Just looking for general opinions here... Consider an open-ended RPG where there are random missions and random events to supplement the main storyline. Two questions: 1) Should every random event have a gameplay point-- that is, some reward or something you can do with the event that makes it personally meaningful? Here's an example: You're orbiting a planet and detect that there's a ship below. You land and find that the crew is missing without a trace. You determine that the ship has only been sitting here for a few days. For the heck of it, you search around the surrounding map and find nothing-- no bodies, no equipment, no tracks, nothing. If you're a law abiding player there's not much you can do about this. If you're a pirate, you could possibly steal the ship, but if it was just a worthless shuttle there may not be much of a point. The game leaves you with a mystery that you can only answer with your imagination. Should such an event always lead to something momentous-- such as clues that lead to the crew being trapped as a rescue scenario, or held hostage by natives or whatever? Should there always be a meaningful explanation to why something happens in the game? 2) Would you prefer events that have a point / reward to be flagged somehow by the game if there were random events like the one listed above? Modifying the above: As you orbit the planet you get a faint, fading distress call that seems to have come from a certain grid area of the planet. By gameplay convention you automatically know that whenever you get a message it means that there's a series of plot points/events and potential reward. You land, find the shuttle empty, successfully scan for clues and follow them to a cave, where you find that a crew of wounded scientists has been trapped in a collapsed tunnel. At this point you can rescue them, extort them, steal their ship, etc.

Hey

In terms of the game, as an RPG. I don't think it's nessecary to have a reward for everything. It could be a starting point. Taking your example with the ship, you may find nothing and you feel like, "Ok, why did I come down here". But then much later on in the story/world you find out what happened.

It's still a difficult one though becasue if you have to many events without rewards people will probably become dispondent and not want to go anywhere because there's no point. Sometimes you have to do something just to keep people in the game. Make them want to know what happened to the ship. There has to be balance probably favouring the reward side.

One of the problems with open ended RPG's in my opinion, is that if you find a man wounded in a field, you straight away think 'ooh, a mission'. You know straight away he has a story attached to him that you will follow through to the end, and that only you will figure out. I think that ruins the game in some ways, because you feel like the entire universe revolves around you, and you see everything in terms of ‘missions I can do’, rather than a dynamic world.

I think it would be refreshing to find the empty spaceship, find no clue as to what happened, and then at best hear some people in a bar talking about how the ship that was supposed to pick them up never arrived.

Also, by doing this, you can really catch the player off guard. By letting them believe that a star cruiser exploding might just be some accident that happened, when they see a man getting mugged in an alley they will have no idea if it's a story element or just something that happened. This I think would make them a lot more surprised when they find out that they are at the centre of a story involving the mugged man.

I always felt that the key to making a belivable game world is ambiant activitiy. Basically that other things are go on in the universe besides what the player does. Because of this it only natural to encounter things like derlict ships or crash sights. You could assign a cause to them or not but they shouldn't nessirally lead to a reward or mission. For instance if the player can find crashesd ships from time to time - perhaps some hidden functions could calculate what events have happened or will happen this week in each sector and distribute them around - then the player maybe be able to make a sideline as a salvager, or just cruise around looking for maidains in distress.

Also ambiant activity could be an excellent way to have subplots to play out. Perhaps the player notices a some strange marks on the crashed ships hall. Then occasional find similar marks are similar accidents in the area. Pretty soon there are rumors of a monster lurking in the area among the locals. Next there is a major headline about a Gate building ship having vanshied in the area the crews last message concerned an attack by an unknown entity. Then a few days later another story hits the headlines about militart vessels being called into the area to hunt for the beast after debri was found. Then lastly a few months later another major story hits the headlines explain that the whole incident concerning the monster was manufactured by a gatebuilding company as an insurance scam, it was all revealied when a low level clerk came across some unusal expenses.

Thats just an idea for a short story line that could be developed through seemingly random encounters. But there is no reason that you could didn't do something like the player themself can never get directly involved in the series of events and ultimatily they have no major impact or relevence to the games main plot, altough the player make think it does.

You know, I'm actually starting a project that sounds vaguely similar to what you are planning with your random events/missions.

I have come up with a decent way of handling the events/missions. Aside from the player's own assortment of quests, I give NPC's their own quests. They will actually do things in whatever their quest details them.

