Introducing more variety in gameplay and challenge

Post » Fri May 13, 2011 1:59 pm

Well, one of my big disapointement with Oblivion, was the fact that the game only challenged me with combat. I never had to think about the best choice to do in dialogs, nor to prepare my explorations (beside preparing for tedious fights), I had no major political choices to do...

I think an opened RPG as TES should allow the player to handle a wide diversity of adventurers profiles. Such diversity should be reflected in gameplay, giving more opportunities and setting different kinds of challenges.
My questions are both about the difficulty level and the role of those alternative gameplay mechanics in the game. For each, the upper option clearly state that it should be at the core of the game challenge and should deserve much more attention than in Oblivion (except combat maybe, that was broken, but overpresent in oblivion). As you go down, you set it as a lesser priority element, even asking it not to bother you anymore in the game.

Lets talk!
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Niisha
 
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Post » Fri May 13, 2011 7:19 pm

More options in dialogue.
Let me be a dike.
Let me be a man of respect.
Let me be a [censored] (If censored: "it doesn't take a lot to get me into bed").
Let me be a snarky little bugger.

Allow me to craft my character through dialogue.
Maybe that's a Fallout thing considering Morrowind (From what I've seen) and Oblivion mostly had one word dialogue on the PC's part.
But then let me say this, it's an improvement.
Part of an RPG is to allow us to define our characters through interaction with other NPC's.
And dialogue is a big part of it, so please, no more one word dialogue line from the players part.
Write real sentences.
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Scared humanity
 
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Post » Fri May 13, 2011 12:30 pm

More options in dialogue.
Let me be a dike.
Let me be a man of respect.
Let me be a [censored] (If censored: "it doesn't take a lot to get me into bed").
Let me be a snarky little bugger.

Allow me to craft my character through dialogue.
Maybe that's a Fallout thing considering Morrowind (From what I've seen) and Oblivion mostly had one word dialogue on the PC's part.
But then let me say this, it's an improvement.
Part of an RPG is to allow us to define our characters through interaction with other NPC's.
And dialogue is a big part of it, so please, no more one word dialogue line from the players part.
Write real sentences.


I fully agree that the social gameplay is the core of role playing. It drives me nuts to read computer games reviewers talking about something as "RPGish" because it features an inventory and powergaming (stat building, powers activation...). Old CRPG couldn't handle the complexity of outdoor environments, and devs did not had the time and money to fill their games with the "social" content they deserved, but as technologically progressed, I was amazed to see that they finally get stuck to the only secondary RPG features and that most CRPG just propose you a kill, kill and pillage gameplay.

I want challenging dialogs where I'm always wondering if I'm not making a mistake talking like this to this NPC, wondering if what he tells me is true or not, trying not to say too much, to finaly get the info I want... but again, without being totaly sure of its validity.

I'd like to have to cross NPC opinions, statements and infos to finally take my decisions.

Definitively, TES deserve a serious ... role playing gameplay... at last!
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k a t e
 
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Post » Fri May 13, 2011 7:37 am

It seems all the few voters are for a harder and more challenging game on all sides. Personally, I'm not for a purely harder game, but for a game that gives alternative challenges, of different natures. Challenges the player may choose depending on his character. It is probalby why we would like a higher challenge everywhere, so whatever would be our path, we would find something interesting to do. I think people should not consider it as a hardcoe position, requiring all players to master much more gameplay mechanics to access the game. Currently, we all have to master combat and nothing else. Some people should still choose to put their gaming mastery in combat, and take a path based on it, but they will probably have to avoid venturing in areas they do not master. So will it happen for diplomatic type of characters, who should avoid getting lost in the woods, or creep alone into an haunted ruin.

I think the philosophy is that each player will have a really different gaming experience based on his character choice.
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Emmi Coolahan
 
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Post » Fri May 13, 2011 10:22 am

Can you explain what you mean by strategy management?
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Loane
 
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Post » Fri May 13, 2011 6:10 pm

Can you explain your categories a bit more clearly? What do you mean by "Survival-exploration gameplay?" or "Intrigue-investigation-sociability?" I'm not precisely sure what game mechanics I'm being asked to vote on.

::EDIT:: Ninja'd.
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Quick Draw III
 
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Post » Fri May 13, 2011 8:05 pm

Can you explain your categories a bit more clearly? What do you mean by "Survival-exploration gameplay?" or "Intrigue-investigation-sociability?" I'm not precisely sure what game mechanics I'm being asked to vote on.

::EDIT:: Ninja'd.


Survival-exploration : eating, drinking, sleeping, managing the characters health and preparing your adventures with this in head. I mixed it with navigation-exploration challenge, meaning some ways to get lost and the challenge of avoiding it. Travelling and searching a place should be hard, beside the risk of getting attacked by monsters.

