Have we forgotten the classics?

Fallout. The beginning and end of every play-through is the same, but nothing else is set.

Fallout 2 and Fallout Tactics were even more sophisticated, I understand, but I've never played them.

The problems with non-linearity (Well, closer to 'real' non-linearity at least) are keeping the a high quality level, and avoiding the 'digging a pit' problem.

Think of a game like Half-Life 2. When you're not jumping out of a dam in a makeshift speedboat, you're having... err... 'coversations' with the few remaining rebels and scientists, driving a hobbled-together buggy through dangerous sand dunes and then hiding from a hovering gunship. High quality all the way, each area tweaked for months on end.

When you start approaching it from a non-linear angle, you cant spend the same amount of time making every element operate like clockwork, you've got to make concessions. The more possible paths is inversely proportional to the amount of time you can spend on any one path. Generally unique situational animations are the first to go, followed by a good set of unique events and probably followed by voice-overs. What you're left with is a character that moves the same as a lot of the others and reading plain text to move the story along.

A lot of people dont have an issue with this, normally in an RPG vein because the RPG genre seems to mostly rotate around plot, exploration and battle systems as opposed to the 'wow a minute' that a lot of FPS games try to achieve, but they're seperate goals. If you want a game with a deep, involving, intricately-woven story, but dont care as much about production values, go with an RPG. If you're after something that will constantly keep you on your toes and will introduce cool things one after the other, go with an FPS.

The other problem is the whole 'Digging a hole' syndrome. When you give the player the freedom of choice, chances are (If you're a fatalist like me) that the first thing they're going to try is the one thing you didn't think of. Gameplayers are notorious for trying to break games the second they get their hands on them, so you better make sure your story is air-tight. If you could kill any NPC, for example, what would happen if you killed all of the pivotal NPCs to make the story move forwards? Of course, it IS possible to avoid situations like this, but the more choices you give the player, the more playtesting you have to do to make sure the player cant get into a situation where, basically, you need to get the key to open a door, but the key is on the other side.

I'm sure it would be possible to create a game with hundreds of branches off the main story tree, but anyone who tries is either a fool or a goddamned genious.

I don't see much wrong with "breaking the game". If the key is on the other side of the door it opens, then tough rocks, pal, you don't get to go in there. In Fallout, you COULD kill all the vital NPCs. It made for a less interesting story, but you got some good fights out of it. You had to do this long, difficult quest to get into the Brotherhood of Steel's fortress, but if you had a high enough lockpicking skill, you could just sneak in.

This is a good example of what you describe, though, PlayfulPuppy. If you sneak into the BoS's headquarters, they all talk to you as though you finished the quest and earned entry. There was another time that I had a mission to help a person and one to kill her going on simultaneously, and so she got her group together, followed me to the place where I was going to help her win a fight, and then accused me of being an assassin. Then her graphic glitched out and her team stopped moving. That was embarrassing.

So yeah, I guess it's a lot of work to script all those events so that they work in every possible combination. But to be honest, I didn't break the game until about the fifth time through. You have to know where the triggers are if you are going to bugger it up.

To make it work best, maybe some sort of organic system, where events are less scripted, would be good. Lose the voice acting, put in a dialogue generator (huge hassle all by itself), and let the characters build their own world.

Ridiculous, to be sure, and I'm not going to write the code for it, but it seems tlike the sort of thing that would have a "critical mass". If you put in th enormous amount of effort to build a vibrant virtual world, then you reach a plateau in the process, and so making a vast world is only 20% more work than making a little one.

Sounds like a job for science.

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Original post by Iron Chef Carnage To make it work best, maybe some sort of organic system, where events are less scripted, would be good. Lose the voice acting, put in a dialogue generator (huge hassle all by itself), and let the characters build their own world.

Perhaps social AI will solve the question.

On a different note, it is true that intensity may be lost if you have an open-ended world/story. Thoug, ultimately, it comes down to how good a storyteller and designer you are, I think. This will merit some serious thought.

And, most of the bugs in software are actually due to the faulty, traditional development approach: code, extend, code, test. On our project in particular, we're trying to at least reduce bugs by utilising a test-driven approach. But this has got nothing to do with game design (unless you incorporate the whole process).

More perspectives, anyone? =)

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Original post by Kaze all the truley non-liner game i have played feel like im just doing random errans for people for no reason other than a few gp.

I'm not a big fan of procedurally generated high level content for this reason. The elder scrolls games did this a lot. They had a lot of good points and a lot of depth to them, but the NPCS, dialog, quests, settings, and dungeons all came off feeling very bland and generic to me. Everything was lacking in personality. I know there are a lot of people who loved Morrowind, but for me I like the feeling of a rich handcrafted world.