Since most NPCs are not in the player's view, they are only defined as being at a certain place at a certain time. It will take so much game time for each NPC to complete their task at a specific location. If the player decides to visit a certain area where the NPC is currently located, then that NPC will be placed on the map.

The player can converse with any NPC, and if that NPC allows, the player can help that NPC complete a certain part of his/her quest. NPCs will also keep a chronology of the things that have brought them to that point so that they can provide the player with a simple generated storyline.

Not all NPCs will complete their quests. In fact, many of them might die. This is usually decided statistically. The player might see a corpse of that NPC at the location they visit. There will be various ways a player can pick up the quest of the dead NPC. Either through a journal, map, or through another NPC with knowledge of the quest that NPC was on, a player will be able to decipher what needs to be done next. Though, there may be no way to decide at all.

Games are generated by creating some base NPCs and running them through personal quests for a certain amount of time, adding more NPCs when previous ones die off. When the player enters the game, a new history has already been built in the game for NPCs.

I'm not sure how bland all the quests and NPC storylines are going to be. Though, I am sure that piling more and more story options on would increase the variation. Unfortunately, I'm sure I would get some quests that are not too realistic.

My game is certainly a bit simpler since it is similar to a simple rogue-like game. Not sure if the idea would work so well with a 3d game.

Do you not think that game concepts such as the ones stated above are taking things a bit far. I mean, the whole purpose of playing a game is to have fun, to fight, to get where nothing has got before.

I do like with the concepts though, but I think that the most exciting parts in games are when you can attack the enemy. I think it would be a lot more fun if the enemies were a lot more advanced, meaning that they won't just attack in a common style.

I do think that having random events will push the game though. The idea that NPC's are active while you are not there is also good but I don't think that it should be taken to the extemes. I think that people are prepared to put up with so much before they, "When is it going to end!".

I suppose it's just a matter of balance.

There's nothing wrong with things that don't have any benefit to the player, as long as they can quickly determine that. If you have 'events' that look almost the same but do pay-off, then you are encouraging them to waste time for nothing.

An example of this are breakable boxes in FPS games. If you even once make a special item drop out of one, the player will spend the rest of the game smashing everything in sight, just in case. I think game makers have learnt their lesson on that one.

Another good post Wavinator, you're always interesting to read.

At the risk of stating the obvious, everything in a game must have a point, or... it has no point. It doesn't have to serve much purpose, but it must serve some purpose, or give some reward, or you're wasting the player's time. If you find a hulk of a ship, explore it, and find nothing interesting on it, why is it there? If a player explores why it might be there, reward him! Give him a reason to discover. If there's nothing to discover, it shouldn't be there.

This may seem unrealistic - stuff in life often happens for no good reason, and the events that occur and unfold can often seem cruelly random. This is a game - it's a chance to remove meaningless distractions, and concentrate on a meaningful one.

I think I like the idea of random NPC quests. This way, you could find out that your derelict spaceship was really used by some NPC party to do something dangerous, which they died while doing. In which case, even if you chose not to pick up their quest, you'd know that whatever it was that killed them was really dangerous.

Which leads to another point which I consider obvious. If you just have a random derelict ship, it'll be a bigger mystery than if you have a derelict ship in a known dangerous area (or in an area that you can find out is dangerous). If the ship is floating in the space owned by the evil Blob Aliens, you don't need to explain what happened to it, it's pretty obvious. If it's floating above a relatively peaceful Earth for no apparent reason, I personally would want to know wtf happened to the crew.

Wavinator, your ideas are great. Have you played any of the Escape Velocity Series? They sound similar to the game you are developing.

As for your current question, I think either you do it and have a largish number of unrelated happenings, or you don't have anything unrelated or not having a mission associated with it. If you go in between players will get confused.

It depends on how detailed you can make your world. Most games don't have enough development time to detail everything, so anything that is interesting or detailed usually has a story or mission behind it. By the sounds of it your game is partially a volunteer effort, and I think it would be a bad idea working on non-gameplay related events and situations because you want to get your game finished right?

As for wether a game should have unrelated events not including development time, I think it is tied to what type of game it is. If your game is a action / arcade slant on a rpg (eg Diablo) then excess events are bad. On the other hand if your game has a realistic / simulation slant then real world events are okay.