Intrigue-Investigation-sociability : It is all about dialogs, and information management : can you easilly find infos? are NPC cooperatives? Are info always true or precise? Do you have to cross informations? This mean you have to think, link infos, and be cautious in your social interactions.

Strategy-management : inventory, economics, possessions, guild politics... What do you have to manage, care for? It cover some of your direct and indirect effects on the game world and society. It may also cover allies NPC relations. The idea is that you do not achieve high social ranks being a lonewolf and being a guild masters goes with responsabilities and choices at a larger scale than yours.

Those categories are broad, but the idea is to have the player possibly think of something else than his weaponry and spell list.
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LADONA
 
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Post » Fri May 13, 2011 1:30 pm

The main reason ( I think) of the combat being predominat comparing with dialog, in TES games, is that you can fight the same enemy thousand of times and it will be always different. With dialog, they can make many dialog rich quests, but once you have play a dialog, its done. I really would love to see a repeatable random dialog system, but it's something really dificult to see until sumeone comes with a really brillant idea.
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Jordan Fletcher
 
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Post » Fri May 13, 2011 8:49 pm

Everything, but Intrigue-investigation-sociability should be more developed and challenging.
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Sierra Ritsuka
 
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Post » Fri May 13, 2011 6:05 am

Everything, but Intrigue-investigation-sociability should be more developed and challenging.

I'm curious: why do you make an exception for Intrigue-investigation-sociability? It seems to me that that Intrigue-investigation-sociability is at the very heart of roleplaying.

::EDIT:: LOL. I just read your post again. I completely mis-read it. I read it as saying everything but Intrigue-investigation-sociability should be more developed. Now I see your comma after the word "everything." *smacks head*
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Jessica Nash
 
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Post » Fri May 13, 2011 8:23 am

MOAR OF EVERYTHING!
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Julia Schwalbe
 
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Post » Fri May 13, 2011 8:26 am

The main reason ( I think) of the combat being predominat comparing with dialog, in TES games, is that you can fight the same enemy thousand of times and it will be always different. With dialog, they can make many dialog rich quests, but once you have play a dialog, its done. I really would love to see a repeatable random dialog system, but it's something really dificult to see until sumeone comes with a really brillant idea.


I think most gobelin fights pretty looked like other gobelins fights in Oblivion. Combat was often repetitive. There was too much combat in fact. For dialogs, if NPC could access a kind of procedurally generated database, combined with random quests and various dialog tones, social status, reputation, you can create a wide diversity of dialog situations. But off course, this can easilly be done with text. With voiced dialogs, it is something a bit harder I think.
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Richus Dude
 
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Post » Fri May 13, 2011 11:59 am

MOAR OF EVERYTHING!


It seems that there is a trend for more complexe gameplay! Let the hardcoe gamers show their strenght!
After all, the world is not only filled with players who couldn't find Caius Cosades in MW!
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Emzy Baby!
 
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Post » Fri May 13, 2011 4:24 pm

Everything, but Intrigue-investigation-sociability should be more developed and challenging.


I really hope that devs and casual players will understand one day that it can also feel challenging to enter dialog, hoping not the do a mistake, not to be misunderstood and to grab the infos you want. People argue against those source of gameplay because they don't want to be blocked in their game because of an angry, non cooperative NPC... But I wonder why they accept to be blocked in their game because of a too dangerous combat?

I really think that the first question to ask is : what are the player skills this game will challenge. Then, you can build your game to do so. That is why I dislike the too easy argument of hoping modders to add those features later : if the game design is not made to challenge some player skills, challenging them by adding an artificial layer of mod will probably end with a weird game architecture.
Considering the amount of work to build a good dialog system with a lot of content, I think it is really something that should be done by the devs, during the game construction, not by patching it.

From my role playing experience, the core gameplay challenge of this kind of games is the social challenge : role interpretation and human relations. Until now, I've seen very few games challenging me there, even in CRPG such as TES. I'm still waiting for a first good transportation of RPG gameplay to computers.
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krystal sowten
 
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Post » Fri May 13, 2011 10:45 am

More variety in all aspects of gamplay. I actually don't mind Oblivion's systems, but the dialogue/investigating/socializing should be more challenging, varied and interesting. =)

However, I just accept that I can't get everything I want since there is only so much one can physically do in a game. (And it would require Bioware-level of dialogue---loads and loads of dialogue, enough to fill a book or two!)
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Jessie
 
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Post » Fri May 13, 2011 9:07 am

MOAR OF EVERYTHING!

This
It seems that there is a trend for more complexe gameplay! Let the hardcoe gamers show their strenght!
After all, the world is not only filled with players who couldn't find Caius Cosades in MW!

