinet which is about 7 feet tall, about 2 feet wide, and about 3 feet deep) of IBM Power 7 systems. These systems are multi-socket, and CPUs are not only multi-core, but multi-threaded, with each thread acting as a virtual CPU. So, 2 racks of Power 7 systems, multiplying sockets X CPUs X cores X threads, it comes to more than 2000 virtual CPUs to run this thing. Now I know hardware prices keep going down and hardware keeps getting smaller and smaller , but that kind of processing power is not going to make it any time soon to a desktop or laptop near you. We have just recently started seeing multi-core CPUs in consumer x86 hardware, even though multi-core has been around for a long time in SPARC and Power systems in 8-core offerings, and we are yet to see multi-thread in x86 at any level, which again, has been around for a long time in other architectures.

Look at the scope of Watson:
All the hardware power above that is just to recognize speech in the form of a question and give you an answer (and no [censored] tell me Jeopardy gives answers and expects questions, it is basically the same thing ) This may sound way too simplistic, but that is all it does. It is basically a super charged search engine on steroids that gives you 1 answer. Once an answer is given, nothing else is done with that answer, it just sits there waiting for the next question with no..."attachments" to the previous question/answer. Translate that to a video game, in which questions/answers follow a tree in which each proceeding question/answer relates to the previous one. Now you have some more coding to do
Add to that, there is only one Watson. Again, translate that to a video game: how many Watsons are you going to run? Or are you going to run the same Watson, but just give it different "personalities"? Watson is programmed to give you 1 "right" answer, but it is not programmed to give you one answer if Watson is good, another answer if Watson is evil, another answer if Watson is a mage, another answer if Watson is in danger, etc etc etc. Just like I said before, the more options you add, the tree and the coding grows exponentially.. imagine what kind of computing power would it take to run that

And finally, look at the consumer base:
Even after the 3 years it took 20-some engineers to build it, the obscene level of computing power, and the millions of dlls spent, Watson is not 100% correct in its answer. It still gives you wrong answers some times. If it ever makes it to a game like a TES game, given the game's fan base, I can hear the complaints now: "it broke my immersion"; " this is unacceptable, where is the patch, Bethesda?!?!?"; " it doesn't work with FOMM"....

double post

Erm...you didn't actually say anything. You just spoke in generalities, but you didn't actually identify any substantive problems.

What is this Good and Bad choices in Oblivion thing?

There were no good and bad/evil dialogue choices in Oblivion, hell you barely had any choices at all.

Even in Fallout 3 where the Karma was used as a Good/Evil meter, had some more choices, that mainly depended on your skills.

Well neither option really makes any sense. Just good/bad people or different people that have different responses all have the same outcome; none of them react in any way to your character, and they will both produce times when you want to pick none of the above. There may be times when a good/bad response makes sense, and it's just as likely that it will make sense for your character as two grey options. Sure making some people have grey answers is better than everyone being purely good or bad, but it still won't address the OPs problem. The only way that you can have even a slight semblance of what the OP is after is to make a very linear game with specific choices at specific points that will have specific consequences.

This certainly is a step in the right direction at the very least as far as the discussion itself is concerned. Dialogue and NPC "personalities" are specific topics to discuss, rather than just a general "not good enough" statement about RP. This type of idea is a lot more manageable than making the quests and behaviors of NPCs evolve with ALL of your choices, and is more about the dialogue available itself and about persuasion and disposition. Really, if taken further, this is a very good way to overhaul persuasion.

Limiting it to several categories and making it all about how you talk and just a few types of actions you do I can actually see happening. As your speechcraft skill increases, more or more potent and well written dialogue options are available. Also, the more you use a particular type of dialogue and the higher your related skills to that type of answer are, the same applies. Your fame and how many good quests/evil quests and crimes you've commited will shape the kind of dialogue that becomes available to you and shape reactions of NPCs also who have or haven't yet spoken with you.

The types of categories I'd initially propose would be:

Good/Evil

Stoic/Average/Gregarious

Pious/Neutral/Blasphemous

Prudent/Vulgar

Warrior/Mage/Stealth

Sane/Insane

If you commit crimes, your choices in Evil, Vulgar, Stealth, and Insane go up in potency and availability. Even though NPCs shouldn't be psychic and not know you are a criminal for no reason, it shapes your "character" to do deeds, so people get a "vibe" about you, you carry yourself a certain way. You have to do a lot of these types of negative dialogue choices and actions over time before the game starts to present NPC reactions to you for ones you've never spoken to that are negative. Committing one murder that an NPC somewhere else has no business knowing you've done realistically won't make that NPC have a lower disposition for you. But consistently committing crimes will over time shape these reactions.

You wouldn't only get negative reactions to increasing your Evil, Vulgar, Stealth, or Insane. Some NPCs would like these qualities... and some criminals might not like Vulgar or Insane too, so in order to be in with this crowd, you have to make a concerted effort not only to commit crimes, but practice speaking Prudent and Sane as well.

As you get better at magical types of skills, the potency and availability of your dialogue options for Mage go up. The more you talk about magic, the more this goes up.

The key to the system's success though, is to have this new system replace the persuasion system. NPCs don't all have unique dialogue and scripted events tied to your behaviors and dialogue options. The actual beneficial (or detrimental) effects of your actions in this system would be just like persuasion was used in prior installments. Instead of just using a wheel, or taunt, admire, threaten options, how different people percieve you would be based on the way you talk and behave. If you have a high enough speechcraft and a wide enough repertoire of things you are good at talking about or talking like, you can then intentionally pick out of character options here and there to fool NPCs who wouldn't usually like you into liking you. Actions speak louder than words though, so if you fool a good person by speech and then steal something from someone they know, they'll still hate you.

It wouldn't have the effect of requiring tens of thousands of pages on the part of the writers or an AI system. The persuasion system and storing and calculating the values for those different categories would be a large undertaking for the programmers. The effect on the world though, would not be that NPCs have to have UNIQUE dialogue and behavior responses to the type of character you are, but that based on the type of character that they are flagged to be, they will react with positive or negative results as a function of the type of character you are.