Alternately, I’m waiting for someone to make a game where you don’t select a bunch of fruity dialogue. Instead, you select “goody two-shoes” or “up to no good” and the game supplies the appropriate dialogue. I mean, how is the “good” path not just another bunch of scripted responses anyway? The closest thing I remember to an action-based reputation system was the Blade Runner game, where your interactions were retconned to turn out properly. The game didn’t know if you were playing as a replicant sympathizer or as an infiltrator until the very end, and then the epilogue tied up all of the loose ends so that they made sense.
Actually, this is an idea a couple buddies and I came up with while goofing around one day. It was for a really crappy game that wasn’t a game at all. The idea was basically to give the player all these choices, and then totally ignore whatever the player did and just force-feed them stuff. One of the bits was going to be this actively antagonistic dialogue tree that tried to annoy the player, so picking the “good” choices would mean that the next set of choices would only contain “evil” responses, etc. The player would also get a randomly assigned number of points (possibly negative) for every “choice,” and then the score could be submitted to an online high-score list. You’d be surprised how much crap people will put up with if they think they can get recognition for it.
I concur, I’m tired of “RPGs” coming out which are nothing more than games which replaces the FPS mouse skills with loot and stats. I want story. I want a party, and I should care about them and talk to them. I want dialogue, not tedious backstory dialogue like IWD, but proper dialogue. I want real-time pausable combat. I want locations which don’t use tedious tiled 3D systems. I want a camera which is designed to ACTUALLY HANDLE ALL THIS, rather than trying to make the game look swish.
For me, the Baldur’s Gate series and Planescape Torment are what decent RPGs are all about. Hell, the Baldur’s Gate series (especially with all the available mods out there) is truly epic in scale, and my only wish is that they hadn’t handed out so much experience for so little in the second game, so that a third would have been properly possible.
I’m awaiting the day such gems come out again. I’m trying KOTOR at the moment, but trying to manage more than one person in 3D is pretty tedious. It’s exactly the same as when RTSs went 3D and they had no clue whatsoever about what people wanted from it (i.e. we didn’t want to play with the damn camera).
Yeah, Quitch, I feel the exact same way. I just wish they’d take that style of game and up the ante by developing more intelligent dialogue trees that connected with what your characters were actually doing and that had significant consequences on the direction of the story. Bioware has already said they won’t do more complicated dialogue systems because they’re “too hard”. Pity.
Damn, alright, I’m installing BG and BG2 again so I can play like its 1998.
Me, too. I’m anxious to play with the new EasyTutu mod and its mods (a sweet fixpack, tweakpack, and my favorite, a fucking spawn point throttle. EFF YOU FIREWINE BRIDGE KOBOLDS).
Can someone please tell me some other games that used this mechanic. It seems a simple concept that allows a player to role-play while still allowing the game to keep track of a player’s actions (I think, don’t know how it actually works). I’d be keen to play within a similar system so start listing the titles thanks team.
Yeah, that was my beef with Bioware too: “evil” in Bioware games generally means “robbing and/or killing innocents for the hell of it.” When I wanna play evil, I wanna be Darth Vader, not the bully who kicks sand in people’s faces and takes their lunch money, then laughs about it because he can. I wanna be a grand super villian, not a petty mugger or murderer.
Actually, I think sometimes in Bioware games, being evil gets you more loot, but being good gets you more XP - immediate gratification vs long-term improvement, basically. Since I generally prefer XP over money in RPGs, it’s one reason I choose to be a goody two-shoes.
I think David Gaider was speaking in terms of how to implement it, as well as how to present it to the gamer. Scripting games is enough of a bitch to design and bugfix as it is. The kind of “say one thing while doing another” gameplay-with-long-term-consequences described here would probably drive the average designer batty trying to figure out how to implement it well.
Actually, BG was pretty much the game that saved RPG’s from oblivion (no pun intended). At the time, virtually no RPG’s were being released and everyone was saying that they were dead. Then along comes BG and viola! (violin! piano!) the day is saved. That’s pretty much the reason for BG’s huge popularity–not that it’s not a great game or anything. But the cultural significance or whatever had to do with the moment and the environment it arrived in.