Indeed. Oh my, by the way... How many Oblivion players that grew up with fast travel (the "just turn it off" kind of folk) would be willing to make the trip to Balmora in the first place?
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Dezzeh
 
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Post » Fri May 13, 2011 5:13 pm

Not every player is into exploring dialog options, just as not every player is into combat. The various guilds, factions, and cliques should each have missions and methods that cater to different styles of play. A political faction probably isn't going to want you to stroll through the front door of the rival faction's meetingplace and start chopping heads.....not that they'd be sorry to see it, but it would make for some rather bad publicity. Your mission profile would more likely involve convincing, intimidating, or bribing a particular member of that group into doing what your faction wants. There should be missions that can only be solved with dialog, others which require stealth skills, and yet others which are inherently violent.

Not every character should be able to even begin every factions' quest lines at low level, even if they can probably do so eventually with enough character advancement. A few minimum requirements would make a tremendous amount of sense, so you don't have an illiterate barbarian as head of the Mages Guild, or a thief as the Champion of the Arena, unless they can do so by actually developing the required talents, thereby becoming a hybrid class that can do both.

I'd like to see more done with food, drink, and sleep. Making it a requirement for survival would annoy a lot of players who just want to run around and kill things, so it would need to be implemented as a long-duration "minor penalty" or "minor perk", not short-term "healing potions", as food was used in FO3.

BTW - for the poster who assumed that MW's dialog was similar to OB's:
Not at all! MW had about 3-10 times the dialog that OB did. At first, the topics were fairly limited, and you could only select topics on a few things: their basic background, advice, secrets, lore, occasionally about occupation or faction matters, and generally one or two other items of local concern. By the time you got well into the main quest, had finished a few minor quests, and had travelled to most of the major towns, the list of topics had probably grown considerably. A few NPCs, such as Savants and Scouts, might have 10-20 topics from the start, and that would grow rapidly as you "unlocked" further details by activating the root topic. Essentially, you could (and had to) scroll through pages of topic choices. Compare that to OB's 3-4 dialog options per NPC, on average.
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Lyndsey Bird
 
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Post » Fri May 13, 2011 3:46 pm

Not every player is into exploring dialog options, just as not every player is into combat. The various guilds, factions, and cliques should each have missions and methods that cater to different styles of play. A political faction probably isn't going to want you to stroll through the front door of the rival faction's meetingplace and start chopping heads.....not that they'd be sorry to see it, but it would make for some rather bad publicity. Your mission profile would more likely involve convincing, intimidating, or bribing a particular member of that group into doing what your faction wants. There should be missions that can only be solved with dialog, others which require stealth skills, and yet others which are inherently violent.

Not every character should be able to even begin every factions' quest lines at low level, even if they can probably do so eventually with enough character advancement. A few minimum requirements would make a tremendous amount of sense, so you don't have an illiterate barbarian as head of the Mages Guild, or a thief as the Champion of the Arena, unless they can do so by actually developing the required talents, thereby becoming a hybrid class that can do both.

I'd like to see more done with food, drink, and sleep. Making it a requirement for survival would annoy a lot of players who just want to run around and kill things, so it would need to be implemented as a long-duration "minor penalty" or "minor perk", not short-term "healing potions", as food was used in FO3.

BTW - for the poster who assumed that MW's dialog was similar to OB's:
Not at all! MW had about 3-10 times the dialog that OB did. At first, the topics were fairly limited, and you could only select topics on a few things: their basic background, advice, secrets, lore, occasionally about occupation or faction matters, and generally one or two other items of local concern. By the time you got well into the main quest, had finished a few minor quests, and had travelled to most of the major towns, the list of topics had probably grown considerably. A few NPCs, such as Savants and Scouts, might have 10-20 topics from the start, and that would grow rapidly as you "unlocked" further details by activating the root topic. Essentially, you could (and had to) scroll through pages of topic choices. Compare that to OB's 3-4 dialog options per NPC, on average.


I think that more diversified challenges must go, as you propose, with the ability to take really different ways to handle the game, the main quest, and the factions... The point is not to ask everybody to deal with all challenges who ever is his character, but to have his character face the challenges corresponding to his role. That is a lot of work indeed. Oblivion only gave one path/solution/role through the main quest, and most factions et secondary questlines were centered around combat. The idealist idea behind this thread is that oblivion should have had 4-5 time more dialog lines/topics and quests, so we could have played really different adventures (in oblivion, your only possible adventure was combat).

For dialogs, I would like something a bit more emotional with more consequences, than MW system. I really love a game like the witcher where you can completely turn an NPC against you or where you have to take a side during an enforced dialog. It pushes the player into a real RPG challenge : mixing what his character should do based on the role and what is the best to overcome the problem. Moreover, you never have all the answers and cards in hand when you have to decide. There are always some shadows left so you are never sure to have choosed the best... and off course, you rarely discover immediately if you did right or not, making the reload-retry exploit not that easy.
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