Computer Role Playing Games: How would you design one?

[CygnusZ]

Sorry about the double post... uh... *runs away*

[November Adam]

It will be nice when they have the DM option like in Vampire the Masquerade fleshed out a bit more. As the best DM is a person, for handeling things on the fly. Yet computer games have more continuity to their story.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Cygnus, interesting you linked to those forums .

Morrowind (as well as Neverwinter Nights) are the next big hopes for advancing the CRPG (I hope Morrowind can run on my system ).

Though I totally disagree with that post . I consider Fallout 1/2, Arcanum to be story based. MUCH closer to Planescape than Diablo by a long shot. I consider Fallout to be the immediate ancestor to Planescape.

Grumbold, I agree with you on Fallout 1/2. Especially like the ending where your actions lead to different outcomes based on what you did .

[Grumbold]

True AI is a long way away but if you can take the Fallout 2 approach of including 10 ways to overcome a certain type of room/NPC/situation and multiply that by hundreds of different set-peices then you can get an illusion of better AI than is really happening.

FF7 I enjoyed playing to completion, including some of the sideshows like breeding your golden chocobo. FF8 I found utterly tedious despite the better graphics simply because every battle came down to summon guardian, watch 90 second cutscene, rinse repeat. No way to shortcut them, no variety, no skill. Maybe the console version was different but the PC version was horrible. Its primarily what turned me off ever trying one of these linear games ever again.

Xylix makes some interesting points but he loses me completely when he lumps Diablo I and II in with Fallout 2, Arcanum and Baldurs Gate. In Diablo the sole purpose is to kill, nothing else matters. In Baldurs Gate you have plot checkpoints you must pass through but many side quests you need not complete or can complete in different ways. In Fallout 2 and Arcanum there are fixed start and end points but the ending will depend on how you handle the final encounters and there are many events along the way that you can ignore, avoid or complete in very different ways. Indeed it is possible (if in places extremely difficult) to play non-combat characters in them and get a quite different playing experience. I like the way I can play them in whatever way suits my mood at the time without having to buy separate games. Morrowind is striving to be the the next generation of that kind of game, where the world lives around you and you become a living part of it, rather than every screen being loaded for your benefit and remaining timelessly static in your absence or until you trigger plot point 'X'.

[Imran Siddiqui]

Grumbold, the funny thing is later on in the thread, he talks of Fallout as a story RPG... contradicting himself .

[loinburger]

The thing about Fallout II was that you could kill every single person/creature in the game (except for the infinite supply of baddies in the wastelands, of course), or you could win the game by only killing a single person/creature (the boss). That's true freedom.

[CygnusZ]

I dunno... go back and play Ultima VII. It clearly is a lot more flexible than Fallout or Arcanum. If you read some interviews with the Morrowind team, they even say that Morrowind aspires to the level of living/breathing world that Ultima VII already embodies (and from what I've read they will not be able to grab the crown from them). AH.. Ultima VII. IMHO, the RPG has yet to be beaten.

In any event, while Arcanum has a core "plot", it's really weak. There's not much depth, and some very sub-par gameplay. Most of the time you play is spent on diversion quests to either get this or go into dungeon X. If you play a thief you do things in one way, if you are a fighter you do it another etc. But it's not like within those classes there's a great diversity, as all the quests and ways of handling situations are almost identical. There's no way you can compare the story of Xenogears to that of Arcanum, and that's because Xenogears chooses to become a story RPG and Arcanum chooses to become Hack N' Slash. Naturally they both have elements of each other, but in the end I think it's rather clear that Arcanum emphasizes doing small tasks while Xenogears emphasises a story.

Arcanum doesn't really have a deep story. The most interesting character ends up being "Virgil", whom let's face it really doesn't have such an interesting past...

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by CygnusZ
1)Combat Systems: Computer RPG's typically feature "real time" combat whereas Console RPG's typically feature "turn based" combat. Turn based tends to be more faithful to its D&D roots. And, as anybody on Apolyton knows, turn based is actually more strategic than Real-time.

That seems to be a recent (read: in the past few years) development. I have never played any real time combat resolution other than in The Summoning. [I am not counting the really early ones such as Questron or Ultima I.]

Originally posted by CygnusZ
Turn based combat also has a tighter feel ,has a great many more interesting options and tends to actually look better.

There is a potential, yes. It all depends on the design.

Originally posted by CygnusZ
2)Roleplaying a Character: The problem with Computer RPG's in this department is that although freedom is given to a character, the game world often feels like a shell within which a character must exist.

There are practical limitations to computers, be the application a game or a sophisticated model of the ecosystem. It is the same as a paper-and-pencil RPG campaign in the sense that there really isn't umlimited freedom of what your characters can go.

Originally posted by CygnusZ
This creates a feeling of "generic" areas. The characters you portray in Computer RPGs cannot develop specific and advanced interpersonal relationships, because if it goes too far it'll destroy the capacity of the game to control it. For example, in Baldur's Gate II their was a possibilty for 4 Romances. However, all the Romances amounted to absolutly nothing except a little bit of dialogue. In Console RPGs, it is more true to the P&P experince in that the characters tend to have complex backgrounds and the relationships the character has really effects their lives.

Again, much of this has to do with practical limitations. The more open a computer-based game is, the less likely it will have the same amount of details as a scripted game. There are often trade-offs here. Sure, console games let you have more interesting interpersonal relationships but you are more severely limited in other ways, such as possible actions you can make,

Even in P&P campaigns the characters are most often there to complete a goal, so when they bum around too much the GM will start herding them in certain directions.