Just installed the Sword Coast expansion pack on top of BG1 and went ahead and watched the demo movie. Holy crap the demo for Planescape was awesome, featuring the heavy footfalls of whatever that white giant thing was and the accelerating drums. And to think none of that footage ever got put into the game as far as I know. The Descent 3 demo movie is a little cheesy, though. “You will make them … suffer.”
I always thought the PST movie was pretty crap as it didn’t really tell you anything about the game, which is why I passed on it until it was a budget game, even though I was loving BG… I simply had no idea it was an RPG or WTF it was.
Diablo came out in Nov. 96; Fallout came out Sept. 97; BG1 came out Nov. `98. While it was a major part of the PC RPG revival of the late 90s, it was by no means the first or only RPG to contribute to the genre’s rebirth. And there were other lesser RPGs released in the years prior which proved RPGs weren’t quite dead. I think the significance of BG1 was more it was the first high-profile, high-quality party-based D&D RPG in quite some time. IIRC, the D&D license had languished under the care of SSI for some time before Bioware did BG1.
[QUOTE=unbongwah]Yeah, that was my beef with Bioware too: “evil” in Bioware games generally means “robbing and/or killing innocents for the hell of it.” When I wanna play evil, I wanna be Darth Vader, not the bully who kicks sand in people’s faces and takes their lunch money, then laughs about it because he can. I wanna be a grand super villian, not a petty mugger or murderer.
That’s one of the things that annoyed me about Jade Empire, it seemed that every evil action except for the big one near the end, was you being a jerk for no reason. It would have been great to be able to play as the evil karate expert who if someone just looked at him funny would just destroy them easily.
Exactly. I remember this period well, and I remember reading all the mags at the time. They all credited BG with saving what they feared was a dying genre.
I started working on a NWN module and this is how we decided to do dialogue. I hate that dialogue trees provide my exact words, so we thought it would be better to give the general feel and direction of your response. In some ways it made tracking good and evil responses easier without shoving it down your throat. Also felt like the distinctions could be more nuanced.
But my laziness prevailed and I haven’t worked on it in a while. Maybe with NWN2 or something.
All that aside, while I always enjoy Bioware RPGs, the writing and stories are often weak. I even found the Icewind Dale series more nuanced and interesting than anything Bioware has made.
I seem to recall a few of the Closed Fist responses were like, “I won’t help you because you need to learn to help yourself” or “I’ll do this, not to be an evil prick, but because hardship and adversity build strength.” I.e., you were trying to help people the Closed Fist way, by forcing them to stand up for themselves. But I believe those were the exceptions to the norm.
To me, the druid in Icewind Dale (lives in the tree) is an example of how NOT to write dialogue. It was heavy, it was tedious, it was secondary to everything. It did nothing to draw you in, and it didn’t really matter whether it did or not. I found a similar dialogue in PST, where the setting was explained in detail in one dialogue, equally poor. Exposition should be done through the natural course of dialogue, as should any history and so forth. Having the exposition/history dialogue is just clunky.
Anyway, if we’re going to knock Bioware, let’s hit them for the mostly crappy BG2 music :)
I seem to remember that the latest incarnation of ‘The Bard’s Tale’ had a conversation system like this. I have not played it, but that was how it was explained in previews and so on.
The difference being that Smiling mask (theatrical masks) option meant ‘Bluntly honest’ and mischevious grin meant ‘Total Bastard’.
So neither seemed nice. Did they change this for the final release?
I don’t think so, as one reviewer complained that the Bard really was quite nasty, to the point of taunting a young boy’s corpse.
Edited: Hah! Yes, Sam and Max had icons and scripted dialogue. It fitted there, however.
I have just finished it, I should have remembered that…
It worked in Sam 'n Max because you were never penalized for picking one of the options preferentially. I hated it in some games because you were punished, and occasionally for something that you didn’t expect. Wing Commander 3 did this and it was fairly annoying. Still, that’s more a problem of the consequences not matching the decision; there was nothing wrong with the dialogue itself, er, other than the usual Wing Commander cheesiness.
