J.E. Sawyer is still going strong with the community Q&A he started awhile back on his Formspring account. Here are a couple of the more interesting questions:
Do you think that it’s possible for a return to old-skool, 3D isometric RPG games like the classic BIS games with the advent of mobile gaming like on the iPhone or the DS/PSP?
I’d like to think so, though I’d guess the only handheld platform that has significant overlap with fans of those games is the mobile phone.
That is, I’m sure you could make a lot of those sort of games on handheld platforms, but I’m not sure that the audience is there.
I don’t know if you can answer this, but still, why Obsidian, a relatively little developer, with a not-so-relatively troubled history, continues to focus on two teams with two games at a time instead of doing the (natural imho) choice of simply focusing
Publishers pay us to staff with a given number of employees. That number is typically a lot less than the full developer roster at Obsidian. Additionally, tying yourself to a single project means that you are effectively at the mercy of that single project. Milestone payments, publisher relationships, etc. all rise and fall with the fate of that game. Publishers also know this, and can leverage that vulnerability to the detriment of the developer.
By working on multiple games with different publishers, milestone payments are staggered, there is more flexibility in moving employees around, and the individual publishers have less leverage over the company’s daily operations/fate.
And more.
Do you feel that it’s forgivable for a RPG to be worse at a gameplay element than another game more dedicated to it because it’s a RPG and does other things? The question partially applies to other genres as well such as FPS’s with poor vehicle combat.
It can be marginally worse, certainly. It just shouldn’t feel bad. It can also be “worse” in breadth but just as good in depth, which I think is also perfectly reasonable.
Let’s say a game wanted to have most of the stealth elements of Thief. It has the AI, the light, the sound (including audio occlusion), but it doesn’t have extinguishable lights, water arrows, rope arrows, moss arrows, or any of that jazz. If the AI, light, sound, etc. are well executed, the goodies that are missing really aren’t that big of a deal — in my opinion, anyway.
I thought a bit more on our discussion. I think I argued more on what *is* considered an RPG while you argued what you think *should* be an RPG. Then, I’m interested in why you consider an interactive narrative in an RPG. Thanks =)
I think what tabletop RPGs (D&D, specifically) introduced that was revolutionary was the ability to make your own character. This does included “statty” stuff, but was building upon/expanding rules from Chainmail, a war game.
Tabletop RPGs allow you to make a character, define his/her personality, and express it during game play in whatever way you see fit. DMs adapt and change the story based on the outcome of the player’s actions.
Through the 80s and early 90s, all CRPGs could do/did do was simulate the war game and character advancement aspects of their tabletop counterparts. Ultima games started to experiment with player choice and morality around Ultima IV. I may be forgetting some important precursor, but I believe the original Fallout was the first RPG that allowed the player a “judgment-free” way to play the game as anything ranging from a saint to a horrible monster — with appropriate reactions to that behavior. I believe this was the point where RPGs started to emulate the underlying character / personality mechanics of RPGs in addition to the stat / advancement / combat mechanics.
Moving out of the 90s and into the 00s, western RPGs focused increasingly on player personality, interactions with companions / NPCs, and ways in which the player can alter the outcome of the story based on those interactions and choices. Concurrently, other “non-RPG” games (e.g. Castlevania) started leaning more heavily on traditionally “RPG” character stat / advancement mechanics. By 2010, character stats / advancement are far from exclusive to the RPG genre, but companies like BioWare, Black Isle, Obsidian, Troika, and Bethesda, have put an enormous amount of focus on making games where character choices have a directly supported / scripted effect on the story (in contrast to something that is more abstracted / systemic like The Sims or GTA).
Don’t get me wrong; I like character statistics and advancement. I think they should be part of all sorts of games, and I appreciate it whenever I can get it. But when it comes to the sort of games I help make that are going to be called “RPG”, it’s important to me that we always do our best to actively support the player’s ability to the sort of character they want to make — with a heavy focus on personality reactivity.
How do you feel about NPCs straight out lying to the player?
I think it’s totally fine, though it is nice to allow the player to see through it if they a) run through the story in a way that allows them to see through the falsehood immediately or b) have a special perk/statistic that allows them to catch the person in the lie.
Hi. How do you perceive difficulty in RPGs? Is it just a matter of fights, hard levelling up? Or is it mainly a matter of complexity of relations between NPCs, hard moral decisions, logic puzzles and other non-violent aspects?
I think difficulty and agony are two separate things (or should be) in games. Combat and “contested” game play should be oriented around challenge, of which difficulty is an important element. The focus is on figuring a way through a problem. This can be a puzzle, logical or otherwise, through which there are a finite amount of designed paths, or it can be something like combat, with a theoretically infinite number of strategic and tactical approaches.
When it comes to making moral decisions, ethical decisions, or character decisions with NPCs, I believe the focus should be on agony in the classical sense. The struggle is to make the choice, not to succeed or fail. If you’re guessing blindly, success and failure aren’t particularly interesting. In many cases, it’s boring or infuriating.
The reason why stories like Antigone and the Oresteia are interesting (to some) is because their characters are trapped between two equally good (and bad) choices. Orestes makes the choice to avenge his father’s death by murdering his mother, but in doing so is pursued by the Furies for his filial betrayal.
A lot of games have dialogue trees where to return to talk about another topic, you say “I want to talk/ask you about something else”. Why do that? No one talks like that. When people want to talk about something else, they just bring the topic up.
Short version: it’s an organizational convention.
It is much easier, structurally, to do this than it is to a) load up every node with all possible questions or b) guess at what the player might want to talk about in any given node.
Dialogue trees are fundamentally oriented around two types of data: nodes (or topics) and replies. Beneath any given node, the designer will typically place replies that are relevant to what’s being discussed. These are sub-topics or branches of that topic. At the root level are the major topics. To help the player navigate (by preventing an enormous list of potential topics), designers will typically allow the player to go two or three node layers deep with two to four options per node layer.
If the player wants to talk about something else (especially if it is completely off-topic from what’s currently being discussed), the player will include an option like, “Let’s talk about something else.” This will move to a main question/master question node with the root topics. The player can then delve down into those basic topics and branch off.