Originally posted by CygnusZ
Personally, I like both (but I _HATE HATE HATE HATE_ fallout). To me though, Computer RPGs represent the promise of a "virtual world" to explore. However, the world is hardly ever very interesting or alive. Neither is the story that accompanies the world. It is the exploration of this vast world which will spring the interest. Computer RPG's *NEED* to be big and have a tremendous number of diversions built in to be sucessful, which Console RPGs simply don't need.

Again, the limitations come in. There is a finite amount of resources available to any team, so when the world is big the details will necessarily be lower. For example, if the team can fully detail 20 NPCs, packing them all in one single building will make that building very interesting. The flip side of the coin is of course that whole game is limited to moving around in that one building.

[Urban Ranger]

Originally posted by CygnusZ
Even Wizardry 8's difficult battles eventually just become a matter of routine, whereas in Final Fantasy X many battles are unique and challanging.

My view is that combat should not dominate the game. While battles are an integral part of RPGs, most modern P&P RPG systems downplay combat. Afterall, fighting is just one way to resolve conflicts. As a matter of fact if you have ever played some "spy vs spy" type RPG such as Danger International or even Top Secret fighting is the last thing you want to do.

[Urban Ranger]

Re: Computer Role Playing Games: How would you design one?

Sorry for being too brief I will attempt to elaborate on some of the more confusing points.

• Classless system. That basically means whether you want an AD&D clone. In a class-based system only certain class of characters are allowed to have certain skills and to use certain items. Of course, there is a large transitional area between the two end points. Champions is a completely skill-based system while Warhammer (not the wargame, the RPG) is something in-between.
• Skill-based or level-based character development. Level-based is again something like AD&D. A character gets a wholesale upgrade when she makes a new level while remaining mostly static (in terms of skills and capabilities) in between gaining new levels. On the other hand, a skill-based system allows characters to improve individual skills. Again, there is no clearcut division and many systems use a combination of both.

[CygnusZ]

I think we basically agree Urban. This real time combat thing has got to stop, but it's really that recent (Ultima VII...). I am going to underdogs to find those games you talked about too, they sound fun (although right now I'm trying to get through Quest for Glory 4 1/2).

The main thing is that there is a tradeoff that occurs between the concept of "freedom" and "story". With greater freedom, there is less story and less story can mean greater freedom.Of course a game could be made poorly and just really screw up :P

[loinburger]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
Even in P&P campaigns the characters are most often there to complete a goal, so when they bum around too much the GM will start herding them in certain directions.

My (extremely limited) experience with P&P campaigns is that they allow very little freedom in character development, at least if the DM is incompetent. Our DM was constantly penalizing my Neutral-Evil Fighter-Mage and my friend's Lawful-Good Paladin for not killing one another, when in fact our characters were just two sides of the same coin.

[loinburger]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
My view is that combat should not dominate the game.

I completely agree. I loved how Fallout II allowed you to complete the game with a minimum of combat if that's what floated your boat. Even in the boss fight you could make your battle much easier by having a high Charisma and Speech skill (convince Horrigan's bodyguard to fight on your side) as well as a high Computer skill (turn the auto-turrets on Horrigan). Heck, with Marcus on your side, you could have absolutely no combat skills and still come out ahead on most combats.

[Dis]

yeah loin took my point.

someone mentioned fallout2 earlier.

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you don't even have to kill the president to win. There are some guides out there with alternatives. I think I tried the peaceful way. I just didn't have the skills. I also blasted every baddie in that offshore platform thingie. That was hard as hell! . I wasted tons of ammo. Then later I found out there was a way to aboid all that.

Fallout2 had some bugs that unfortunately diminish what a great game it was. It had a few other minor problems. But overall it was better than fallout1.

And yes real time has got to stop. Baldur's gate was reasonable because it enabled me to autopause as much as I wanted. And I did that a lot . I autopaused everytime I was hit, whenever I lost a target, etc.

[Grumbold]

I can't comment on Xenogears because its not something I have played. I will say that Arcanum as a world has a pretty good history to it. There are hundreds of newspapers,books, notes and such like that have all been carefully written to set the scene. While some of the NPC's you encounter may be tissue-paper thin, the world itself is solidly consistent. Had they not been a startup company on a shoestring budget I'm sure theat more depth would have been built in.

Final Fantasy seems to be the opposite. The core characters are so solidly defined that your interactions have to run on rails to fit the prescripted FMV scenes. Incidental NPC's like shopkeepers though are still as two dimensional and quite often the world itself seems hollow because little exists outside the present day scenario of good guys v bad guys. Perhaps Xenogears is different?

I'm not sure what makes Ultima VII so good. It had NPC's that moved around but so do many other games. It had realtime combat which was annoying as hell occasionally (I seem to remember my followers having view ranges of double or triple the screen size so my first warning of trouble was all my guys haring off chaotically in a different direction to engage invisible monsters, no tactics or planning possible). I freely admit that it was a living and breathing world, but so it should be when you consider it was the 9th title in eighteen years based on a slowly evolving world (and all the NPC's were still alive no matter how often you killed them in the past). I thought Ultima IV was the revolutionary one for actually introducing conflicting traits (principles?) like honor, meekness and spirituality which were far more about roleplaying a personality than the usual strength, wisdom etc of other games where highest was always best.

loin...bad DM's are to be avoided at all costs and no true test of the roleplaying genre. Unfortunately they are all to common because the ability to combine storytelling with the inventiveness to react on the fly to unexpected challenges by the players is very rare. Keep looking!