On a completely different note, I think the middle Ultima games (4 - 7) had an interesting approach to a non-linear story. These games had a very rich hand crafted world (6 and 7 especially) with unique npcs, original dialog, and lots of things to discover. However the order you explored the world was pretty much up to you. You could head off in any direction and find interesting things to see and do, and it felt like you had a ton of freedom. Of course the story itself was very linear in the sense that the story really had only one path and one ending, it didn't branch much at all, but the fact that you could explore the story in any order you wanted made it feel much more free.

alot of the ultima games seem like that, i particuarly liked Ultima Underworld 1. Sure there was only one ending, but i could go anywhere in the dungeon i want to (whether i'd survive or not was another matter altogether). ;D

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Original post by Iron Chef Carnage To make it work best, maybe some sort of organic system, where events are less scripted, would be good. Lose the voice acting, put in a dialogue generator (huge hassle all by itself), and let the characters build their own world.

And not just a dialogue generator, but level generator, mission generator etc. I'm with Iron Chef Carnage on this one. Don't model the outcome, but rather the system; just as with particle systems you get more diversity and awe on graphical effects than if you just had the same explosion animation every time something blows up. Rely on emergent behaviour, don't have a strictly pre-written story. Note that you can still control the story to a degree by adjusting the probability distributions of the generated levels, missions etc. You could still have scripted sequences, but generate the scripts randomly.

As for the game becoming "broken" if the player does something unexpected, I'd say it's rather an inherent flaw in pre-written stories than non-linearities and freedom. You should not assume anything. I'm not saying you have to consider every possible player action (as you really can't), but rather to build the system that the story of the game creates itself while the player is playing. Assume there is an NPC that the player needs to talk to in order to accomplish something. If the quest/whatever related to that NPC is critical, then you could have a backup plan. Create a new NPC in the world with a similar personality and quests, maybe a relative of the late questmonger. Or turn the NPC's information into tavern gossip, so the player can find it out there. Or whatever. Don't make rules of the sort "NPC X must not die", unless it is specifically the mission (eg. a quest to protect someone). If the quest/whatever of the NPC is not critical, then big deal. The player won't miss a side quest as new ones get generated all the time.

The mission generator should do much more than to turn ordinary NPCs into questmongers with quests like "fetch me a Sword of Mayhem +2". You could first create a problem that needs to be solved, eg. a humongous green multi-legged creature terrorizes the countryside. Create stochastically effects, such as NPCs start to disappear, villages are deserted, put a randomly generated lair of the monster somewhere on the map where the player hasn't explored, or whatever. Create information about the quest, such as tavern gossip, people who have seen the monster, piles of corpses near the monsters lair, the king promises a reward to anyone who slays the monster etc. Then, if the player doesn't act, maybe a village or two die out, and maybe then some other hero slays the monster. More gossip follows etc. If the player actually kills the monster, his reputation increases, local villges will regard him as a hero etc. Make the player feel that the world is dynamic and there is more happening than just the player's actions, and give depth to random quests. Random quests should also have prerequisites, such as the questmonger having a certain personality etc., in order to prevent obviously silly quests.

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Original post by Kaze all the truley non-liner game i have played feel like im just doing random errans for people for no reason other than a few gp.

Not to mention that usually these random errands are of the order of "I seem to have lost a cow. Some broken twigs were found near the forest. Quickly, there is no time! Accept/Reject?", which is pretty much the complexity of the random missions in Sacred. Heck, if you accept the mission the game actually gives you the exact location of the objective.

But this just means the system was done badly. I wouldn't say it was an inherent flaw of emergent behaviour per se, but rather that in order to achieve an interesting world you need much more than just a questmonger and a single objective. These missions should have more effect on the game world than just the fact the player gained a lousy amount of cash.

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Original post by Grim And not just a dialogue generator, but level generator, mission generator etc. I'm with Iron Chef Carnage on this one. Don't model the outcome, but rather the system

There is only so much that can be done with today's technology, let you put together a team of twenty scientists. What we do have is a society and personality/emotion/behaviour synthesis system. Perhaps "mission generation" could be included into that, at the least. Very interesting post, though! ^^

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Original post by mkallman Quote: Original post by Grim And not just a dialogue generator, but level generator, mission generator etc. I'm with Iron Chef Carnage on this one. Don't model the outcome, but rather the system There is only so much that can be done with today's technology, let you put together a team of twenty scientists. What we do have is a society and personality/emotion/behaviour synthesis system. Perhaps "mission generation" could be included into that, at the least. Very interesting post, though! ^^

exactlly, the original point of this topic was a non-linear game with a good storyliny, the primary problem with them is they do use ai/level/dialog generators, but game AI cant write storylines or even carry continuity(unless its pre scripted)