How come there are no good detective games?

[MattH]

As far as I can tell, they're one-shot, one-crime, one-solution games. I. E. NO replayability. What I'm looking for is a game styled after those but created from the algorithms that I've listed above.

[okblacke]

Originally posted by vovan
Well, no necessarily... Take the board game Matt was citing for example... I think it's called Clue?

"Clue" has been the basis for a number of retail and shareware games, though generally using a more complex scheme than the 6x6x9 format of the board game. (The board game has six potential playres, six potential weapons, and nine locations.)

There have been a number of text and graphic adventure mysteries. "Blade Runner" is, essentially, a mystery. Mysteries are incorporated into many RPG games. (Many mysteries, usually.)

One perennially popular board game "221B Baker Street" has a good format that could be adapted.

The problem with random crime generation is that you need a lot of dialogue and atmosphere. Tough to do in a text environment. Tougher (maybe impossible) if you want decent voice acting.

"221B" did it by having packs of adventures you could buy. That could work well in a computer format.

[MattH]

I thought about the voice part. While speech synth is getting very flexable (Mac OSX), it's not up to the standards that a game like this demands. That's why I'm thinking about the dialouge in a Morrowind or NeverWinter Nights style.

[Jamski]

It could be done in NWN. In fact I could do it. The trouble is - to make it replayable you need soooo much redundant material (i.e. dialogues, items, loctations that are never seen by the player) that I'm completely daunted by the whole idea. It would be an enormous project.

-Jam

[DrSpike]

Exactly, which is why the one-shot but rich adventure game system predominates. The Sherlock Holmes games are great if you like murder mysteries. You'll only play them once though.

[MattH]

Jam: can you create locations using scripts?

[Sava]

I remember the older detective sims... there were a few good ones for NES... Maniac Mansion... umm... crap there's more. Those games were fun, but later games of that genre just sucked. The old Monkey Island games were great... the new ones were too cartoony for my tastes. I liked the games where you moved around with the mouse and searched for items and your commands were "use, push, pull" , etc.

I don't think a detective game like you are describing would be easy to make. It's hard enough to script an entire game, but writing some sort of random case type game would just be too hard. Maybe you can make your own

[vovan]

So, I've been thinking about the idea a little more, and it seems to me that there are two directions you could take this in:

1. Adventure game. This is what MattH is talking about. Here, the solution of one crime is the whole game. You start at the beginning, the enormous storyline is generated, and you go through it. After you are done, it's game over, and it's time to fire up that generator again. I think this would be really hard to implement, just because of the sheer amount of stuff than needs to be generated randomly. If you want a game to last at least 40 minutes, that's already a lot of story and dialog to create. To achieve any kind of realism and coherence in the story, you would already have to work hard - to make the stories vary enough to not become boring after a couple trials will make this even harder.

2. An RPG kind of thing. This is what I was more leaning towards. Here you have some kind of big plot that is recurring from game to game. Say, we were making a Sherlock Holmes RPG, then the grand goal would be to catch Moriarty. No matter how many games you start, that's your ultimate goal. However, along the way to that goal, you need to perform a number of "side quests", sort of like in Fallout 2 - you don't go and kill ol' Frank right away - you first roam about the wastelands and solve numerous other quests. Similarly here: you don't go after your ultimate goal right away - you must first solve a number of smaller cases - starting with maybe thefts, going on to burglaries, rapes, murders, and finally serial murders. Now, these cases would be randomly generated each game. I'm thinking this RPG system would be much easier to implement, simply because the game would not revolve around the one single case, but rather, each game would be comprised around solving a maybe 20-30 smaller cases. Then, the even the amount of information generated for every given case is going to be much much smaller. That way, it would be much easier to achieve diversity in the cases. Also, it would be easier to make them more coherent, simply because there are fewer pieces of data that need to be stringed together.

[Space05us]

Theres an old DOS detective game. Your Dad is jailed for the murder of your mom iirc, and you have a limited number of days to prove him innocent. The setting is somewhere in England I think, I remember the bar was called a pub. If you played your cards right you could get a date with a nurse from the hospital, and if you werent careful you could end up getting killed before the limit was up.

I'll go look fer it.

[Standup]

Bladerunner from what i remember had several of the detective elements. I always much prefered those parts to the 'arcade' elements. It also had some limited replayability.

[duke o' york]

Originally posted by vovan

2. An RPG kind of thing. This is what I was more leaning towards. Here you have some kind of big plot that is recurring from game to game. Say, we were making a Sherlock Holmes RPG, then the grand goal would be to catch Moriarty. No matter how many games you start, that's your ultimate goal. However, along the way to that goal, you need to perform a number of "side quests", sort of like in Fallout 2 - you don't go and kill ol' Frank right away - you first roam about the wastelands and solve numerous other quests. Similarly here: you don't go after your ultimate goal right away - you must first solve a number of smaller cases - starting with maybe thefts, going on to burglaries, rapes, murders, and finally serial murders. Now, these cases would be randomly generated each game. I'm thinking this RPG system would be much easier to implement, simply because the game would not revolve around the one single case, but rather, each game would be comprised around solving a maybe 20-30 smaller cases. Then, the even the amount of information generated for every given case is going to be much much smaller. That way, it would be much easier to achieve diversity in the cases. Also, it would be easier to make them more coherent, simply because there are fewer pieces of data that need to be stringed together.

I think that you could go with an RPG style. Basically you need a certain number of experience points to get promotion to Sergeant, etc, and you have to collect them by solving crimes. For each level there are about ten crimes, increasing in difficulty as the levels go up, and you would need to solve maybe four of these per level to be promoted. Basing your game entirely on side-quests would prolong its playing life, and you could have many many different ways through to the final crime, which would probably be the same each time round. If you were going to use something like Jamski's NWN suggestion, then you could have different crimes taking place at different times of day, and the extras would move about following a daily routine. Various shops would open and close according to time of day, and different people would be in different locations. With each level you are promoted, a new area of the city is opened up (like in GTA), but you still have to go back to your old favourite grass, etc for the more advanced investigations.

[Barinthus]

Where in the World's Carmen Santigo was a great game back then.

While it's not your traditional detective story, a lot of skills related are used in the King's Quest series.

[vovan]

So, in NWN, you could essentially randomly generate events and quests at every replay of the game?

I guess what bothers me most about this is that you cannot really at present implement a truly flexible storytelling engine, without which such a game would suffer (and the adventure variety would be entirely impossible). What one would have to do it seems is essentially provide a bunch of pieces of story to the game to string together randomly into a whole. But to achieve a good replay value, like Jamski said, you'd have to have a LOT of these little pieces.

[bipolarbear]

There was actually a really great game for the NES called Nightshade, where you were a dectective, and you had to solve all of these mysteries. It was quite advanced as far as interactivity is concerned for a game of its time. It was really, fun, and it was really long too. The big downside though, was that there was no way to save your progress at all. I think that's why it never took off.

[bipolarbear]

I've tried te demos for the law and order games, and to be honest, they really suck. I think that if there were dectective games that were sort of like that one part of KOTOR where you have to play detective on Dantooine, only waaaaaay more heavy on the detective end of things, then that would sell really well. It would have to include a little bit of gunplay too, just to keep things from getting too dull.