Cheese?

Landfish · 2000-10-15T12:47:38

You may have heard me use this before: "Amnesiac monster-hunter on a quest to save the world through recovering the four magical doo-dads..." There''s more to this heinous cliché, but we''re just going to address this one for today. What''s with the 4 or 12 or however many doo-dads? They are an inherent weakness in game writing/design, since you are essentially asking the player to do the same thing multiple times. This reflects a problem taht writiers in other media have struggled with for centuries, but "interactivity" has severely magnified it: How do you make the player go where you want? I won''t bore you with a summary of current technique, because current technique sucks. "Railroad your player", they say. Or worse yet, "Give them a choice but have the story be the same regardless of that choice." Can anyone provide me with a plan to put all of these writer-designers in a shack and burn it down? So here''s the problem at it''s core: Cause and Effect. It''s easy to write, isn''t it? If there''s only one thing that furthers the plot, the plot won''t further until that thing happens. So the player goes off on an easter-egg hunt, trying to find the one signpost/NPC hybrid that will tell her what to do next so she can further the story and find a place to kill more powerful monsters, hence speeding the religious experience of leveling. And of course, the designers make this signpost-NPC impossible to find, so they can brag of more gameplay time. Dorks. This is not how things should be. The reverse end of these games are the ones that let you affect everything. As fun as these might be, they inevitably have large plot-holes, or no real plot to speak of. It just doesn''t suit what I want to do: tell a story whilst using interactivity (I hate that word) to enhance, not hinder. So, I come to you guys for some input. Any ideas about how we can break the cause/effect chain?

Writing for Games Game Design

Started by Landfish October 08, 2000 10:27 AM

80 comments, last by Landfish 24 years, 2 months ago

dwarfsoft

1,237

October 15, 2000 06:44 AM

quote: Original post by Landfish

Graphical MMORPGs were the one demon I could not fight. When and if Goblin is ever made, perhaps I would consider it, but until then, no one but you will support my ideas. Oh well.

Has anybody heard anything about Goblin recently? Did it die or what?

Remember, goblin is not the only thing that has this sort of demotion of Hack''n''Slash. You can also think about what ''The Learning Experience'' has to offer a player. This is why I agree that prejudice can be used against the player. Just remove cheese from fighting altogether. Make it a requirement that the character needs a balance of skills to get them through the game. If they have an unbalanced nature then they are going to find it more difficult in different points. There is a simple weighting system that you can use (I know this part belongs in Game Design, but here it is anyway). If the character is a warrior (they are more prone to fighting) then the weighting of what they learn when fighting is relatively low. If they are a cleric, then the weighting is relatively hight. If a player outbalances their character in an attribute, then start reducing another attribute. This way they will start wasting away in another aspect. This keeps them in their role and away from doing what they shouldn''t be doing (mindless slaughter).

Ideas?

-Chris Bennett of Dwarfsoft - Site:"The Philosophers' Stone of Programming Alchemy" - IOL
The future of RPGs - Thanks to all the goblins over in our little Game Design Corner niche